Human communication is highly adaptive: speakers continuously adjust how they speak, move, and look in response to changing communicative conditions. These adaptations are central to face-to-face interaction and are increasingly relevant for speech technologies that aim to operate in natural, interactive, and multimodal settings. While adaptive speech has been extensively studied within the articulatory and acoustic domains, spoken communication is fundamentally multimodal, raising the question of how visual and bodily cues participate in adaptive behaviour. Lindblom’s classic Hyper- and Hypo-articulation (H&H) Theory provides a principled account of adaptive speech production by framing variability as a trade-off between effort and intelligibility. However, how this adaptive logic extends beyond speech to multimodal communication remains insufficiently integrated across disciplines.This review synthesises research on speech and a range of visual and bodily signals to examine how multimodal behaviours contribute to adaptive communication. We first review evidence on how environmental, listener-related, and speaker-related constraints shape adaptive responses in speech. We then extend this analysis to multimodal communication, highlighting how speakers and listeners flexibly redistribute communicative effort across modalities in response to environmental, listener-related, and speaker-internal constraints.We argue that multimodal cues participate in the same adaptive optimisation described by the H&H Theory, and that adaptation emerges from dynamic trade-off across modalities rather than from speech alone. This multimodal reinterpretation of H&H has implications for speech technologies, including audiovisual speech, synthesis, and interactive systems.
This study investigates response time as a behavioral indicator related to listening effort (LE) for evaluating speech enhancement (SE) systems. English and Norwegian intelligibility matrix tests were conducted within a single-task paradigm that incorporated click-time recording (logging the precise time of all participant clicks), enabling simultaneous estimation of speech intelligibility and LE-related temporal behavior. Three temporal proxy measures for LE were examined—time per stimulus, reaction time, and word click time—across a broad range of input signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) and for both discriminative and generative enhancement approaches. Time per stimulus showed an inverted-U pattern across SNRs, whereas reaction time and word click time exhibited monotonic behavior, providing more directly interpretable metrics for comparative evaluation. Analyses of pairwise SNR comparisons revealed that increases in our LE-related temporal measures at higher SNRs precede measurable intelligibility declines, suggesting that these temporal metrics can be more sensitive than intelligibility in this regime. Overall, the proposed framework—where LE-related measurements remain unknown to participants—offers a comprehensive and nuanced behavioral tool for SE evaluation, complementing intelligibility particularly under realistic, moderate-to-high SNR conditions.
Hypoxia, a defining feature of many solid tumours, arises from rapid cellular proliferation, abnormal tumour stroma, and aberrant vasculature. Reduced oxygen availability contributes to several cancer hallmarks, including sustained proliferative signalling, angiogenesis, metabolic reprogramming, immune evasion, invasion, and metastasis. Consistent with these biological effects, tumour hypoxia is associated with poorer prognosis across multiple cancer types, irrespective of treatment modality. Consequently, the characterisation and therapeutic leverage of hypoxic tumour status have been key areas of clinical investigation over the past three decades. However, despite extensive research, no method for routine clinical stratification of tumours by hypoxic status has been widely adopted, and hypoxia-targeted or hypoxia-alleviating treatments remain limited in clinical use.This review summarises the clinical progress and ongoing challenges in hypoxia imaging and therapeutic intervention. It focuses on strategies designed to enhance oxygen delivery, exploit hypoxic tumour environments through hypoxia-activated prodrugs, or modify tumour oxygen consumption. By these approaches under clinical evaluation, this review aims to identify key barriers to the integration of hypoxia-focused intervention and highlight the volume and diversity of hypoxia targeted treatments that are pending clinical translation.
Critical infrastructure systems, from transport to energy systems, are becoming increasingly exposed to operational risks driven by evolving uncertain operational conditions. Many of these systems are still designed using fixed assumptions that may not hold in the future. This has raised questions on how to design infrastructure systems that remain safe even when the conditions they face change In this context, the present work discusses sensitivity analysis as an enhancer of safety for such systems. Sensitivities and sensitivity analysis are highly informative tools to address deep uncertainties and unforeseen risks. These can enhance the exploratory context of design practices to uncover intrinsic system vulnerabilities, be applied to inform flexibility in system variables or produce analysis that are agnostic to hazards, which are highly suitable to deal with deep uncertainty. Three illustrative examples, a parallel system, a wind turbine and a traffic network, are used to showcase the importance of understanding sensitivities in safety-driven systems. These represent applications to a component, an asset and a system; with results remarking the importance of anticipating any changes in system variables that can lead to a large loss in system safety (where in a complex system relative changes in risk can be an order of magnitude larger than the relative change experienced by the input). Results emphasise the value of explicitly assessing safety and embedding sensitivity analysis into engineering practice to map critical variables, anticipate safety tipping conditions in operation, and identify system weak points without knowing which hazard may exploit them. This discussion offers a foundation for complex infrastructure systems in an increasingly uncertain world and is a manifesto for safety-centered considerations in addressing future uncertainty.
This paper explores how the 15-min city concept plays out in Greater Cairo by examining three neighbourhoods: Agouza, Madinaty, and Badya. To do so, it draws on a systematic approach that includes selecting case studies, identifying key service categories, extracting POI and street-network data, mapping service areas in ArcGIS, and presenting the results through service area analysis and thematic mapping. To complement this, accessibility was assessed through four measures: cumulative opportunities, land-use entropy, functional redundancy, and space syntax (integration) metrics.The findings show that access in Cairo depends not just on distance but also on the diversity of available services, the degree of proximity between services, and the way streets connect different areas. Cycling makes a clear difference in widening reach and reducing accessibility inequalities and fragmentation. The findings suggest that, in addition to clinics and schools, social anchors such as souqs, ahwa, and cultural places emerge as vital parts of daily urban life. The paper argues that in Cairo, the 15-min city concept, whether built from scratch or adapted to existing urban fabrics, should not be treated as a universal recipe but as a flexible framework. The concept is part of a longer lineage of planning ideals, adopted in the planning of several areas of Cairo, from the Garden City movement to New Urbanism. It should build on the city’s own urban vocabularies, shaped through layered urban planning and lived experiences, which continue to define how urban spaces and services are used and valued within the 15-min radius or beyond.
