Abstract
AOB-1 is an Adaptive Optics (AO) facility currently designed to feed the Gemini infrared Multi Object Spectrograph (GIRMOS) on the GEMINI North 8m class telescope located in Hawaii. This AO system will be made of two AO modes. A laser tomography AO (LTAO) mode using 4 LGS (laser guide stars) and [1-3] NGS (natural guide stars) for high performance over a narrow field of view (a few arcsec). The LTAO reconstruction will benefit from the most recent developments in the field, such as the super-resolution concept for the multi-LGS tomographic system, the calibration and optimization of the system on the sky, etc. The system will also operate in Ground Layer Adaptive Optics (GLAO) mode providing a robust solution for homogeneous partial AO correction over a wide 2’ FOV. This last mode will also be used as a first step of a MOAO (Multi-object adaptive optics) mode integrated in the GIRMOS instrument. Both GLAO and LTAO modes are optimized to provide the best possible sky coverage, up to 60% at the North Galactic Pole. Finally, the project has been designed from day one as a fast-track, cost effective project, aiming to provide a first scientific light on the telescope by 2027 at the latest, with a good balance of innovative and creative concepts combined with standard and well controlled components and solutions. In this paper, we will present the innovative Phase A concepts, design and performance analysis of the two AO modes (LTAO and GLAO) of the AOB-1 project. © 2023 7th Adaptive Optics for Extremely Large Telescopes Conference, AO4ELT7 2023. All rights reserved.

Abstract
The Gemini Infrared Multi-Object Spectrograph (GIRMOS) will be a near-infrared, multi-object, medium spectral resolution, integral field spectrograph (IFS) for Gemini North Telescope, designed to operate behind the future Gemini North Adaptive Optics system (GNAO). In addition to a first ground layer Adaptive Optics (AO) correction in closed loop carried out by GNAO, each of the four GIRMOS IFSs will independently perform additional multi-object AO correction in open loop, resulting in an improved image quality that is critical to achieve top level science requirements. We present the baseline parameters and simulated performance of GIRMOS obtained by modeling both the GNAO and GIRMOS AO systems. The image quality requirement for GIRMOS is that 57% of the energy of an unresolved point-spread function ensquared within a 0.1 x 0.1 arcsecond at 2.0 mu m. It was established that GIRMOS will be an order 16 x 16 adaptive optics (AO) system after examining the tradeoffs between performance, risks and costs. The ensquared energy requirement will be met in median atmospheric conditions at Maunakea at 30 degrees from zenith.

Abstract
Context. Monitoring turbulence parameters is crucial in high-angular resolution astronomy for various purposes, such as optimising adaptive optics systems or fringe trackers. The former systems are present at most modern observatories and will remain significant in the future. This makes them a valuable complementary tool for the estimation of turbulence parameters. Aims. The feasibility of estimating turbulence parameters from low-resolution sensors remains untested. We performed seeing estimates for both simulated and on-sky telemetry data sourced from the new adaptive optics module installed on the four Auxiliary Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer. Methods. The seeing estimates were obtained from a modified and optimised algorithm that employs a chi-squared modal fitting approach to the theoretical von Karman model variances. The algorithm was built to retrieve turbulence parameters while simultaneously estimating and accounting for the remaining and measurement error. A Monte Carlo method was proposed for the estimation of the statistical uncertainty of the algorithm. Results. The algorithm is shown to be able to achieve per-cent accuracy in the estimation of the seeing with a temporal horizon of 20 s on simulated data. A (0.76 '' +/- 1.2%vertical bar(stat) +/- 1.2%vertical bar(sys)) median seeing was estimated from on-sky data collected from 2018 to 2020. The spatial distribution of the Auxiliary Telescopes across the Paranal Observatory was found to not play a role in the value of the seeing.

Abstract
Physical models and probabilistic applications often guide the study and characterization of natural phenomena in engineering. Such is the case of the study of air change rates (ACHs) in buildings for their complex mechanisms and high variability. It is not uncommon for the referred applications to be costly and impractical in both time and computation, resulting in the use of simplified methodologies and setups. The incorporation of airtightness limits to quantify adequate ACHs in national transpositions of the Energy Performance Building Directive (EPBD) exemplifies the issue. This research presents a roadmap for developing an alternative instrument, a compliance tool built with a Machine Learning (ML) framework, that overcomes some simplification issues regarding policy implementation while fulfilling practitioners' needs and general societal use. It relies on dwellings' terrain, geometric and airtightness characteristics, and meteorological data. Results from previous work on a region with a mild heating season in southern Europe apply in training and testing the proposed tool. The tool outputs numerical information on the air change rates performance of the building envelope, and a label, accordingly. On the test set, the best regressor showed mean absolute errors (MAE) below 1.02% for all the response variables, while the best classifier presented an average accuracy of 97.32%. These results are promising for the generalization of this methodology, with potential for application at regional, national, and European Union levels. The developed tool could be a complementary asset to energy certification programmes of either public or private initiatives. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Abstract
Training motor imagery (MI) and motor observation (MO) tasks is being intensively exploited to promote brain plasticity in the context of post-stroke rehabilitation strategies. This may benefit from the use of closed-loop neurofeedback, embedded in brain-computer interfaces (BCI's) to provide an alternative non-muscular channel, which may be further augmented through embodied feedback delivered through virtual reality (VR). Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a group of healthy adults to map brain activation elicited by an ecologically-valid task based on a VR-BCI paradigm called NeuRow, whereby participants perform MI of rowing with the left or right arm (i.e., MI), while observing the corresponding movement of the virtual arm of an avatar (i.e., MO), on the same side, in a first-person perspective. We found that this MI-MO task elicited stronger brain activation when compared with a conventional MI-only task based on the Graz BCI paradigm, as well as to an overt motor execution task. It recruited large portions of the parietal and occipital cortices in addition to the somatomotor and premotor cortices, including the mirror neuron system (MNS), associated with action observation, as well as visual areas related with visual attention and motion processing. Overall, our findings suggest that the virtual representation of the arms in an ecologically-valid MI-MO task engage the brain beyond conventional MI tasks, which we propose could be explored for more effective neurorehabilitation protocols. Copyright: © 2023 Nunes et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract
Zero-shot learning enables the recognition of classes not seen during training through the use of semantic information comprising a visual description of the class either in textual or attribute form. Despite the advances in the performance of zero-shot learning methods, most of the works do not explicitly exploit the correlation between the visual attributes of the image and their corresponding semantic attributes for learning discriminative visual features. In this paper, we introduce an attention-based strategy for deriving features from the image regions regarding the most prominent attributes of the image class. In particular, we train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for image attribute prediction and use a gradient-weighted method for deriving the attention activation maps of the most salient image attributes. These maps are then incorporated into the feature extraction process of Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL) approaches for improving the discriminability of the features produced through the implicit inclusion of semantic information. For experimental validation, the performance of state-of-the-art ZSL methods was determined using features with and without the proposed attention model. Surprisingly, we discover that the proposed strategy degrades the performance of ZSL methods in classical ZSL datasets (AWA2), but it can significantly improve performance when using face datasets. Our experiments show that these results are a consequence of the interpretability of the dataset attributes, suggesting that existing ZSL datasets attributes are, in most cases, difficult to be identifiable in the image. Source code is available at https://github.com/CristianoPatricio/SGAM.