Enhancing Public Speaking Skills in Engineering Students Through AI

This research-to-practice full paper was inspired by the persistent challenge in effective communication among engineering students. Public speaking is a necessary skill for future engineers as they have to communicate technical knowledge with diverse stakeholders. While universities offer courses or workshops, they are unable to offer sustained and personalized training to students. Providing comprehensive feedback on both verbal and non-verbal aspects of public speaking is time-intensive, making consistent and individualized assessment impractical. This study integrates research on verbal and non-verbal cues in public speaking to develop an AI-driven assessment model for engineering students. Our approach combines speech analysis, computer vision, and sentiment detection into a multi-modal AI system that provides assessment and feedback. The model evaluates (1) verbal communication (pitch, loudness, pacing, intonation), (2) non-verbal communication (facial expressions, gestures, posture), and (3) expressive coherence, a novel integration ensuring alignment between speech and body language. Unlike previous systems that assess these aspects separately, our model fuses multiple modalities to deliver personalized, scalable feedback. Preliminary testing demonstrated that our AI-generated feedback was moderately aligned with expert evaluations. Among the state-of-the-art AI models evaluated, all of which were Large Language Models (LLMs), including Gemini and OpenAI models, Gemini Pro emerged as the best-performing, showing the strongest agreement with human annotators. By eliminating reliance on human evaluators, this AI-driven public speaking trainer enables repeated practice, helping students naturally align their speech with body language and emotion, crucial for impactful and professional communication.

Mitigating Vanishing Activations in Deep CapsNets Using Channel Pruning

Capsule Networks outperform Convolutional Neural Networks in learning the part-whole relationships with viewpoint invariance, and the credit goes to their multidimensional capsules. It was assumed that increasing the number of capsule layers in the capsule networks would enhance the model performance. However, recent studies found that Capsule Networks lack scalability due to vanishing activations in the capsules of deeper layers. This paper thoroughly investigates the vanishing activation problem in deep Capsule Networks. To analyze this issue and understand how increasing capsule dimensions can facilitate deeper networks, various Capsule Network models are constructed and evaluated with different numbers of capsules, capsule dimensions, and intermediate layers for this paper. Unlike traditional model pruning, which reduces the number of model parameters and expedites model training, this study uses pruning to mitigate the vanishing activations in the deeper capsule layers. In addition, the backbone network and capsule layers are pruned with different pruning ratios to reduce the number of inactive capsules and achieve better model accuracy than the unpruned models.