Whilst techniques for narrative generation and agent behaviour have made significant progress in recent years, natural language processing remains a bottleneck hampering the scalability of Interactive Storytelling systems. This demonstrator introduces a novel interaction technique based solely on emotional speech recognition. It allows the user to use speech to interact with virtual actors with...

While hybrid programs inherently describe physical systems, there is currently no way to visualize the scenario described by a hybrid program, hampering one’s ability to gain intuition for the system they are trying to model. While it is certainly possible to reason about hybrid programs from a purely mathematical perspective, ultimately hybrid programs are meant to describe real-world scenario...

Existing Transactional Memory (TM) algorithms typically abort many transactions that could be safely committed. The extent to which a TM allows such spurious aborts is captured by the theory of Input Acceptance. Recently, the Time-Warping Multi-version (TWM) algorithm was proposed to minimize spurious aborts without hampering practical performance. In this work we seek to theoretically assess t...

Sulfated proteoglycans have important structural and signaling functions in the growth plate. In the October 1, 2008, issue of Genes & Development, Settembre and colleagues (2645-2650) report that lack of SUMF1, a crucial enzyme in the activation of sulfatases, causes a severe chondrodysplasia by augmenting fibroblast growth factor signaling and by hampering the autophagic process, which the in...

The mammalian thioredoxin reductases (TrxRs) are a family of selenium-containing pyridine nucleotide disulfide oxidoreductases playing a central role in cellular redox homeostasis and signaling pathways. Recently, these selenoproteins have emerged as promising therapeutic targets for anticancer drug development, often being overexpressed in tumor cells and contributing to drug resistance. Herei...

Despite recent advancements in "omic" technologies, personalized medicine has not realized its fullest potential due to isolated and incomplete application of gene expression tools. In many instances, pharmacogenomics is being interchangeably used for personalized medicine, when actually it is one of the many facets of personalized medicine. Herein, we highlight key issues that are hampering th...

Background Misdiagnosis of ATTR and late diagnosis may be detrimental hampering adequate management and delaying therapy onset. Objective of the present study was to investigate in a large single-centre cohort of genetically– confirmed ATTR patients the prevalence, type and causes of misdiagnoses. Given the high frequency of cases erroneously diagnosed as having chronic inflammatory demyelinati...

Unlike other fields of computing and communications, low-power wireless networking is plagued by one major issue: the absence of a well-defined, agreed-upon yardstick to compare the performance of systems, namely, a benchmark. We argue that this situation may eventually represent a hampering factor for a technology expected to be key in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical Systems (C...

Protein kinase C (PKC) has been proposed as a primary cellular mediator of ischemic preconditioning. However, the role of PKC in eliciting cardioprotection remains controversial. In this review, we summarize the evidence for and against the 'PKC hypothesis' of preconditioning, discuss the important technical limitations currently hampering PKC research, and suggest new approaches (i.e. PKC isof...

Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is facing considerable challenges just as it has rebounded from the Covid-19 pandemic. Spillovers war in Ukraine are fueling inflation weighing on domestic spending external demand, while political tensions hampering economic policies reforms.