In this paper, we define the concept of digital actors and show their importance in the future interactive digital television and multimedia. We discuss the applications of these digital actors in the new multimedia services especially for training and education. We summarize the main techniques to create and control these digital actors and emphasize the importance to develop new tools for the...

A growing amount of tasks are expected to be delegated to software agents by human users. Such agents carry personal data of the user and act on his behalf. Especially if mobile software agents leave the users’ host, the users are left with an uncomfortable lack of knowledge about and control over “what’s going on”. We believe that an important remedy to this, each of comfort and trust, lies in...

This paper explores how local actors can play a role in bridging the rural broadband divide. It presents the bottom-up development of broadband infrastructure in the rural region of ‘Sogn & Fjordane’, Norway. To bridge the broadband divide individuals, businesses and public sector in several rural communities have joined forces and have taken an initiative to develop and operate local broadband...

As informal methods do little to help their use for concurrent and distributed programming, one of the most challenging current tasks is to build tools based on formal method in order to ease the development of such applications. In this context, we propose precise type systems for concurrent object and actor oriented programming languages. This paper analyzes the type systems that we have deve...

a r t i c l e i n f o A new concept, commitments, is introduced and defined as " agreements between two or more social actors to carry out future actions " and its incorporation into, and articulation of, the actors–resources–activities model described. Commitments are distinguished from the concept of commitment as traditionally used in inter-organisational relationships. The latter is mainly ...

This article explores the role of actors and agency in the literature on sustainability transitions. We reviewed 386 journal articles on transition management and sustainability transitions listed in Scopus from 1995 to 2014. We investigate the thesis that actors have been neglected in this literature in favor of more abstract system concepts. Results show that this thesis cannot be confirmed o...

Both in the performative arts and in emotion research, professional actors are assumed to be capable of delivering emotions comparable to spontaneous emotional expressions. This study examines the effects of acting training on vocal emotion depiction and recognition. We predicted that professional actors express emotions in a more realistic fashion than non-professional actors. However, profess...

We describe Actors, a exible, scalable and eÆcient model of computation, and develop a framework for analyzing the parallel complexity of programs written in it. Actors are asynchronous, autonomous objects which interact by message-passing. The data and process decomposition inherent in Actors simpli es modeling realworld systems. High-level concurrent programming abstractions have been develop...

A central issue in the study of joint task performance has been one of whether co-acting individuals perform their partner's part of the task as if it were their own. The present study addressed this issue by using joint task switching. A pair of actors shared two tasks that were presented in a random order, whereby the relevant task and actor were cued on each trial. Responses produced action ...

We consider the problem of labeling actors in social networks where the labels correspond to membership in specific interest groups, or other attributes of the actors. Actors in a social network are linked to not only other actors but also items (e.g., video and photo) which in turn can be linked to other items or actors. Given a social network in which only some of the actors are labeled, our ...