Multimedia and hypermedia had and still have a tremendous impact on the evolution of educational software. In this paper we propose an Integrated Distributed Learning Environment (IDLE) for the implementation of the services of an educational network over TCP/IP networks such as the Internet. Our proposal aims at providing an integrated communicational environment, which supplies the communicat...

Adolescents have particular needs in health care that are often not met. Health care providers can help overcome barriers that hinder adolescents' effective use of health services by incorporating health literacy strategies that are developmentally and contextually appropriate, and that actively involve adolescents in their own learning. Based on extensive practice and research experience in Ca...

BACKGROUND Beyond providing cues about an agent's intention, communicative actions convey information about the presence of a second agent towards whom the action is directed (second-agent information). In two psychophysical studies we investigated whether the perceptual system makes use of this information to infer the presence of a second agent when dealing with impoverished and/or noisy sens...

This paper introduces the theory of communicative competence by Hymes, the interpretation of communicative competence by Canale & Swain, the elements of efficient communication by Widdowson respectively, and the limitation of the previous application in China with the teaching environment of Classroom plus blackboard, analyzes the necessity and feasibility of creating authentic communicative en...

In this paper I describe ongoing research that seeks to provide a common framework for the generation and interpretation of spontaneous gesture in the context of speech. I present a testbed for this framework in the form of a program that generates speech, gesture, and facial expression from underlying rules specifying (a) what speech and gesture are generated on the basis of a given communicat...

The capabilities for agents in a team to anticipate informationneeds of teammates and proactively offer relevant information are highly desirable. However, such behaviors have not been fully prescribed by existing agent theories. To establish a theory about proactive information exchanges, we first introduces the concept of “information-needs”, then identify and formally define the intentional ...

This study is based upon qualitative research conducted with the Phoenix chapter of the Prime Timers, a social organization that offers older men in the gay community a space to communicate their general needs and desires. Using data collected through participant observation and informant interviews, the research demonstrates the ways in which the group's affiliates respond to queer sensibiliti...

Despite the several benefits that teleconsultation offers, its commercial acceptance has been relatively low. Through this work, we would like to contribute to a conceptual understanding of the needs and experiences of various people involved in a teleconsultation session, which we believe will open up new possibilities to design future technology for teleconsultations. As a starting point, we ...

Further advances in speech recognition heavily depend on the design of architectures which are ex-ible enough to accomodate very diierent requirements for the ow of data and hypotheses. These requirements result from the peculiarities of the speech understanding process, which is a complex decision procedure covering a number of diierent levels of language description. The paper identiies some ...

In principle, FEMA supports the implementation of ITS technology that has the potential to provide added safety, comfort and economy to road users provided that: their use is not mandatory, and does not exclude unequipped vehicles from the road; they take into account the needs, characteristics and limitations of powered two wheeler users and their vehicles; they do not create an additional haz...