CHAOS, the Combat Hunter Action and Observation Simulation, is an immersive simulation training environment which gives small military units the experience of interacting with local Afghan villagers during a patrol. It is a physical build-out of a housing compound in a mock Afghan village, with several lifesize reactive and interactive animated Pashto-speaking virtual characters. The exercise r...

People in Western cultures are poor at naming smells and flavors. However, for wine and coffee experts, describing smells and flavors is part of their daily routine. So are experts better than lay people at conveying smells and flavors in language? If smells and flavors are more easily linguistically expressed by experts, or more "codable", then experts should be better than novices at describi...

Experts have remarkable capability of locating, identifying and categorizing objects in their domain-specific images. Eliciting experts’ visual strategies will benefit image understanding by transferring human domain knowledge into image-based computational procedures. In this paper, an experiment conducted to collect both eye movement and verbal description data from three groups of subjects w...

This research was carried out to investigate the role of natural resources cooperatives in ecotourism development. This was an analysis-descriptive study conducted through survey method. Statically population of study was 123 members of the directors of these cooperatives. A structured questionnaire was designed and distributed among the cooperative directors. Census technique was applied in th...

A phenomenon as complex as protein folding requires a complex model to approximate it. This thesis presents a bottom-up approach for building complex probabilistic models of protein secondary structure by incorporating the multiple information sources which we call experts. Expert opinions are represented by probability distributions over the set of possible structures. Bayesian treatment of a ...

How does long-term training affect the neural control of movements? Here we tested the hypothesis that long-term training leading to skilled motor performance alters muscle coordination during challenging, as well as nominal everyday motor behaviors. Using motor module (a.k.a., muscle synergy) analyses, we identified differences in muscle coordination patterns between professionally trained bal...

Sports experts represent a population of people who have acquired expertise in sports training and competition. Recently, the number of studies on sports experts has increased; however, neuroanatomical changes following extensive training are not fully understood. In this study, we used cortical thickness measurement to investigate the brain anatomical characteristics of professional divers wit...

The human brain has the remarkable capacity to alter in response to environmental demands. Training-induced structural brain changes have been demonstrated in the healthy adult human brain. However, no study has yet directly related structural brain changes to behavioral changes in the developing brain, addressing the question of whether structural brain differences seen in adults (comparing ex...

BACKGROUND This article derives lessons from international experience of innovative rural health placements for medical students. It provides pointers for strengthening South African undergraduate rural health programmes in support of the government's rural health, primary healthcare and National Health Insurance strategies. METHODS The article draws on a review of the literature on 39 traini...

Machine learning algorithms are gaining increasing interest in the context of computer-assisted interventions. One of the bottlenecks so far, however, has been the availability of training data, typically generated by medical experts with very limited resources. Crowdsourcing is a new trend that is based on outsourcing cognitive tasks to many anonymous untrained individuals from an online commu...