We are now in the process of creating, educating and indoctrinating a third generation of speech synthesis researchers. We are also in the process of developing a third generation of synthesis systems. These generations go hand in hand and some unique researchers span all these generations as can be seen in this issue. The first generation made a breakthrough by creating systems that produced h...

Roles and rituals are essential for creating, situating and maintaining cultural practices. Computer Role-Playing games (CRPGs) and virtual online worlds that appear to simulate different cultures are well known and highly popular. So it might appear that the roles and rituals of traditional cultures are easily ported to computer games. However, I contend that the meaning behind worlds, rituals...

Since Organizations have recognized that knowledge constitutes a valuable intangible asset for creating and sustaining competitive advantages, knowledge sharing has a vital role in present society. It is an activity through which information is exchanged among people through different media. Many problems face the area of knowledge sharing and knowledge reuse. Currently, knowledge sharing betwe...

The goal of our research is to enhance the traditional museum viewer experience by constructing an interactive exhibition piece where viewers can emotionally interact with the act of creating a fine art painting. Through our interactive Creative Artificial Intelligence System (CAIS) which generates art portraiture, we try to recognize what our users are experiencing (emotionally) when they view...

This study identifies the meaning of context in recapturing self-care after a stroke or spinal cord injury (SCI). Recapturingdenotes the process of engaging in self-care to regain the ability to participate in self-care activities. Five people who had had a stroke and 6 people with SCI were interviewed 1-3 months after onset. The interviews were open ended and transcribed verbatim. They were an...

Coercion effects, including aspectual ones, appear to indicate a modular grammatical architecture, in which the process of composition may add meanings absent in the syntax in order to ensure that certain functors, e.g., the progressive operator, receive suitable arguments (Herweg 1991, Jackendoff 1997, De Swart 1998). In this paper, coercion effects are instead taken as evidence for the existe...

Community is the main pillar of the urban body; and balance of social life in cities depends on preserving communities. During the twentieth century, the idea of residential-centered community has been offered in many modern theories and has been widely accepted for solving urban various problems such as management, social and human relations, health and welfare issues and aspects of meaning an...