We present a series of experiments investigating face-to-face interaction between an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) and a human interlocutor. The ECA is embodied by a video realistic talking head with independent head and eye movements. For a beneficial application in face-to-face interaction, the ECA should be able to derive meaning from communicational gestures of a human interlocutor, a...

Przewalski's wild horse (E. przewalskii, EPR) has a diploid chromosome number of 2n = 66 while the domestic horse (E. caballus, ECA) has a diploid chromosome number of 2n = 64. Discussions about their phylogenetic relationship and taxonomic classification have hinged on comparisons of their skeletal morphology, protein and mitochondrial DNA similarities, their ability to produce fertile hybrid ...

The enterobacterial common antigen (ECA) is a highly conserved exopolysaccharide in Gram-negative bacteria whose role remains largely uncharacterized. In a previous work, we have demonstrated that disrupting the integrity of the ECA biosynthetic pathway imposed severe deficiencies to the Serratia marcescens motile (swimming and swarming) capacity. In this work, we show that alterations in the E...

Noninvasive geophysical methods have a great potential for improving soil-biological studies at field or regional scales: they enable the rapid acquisition of soil information which may help to identify potential habitats for soil biota. A precondition for this application is the existence of close relationships between geophysical measurements and the soil organism of interest. This study was ...

PURPOSE This study was conducted to compare the diagnostic performance and early recurrence rate between gadoxetic acid-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging (Gd-EOB-MRI) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with extracellular contrast agent (ECA-MRI) for evaluating hepatic lesions in colorectal cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS Between 2005 and 2010, 418 colorectal cancer patients with both preope...

Sphingosylphosphorylcholine (SPC) is significantly increased in the malicious ascites of tumor patients and induces perinuclear reorganization of keratin 8 (K8) filaments in PANC-1 cells. The reorganization contributes to the viscoelasticity of metastatic cancer cells resulting in increased migration. Recently, we reported that transglutaminase-2 (Tgase-2) is involved in SPC-induced K8 phosphor...

The present study examined to what extent an acute bout of hypotension influences blood flow in the external carotid artery (ECA) and the corresponding implications for blood flow regulation in the internal carotid artery (ICA). Nine healthy male participants were subjected to an abrupt decrease in arterial pressure via the thigh-cuff inflation-deflation technique. Duplex ultrasound was employe...

This paper presents modeling of the transaction in the real time active database management systems. Active database with ECA rule has been found to provide an elegant framework to capture semantics of many real life applications. Real time database management system functions as a repository of data and provides storage and retrieval of data. Transactions, which update the database, are assign...

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) are computer generated life-like characters that interact with human users in face-to-face conversations. To achieve natural multi-modal conversations, ECA systems are very sophisticated and require many building assemblies and thus are difficult for individual research groups to develop. This paper proposes a generic architecture, the Universal ECA Framewo...