This paper describes a CALL approach which integrates software for speaker independent continuous speech recognition with embodied virtual agents and virtual worlds to create an immersive environment in which learners can converse in the target language in contextualised scenarios. The result is a self-access learning package: SPELL (Spoken Electronic Language Learning). The SPELL system has be...

While emotion is a central component of human health and well-being, traditional approaches to understanding its biological function have been wanting. A dynamic systems model, however, broadly redefines and recasts emotion as a primary sensory system-perhaps the first sensory system to have emerged, serving the ancient autopoietic function of "self-regulation." Drawing upon molecular biology a...

The fast Hankel transform (FHT) implemented with digital filters has been the algorithm of choice in EM geophysics for a few decades. However, other disciplines have predominantly relied on methods that break up the Hankel transform integral into a sum of partial integrals that are each evaluated with quadrature. The convergence of the partial sums is then accelerated through a nonlinear sequen...

This paper develops a semiotic operand, the hypersign. The hyperlink is structurally amenable to semiotic analysis. Anchor and destination function as signifier and signified. Especially significant are digital surrogates, such as Amazon catalogue entries, and Google gists, which are systematically produced hypertextual signifier-signified pairings. Hyperlinked surrogates constitute the hypersi...

For conservative mechanical systems, the so-called Caughey series are known to define the class of damping matrices that preserve eigenspaces. In particular, for finite-dimensional systems, these matrices prove to be a polynomial of one reduced matrix, which depends on the mass and stiffness matrices. Damping is ensured whatever the eigenvalues of the conservative problem if and only if the pol...

Global Platform’s “Open Platform Specification” sets a new cross-industry standard for smart cards, governing the loading, installation and removal of applications at any time that the card is on-line during the card lifecycle prior to card termination. The Open Platform Protection Profile (OP3) recasts the Open Platform (OP) security requirements into the language of the Common Criteria (CC) t...

We present a probabilistic approach to shape decomposition that creates a skeleton-based shape representation of a 3D object while simultaneously decomposing it into constituent parts. Our approach probabilistically combines two prominent threads from the shape literature: skeleton-based (medial axis) representations of shape, and part-based representations of shape, in which shapes are combina...

In pursuit of graph processing performance, the systems community has largely abandoned general-purpose distributed dataflow frameworks in favor of specialized graph processing systems that provide tailored programming abstractions and accelerate the execution of iterative graph algorithms. In this paper we argue that many of the advantages of specialized graph processing systems can be recover...

Recovering the relative geometry of two perspective stereo images is a classical problem in photogrammetry and also a basic problem in computer vision. General relative orientation refers to recovering ve relative orientation parameters and two principal distances from pure image measurements. This paper exposes the kernel of a new direct closed-form solution to this problem while the general f...

In order to constrain the models describing circumstellar environments, it is necessary solve radiative transfer equation in presence of absorption and scattering, coupled with for equilibrium. However, solving this problem requires much CPU time, which makes use automatic minimisation procedures characterise these environments challenging. The approximate methods then primary interest. One pro...