In this work, we assess the usability of a virtual environment where the force of interaction between the electrostatic field around the molecule and a charge associated to the proxy of a haptic device can be felt. Feedbacks to user are provided in a multimodal visual and haptic way, and auxiliary information are also rendered.

DIABMEMORY is a telehealth system supporting patients suffering from diabetes mellitus in selfmanagement of their disease. Patients are equipped with a mobile software application running on a Near-FieldCommunication (NFC)-enabled mobile phone to collect essential health parameters, such as glucose levels, blood pressure, well-being, body weight and physical activity on a regular basis. Data ar...

In this paper, we propose a new haptic-assisted virtual cane system operated by a simple finger pointing gesture. The system is developed by two stages: development of visual information delivery assistant (VIDA) with a stereo camera and adding a tactile feedback interface with dual actuators for guidance and distance feedbacks. In the first stage, user's pointing finger is automatically detect...

To understand the interplay between environmental stochasticity and Allee effects, we analyse persistence, asymptotic extinction, and conditional persistence for stochastic difference equations. Our analysis reveals that persistence requires that the geometric mean of fitness at low densities is greater than one. When this geometric mean is less than one, asymptotic extinction occurs with high ...

The feedbacks obtained regarding the sense of presence from pilot users operating a Mobile Robotic presence (MRP) system to visit a simulated museum are reported in this paper. The aim is to investigate how much the perception of system’s usefulness and ease of use is affected by operators’ sense of social telepresence (presence) in the remote location. Therefore, scenarios of visiting a museum...

Land systems are characterised by many feedbacks that can result in complex system behaviour. We defined feedbacks as the two-way influences between the land use system and a related system (e.g., climate, soils and markets), both of which are encompassed by the land system. Land models that include feedbacks thus probably more accurately mimic how land systems respond to, e.g., policy or clima...

Trust is one of the most concerned obstacles for the adoption and growth of cloud computing. Although several solutions have been proposed recently in managing trust feedbacks in cloud environments, how to determine the credibility of trust feedbacks is mostly neglected. In addition, managing trust feedbacks in cloud environments is a difficult problem due to unpredictable number of cloud servi...

Changes to climate-carbon cycle feedbacks may significantly affect the Earth System’s response to greenhouse gas emissions. These feedbacks are usually analysed from numerical output of complex and arguably opaque Earth System Models (ESMs). Here, we construct a stylized global climate-carbon cycle model, test its output against complex ESMs, and investigate the strengths of its climate-carbon ...

Species experience both internal feedbacks with endogenous factors such as trait evolution and external feedbacks with exogenous factors such as weather. These feedbacks can play an important role in determining whether populations persist or communities of species coexist. To provide a general mathematical framework for studying these effects, we develop a theorem for coexistence for ecologica...

Re-ranking for Information Retrieval aims to elevate relevant feedbacks and depress negative ones in initial retrieval result list. Compared to relevance feedback-based re-ranking method widely adopted in the literature, this paper proposes a new method to well use three features in known negative feedbacks to identify and depress unknown negative feedbacks. The features include: 1) the minor (...