Imagine a simulated world where the characters you interact with are almost human – they converse with you in English, they understand the world they are in, can reason about what to do, and they exhibit emotions. Some of these characters may be your friends, while others will oppose you. Unlike current video games, being successful in this world won’t just be a matter of who is quickest on the...

Objective: To develop and evaluate the Mandarin Quick Speech-in-Noise (M-Quick SIN) Test materials in mainland China. Design: Four parts were included in the experiment to (1) develop sentence materials and select equivalent sentences, (2) evaluate the reliability of the lists we grouped afterwards, (3) discuss the formula of SNR loss fitted for M-Quick SIN, and (4) quantify the classification ...

The first “Convegno Informale su Quantum Groups” was held in Florence from February 3 to 6, 1993. This Convegno was conceived as an informal meeting to bring together all the italian people working in the field of quantum groups and related topics. We are very happy indeed that about 30 theoretical physicists decided to take part presenting many aspects of this interesting and live subject of r...

background and aims:nosocomial infections cause considerable morbidity and mortality and pose high financial burden on healthcare systems. although surface contact, surgical incisions, wounds and catheters are responsible for a high percentage of nosocomial infections, bacterial and fungal air contaminations in hospitals have an important role in development of hospital infections. the purpose ...

Extended Abstract. Sampling is the process of selecting units (e.g., people, organizations) from a population of interest so that by studying the sample we may fairly generalize our results back to the population from which they were chosen. To draw a sample from the underlying population, a variety of sampling methods can be employed, individually or in combination. Cut-off sampling is a pr...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were defined in 2001, making poverty the central focus of the global political agenda. In response to MDG targets for health, new funding instruments called Global Health Initiatives were set up to target specific diseases, with an emphasis on "quick win" interventions, in order to show improvements by 2015. In 2005 the UN Millennium Project defined quick...

Before we discuss the details of the Bayesian detection, let us take a quick tour about the overall framework to detect (or classify) an object in practice. In the Bayesian setting, we model observations as random samples drawn from some probability distributions. The classification process usually involves extracting features from the observations, and a decision rule that satisfies certain op...

Virtual endoscopy needs some precomputation of the data (segmentation, path finding) before the diagnostic process can take place. We propose a method that precomputes multinode spherical panorama movies using Quick-Time VR. This technique allows almost the same navigation and visualization capabilities as a real endoscopic procedure, a significant reduction of interaction input is achieved and...