This paper describes an interdisciplinary experiment in controlling semi-autonomous animated human forms with natural language input. These computer-generated characters resemble traditional stage actors, in that they are more autonomous than traditional hand-guided animated characters, and less autonomous than fully improvisational agents. We introduce the desktop tkeatev metaphor, reserving f...

The real challenge of business environment is derived from a situation where organizations need to find opportunities on how to introduce ideas and new products to market that provide future earnings stream. Management accounting is used as a tool in this process and provides information on opportunities and threats. The purpose of this research is to explain the role of management accounting i...

In this paper, we show the evolution from the earliest frame-by-frame synthetic actors to real-time perceptive actors living in distributed virtual environments or even in the real world. We first compare requirements and methods for frame-by-frame and real-time actors. Then, we introduce a new classification of synthetic actors with four categories: participants, guided actors, autonomous acto...

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals has proven to be a real challenge. Providing evidence on cost-effective interventions did not prove to be sufficient to secure the trust of national authorities, health care providers and patients. Introducing change in a health system requires a good understanding of the relationships between the actors of the system. Social network analysis can provi...

Members of the 67th World Health Assembly in 2014 were presented with a framework document to guide World Health Organization (WHO) engagement with non-state actors, a key part of WHO reform kick-started in 2011. According to this document, non-state actors include four distinct constituencies: i) nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), ii) private sector entities; iii) philanthropic foundations;...

Abstract Actors are a popular mechanism for indirectly expressing concurrency. This article examines an implementation in the concurrent dialect of C ++, which runs actors on shared‐memory multi‐processor computers. The ++ actor system targets 32–256+ multi‐core computers that form backbone high‐performance computing, rather than distributed communication or robust execution via parentage fallb...