Beirat • Comité consultatif Prof Dr. Boi Faltings (EPFL Lausanne), Prof. Dr. Stefan Klein (Universität Münster), Dr. Ernst Lebsanft (Synlogic AG, Binningen), Prof. Dr. Rudolf Marty (IFA Informatik, Zürich), Prof. Dr. Moira C. Norrie (ETH Zürich), Prof. Dr. Hans-Jörg Schek (ETH Zürich), Dr. Hans Stienen (Synscape, Binningen), Helmut Thoma (ITpro AG Basel), Dr. Reinhold Thurner (Herrliberg), Rudo...

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to audiences at UC Irvine, and at a UCSC phonology lunch meeting, for much helpful commentary. Thanks especially to Ryan Bush, Junko Itô, Armin Mester, Nathan Sanders, Rachel Walker, and Moira Yip. 1 On the following see Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale, and for interpretation Wells (1957) and Anderson (1985). The usual caveats when one attributes views to ...

The author presents an experiment which critically examines whether current state of the art text to speech synthesisers and web based VRML style graphics can be utilised to provide a multimodal persona presence in less than ideal user conditions. Audio visual anthropomorphised representations of online agents are becoming more common and their use in commercial systems has to be examined in or...

The review is devoted to the problems of microbiota and the ways of it correction employing beneficial life bacteria- probiotics. It covers the issues related to the functioning of human microbiota and its importance for the health, individual variability of microbial content, functioning of the probiotics in the human organism and the history of probiotic studies with particular focus on the m...

Children will increasingly come of age with personified robots and potentially form social and even moral relationships with them. What will such relationships look like? To address this question, 90 children (9-, 12-, and 15-year-olds) initially interacted with a humanoid robot, Robovie, in 15-min sessions. Each session ended when an experimenter interrupted Robovie's turn at a game and, again...

Evan Wood, MD, PhD, ABIM, FRCPC, is Co-Director of the Urban Health Research Initiative at the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He is also a Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of AIDS, at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Moira McKinnon, MD, MBBS, FAFPHM, is the Chief Medical Health Officer for Saskatchewan. Robert Strang, MD, FRCPC, is...

An autonomous control methodology is proposed for locomotive agents to have lifelike personified behaviors. The control introduces a pattern generator that is constructed by connecting oscillators composed of mutually inhibited neurons. The rhythmic signal of the pattern generator drives a proportional derivative controller that determines the legs joint angles of a locomotive agent, and the si...

Early socialization experiences have a long-term impact on newcomers’ satisfaction, performance, and intention to stay in a group. We know that newcomers proactively shape their own socialization, but we know little about the behavioral tactics they employ, or how the words they choose affect their acceptance by the group. The present article highlights three common conversational strategies of...

The growth of the Internet as a commercial medium has led advertisers to exploit humans' inherent sensitivity to movement in the form of animated banner ads. An experiment was designed to compare the exogenous, or involuntary, attention capture of four types of banners: animated commercial banners, static commercial banners, flashing text banners, and blank banners. Participants performed a sim...