This article is based on an exploratory study on the use of blogs to support learning in an online MBA school. In this paper, the authors examine students’ perceptions toward blogs and their effectiveness. The study finds that although students are open to the idea of using blogs to enhance presentation and reflection of their learning, concerns exist on their suitability for threaded discussio...

Recent advance in digital storage technology has enabled us to archive more than 1,700 hours of video data from a daily Japanese news show in the last nine years. In this paper, to effectively make use of the video data in the archive, we first present a news video structuring method based on the chronological semantic relations between stories, namely the “topic thread structure”. Next, we int...

We are modeling roles of individual messages and participants in Q&A discussion forums. In this paper, we present a mixed network model that represents message exchanges and message influences within a discussion thread. We first model individual message roles and thread-level user roles using discussion content features. We then combine the resulting message roles and the user roles to generat...

The aim of this study was to explore nursing staffs' perceptions of the physical and psychological care needs of elderly residents, their views on the relative importance of these needs and their perceived ability to meet them. The literature reveals that the quality of elder care in nursing homes should comprise both physical and psychosocial care. Despite this, the nursing staffs' perceptions...

This paper verifies the effect of delay of voice information between the participants in a conference telephone call on the subjective assessment of the quality of the conversation. And evaluate changes in the assessment of individual respondents based on their mental state. Criterion of transmission quality is a parametr MOS obtained from respondents of subjective tests before and after the st...

BACKGROUND Presbycusis has a direct influence on autonomy of the elderly but hearing aids lack of affordability. Moreover a recent review demonstrate that electroacoustic characteristics of OTC hearing aids were generally not suitable for the elderly people. In our study, we assessed the clinical value of a new over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid device (TEO First®) in the elderly. METHOD This...

We present a method to estimate the perceived listening quality by a subscriber at the end of a common voice telephony conversation. This method was recently introduced in ETSI STQ mobile and was approved as TR 102 506 ‘Speech Quality per Call’ [1]. The idea is to calculate this “speech-quality-per-call” value based on short-term listening quality scores (so-called Mean Opinion Scores, MOS), as...

Recently, many machine translation systems have been developed. However, for translation of conversation, correct translation rates and quality of translation are particularly low. This is due to machine translation systems not being able to generate translation results which fit the context of the conversation . We previously proposed a method of Machine Translation Using Inductive Learning wi...

The aim of the paper is to document and share an induction technique (The Sensitive Artificial Listener) that generates data that can be both tractable and reasonably naturalistic. The technique focuses on conversation between a human and an agent that either is or appears to be a machine. It is designed to capture a broad spectrum of emotional states, expressed in ‘emotionally coloured discour...