in recent years, virtual communities have been significantly popular and almost all of them are targeted for business profitability. in our study, the profitability of these communities for businesses has been analyzed from a commercial perspective. the study considers virtual community as a business model which can have a great impact on consumer purchase decision process. with respect to refe...

A novel method of direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation based on subarray beamforming for uniform circular arrays is proposed. In this method, the beamform manifold of uniform circular arrays is transformed via virtual structure, and then the virtual array is divided into two subarrrays. The target DOA is estimated from the phase shift between the reference signal and its phase-shifted version ...

The audio of the spoken dialogue between a human and a virtual human (VH) is analyzed to explore the impact of H-VH interaction. The goal is to determine if conversing with a VH can elicit detectable and systematic vocal changes. To study this topic, we examined the H-VH scenario of pharmacy students speaking with immersive VHs playing the role of patients. The audio analysis focused on the stu...

This paper presents different pre-processing techniques, coupled with three speaker diarization systems in the framework of the NIST 2005 Spring Rich Transcription campaign (RT’05S). The pre-processing techniques aim at providing a signal quality index in order to build unique ”virtual” signal obtained from all the microphone recordings available for a meeting. The unique ”virtual” signal relie...

Presented in the paper is the PLC symbol naming rules in order to simulate the virtual factory which is operated by the PLC control logic. In the PLC simulation, the corresponding model, normally called as the plant model, to the PLC receives the PLC output signal, operates virtual devices, and sends the changed PLC input signal which is updated by the virtual device movements. Therefore the pl...

Large scale traffic congestion often stems from local traffic jam in single road or intersection. In this paper, macroscopic method was used to explore the formation and propagation of local traffic jam. It is found that (1) the propagation of traffic jam can be seen as the propagation of traffic signal parameters, that is, virtual split and virtual green time; (2) for a road with endogenous fl...

the subject under investigation has been electronic learning (e-learning) or electronic education (e-education), specifically concentrating on virtual university. virtual university has been the subject of much debate in recent years. in short, the concept of virtual university denotes a learning/educational system/environment based on internet where higher education is promoted using tools and...

Indoor localization using Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) fingerprinting has been extensively studied for decades. The positioning accuracy is highly dependent on the density of the signal database. In areas without calibration data, however, this algorithm breaks down. Building and updating a dense signal database is labor intensive, expensive, and even impossible in some areas. Res...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Dual-energy CT is not used routinely for evaluation of the head and neck, and there is no consensus on the optimal virtual monochromatic image energies for evaluating normal tissues or head and neck cancer. We performed a quantitative evaluation to determine the optimal virtual monochromatic images for visualization of normal tissues, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma...

background : along with emersion of the internet, virtual education increasingly has been growing. many studies discussed this method and its impact on learning. present study investigated students’ attitude towards virtual education as well as its effect on learning. methods : this was a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental study. the nursing students, who had selected fluids and electrolyte di...