Circadian rhythms with a period of ~24 h, are natural timing machines. They are broadly distributed in living organisms, such as Neurospora, Drosophila, and mammals. The underlying natures of the rhythmic behavior have been explored by experimental and theoretical approaches. However, the global and physical natures of the oscillation under fluctuations are still not very clear. We developed a ...

We highlight the importance of dialogue management in systems that support mixed-initiative interaction. For concreteness, we focus on interaction with recommender systems. We propose an approach that uses both a dialogue grammar and a recommendation strategy. The dialogue grammar makes explicit the opportunities the user and system have for seizing and ceding the initiative. But it maintains o...

Prosody is critical in conveying topic coherence and the salience of information in speech. In this study we propose that the overall coherence is brought about through pitch level structuring of phrases at both the local level of hierarchical phrase unit positioning and the global level of pitch baseline rise and fall as climax and resolution. Our results show that prosody has critical importa...

In summarization, sentence ordering is conducted to enhance summary readability by accommodating text coherence. We propose a grouping-based ordering framework that integrates local and global coherence concerns. Summary sentences are grouped before ordering is applied on two levels: group-level and sentence-level. Different algorithms for grouping and ordering are discussed. The preliminary re...

We study phase synchronization (PS) of coupled chaotic oscillators as a result of an interplay between local coupling and global noise. In the weak coupling region, noise first significantly enhances spatiotemporal PS, but it spoils the phase coherence of chaotic oscillation and reduces the degree of synchronization at large intensities. The spatiotemporal behavior exhibits coherence resonance....

The quantization of resistances in the quantum Hall effect and ballistic transport through quantum point contacts is compared with the quantization of the charge relaxation resistance of a coherent mesoscopic capacitor. While the former two require the existence of a perfectly transmitting channel, the charge relaxation resistance remains quantized for arbitrary backscattering. The quantum Hall...