Nowadays creating believable characters is a top trend in the video game industry. Recent projects present new design concepts and improvements in artificial intelligence that are oriented to this goal. The expected behaviour of computer-played characters becomes increasingly demanding: proactivity, autonomous decision-making, social interaction, natural communication, reasoning and knowledge m...

Threshold secret sharing schemes are ideal to protect confidential information. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed threshold secret sharing scheme based on spherical coordinates. As four non-coplanar points can determine a unique sphere, we design transformation algorithms to generate secret as sphere center and mapping algorithms to convert participants to be sphere surface p...

659 Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) reduce sudden cardiac death risk and improve survival in patients with a history of life-threatening arrhythmia or cardiac arrest (secondary prevention) and in high-risk patients without such a history (primary prevention). Patients with ICDs, however, may receive unnecessary shocks, which have been associated with proarrhythmia, anxiety, depre...

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) has been identified as a key concept within manufacturing industries for improving product quality, time-tomarket and costs. Previous works on this field are focused on processes, functions and information models, and those aimed at putting more intelligence on products are related to specific parts of the product lifecycle (e.g. supply chain management, shop ...

Proactive computing reinforces the need for non-command interfaces that fulfill the user’s intentions without explicit commands. Eye gaze is a natural modality to be used in this connection, because it is also used proactively in everyday life. Previously eye-tracking has been used mostly for research purposes or in applications targeted for users with special needs. We present iDict, a gaze-as...

Agent orientation is currently pursued primarily as a software paradigm. Software with characteristics such as autonomy, sociality, reactivity and proactivity, and communicative and cooperative abilities are expected to offer greater functionality and higher quality, in comparison to earlier paradigms such as object orientation. Agent models and languages are thus intended as abstractions of co...

Article history: Received 21 December 2013 Available online 28 February 2014 The value of mentoring is growing substantially as organizations take a renewed interest in employee development to better survive in the dynamic and competitive market today. In the wake of this renewed interest, this meta-analysis was conducted to quantitatively review the multi-level antecedents (e.g., individual, r...

The Machine-to-Machine (M2M) paradigm involves devices (sensors, actuators) interacting together to provide services located in the physical world. As the technology is gaining maturity, there is a growing need for mutualized solutions in which applications can share a common set of devices. In this context, the SensCity project proposes an infrastructure to enable mutualized city scale applica...