Tapping into effective emotional reactions via a user driven audio design tool.

A major problem when tackling any audio design problem aimed at conveying important and informative content, is the imposing of the designer’s own emotion, taste and value systems on the finished design choices, rather than reflecting those of the end user. In the past the problem has been routed in the tendency to use passive test subjects in rigid environments. Subjects react to sounds without no means of controlling what they hear. This paper suggests a system for participatory sound design that generates results by activating test subjects and giving them significant control of the sounding experience under test. The audio design tool application described here, the AWESOME (Auditory Work Environment Simulation Machine) Sound Design Tool, sets out to enable the end user to have direct influence on the design process through a simple yet innovative technical applications This web based device allows the end users to make emotive decisions about the kinds of audio signals they find most appropriate for given situations. The results can be used to both generate general knowledge about listening experiences and more importantly, as direct user input in actual sound design processes

The Beauty Industry\u27s Influence on Women in Society

There has been a significant amount of research done on the effect that advertising in the fashion and beauty industry has on women. By creating advertisements with unrealistic images of beauty, it has resulted in anxiety, low self-esteem, and low self-confidence in many women. Most of these negative emotions stems from unhappiness among body and appearance. Less research has been performed relating to cosmetics and how this can have an influence on women, and how women can use cosmetics to manipulate their appearance. This paper first discusses the existing research that focuses on the cosmetic industry’s influence on women. From this research, a general survey was created in order to gather general information about a group of college student’s cosmetic usage, habits, and beliefs. The results indicate that college women are high users of cosmetics, are very aware of the cosmetic industry, and that some individual differences can have an effect on the choices a woman makes regarding cosmetics

Comparing human robot interaction scenarios using live and video based methods: towards a novel methodological approach

This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.---- Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. DOI : 10.1109/AMC.2006.1631754This paper presents results of a pilot study that investigated whether people’s perceptions from live and video HRI trials were comparable. Subjects participated in a live HRI trial and videotaped HRI trials in which the scenario for both trials was identical, and involved a robot fetching an object using different approach directions. Results of the trials indicated moderate to high levels of agreement for subjects’ preferences, and opinions for both the live and video based HRI trials. This methodology is in its infancy and should not be seen as a replacement for live trials. However, our results indicate that for certain HRI scenarios videotaped trials do have potential as a technique for prototyping, testing, developing HRI scenarios, and testing methodologies for use in definitive live trials

Catering for different learning styles

This paper describes a study to investigate the possibility of applying a quick and simple front‐end to multimedia presentations. The front‐end will determine the user's learning style and suggest a suitable navigation method The paper recognizes not only different learning styles which influence learners’ performance, but also the practical use of valid learning styles’ measurements

A Comprehensive Experimental Comparison of Event Driven and Multi-Threaded Sensor Node Operating Systems

The capabilities of a sensor network are strongly influenced by the operating system used on the sensor nodes. In general, two different sensor network operating system types are currently considered: event driven and multi-threaded. It is commonly assumed that event driven operating systems are more suited to sensor networks as they use less memory and processing resources. However, if factors other than resource usage are considered important, a multi-threaded system might be preferred. This paper compares the resource needs of multi-threaded and event driven sensor network operating systems. The resources considered are memory usage and power consumption. Additionally, the event handling capabilities of event driven and multi-threaded operating systems are analyzed and compared. The results presented in this paper show that for a number of application areas a thread-based sensor network operating system is feasible and preferable

Fluid-dynamical and microscopic description of traffic flow: a data-driven comparison

A lot of work has been done to compare traffic flow models with reality; so far, this has been done separately for microscopic as well as for fluid-dynamical models of traffic flow. This paper compares directly the performance of both types of models to real data. The results indicate, that microscopic models on average seem to have a tiny advantage over fluid-dynamical models, however one may admit that for most applications the differences between the two are small. Furthermore, the relaxation time of the fluid-dynamical models turns out to be fairly small, of the order of two seconds, and are comparable with the results for the microscopic models. This indicates that the second order terms are weak, however, the calibration results indicate that the speed equation is in fact important and improves the calibration results of the models

Efficient resources assignment schemes for clustered multithreaded processors

New feature sizes provide larger number of transistors per chip that architects could use in order to further exploit instruction level parallelism. However, these technologies bring also new challenges that complicate conventional monolithic processor designs. On the one hand, exploiting instruction level parallelism is leading us to diminishing returns and therefore exploiting other sources of parallelism like thread level parallelism is needed in order to keep raising performance with a reasonable hardware complexity. On the other hand, clustering architectures have been widely studied in order to reduce the inherent complexity of current monolithic processors. This paper studies the synergies and trade-offs between two concepts, clustering and simultaneous multithreading (SMT), in order to understand the reasons why conventional SMT resource assignment schemes are not so effective in clustered processors. These trade-offs are used to propose a novel resource assignment scheme that gets and average speed up of 17.6% versus Icount improving fairness in 24%.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version