59,124 research outputs found
The Influence of oral environment on diet choices in goats: a focus on saliva protein composition
There is ample evidence that ruminants are capable of making choices between
different foods that provide a more balanced diet that would be obtained by eating at
random. In the particular case of goats, they occupy a diversity of habitats and different
breeds present variability of feeding behaviors resultant from adaptations to the existent
plant species. In their food search activity, individuals are faced with variable amounts of
plant secondary metabolites (PSMs), which may present some toxic and anti-nutritional
effects depending on the individual’s ability to deal with it.
The oral cavity has a key role in the recognition and decision processes of ingestion
or rejection. In this chapter we will first consider how goats identify foods and behave
according to the food items available. Focus will be done on the importance of taste sense
in this process and the information available on the main structures involved in taste
detection and perception in goats will be reviewed. In a second section we will focus on
the characteristics of goat’s saliva, particularly in terms of their protein composition,
presenting results obtained by our research team
Controlling the Gaze of Conversational Agents
We report on a pilot experiment that investigated the effects of different eye gaze behaviours of a cartoon-like talking face on the quality of human-agent dialogues. We compared a version of the talking face that roughly implements some patterns of human-like behaviour with\ud
two other versions. In one of the other versions the shifts in gaze were kept minimal and in the other version the shifts would occur randomly. The talking face has a number of restrictions. There is no speech recognition, so questions and replies have to be typed in by the users\ud
of the systems. Despite this restriction we found that participants that conversed with the agent that behaved according to the human-like patterns appreciated the agent better than participants that conversed with the other agents. Conversations with the optimal version also\ud
proceeded more efficiently. Participants needed less time to complete their task
Experimenting with the Gaze of a Conversational Agent
We have carried out a pilot experiment to investigate the effects of different eye gaze behaviors of a cartoon-like talking face on the quality of human-agent dialogues. We compared a version of the talking face that roughly implements some patterns of humanlike behavior with two other versions. We called this the optimal version. In one of the other versions the shifts in gaze were kept minimal and in the other version the shifts would occur randomly. The talking face has a number of restrictions. There is no speech recognition, so questions and replies have to\ud
be typed in by the users of the systems. Despite this restriction we found that participants that conversed with the optimal agent appreciated the agent more than participants that conversed with the other agents. Conversations with the optimal version proceeded more efficiently. Participants needed less time to complete their task
Invariant measures for monotone SPDE's with multiplicative noise term
We study diffusion processes corresponding to infinite dimensional semilinear
stochastic differential equations with local Lipschitz drift term and an
arbitrary Lipschitz diffusion coefficient. We prove tightness and the Feller
property of the solution to show existence of an invariant measure. As an
application we discuss stochastic reaction diffusion equations.Comment: 10 page
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