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

Peculiar history of women\u27s suffrage in Jasper County, Missouri.

The women’s suffrage movement in Jasper County Missouri was unlike the same movement anywhere else in the state. The election of 1890 began a series of events that made the county one of the most important places in Missouri for the suffrage movement. Jasper County strongly supported women’s suffrage, and its citizens were not afraid to demonstrate their support through letters, newspapers, and public events. Once Tennessee ratified the Nineteenth Amendment on 18 August 1920, men and women alike joined in celebrating its passage in all of the cities of the county, and finally a battle that had raged on for over seventy years in the United States came to a close. This thesis uses primary and secondary sources to tell the history of the suffrage movement in Jasper County and how its citizens influenced the state and national suffrage movement. Personal letters between Ella Harrison and the women of Jasper County displayed the political tactics suffragists used to gain many supporters. Speeches from local legislators demonstrated how important the question of suffrage was to these leaders and their constituents. Minutes from the League of Women Voters in Joplin gave first-hand accounts of what women were doing to promote suffrage on the local level. Local newspapers were critical in telling the story of how suffrage was important to the county citizens. Finally, secondary sources revealed the demographics of the region and helped to illustrate the history of the state and federal suffrage movement

Yang-Yang thermodynamics on an atom chip

We investigate the behavior of a weakly interacting nearly one-dimensional (1D) trapped Bose gas at finite temperature. We perform in situ measurements of spatial density profiles and show that they are very well described by a model based on exact solutions obtained using the Yang-Yang thermodynamic formalism, in a regime where other, approximate theoretical approaches fail. We use Bose-gas focusing [Shvarchuck etal., Phys. Rev. Lett. 89, 270404 (2002)] to probe the axial momentum distribution of the gas, and find good agreement with the in situ results.Comment: extended introduction and conclusions, and minor changes throughout; accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let