3,444 research outputs found
Alien Registration- Archibald, John D. (Monticello, Aroostook County)
https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/34222/thumbnail.jp
Towards the improvement of self-service systems via emotional virtual agents
Affective computing and emotional agents have been found to have a positive effect on human-computer interactions. In order to develop an acceptable emotional agent for use in a self-service interaction, two stages of research were identified and carried out; the first to determine which facial expressions are present in such an interaction and the second to determine which emotional agent behaviours are perceived as appropriate during a problematic self-service shopping task. In the first stage, facial expressions associated with negative affect were found to occur during self-service shopping interactions, indicating that facial expression detection is suitable for detecting negative affective states during self-service interactions. In the second stage, user perceptions of the emotional facial expressions displayed by an emotional agent during a problematic self-service interaction were gathered. Overall, the expression of disgust was found to be perceived as inappropriate while emotionally neutral behaviour was perceived as appropriate, however gender differences suggested that females perceived surprise as inappropriate. Results suggest that agents should change their behaviour and appearance based on user characteristics such as gender
Short-term and working memory in children with specific language impairment
Investigations of the cognitive processes underlying Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have implicated deficits in the storage and processing of phonological or verbal information. This thesis reports five studies that investigated the role of short-term and working memory in children with SLI. Study 1 demonstrated SLI deficits on measures of verbal working memory, and short-term memory for verbal but not visuospatial information. Study 2 provided evidence that children with SLI perform at age-level on visuospatial working memory measures. Study 3 demonstrated slower processing in the SLI group across domains, as well as verbal storage decrements, with the greatest deficits found for tasks tapping both of these. Study 4 found SLI deficits on measures of nonword repetition in common use, with greater impairments on the task that relied to a lesser extent on short-term memory. Study 5 established more accurate recall for multisyllabic nonwords than matched single syllable lists for all groups, although the SLI group showed different patterns of phoneme retention. It is suggested that the combination of deficits in generalized processing speed and verbal storage in SLI may be expected to have a drastic and detrimental impact on learning, and provides an account of the disorder that could encompass the range of impairments observed in SLI. The findings also suggest that factors additional to short-term memory contribute to poor nonword repetition in SLI
A submillimetre survey of the star-formation history of radio galaxies
We present the results of the first major systematic submillimetre survey of
radio galaxies spanning the redshift range 1 < z < 5. The primary aim of this
work is to elucidate the star-formation history of this sub-class of elliptical
galaxies by tracing the cosmological evolution of dust mass. Using SCUBA on the
JCMT we have obtained 850-micron photometry of 47 radio galaxies to a
consistent rms depth of 1 mJy, and have detected dust emission in 14 cases. The
radio galaxy targets have been selected from a series of low-frequency radio
surveys of increasing depth (3CRR, 6CE, etc), in order to allow us to separate
the effects of increasing redshift and increasing radio power on submillimetre
luminosity. Although the dynamic range of our study is inevitably small, we
find clear evidence that the typical submillimetre luminosity (and hence dust
mass) of a powerful radio galaxy is a strongly increasing function of redshift;
the detection rate rises from 15 per cent at z 2.5,
and the average submillimetre luminosity rises as (1+z)^3 out to z~4. Moreover
our extensive sample allows us to argue that this behaviour is not driven by
underlying correlations with other radio galaxy properties such as radio power,
radio spectral index, or radio source size/age. Although radio selection may
introduce other more subtle biases, the redshift distribution of our detected
objects is in fact consistent with the most recent estimates of the redshift
distribution of comparably bright submillimetre sources discovered in blank
field surveys. The evolution of submillimetre luminosity found here for radio
galaxies may thus be representative of massive ellipticals in general.Comment: 31 pages - 10 figures in main text, 3 pages of figures in appendix.
This revised version has been re-structured, but the analysis and conclusions
have not changed. Accepted for publication in MNRA
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