Helping those who help their science

Helping those who don't help themselves.

On a recent program night, third-grader Tyrell came to speak with Ms. Dee, our COO. He had received a mattress at Christmas and was now very happy to have his own place to sleep. Tyrell’s mom is out of the house, and he and his siblings live with Granny. He proceeded to tell Ms. Dee his dream of having his mattress “put up” (which meant with a frame and box spring) but wasn’t sure how this was ...

Mending the Torn Fabric: For Those Who Grieve and Those Who Want to Help Them

Helping Agents Help Their Users Despite Imperfect Speech Recognition

Spoken language is an important and natural way for people to communicate with computers. Nonetheless, habitable, reliable, and efficient human-machine dialogue remains difficult to achieve. This paper describes a multi-threaded semisynchronous architecture for spoken dialogue systems. The focus here is on its utterance interpretation module. Unlike most architectures for spoken dialogue system...

Helping people help themselves

Deliberate self-harm in adolescents: comparison between those who receive help following self-harm and those who do not.

This international comparative study addresses differences between adolescents who engage in deliberate self-harm (DSH) and who receive help following the DSH episode versus those who do not. A standardised self-report questionnaire was completed by pupils aged 14-17 in Australia, Belgium, England, Hungary, Ireland, The Netherlands, and Norway (n=30,532). An act of DSH in the year prior to the ...