Your destiny, from day one

Your day-by-day guide to ASCO

How Was Your Day?

We describe a ‘How was your day?’ (HWYD) Companion whose purpose is to establish a comforting and supportive relationship with a user via a conversation on a variety of work-related topics. The system has several fairly novel features aimed at increasing the naturalness of the interaction: a rapid ‘short loop’ response primed by the results of acoustic emotion analysis, and an ‘interruption man...

Bring Your Self to Work Day—Every Day

But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused—and I am so powerless to do anything about it—that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then the enemy is everywhere: in those students from some alien planet, in that subject I thought I knew, and in the personal pathology that keeps me earning my living this way. What a fool I was to imagine that I had mas...

Plant senescence and proteolysis: two processes with one destiny

Senescence-associated proteolysis in plants is a complex and controlled process, essential for mobilization of nutrients from old or stressed tissues, mainly leaves, to growing or sink organs. Protein breakdown in senescing leaves involves many plastidial and nuclear proteases, regulators, different subcellular locations and dynamic protein traffic to ensure the complete transformation of prote...

How was your day?: a companion ECA

We demonstrate a “Companion” ECA, which is able to provide advice and support to the user, taking into account emotions expressed by her through dialogue. The integration of all required multimodal I/O components is based on interaction strategies defining the shape of dialogue, on the ECA’s response times, and on the underlying affective strategy. The system supports free conversation on an ev...