1 ARC Centre of Excellence in Plant Cell Walls, School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia, 2 Bioinformatics, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Parkville, Victoria, Australia, 3 School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia, 4 School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria...

Toxoplasma gondii as an apicomplexan zoonotic parasite is able to infect humans and almost all other warm-blooded animals. Wild and domestic felids are the main definitive hosts. Also, canids such as dogs and jackals have been introduced as mechanical vectors since T. gondii oocysts can pass their intestinal tract and spread by feces in environment. Toxoplasmosis is a common zoonotic disease in...

The geography of a modern Eliza provides an illusion of natural language understanding. However, this is seen in very few of the hundred-plus programmes entered into Chatterbox Challenge 2005 (CBC 2005), a competition for artificial intelligence based on Turing’s measure for intelligence through textual dialogue. The author’s experience as one of the Judges in CBC 2005 has found that though not...

We are studying how to create social physical agents, i.e., humanoids, that perform actions empowered by real-time audio-visual tracking of multiple talkers. Social skills require complex perceptual and motor capabilities as well as communicating ones. It is critical to identify primary features in designing building blocks for social skills, because performance of social interaction is usually...

Although Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash (1992) is often noted as the inspiration for virtual worlds like Second Life, virtual environments were flourishing prior to its publication. Multi-user dungeons (MUDs), text-based and multiplayer environments for role-playing games, were popular in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, a new trajectory for online spaces was mapped by the introduction of what beca...