Ambient intelligence gathers best results from three key technologies, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous communication, and intelligent user friendly interfaces. The functional and spatial distribution of tasks is a natural thrust to employ multi-agent paradigm to design and implement AmI environments. Two critical issues, common in most of applications, are (1) how to detect in a general and ef...

Here we have investigated the role of the muscle fiber in the maintenance of presynaptic function at frog motor nerve terminals. Muscle fibers were selectively damaged and prevented from regenerating while leaving the motor innervation intact. Presynaptic activity of the resulting target-deprived nerve terminals was assayed using the fluorescent dye, FMl-43. FMI-43 stains nerve terminals in an ...

The problem of Personalized Face Animation is addressed in this paper by proposing ShowFace streaming structure. This structure is based on most widely accepted industry standards in multimedia presentation like MPEG-4 and SMIL, and extends them by defining image transformations required for certain facial movements, and also by providing a higher level Face Modeling Language (FML) for modeling...

Pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (PNETs) are becoming increasingly common, with the majority of patients presenting with either lymph node involvement or metastatic disease, thus requiring systemic therapy. Targeted therapy is a type of medication that blocks the growth of cancer cells by interfering with specific targeted molecules needed for carcinogenesis and tumor growth rather than by simp...

We approach the discussion of requirements for an FML from a high-level perspective on communication and the current state of developments in ECA communication. From a general point of view questions arise such as: Who is communicating to whom in which socio-cultural and situational context. What is the overall interaction history of the communication partners, and what is the history of the on...

AbstructWe develop a procedure for the order selection of damped sinusoidal models based on the maximum U posterion’ (MAP) criterion. The proposed method merges the concept of predictive densities with Bayesian inference to arrive at a complex multidimensional integral whose solution is achieved by way of the efficient Monte Carlo importance sampling technique. The importance function, a multiv...

This chapter will discuss the multimedia modeling and specification methods, especially in the context of face animation. Personalized Face Animation is and/or can be a major User Interface component in modern multimedia systems. After reviewing the related works in this area, we present the ShowFace streaming structure. This structure is based on most widely accepted industry standards in mult...

In this paper I discuss how communicative behavior can be represented at two levels of abstraction, namely the higher level of communicative intent or function, which does not make any claims about the surface form of the behavior, and the lower level of physical behavior description, which in essence instantiates intent as a particular multimodal realization. I briefly outline the proposed SAI...

Latest research on formal methods for knowledge representation based on semantic web technologies witnessed how ontologies have become a fundamental and critical component for developing applications in different real world scenarios. Indeed, ontologies formally model application domains to enable reuse of knowledge and allow people and software agents to share a common understanding of the str...