The paper addresses the issue of making Virtual Humans unique and typical of some (social or ethnical) group, by endowing them with style. First a conceptual framework of defining style is discussed, identifying how style is manifested in speech and nonverbal communication. Then the GESTYLE language is introduced, making it possible to define the style of a VH in terms of Style Dictionaries, as...

This paper presents a resource-constrained scheduling algorithm for hierarchical behavioral speciications containing nested loops. The algorithm attempts to share resources across levels, to schedule operations that belong to diierent levels of the nested loop structures in the speciications as well as operations that belong to the same level. We compare the results of scheduling using our algo...

We present a technique for certifying domain-specific properties of code generated using program synthesis technology. Program synthesis is a maturing technology that generates code from high-level specifications in particular domains. For acceptance in safety-critical applications, the generated code must be thoroughly tested which is a costly process. We show how the program synthesis system ...

Currently, a lot of research in the field of intelligent tutoring systems is concerned with recognising student’s emotions and affects. The recognition is done by extracting features from information sources like speech, typing and mouse clicking behaviour or physiological sensors. In former work we proposed some low-level speech features for perceived task difficulty recognition in intelligent...

We present a novel approach to the generation of speech movements for an articulatory speech synthesizer. The movements of the articulators are modeled by dynamical third order linear systems that respond to sequences of simple motor commands. The motor commands are derived automatically from a high level schedule for the input phonemes. The proposed model considers velocity differences of the ...

This paper discusses aBlox a specification notation that we defined for automated synthesis of mixed-signal systems. aBlox addresses two important aspects of mixed-signal system specification: (1) description of functionality and performance issues and (2) expression of analog-digital interactions. The semantics of aBlox embeds concepts and rules of a computational model that we developed for m...

We present a new model for representing timing information for functions in High-Level Synthesis (HLS). We identify shortcomings of the conventional timing model, which is a very simple model derived from the combinational logic model, and show that our new model overcomes many of these defects. In particular, we are able to provide a unified timing model that describes hierarchical combination...

This paper describes a new approach to integrate testability consideration into high-level synthesis. The approach is based on an iterative technique for high-level synthesis which utilizes a sequence of design-improvement transformations to generate a register-transfer level design from a VHDL behavioral specification. A testability analysis algorithm is used to analyze the intermediate result...

High-level Synthesis or HLS represented an ambitious attempt by the community to provide capabilities for ‘algorithms to gates’ for a period of almost three decades. The technical challenge in realizing this goal drew researchers from various areas ranging from parallel programming, digital signal processing, and logic synthesis to expert systems. This article takes a journey through the years ...