We study the problem of imposing conversational goals/keywords on open-domain agents, where agent is required to lead conversation a target keyword smoothly and fast. Solving this enables application agents in many real-world scenarios, e.g., recommendation psychotherapy. The dominant paradigm for tackling 1) train next-turn classifier, 2) keyword-augmented response retrieval model. However, ex...

abstract background: abdominal tumors are still a diagnostic problem in children. this study was conducted to assess the presentation and types of childhood intra abdominal tumors in children in shiraz. materials and methods: participants of this historical cohort study consisted of 298 children aged between 1.5 months to 15 years old who were diagnosed with abdominal mass between march 2003 an...

this study is a typological description of written formative feedback in an efl context in iran. twenty m.a. students of tefl participated in the study. they were required to summarize a scholarly article in each session on which the instructor would provide written corrective feedback (cf). written formative comments were extracted, coded, and categorized into various types, such as asking for...

Abstract In this paper, we describe a CMOS DC-DC converter with a variable output voltage (8-12V @100mA) for a portable battery-operated system applications. The proposed DC-DC converter is used along with a Pulse-Frequency Modulation (PFM) method and consists of a reference circuit, a feedback resistor, a controller, and an internal oscillator. The integrated DC-DC converter with two external ...

This paper proposes structural features for content-based image retrieval (CBIR), especially edge/structure features extracted from edge maps. The feature vector is computed through a “Water-Filling Algorithm” applied on the edge map of the original image. The purpose of this algorithm is to efficiently extract information embedded in the edges. The new features are more generally applicable th...

In the rural sector of India there is a large number of hearing impaired persons. With moderate or acute hearing loss Hearing impaired persons, suffer from opportunities for communicating with others Presently the conventional analog hearing aids have a number of functional limitations such as fixed frequency, lack of flexibility, can’t distinguish speech from noise, etc. The Digital hearing ai...

In minimally invasive surgery, tactile feedback is lacking. A tactile display, consisting of a matrix of micro-actuators, represents tactile sensations on the fingertip. Miniaturising powerful, dynamic and accurate actuators with a sufficient stroke and bandwidth is a considerable challenge. The use of pneumatics is promising due to the potential for high power density. This paper discusses a p...

Received Mar 30, 2013 Revised Aug 15, 2013 Accepted Aug 29, 2013 In this paper, two types of robust adaptive compensation control schemes for the trajectory tracking control of robot manipulator with uncertain dynamics are proposed. The proposed controllers incorporate the computed-torque control scheme as a nominal portion of the controller; an adaptive fuzzy control algorithm to approximate t...