The Bank’s engagement in carbon finance started with the establishment of the $180 million Prototype Carbon Fund in 1999. Since then the Bank has also agreed to administer country carbon funds for the Dutch, Italian, Spanish and the Danish Governments. In addition to the country carbon funds, the Bank established the Community Development Carbon Fund on March 25, 2003 and the BioCarbon Fund on ...

Little is known on the perceptual processes of speaker identification and its relations to the acoustic features of the speaker’s voice. A study of speaker perception and identification by psycho-acoustic experiments was carried out. Statistical analysis of the results suggests that the prototype model is appropriate for explaining the process of speaker identification. It has been also found t...

A set of five practically manageable Network Services is proposed for the IP QoS AQUILA architecture and implemented in a prototype network. QoS capabilities of routers in conjunction with Admission Control (AC) and Resource Pool (RP) allow for an efficient handling of traffic requiring different packet transfer characteristics. The paper presents the trial results illustrating the effectivenes...

In this study we re-evaluated earlier findings that natural language categories are represented by an exemplar representation rather than by a prototype representation. Using a restricted prototype model, an exemplar model and a “flying” prototype model, we predicted typicality ratings for 11 natural language categories from 2 semantic domains, animals and artifacts. We showed that exemplar mod...

This paper presents a dialogue system in the form of an ECA that acts as a sociable and emotionally intelligent companion for the user. The system dialogue is not task-driven but is social conversation in which the user talks about his/her day at the office. During conversations the system monitors the emotional state of the user and uses that information to inform its dialogue turns. The syste...

With higher life expectancy and an increasing number of older people, the number of people suffering from dementia continues to grow. Dementia impacts all areas of daily life and, in particular, communication with other people and maintenance of personhood. Technology is a promising means to address these challenges, yet approaches to design with and for people with dementia remain sparse. In o...

Spatial and situational awareness could be decreased significantly under low visibility and adverse weather conditions. This could affect exponentially the reactions of the older drivers and increase dramatically their collision probability. To this end we developed a novel Head-Up Display interface that aims to reinstate the drivers’ vision which is predominantly hindered under these condition...

In this work we present a prototype that calculates similarity between authors and books. The application allows the user to choose the author and the system retrieves books from other authors that are similar to the chosen author’s work.

The Hydromechanics Laboratory supports midshipmen education, as well as midshipmen, faculty and staff research, in the areas of naval architecture and ocean engineering. The laboratory facilities include a large towing tank (380-ft long, 26ft wide, and 16-ft deep), a small towing tank (120-ft long, 8-ft wide, and 5-ft deep), a coastal engineering wave basin (52-ft long, 48-ft wide, and 2-ft dee...

This article announces the first public release of an experimental research tool for variability management, called “CVM framework” and provides an overview of the tool’s capabilities and architecture.