The central product of the DRAMA (Dynamic ReAllocation of Meshes for parallel Finite Element Applications) project is a library comprising a variety of tools for dynamic re-partitioning of unstructured Finite Element (FE) applications. The input to the DRAMA library is the computational mesh, and corresponding costs, partitioned into sub-domains. The core library functions then perform a parall...

The video gaming industry has experienced extraordinary technological growth in the recent past, causing a boom in both in the quality and revenue of these games. Educational games, on the other hand, have lagged behind this trend, as their creation presents major creative and pedagogical challenges in addition to technological ones. By providing the technological advances of the entertainment ...

Emotion plays a central role in engaging drama. The conflicts between the characters in a play and the emotions involved in resolving them are the constituents of a dramatic structure, a plot. This premise leads to the assumption that a cast of characters driven by a simulation of the process described by the appraisal theory of emotion might realize dramatic structures by simply interacting in...

Adaptation to their environment is a fundamental capability for living agents, from which autonomous robots could also benefit. This work proposes a connectionist architecture, DRAMA, for dynamic control and learning of autonomous robots. DRAMA stands for dynamical recurrent associative memory architecture. It is a time-delay recurrent neural network, using Hebbian update rules. It allows learn...

Television ads can be classified as either arguments or dramas or hybrids of these forms. We claim that form dimension influences how ads are processed. An argument backs its claims with appeals to objectivity and is processed evaluatively. A drama appeals more to subjective criteria and is processed empathically. A study is reported in which 40 television commercials were classified on a drama...

The goal of our group is to produce immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences that engage the user as a central protagonist in compelling interactive dramas. Our dramas are designed for CAVEs or CAVE-like systems – projection-based, 3-D stereo VR displays with one large screen or multiple screens forming a virtual theater. A tracking system and ”wand,” with joystick and programmable buttons, c...

Drawing is valued as a non-verbal assessment tool to measure children’s conceptual development and emotional state. Drawing has also been described as a problem-solving activity and unique symbol system. Although drama has been known to facilitate learning in other symbol systems, such as reading and writing, and to bring about advances in perspective taking and understanding of emotion, its im...

1Often, video game designers must choose between creating a restrictive, linear experience and designing an open world with many different story lines that fail to form a tightly crafted narrative arc. A drama manager (DM) can provide a solution to this dilemma. A DM monitors an interactive experience, such as a computer game, and intervenes to shape the global experience so that it satisfies t...