The ACTOR® Text-To-Speech (TTS) synthesis system, developed at Loquendo S.p.A., is here described. The system employs a unit -selection concatenative synthesis technique, relying on labeled acoustic databases providing phonetic and prosodic coverage of the intended language/domain and on an original algorithm for run-time selection of the acoustic units to be concatenated. This technique yields...

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) consist of powerful actors and resource constraint sensors that are linked together in wireless networks. They mostly rely on actors to make proper decisions and perform desired coordination to achieve the goals of the entire network. They are usually deployed in critical applications and actor-actor network connectivity is thus vital to their effectiv...

Liaison is a workflow management model that supports complex workflows and human resources management. Liaison System is the implementation of the Liaison Model. This paper discusses the architecture of the Liaison Workflow Engine, the core of the Liaison Workflow Management System, which is responsible for controlling workflows. Besides managing and controlling complex workflows and human reso...

Introduction. Our aim is to put on a short play featuring a real actor and a virtual actor, who will communicate through movements and choreography with mutual synchronization. Although the theatrical context is a good ground for multimodal communication between human and virtual actors, this paper mainly deals with the ability to perceive the gestures and chaining of gestures of a real actor. ...

Reinforcement learning theory has generated substantial interest in neurobiology, particularly because of the resemblance between phasic dopamine and reward prediction errors. Actor-critic theories have been adapted to account for the functions of the striatum, with parts of the dorsal striatum equated to the actor. Here, we specifically test whether the human dorsal striatum--as predicted by a...