The birth of the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1993, particularly its graphical user interface, offered marketers opportunities that were previously unimaginable. The WWW allows advanced marketing activities and more particularly interactive marketing, as the user is actively involved in responding to the vendor’s promotion campaign. Interactive TV, also referred to as iTV, combines the appeal and ma...

A fte r a few in tro d u cto ry rem ark s, w e shall p resen t the co rp u s and th e search eng ine as seen from th e u se r’s p o in t o f v iew , fo llow ing up the p resen ta tio n w ith a few exam ple queries. In conclusion , som e re flec tio n s o n th e p ossib ilities th a t th e In te rn e t has to o ffer in u tilisa tio n , m ain tenance, and co n tro l o f la rg e co rpo ra o f sem ...

StreetTiVo is a project that aims at bringing research results into the living room; in particular, a mix of current results in the areas of Peer-to-Peer XML Database Management System (P2P XDBMS), advanced multimedia analysis techniques, and advanced information retrieval techniques. The project develops a plug-in application for the so-called Home Theatre PCs, such as set-top boxes with MythT...

Persons with severe mental illness experience episodic crises, resulting in frequent visits to hospital emergency departments (EDs). EDs, however, are not the most effective treatment environments for these individuals who might better be served elsewhere in an environment based on recovery-oriented framework. The purpose of this study is to describe the lived experience of guests (persons in e...

Consumer demand and current computational capabilities are driving the manufacturing complex from mass production to mass customization. Current barriers to mass customization have less to do with manufacturing machinery and more to do with the manual and computerized information systems currently used to control that machinery. On-line commerce offers potential benefits and functionality far b...

Despite continuous progress in robust automatic speech recognition in recent years acoustic mismatch between training and test conditions is still a major problem. Consequently, large speech collections must be conducted in many environments. An alternative approach is to generate training data synthetically by filtering clean speech with impulse responses and/or adding noise signals from the t...

After entering an assisted living facility at age fifty-three because of young-onset Parkinson's, an observer-advocate contemplates the dire need for long-term care reform.

Culture, society, and technology heavily influence architectural form, and basic architectural elements and functions evolve to suit users’ needs. In the 20 century, with the development of computational technology, architecture underwent dramatic transformation. Human-computer interaction (HCI) has changed architectural space into a smart space, which provides new ways for humans to interact w...

This article examines how cultural representations of deviant bodies vary based on historically informed narratives of bodily stigma. Using content analysis of 40 episodes of reality television programming, I contrast cultural representations of dwarfism and obesity. Over time, dwarfism became constructed as an identity project with the aim of bodily acceptance, whereas obesity became regarded ...

Adult-targeted automatic speech recognition (ASR) has made significant advancements in recent years and can produce speech-to-text output with very low word-error-rate, for multiple languages, and in various types of noisy environments, e.g. car noise, living-room, outdoor-noise, etc. But when it comes to child speech, little is available at the performance level of adult targeted ASR. It requi...