The abruptness and virulence of the 1997 Asian crises have led many to claim that these crises are of a new breed and thus they were unforecastable. This paper examines 102 financial crises in 20 countries and concludes that the Asian crises are not of a new variety. Overall, the 1997 Asian crises, as well as previous crises in other regions, occur when the economies are in distress, making the...

Virtual advisory services are very important tools for the psychological self-help domain. It is particularly valuable for emergency rescuers in relieving their psychological distress given the high-stress nature of their occupation. To investigate optimal design strategies for an effective virtual advisory service to empower emergency rescuers, this article explores how virtual advisor identit...

This demonstration highlights the dialogue processing in SimSensei Kiosk, a virtual human dialogue system that conducts interviews related to psychological distress conditions such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The dialogue processing in SimSensei Kiosk allows the system to conduct coherent spoken interviews of human users that are 15-25 minutes in length, a...

Education professionals and researchers are concerned by school bullying and cyberbullying because of its repercussions on students’ health and the school climate. However, only a few studies investigating the impact of school versus cyberbullying have systematically explored whether student victims and perpetrators are involved in school bullying only, cyberbullying only, or both. The aim of t...

Property market busts are usually implicated in some way in episodes of financial instability. The losses on US mortgages that sparked the recent financial crisis are a good example of this connection, as are the episodes in Japan, Scandinavia and Australia in the early 1990s, which largely stemmed from commercial property lending. One might think property loans should be fairly safe, given the...

Rasch analysis was used to illustrate the usefulness of item-level analyses for evaluating a common therapy outcome measure of general clinical distress, the Symptom Checklist-90Revised (SCL-90-R, Derogatis, 1994). Using complementary therapy research samples, we found that the instrument’s 5-point rating scale exceeded clients’ ability to make reliable discriminations and could be improved by ...

This paper provide a large-deviations approximation of the tail distribution of total financial losses on a portfolio consisting of many positions. Applications include the total default losses on a bank portfolio, or the total claims against an insurer. The results may be useful in allocating exposure limits, and in allocating risk capital across different lines of business. Assuming that, for...

We present the SimSensei system, a fully automatic virtual agent that conducts interviews to assess indicators of psychological distress. We emphasize on the perception part of the system, a multimodal framework which captures and analyzes user state for both behavioral understanding and interactional purposes.