I n his famous fantasy epic, The Lord of the Rings, British writer and Professor of English Language and Literature, J. R. R. Tolkien, invented the Ents: tree-like creatures who were some of the oldest beings in his fantasy world of Middle-earth. In Tolkien’s story, the Ents used a unique and ancient language to communicate with each other in a very deliberate way. Tolkien described this langua...

In this paper, we propose an XML-based recommender system, called SPGProfile. It is a type of collaborative information filtering system. SPGProfile uses ontology-driven social networks, where nodes represent social groups. A social group is an entity that defines a group based on demographic, ethnic, cultural, religious, age, or other characteristics. In the SPGProfile framework, query results...

Microorganisms have provided mankind with a multitude of useful compounds ranging from industrial enzymes to anti-cancer compounds and antibiotics. With the aging population, our need for treatment principles against cancer, Alzheimer's disease and metabolic disorders is increasing. Also, the occurrence and spread of antibiotic resistance in pathogenic microorganisms has become one of our main ...

Music, more than any other art form, can raise the human spirit to the heights of joy or plunge it into the depths of sorrow. Yet, the power of music to influence our emotions, regardless of age or cultural background, has left philos ophers, scholars and musicians baffled; perhaps unsurprisingly, given the inevitable subject ivity of the phenomenon (Fig 1). In the late twentieth century, biolo...

fantile period, toddler stage, and late childhood and adolescence. For each section there is a description of both the diseases presenting at that age period and a differential diagnosis for the symptoms manifested, such as ataxia, seizures, and dementia. In addition, for each disease there is a concise, readable section detailing the symptomatology in both its classical presentation and its va...

The fields of language production and verbal memory have relatively little contact. I argue that utterance planning for language production has substantial memory maintenance demands and that utterance planning provides the maintenance and ordering processes for short-term verbal memory tasks. There has already been some movement toward this view. I discuss benefits to pursuing these links more...

This paper reports various aspects of the computer music realization of “Speakings” for live electronic and large orchestra by composer Jonathan Harvey, with the artistic aim of making an orchestra speak through computer music processes. The underlying project asks for various computer music techniques: whether through computer aided compositions as an aid for composer’s writing of instrumental...

We present a prototype of the Minnesang exhibit that translates visitors’ utterances into medieval German in their own voice. This lets visitors experience how they would have spoken in medieval times. The project illustrates new variants of voice conversion and their use in human-computer interaction.

We explain the relevance of Nash, Hoare and others in explaining Gricean implicature and cheap talk. We also develop a general model to address cases where communication is not cooperative, i..e cases of deception as well as cases where there is common knowledge of different interests in speaker and hearer. Tow models, one qualitative and one quantitative are introduced.