Understanding whether an event attracted the audience’s attention and which moments were mostly enjoyable is a primary goal for sport and show business managers. OZ (Osservare l’attenZione – Observing attention) is an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods project that aims at developing a technology able to automatically detect at run time spectators’ attention level, via the integration of microsoc...

Model checking, a formal automatic verification method, has been widely used in multi-agent systems to verify specifications that contain qualitative properties (e.g safety and liveliness) and quantitative properties. Decision making processes based on inherent knowledge are necessary for agents to act appropriately, particularly in uncertain settings. In order to check epistemic (i.e knowledge...

Although theory rich, contemporary psychologists have no consensual understanding of what constitutes a theory or how theory should be used, revised, and appraised. Likewise neglected are ways that a theory is taken up in specific research domains and how a theory can change over time. In response to calls for renewing psychology’s appreciation of theory, this article introduces an understandin...

Over the past decade, security and privacy concerns about the growing deployment of biometrics as a proof of identity have motivated researchers to investigate solutions such as cancellable biometrics to enhance the security of biometric systems. However, the open nature of newly emerged mobile authentication scenarios has made these solutions impractical and necessitated the need for new innov...

Because play is extremely sensitive to environmental conditions, extended hospitalization may have adverse effects on normal play development in young children. This study compared the playfulness, as well as the level of play development, of three 2-year-old children who had been hospitalized most of their lives for tracheostomies, and three 2-year-olds living at home. Data on the children's p...

A formal specification animator interprets and executes specifications to give them the appearance of liveliness. This can be used to identify errors in a specification because it provides concrete examples of the behaviour of the specification. By providing a suitable user interface, it allows users unfamiliar with specification languages and notations to interact with the specification. In th...

A visual overt attention mechanism is presented in this paper. Our algorithm chooses the next fixation point for a robot mobile camera in order to track several objects around the robot simultaneously, even if the whole set of them can not be covered by the same camera image. Our approach is based on two related measurements, liveliness and saliency, that dynamically evolve depending on the ima...

This paper presents a state-space based model-checking framework to test and validate embedded system controllers specified using the IOPT Petri net formalism. The framework is composed of an automatic software code generator, a state-space generator and a query engine, used to define queries applied to the resulting state-space graphs. During state-space generation, the tools collect informati...

With the ever-increasing security threats, the problem of invulnerable authentication systems is becoming more acute. Traditional means of securing a facility essentially depend on strategies corresponding to “what you have” or “what you know”, for example smart cards, keys and passwords. These systems however can easily be fooled. Passwords for example, are difficult to remember and therefore ...

OBJECTIVE To clarify the physical and psychological effects of head massage performed in the supine position using Ayurveda-based techniques (head treatment). DESIGN Twenty-four healthy female students were included in the study. Using a crossover study design, the same participants were enrolled in both the head treatment intervention group and control group. There was an interval of 1 week ...