Actions can create preferences, increasing the value ascribed to commodities acquired at greater cost. This behavioural finding has been observed in a variety of species; however, the causal factors underlying the phenomenon are relatively unknown. We sought to develop a behavioural platform to examine the relationship between effort and reinforcer value in mice trained under demanding or lenie...

Software component technologies support assembly of systems from binary component implementations that may have been created in isolation from one and another. While these technologies provide assistance in wiring components together they fail to provide support for predicting the quality and behavior of configurations of components prior to actual system composition. We believe that all qualit...

Interaction among genes and gene products has a major role in many cellular processes. Obtaining an accurate picture of protein-protein interactions is one of the major challenges to the systematic understanding of cellular activity. While there are reliable but time-consuming experimental techniques to determine interactions, there have been developed a variety of high-throughput methods to ob...

Usability measure user preferences and performance of interaction with a system. Criteria for usability evaluation vary system to system depending upon the selection among wide variety of usability parameters. To enhance the acceptability of biometric based identification among large population usability evaluation of HumanBiometrics Sensor Interaction (HBSI) is highly important. This paper pro...

Most of the biological processes are governed through specific protein-ligand interactions. Discerning different components that contribute toward a favorable protein- ligand interaction could contribute significantly toward better understanding protein function, rationalizing drug design and obtaining design principles for protein engineering. The Protein Data Bank (PDB) currently hosts the st...

BUILD-IT is a planning tool based on computer vision technology, supporting complex planning and composition tasks. A group of people, seated around a table, interact with objects in a virtual scene using real bricks. A plan view of the scene is projected onto the table, where object manipulation takes place. A perspective view is projected on the wall. The views are set by virtual cameras, hav...

People, as well as things, appear to have character--high-level attributes that help us understand and relate to them. A character is a coherent set of characteristics and attributes that apply to appearance and behaviour alike, cutting across different functions, situations and value systems--esthetical, technical, ethical--providing support for anticipation, interpretation and interaction. Co...

A multi-method persona development process in a large e-commerce business is described. Personas are fictional representations of customers that describe typical user attributes to facilitate a user-centered approach in interaction design. In the current project persona attributes were derived from various data sources, such as stakeholder interviews, user tests and interviews, data mining, cus...

Recent theory and experimental work in metapopulations and metacommunities demonstrates that long-term persistence is maximized when the rate at which individuals disperse among patches within the system is intermediate; if too low, local extinctions are more frequent than recolonizations, increasing the chance of regional-scale extinctions, and if too high, dynamics exhibit region-wide synchro...