With the aim of more emphasis on pragmatics and its inclusion in EFL classrooms, this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of obtrusive and unobtrusive focus on form instructions on learners’ pragmatic performance of criticizing in English. 54 Iranian learners, all at intermediate level, participated in this study, and they were divided into three groups: 19 participants receiving o...

This project investigates the effects of gender in a human-robot collaboration interaction. In the experiment, participants completed four Sudoku-like puzzles with a robot from which they could verbally elicit help. The robot was given the gendered characteristics of a gendered computer generated voice and either the name Charlotte (female condition) or Charley (male condition). Contrary to exp...

Profile data is valuable for identifying performance bottlenecks and guiding optimizations. Periodic sampling of a processor’s performance monitoring hardware is an effective, unobtrusive way to obtain detailed profiles. Unfortunately, existing hardware simply counts events, such as cache misses and branch mispredictions, and cannot accurately attribute these events to instructions, especially ...

While eye tracking is gaining popularity in IS research, pupillometry is relatively less explored in IS eye tracking studies. Research however suggests that pupillometry may serve as an excellent unobtrusive measure to study user information processing behavior. The Adaptive decision making theory asserts that task demand affects information processing behavior. Grounded in this theory, we argu...

Current advances in wireless communication, microelectronics, semiconductor technologies, and intelligent sensors have contributed to the development of unobtrusive WBANs. These networks provide long term health monitoring of patients without any constraint in their normal activities. Traditional MAC protocols do not accommodate the assorted WBAN traffic requirements in a power efficient manner...

We propose a new system for vision-based mobile robot navigation in an unmodeled environment. Simple , unobtrusive artiicial landmarks are used as navigation and localization aids. The landmark patterns are designed so that they can be reliably detected in real-time in images taken with the robot's camera over a wide range of viewing conngurations. The code for the recognition algorithm is publ...

The expanding application of computing systems and the continuing advances in semiconductor technology are forcing the on-chip inclusion of design for dependability features (concurrent fault tolerance). These features detect, log and provide recovery from errors induced by faults concurrently with the operation of the system. A very difficult task is the hardware validation of concurrent fault...

Unobtrusive capturing of program execution traces in real-time is crucial for debugging many embedded systems. However, tracing even limited program segments is often cost-prohibitive, requiring wide trace ports and large on-chip trace buffers. This paper introduces a new cost-effective technique for capturing and compressing program execution traces on-thefly. It relies on branch predictor-lik...