Computing & Technology

The appalling earthquake in the ancient city of Bam on December 27th 2003 was one of the worst disasters since the last century in Iran. Further to the chilling statistics of human loss, essential services including water supply, power, telephone, health care services, main roads, and the city's only airport were crippled.

Article CITATION 1 READS 28 10 authors, including: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Effect of planting date and density on dry matter and antioxidant capacity of purple coneflower [Echinacea purpurea (L.) Moench] root View project eucalyptus View project Seyed Fazel Mirahmadi Velayat university

Recent studies have made it clear that Iran has too many road traffic injuries (RTI). This paper explains the reasons for high traffic injury rates and points to solutions. It also provides detailed data on the burden of traffic injury in Iran in 2005. Traffic injury rates have rapidly risen out of control because for a variety of possible reasons such as increasing number of non-standard cars and motorcycles, low gas price, decreasing ratio of travels via public transportation than with private vehicles, and problems with safety design. Besides a high need for a system safety approach, Iran needs to deal with the problem of producing a high number of cars and motorcycles. Providing safe mobility for the people of Iran needs to be a top priority of the government.

Recent studies have made it clear that Iran has too many road traffic injuries (RTI). This paper explains the reasons for high traffic injury rates and points to solutions. It also provides detailed data on the burden of traffic injury in Iran in 2005. Traffic injury rates have rapidly risen out of control because for a variety of possible reasons such as increasing number of non-standard cars and motorcycles, low gas price, decreasing ratio of travels via public transportation than with private vehicles, and problems with safety design. Besides a high need for a system safety approach, Iran needs to deal with the problem of producing a high number of cars and motorcycles. Providing safe mobility for the people of Iran needs to be a top priority of the government.

This interactive demo features MIXER, a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) consisting of synthetic characters representing the various actors in a scenario group difference scenario. MIXER creates virtual dramas by using interactive narrative with those characters. The goal is to enable children to identify social rule differences, by interacting with one of the characters to which they become empathic. MIXER

This paper considers affective interactions to achieve empathic engagement with synthetic characters in virtual learning environments, in order to support and induce the expression of empathy in children. The paper presents FearNot!, a school based virtual learning environment, populated by synthetic characters used for personal, social and health education, specifically bullying issues in schools. An empirical study of 345 children aged 8-11 years who interacted with FearNot! is outlined. The results identify that affective ...

This paper is concerned with the simulation of human-likess capabilities in synthetic characters within the domain of Personal and Social Education. Our aim was to achieve socially meaningful and engaging interactions with children in the 8���12 age group to enable an exploration of bullying and coping strategies. We consider the engagement between the interacting partners, focusing particularly on the affective and empathic aspects of this relationship. We have used Theory of Mind methods to enable us to evaluate children's ...

Abstract: FearNot! is a novel software application aimed at the age-group of 8-12 year old students with the aim to influence their attitude towards and knowledge about bullying. It is a virtual learning environment for social and emotional learning that allows for individual interaction with synthetic autonomous characters that engage in bullying and ask the learner for help and advice in order to escape victimisation. FearNot! uses an emergent narrative approach that generates stories through the interaction of the learner with the autonomous ...

In the 21st Century the contemporary experience of the citizen is to live and work alongside many cultural, ethnic and religious groups, however cultural differences can lead to social stresses and sometimes outright conflict. Helping children and young people to develop empathy for people from other cultures is therefore an ever pressing pedagogical imperative. Role play and case studies which support experiential learning have been shown to be highly effective in this domain, however they are difficult to organise and ...

Background and purpose: Many holistic anti-bullying interventions have been attempted, with mixed success, while little work has been done to promote a 'self-help' approach to victimization. The rise of the ICT curriculum and computer support in schools now allows for approaches which benefit from technology to be implemented. This study evaluates the cross cultural effects of a computer based anti-bullying intervention on primary school aged children's knowledge about bullying and relevant coping strategies. Programme description: FearNot! is an interactive computer based virtual learning environment designed for use as an anti-bullying intervention. It includes interactive virtual agents who assume the most common participant roles found in episodes of bullying. FearNot! was used by children over three consecutive weeks to allow its effectiveness to be evaluated in a longitudinal in-situ programme. Sample: Two comparable samples were drawn from the UK and Germany. In the UK, 651 participants (aged 8-11) were recruited from primary schools in Hertfordshire, Coventry, and Warwickshire; while the 535 German participants (aged 7-10) were sourced from Grundschulen in the Bayern and Hessen regions. Due to lack of parental consent, late joiners and absences/ missing responses, data from 908 participants (UK 493; Germany 415) were analysed. Design and methods: A quasi-experimental, pre/post-tests control group design employed prepublished and bespoke questionnaires to collect data. Descriptive and inferential analyses were conducted. Results: UK students possessed higher coping strategy knowledge scores than German participants, but German children's scores improved over time and as a result of the FearNot! intervention. Conclusions: Overall, while not effective at increasing children's coping strategy knowledge in this study, the FearNot! intervention could prove a useful classroom tool to approach the issue of bullying as part of a wider initiative. Cultural differences at baseline, and reactions to the intervention are discussed.

Mobile computing devices are becoming increasingly prevalent in a huge range of physical guises, offering a considerable market opportunity for software. Mature Artificial Intelligence technologies offer the potential to create compelling software for the mobile platform. However, few intelligent applications have been developed for mobile devices. This lack of development is related firstly to mobile device limitations, such as memory and processing power, and secondly to the requirement for portability due to the diversity in the mobile device market. This paper presents a development environment for intelligent applications for mobile devices that successfully addresses both of these issues. Case studies of intelligent applications developed with this development environment are briefly described. Some conclusions are presented and directions for future research considered.

Wuerzburg plus INESC-ID and Interagens. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this publication. It does not represent the opinion of the EC, and the EC is not responsible for any use that might be made of data appearing therein.

This work considers findings from synthetic character research using virtual learning environments. Children aged 8-11 years interacted with FearNot, a software package that deals with the social problem of bullying in schools. Following the interaction, children participated in classroom discussion forums, a method we have developed to assist children in verbalizing their views and perspectives. This approach enables the exploration

Affective information processing, which is computing emotions, tries to assign computers the humanlike capabilities of observation, interpretation, and generation of affect features. It is an important topic in human-computer interaction (HCI), because it helps increase the quality of human-to-computer communications. But traditionally, "affect" was seldom linked to lifeless machines. It is quite new in HCI to consider the affect features and to capture and process these by the computer. More and more researchers are interested in how to process the affective multimodal information in this area, which has become known as "affective computing" and has become a very hot research topic. In 2005, we organized the first international conference on affective computing and intelligent interaction (ACII2005) in Beijing. There were 134 papers accepted for the conference in total, and about 140 people from 32 nations attending the conference. The final proceeding was published in Springer LNCS. In 2007, the second ACII was held in Lisbon with an attendance of around 150 people. Nowadays, ACII has become an event of the HUMAINE Association and a central event for researchers studying and developing the role of emotion and other affective phenomena as these relate to human-computer and human-robot interaction, graphics, artificial intelligence, robotics, vision, speech, synthetic characters, games, educational software, and related areas. In order to solicit original theoretical and practical work offering new and broad views of the latest research in affective information processing, we decided to edit this book. Most of the authors were invitees from the ACII2005. But still some chapters were specially arranged from that to give a good balance to the book. The reaction has been excellent. The book summarizes some key technologies, organized into three parts, "Cognitive Emotion Model," "Affect in Speech," "Affect in Face," and "Affect in Multimodal Information" with 17 chapters. Unlike other books which might give major focus to psychological problems or cognitive models for emotions, this book gives more content on how to process the affective information for the next generation of HCI technologies. So, language, speech, face, and multimodal information are emphasized in the book. v vi Preface We have no intention to solve all the problems in affective information processing within this book, but we try to give a wide description and some detailed knowledge in this area. And we believe it will be helpful for our research to use this as a reference book. As a final word, we would like to thank the authors that did a wonderful job of writing and improving the papers. Our thanks also go to Wayne Wheeler and Catherine Brett from Springer, for their immense help and guidance throughout the process. This book is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (60575032).

Social eco-systems are often evaluated through quantitative data that is automatically logged and analysed. However, where the user's experience of social eco-systems is evaluated, more explicit intervention approaches are typical, with questionnaires, focus groups and user testing widely used, directly asking the user about their experience. User experience evaluation thus ruptures the social eco-system, occurring as a separate, discrete activity outside of that system. In this paper, we propose that evaluation should be part of the social eco-system adding value to the user experience. We outline an evaluation approach that has been applied within games-based learning environments where the evaluation is seamlessly embedded. We briefly outline our approach to generating and analyzing data highlighting its potential for social eco-system evaluation.

Much attention is currently being focussed on the use of the World Wide Web as a delivery channel for teaching and learning. A significant problem with the Web as a learning environment is that it does not adapt to the needs of the individual learner. VALIENT is an attempt to add a degree of adaptability to the Web. VALIENT combines conventional Web-based delivery with what are termed Intelligent Learning Environments-virtual learning spaces for experiential learning. The intelligence in these environments is provided by a set of intelligent agents which monitor learner performance. By communicating with a custom servlet running on the Web server, these intelligent agents can cause web-based material to be presented to the learner that are adapted to that learner's current learning requirements.