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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Effect Of Deictic Gestures On Direction-Giving In Virtual Humans, Anthony Pham
Effect Of Deictic Gestures On Direction-Giving In Virtual Humans, Anthony Pham
Honors Theses
Virtual agents are animated characters that use speech and gesture to interact with human users. They can serve as an intuitive interface for a variety of purposes. I am investigating the use of deictic gestures by a direction-giving agent. Deictic gestures are pointing gestures that humans often use in direction-giving to help clarify the route and destination. In my experiment, I developed a virtual agent to give directions to people to six different locations with the following spatial relationships to the starting point: left, right, left behind, right behind, left up, and right up. Three versions of the virtual agent …
A Graph Based Departmental Spoken Dialogue System, Julia Isaac
A Graph Based Departmental Spoken Dialogue System, Julia Isaac
Honors Theses
Spoken dialogue systems are automatic, computer based systems that are a great way for people to receive important information. In this project, I created a spoken dialogue system that people can use to learn about the Computer Science Department at Union College. The system was built by populating an open source dialogue system using a graph based dialogue manager. I improved upon a previous working dialogue system by making the conversations sound more natural, improving the flexibility of the system and making the system more robust. To help with this process a corpus was created using about 200 different dialogues …
Blending Two Automatic Playlist Generation Algorithms, James Curbow
Blending Two Automatic Playlist Generation Algorithms, James Curbow
Honors Theses
We blend two existing automatic playlist generation algorithms. One algorithm is built to smoothly transition between a start song and an end song (Start-End). The other infers song similarity based on adjacent occurrences in expertly authored streams (EAS). First, we seek to establish the effectiveness of the Start-End algorithm using the EAS algorithm to determine song similarity, then we propose two playlist generation algorithms of our own: the Unbiased Random Walk (URW) and the Biased Random Walk (BRW). Like the Start-End algorithm, both the URW algorithm and BRW algorithm transition between a start song and an end song; however, issues …
Computing The (Un)Computable: A Computationally-Augmented Perspective On The Yasukuni Shrine Controversy, Ryan Muther
Computing The (Un)Computable: A Computationally-Augmented Perspective On The Yasukuni Shrine Controversy, Ryan Muther
Honors Theses
Computational methods have been used with increasing frequency in the social sciences and humanities, due to the availability of digital sources and computing power to study everything from changes in the meanings of words in Latin texts to how knowledge was categorized in eighteen century encyclopedias. Recent trends in the fields of digital humanities and computational social science include statistical methods like machine learning, requiring large pre-tagged and annotated sets of documents which in turn necessitates a great deal of prior work to create data to use with such methods. This reliance on large corpora of annotated data limits the …
Approaching Humans For Help: A Study Of Human-Robot Proxemics, Eric Rose
Approaching Humans For Help: A Study Of Human-Robot Proxemics, Eric Rose
Honors Theses
In order for a robot to be effective when interacting with a person, it is important for the robot to choose the correct person. Consider an example where a robot is trying to perform a task but it isn’t capable of doing a subtask, like going up a flight of stairs. In this case, the robot would need to ask a person for help with the elevator, in a socially appropriate way. We have conducted an experiment to determine who would be the best candidate to approach in a situation like this. Should the robot choose to approach someone who …
The Effects Of Early Confidence Interval Training On User Efficacy In A P300 Brain-Computer Interface Spelling Task, Adam Starkman
The Effects Of Early Confidence Interval Training On User Efficacy In A P300 Brain-Computer Interface Spelling Task, Adam Starkman
Honors Theses
Brain-computer interface (BCI) technology can provide communication for individuals suffering from degenerative neuromuscular disorders. The present study sought to demonstrate improved BCI performance in healthy individuals using confidence interval training with a P300 BCI spelling program. In this BCI interface, electroencephalographic (EEG) activity was recorded as participants attended to a specific target character within a matrix of flashing letters and numbers presented on a computer screen. The BCI uses the P300 Event Related Potential to select the intended character. In a prior patient case, use of a confidence measure that rejected questionable selections improved that user’s spelling efficiency. The present …