The Virtual World of Cerberus

2011 ◽  
pp. 158-166
Author(s):  
Jocelyne Kiss ◽  
Sidi Soueina ◽  
Martin Laliberté ◽  
Adel Elmaghraby
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Spike Timing ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Learning Capacity ◽  
Learning Machines ◽  
Learning Rules ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Autonomous Evolution

While exploring autonomous evolution concepts for virtual worlds, we will present a new design Cerberus an avatar singer who can accompany a singer, perform alone and make his song evolves using simple past events. This 3D interactive facial animated avatar was made thanks to virtools software. The main originality of Cerberus is to develop his own melody by using learning machines and constantly improve his musical style and emotions. Cerberus is implemented using competitive learning rules to trained artificial neural networks in order to perform these self-improvements. Self-improvements is a key of our learning capacity, The challenge of building a virtual singer that could promotes his own improvisation is an open research field (Minsky, 2000).We will expose the difficulties of the synchronization in real-time between the voice and animation to generate the right emotion, also the difficulties of establishing a classification which could be in contradiction with the ontology of the musical fact. Also we will expose the necessity of developing avatars that use the amazing potentialities of spike-timing-dependent plasticity concept (Abraham, & Bear, 1996), that hence metaplasticity. This powerful concept enhance the potentiality of avatar design and give the impression that the avatar has a memory and simulate “feelings” linked to a context.

scholarly journals Blockchain protocols in clinical trials: Transparency and traceability of consent

F1000Research ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mehdi Benchoufi ◽  
Raphael Porcher ◽  
Philippe Ravaud
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Trial ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Complex Data ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Chronological Order ◽  
Blockchain Technology ◽  
Smart Contract ◽  
The Right ◽  
Core Functionality

Clinical trial consent for protocols and their revisions should be transparent for patients and traceable for stakeholders. Our goal is to implement a process allowing the collection of patients’ informed consent, which is bound to protocol revisions, storing and tracking the consent in a secure, unfalsifiable and publicly verifiable way, and enabling the sharing of this information in real time. For that, we will built a consent workflow using a rising technology called Blockchain. This is a distributed technology that brings a built-in layer of transparency and traceability. Additionally, it removes the need for third parties, and gives participative control to the peer-to-peer users. From a more general and prospective point of view, we believe Blockchain technology brings a paradigmatical shift to the entire clinical research field. We designed a Proof-of-Concept protocol consisting of time-stamping each step of the patient’s consent collection using Blockchain; thus archiving and historicising the consent through cryptographic validation in a securely unfalsifiable and transparent way. For each revision of the protocol, consent was sought again. We obtained a single document, in a standard open format, that accounted for the whole consent collection process: timestamped consent status with regards to each version of the protocol. This document cannot be corrupted, and can be checked on any dedicated public website. It should be considered as a robust proof of data. In the future, we think that the complex data flow of a clinical trial can be tracked using Blockchain. Moreover, a blockchain core functionality, named Smart Contract, can help prevent clinical trial events not to happen in the right chronological order: including patients before they consented or analysing case report forms data before freezing the database. This will help reaching reliability, security, and transparency, and could be a consistent step towards reproducibility.

The Role of Standards for E-Commerce in Virtual Worlds

2011 ◽  
pp. 257-266 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joerg H. Kloss
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
3D Graphics ◽  
Iso Standard ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Future Developments ◽  
3D Environments ◽  
Interactive 3D ◽  
The Right

This chapter discusses the topic of standards for Virtual Worlds with emphasis on their usability as a stable and reliable basis for long-term investments into 3D-E-Commerce. The text explains why standards are important for the success of Virtual Worlds as well as the business in these shared online 3D environments, and what the relevant criteria are to decide for the right technology and/or provider. Although sometimes in the shadow of popular proprietary platforms there are already many different candidates for a Virtual World standard, currently in different states of development. By choosing a 3D platform, E-Commerce providers will decide about their business potential and at the same time strengthen one or another standard in the current technical competition phase. So it is important to get an overview about the current approaches, their advantages and disadvantages as well as the tendencies for the future developments. In this chapter the reader will be sensitized for the issues of standardization, compatibility and interoperability of Virtual Worlds for successful E-Commerce applications. An overview about the current approaches supports the orientation and decision for the different technologies. Some concrete XML-based code examples realized in the international ISO standard for interactive 3D-Graphics X3D demonstrates the practical deployment of highly compatible concepts. An outlook to the further integration of interactive 3D graphics into the Next Generation Web respectively the 3D Internet completes the overview.

A Comparative Study of Platforms for Multi-User Virtual Environments

2011 ◽  
pp. 137-170
Author(s):  
Arda Tezcan ◽  
Debbie Richards
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Real World ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
Fields Of Study ◽  
The Right ◽  
Minimal Effort

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) have been found to be engaging and provide an environment in which the elements of discovery, exploration and concept testing, fundamental to the field of science, can be experienced. Furthermore, MUVEs accommodate lifelike experiences with the benefit of the situated and distributed nature of cognition; they also provide virtual worlds to simulate the conditions that are not doable or practicable under real world circumstances making them very relevant to many other fields of study such as history, geography and foreign language learning. However, constructing MUVEs can be expensive and time consuming depending on the platform considered. Therefore, providing the most appropriate platform that requires minimal effort, cost and time will make MUVE deployment in the classroom faster and more viable. In this chapter, the authors provide a comparative study of prominent existing platforms for MUVEs that can be used to identify the right balance of functionality, flexibility, effort and cost for a given educational and technical context. A number of metrics are identified, described and used to enable the comparison. Platform assessment was done in four main metric groups: communication and interaction, characters, features and education. Communication and interaction metrics are used to assess how the communication and interaction is done within the examined platform. Character metrics are employed to measure avatar and agent affordances. Features metrics are defined to compare what the platform offers in terms of technology. Lastly, education metrics are used to identify the value of the associated platform for educational purposes.

CHARLOTTE BRAY (b. 1982)Sonnets and Love Songs (2011)

2021 ◽  
pp. 15-19
Author(s):  
Jane Manning
Keyword(s):  
Technical Skill ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Fernando Pessoa ◽  
The Voice

This chapter assesses British composer Charlotte Bray’s Sonnets and Love Songs (2011). Bray’s musical style is cohesive, fluent, and evocative, with a strong harmonic sense and tonalities occasionally reminiscent of the English Romantics, albeit with a modernist ‘take’. The texts are by the distinguished Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, who revered Shakespeare as his model. They concern complex philosophical issues and dilemmas of life and love—three of the poems are actual sonnets. The composer has assembled her selection to describe a clear trajectory: from musings on innocence, through turbulence, to eventual liberation—an ambitious, bold concept, achieved with assurance. There is no getting away from the fact that the cycle demands a singer of exceptional accomplishment—the wide compass might indicate a bass-baritone, but the upper range is exploited mercilessly. Indeed, notes frequently have be held high in the voice, and many end with diminuendos, requiring technical skill in travelling through register changes.

LYELL CRESSWELL (b. 1944)Eight Shaker Songs (1985)

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-71
Author(s):  
Jane Manning
Keyword(s):  
Musical Style ◽  
Charles Ives ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Voice

This chapter introduces works by Lyell Cresswell. His use of the voice as showcased in this chapter is highly imaginative and often demanding. The refreshingly uninhibited musical style defies easy categorization, but displays signs of an iconoclasm developed by Charles Ives. Cresswell achieves its effect by relatively simple means, including repetition. All the songs are brief yet sharply contrasted, and they convey a heady religious fervour that carries all before it. The third perhaps requires the most vocal virtuosity, and the sixth needs considerable stamina to bring it off, especially in some crucially loud spoken (shouted) passages. The final movement is a test of quick rhythmic articulation. The piano’s contribution is brimming with energy and drama, responding and adapting adroitly to the texts’ changing moods.

JONATHAN PITKIN (b. 1978)Feather-Small and Still (2010)

2021 ◽  
pp. 183-185
Author(s):  
Jane Manning
Keyword(s):  
Great Sensitivity ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Prize Competition ◽  
Nature Imagery ◽  
Classic Form ◽  
The Voice

This chapter addresses Jonathan Pitkin’s Feather-Small and Still (2010). Pitkin was commissioned to make a setting of this evocative poem by Sophie Stephenson-Wright, following its commendation in a prize competition for young poets. Its subject is that mysterious bird, the nightjar. The composer has succeeded admirably in capturing the text’s intriguing, distinctive flavour, responding to its nature imagery and heightened language with great sensitivity. Vocal lines are tellingly clear and simple, and it is left to the piano to amplify and illustrate the words to haunting effect, with solo passages bridging the gaps between vocal fragments, always colouring and enriching the sound world. The poem is a villanelle, a classic form in which repetitions of the first and third lines recur throughout. The composer has not adhered strictly to the format in his music, but, by subtle brush-strokes, he manages to preserve traces of reverberation, and his fluent, cohesive musical style enables him to expand and contract textures, often leading off into fresh territory. Though tightly constructed, the piece flows naturally and should prove enjoyable to perform. The voice part is especially suitable for a young singer, and not at all taxing.

scholarly journals Reinforcement Learning Through Modulation of Spike-Timing-Dependent Synaptic Plasticity

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1468-1502 ◽  
Author(s):  
Răzvan V. Florian
Keyword(s):  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Learning Algorithm ◽  
Neural Model ◽  
Spike Timing ◽  
Spike Response ◽  
Learning Rules ◽  
Xor Problem ◽  
Eligibility Trace ◽  
Spike Response Model ◽  
Intrinsic Plasticity

The persistent modification of synaptic efficacy as a function of the relative timing of pre- and postsynaptic spikes is a phenomenon known as spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). Here we show that the modulation of STDP by a global reward signal leads to reinforcement learning. We first derive analytically learning rules involving reward-modulated spike-timing-dependent synaptic and intrinsic plasticity, by applying a reinforcement learning algorithm to the stochastic spike response model of spiking neurons. These rules have several features common to plasticity mechanisms experimentally found in the brain. We then demonstrate in simulations of networks of integrate-and-fire neurons the efficacy of two simple learning rules involving modulated STDP. One rule is a direct extension of the standard STDP model (modulated STDP), and the other one involves an eligibility trace stored at each synapse that keeps a decaying memory of the relationships between the recent pairs of pre- and postsynaptic spike pairs (modulated STDP with eligibility trace). This latter rule permits learning even if the reward signal is delayed. The proposed rules are able to solve the XOR problem with both rate coded and temporally coded input and to learn a target output firing-rate pattern. These learning rules are biologically plausible, may be used for training generic artificial spiking neural networks, regardless of the neural model used, and suggest the experimental investigation in animals of the existence of reward-modulated STDP.

scholarly journals Smart wheelchair using android smartphone for physically disabled people

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siti Nur Suhaila Mirin ◽  
Khalil Azha Mohd Annuar ◽  
Chai Pui Yook
Keyword(s):  
Embedded System ◽  
Voice Recognition ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Voice Input ◽  
Left Turn ◽  
Physically Disabled ◽  
The Right ◽  
Physically Disabled People ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Smart Wheelchair

This paper describes the development of a smart wheelchair system with voice recognition and touch controlled using an embedded system. An android application is developed and installed on the android smartphone. The system is divided into two main modes: voice recognition mode and touch mode. For the voice recognition mode, elderlies or physically disabled people (users) can provide the voice input, for example, “go”, “reverse”, “turn to the left”, “turn to the right” and “stop”. The wheelchair will move according to the command given. For the touch mode, the user can select the specified direction displayed within the four quadrants on the screen of the android smartphone to control the wheelchair. An Arduino Uno is used to execute all commands. The MD30C motor driver and HC05 Bluetooth module are used in this system. This system is designed to save time and energy of the user.

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