Effects of self-myofascial release interventions with or without sliding pressures on skin temperature, range of motion and perceived well-being: a randomized control pilot trial.

Background: Self-myofascial release is an emerging technique in strength and conditioning. Yet, there is no consensus regarding optimal practice guidelines. Here, we investigated the acute effects of various foam rolling interventions targeting quadriceps muscles, with or without sliding pressures.

Mimicry and expressiveness of an ECA in human-agent interaction: familiarity breeds content!

Background: Two experiments investigated the effect of features of human behaviour on the quality of interaction with an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA).

Methods: In Experiment 1, visual prominence cues (head nod, eyebrow raise) of the ECA were manipulated to explore the hypothesis that likeability of an ECA increases as a function of interpersonal mimicry. In the context of an error detection task, the ECA either mimicked or did not mimic a head nod or brow raise that humans produced to give emphasis to a word when correcting the ECA's vocabulary.

Transforming an embodied conversational agent into an efficient talking head: from keyframe-based animation to multimodal concatenation synthesis.

Background: Virtual humans have become part of our everyday life (movies, internet, and computer games). Even though they are becoming more and more realistic, their speech capabilities are, most of the time, limited and not coherent and/or not synchronous with the corresponding acoustic signal.

Methods: We describe a method to convert a virtual human avatar (animated through key frames and interpolation) into a more naturalistic talking head.

xDAWN algorithm to enhance evoked potentials: application to brain-computer interface.

A brain-computer interface (BCI) is a communication system that allows to control a computer or any other device thanks to the brain activity. The BCI described in this paper is based on the P300 speller BCI paradigm introduced by Farwell and Donchin . An unsupervised algorithm is proposed to enhance P300 evoked potentials by estimating spatial filters; the raw EEG signals are then projected into the estimated signal subspace.

Analysis and synthesis of the three-dimensional movements of the head, face, and hand of a speaker using cued speech.

In this paper we present efforts for characterizing the three dimensional (3-D) movements of the right hand and the face of a French female speaker during the audiovisual production of cued speech. The 3-D trajectories of 50 hand and 63 facial flesh points during the production of 238 utterances were analyzed. These utterances were carefully designed to cover all possible diphones of the French language.