Coupling Two Ultra-high-Speed Cameras to Elucidate Ultrasound Contrast-Mediated Imaging and Therapy

Ultrasound contrast-mediated medical imaging and therapy both rely on the dynamics of micron- and nanometer-sized ultrasound cavitation nuclei, such as phospholipid-coated microbubbles and phase-change droplets. Ultrasound cavitation nuclei respond non-linearly to ultrasound on a nanosecond time scale that necessitates the use of ultra-high...

Experimental and numerical study on the mitigation of autogenous shrinkage of cementitious material

This study experimentally investigated the effects of surfactants and water-repelling agents on the hydration process, relative humidity, and mechanical properties of Portland cement pastes. Based on the measurement results, the degree of hydration, degree of saturation, capillary tension of autogenous shrinkage, and magnitude of autogenous...

Evolution of residents' cooperative behavior in neighborhood renewal: An agent-based computational approach

The cooperative behavior of residents is complex and influenced by their complicated social relationships. This complexity is especially noticeable in neighborhood renewal, so the government does not know how to promote residents' cooperative behavior. Therefore, this study proposes an agent-based model (ABM) to investigate the development of...

Ultrasonic Characterization of Ibidi μ-Slide I Luer Channel Slides for Studies With Ultrasound Contrast Agents

Understanding and controlling the ultrasound contrast agent (UCA)'s response to an applied ultrasound pressure field are crucial when investigating ultrasound imaging sequences and therapeutic applications. The magnitude and frequency of the applied ultrasonic pressure waves affect the oscillatory response of the UCA. Therefore, it is...

The artificial-social-agent questionnaire: Establishing the long and short questionnaire versions

We present the ASA Questionnaire, an instrument for evaluating human interaction with an artificial social agent (ASA), resulting from multi-year efforts involving more than 100 Intelligent Virtual Agent (IVA) researchers worldwide. It has 19 measurement constructs constituted by 90 items, which capture more than 80% of the constructs...

Get a Grip on Stress with Grippy!: A Field Study to Understand Human-Wearable Partnerships in Stress Management

Smart wearables are increasingly used to help people deal with stress. Still, a less explored area of research in this field concerns the partnerships that smart wearables can take on when engaging people in stress-coping activities. To facilitate further understanding of the human-wearable partnerships, we designed Grippy, a smart wearable...

Questionnaire Items for Evaluating Artificial Social Agents - Expert Generated, Content Validated and Reliability Analysed

In this paper, we report on the multi-year Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) community effort, involving more than 90 researchers worldwide, researching the IVA community interests and practice in evaluating human interaction with an artificial social agent (ASA). The joint efforts have previously generated a unified set of 19 constructs that...

A Directed Spanning Tree Adaptive Control Solution to Time-Varying Formations

In this article, the time-varying formation and time-varying formation tracking problems are solved for linear multiagent systems over digraphs without the knowledge of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix associated with the digraph. The solution to these problems relies on an approach that generalizes the directed spanning tree (DST)...

Facial feedback for reinforcement learning: a case study and offline analysis using the TAMER framework

Interactive reinforcement learning provides a way for agents to learn to solve tasks from evaluative feedback provided by a human user. Previous research showed that humans give copious feedback early in training but very sparsely thereafter. In this article, we investigate the potential of agent learning from trainers’ facial expressions via...

Decentralized Collision Avoidance of Multi-Agent Systems in 3-Dimensional Space

Multi-Agent Systems, often referred to a network of loosely connected autonomous units, are widely used to model the dynamics of crowds, vehicles, robots and swarms in traffic management, biological environment, distributed control and communication technologies. Recently, the study of multi-agent systems is rapidly growing due to the beneficial...

Social interaction for efficient agent learning from human reward

Learning from rewards generated by a human trainer observing an agent in action has been proven to be a powerful method for teaching autonomous agents to perform challenging tasks, especially for those non-technical users. Since the efficacy of this approach depends critically on the reward the trainer provides, we consider how the...

A review study on encapsulation-based self-healing for cementitious materials

Encapsulation-based self-healing technology is an effective method for healing the crack-deteriorated cementitious material. Encapsulation-based self-healing initiates by crack occurrence and progresses by chemical reaction of released self-healing agents in the cracks, which are contained in capsules. In this paper, a review has been...

Leveraging Social Networks to Motivate Humans to Train Agents (Extended Abstract)

Learning from rewards generated by a human trainer ob- serving the agent in action has been demonstrated to be an effective method for humans to teach an agent to perform challenging tasks. However, how to make the agent learn most efficiently from these kinds of human reward is still under-addressed. In this paper, we investigate the effect of...