One of the brain's key roles is to facilitate foraging and feeding. It is presumably no coincidence, then, that the mouth is situated close to the brain in most animal species. However, the environments in which our brains evolved were far less plentiful in terms of the availability of food resources (i.e., nutriments) than is the case for those of us living in the Western world today. The growing obesity crisis is but one of the signs that humankind is not doing such a great job in terms of optimizing the contemporary food landscape. While the blame here is often put at the doors of the global food companies - offering addictive foods, designed to hit 'the bliss point' in terms of the pleasurable ingredients (sugar, salt, fat, etc.), and the ease of access to calorie-rich foods - we wonder whether there aren't other implicit cues in our environments that might be triggering hunger more often than is perhaps good for us. Here, we take a closer look at the potential role of vision; Specifically, we question the impact that our increasing exposure to images of desirable foods (what is often labelled 'food porn', or 'gastroporn') via digital interfaces might be having, and ask whether it might not inadvertently be exacerbating our desire for food (what we call 'visual hunger'). We review the growing body of cognitive neuroscience research demonstrating the profound effect that viewing such images can have on neural activity, physiological and psychological responses, and visual attention, especially in the 'hungry' brain.

This article gives an introduction and overview of the field of pervasive gaming, an emerging genre in which traditional, real-world games are augmented with computing functionality, or, depending on the perspective, purely virtual computer entertainment is brought back to the real world.The field of pervasive games is diverse in the approaches and technologies used to create new and exciting gaming experiences that profit by the blend of real and virtual game elements. We explicitly look at the pervasive gaming sub-genres of smart toys, affective games, tabletop games, location-aware games, and augmented reality games, and discuss them in terms of their benefits and critical issues, as well as the relevant technology base.

Switched reluctance (SR) motors have an intrinsic simplicity and low cost that make them well suited to many applications. However the motor's doubly salient structure and highly nonuniform torque and magnetization characteristics lead to the inability to excite the motor using conventional AC motor waveforms, or apply established AC motor rotating field theory to the motor. Furthermore, high torque ripple is inherent in the motor unless a torque ripple reduction strategy is employed. Thus, control of the motor is difficult and complex compared to other machines. Previous methods of control have fallen into two main categories: those which use a simplified linear model and those which account for the motor saturation. The simplified linear model schemes have the advantage of simplicity and tractability but are inaccurate in most practical SR drives, whereas the nonlinear schemes have the problem of high complexity and computational expensiveness which makes real-time implementation difficult. To overcome these problems, in this paper, a novel control method for the SR motor is derived from analysis of the nonuniform torque characteristics of the motor. The control method applies the philosophy of direct torque control (DTC). Unlike previous direct torque control schemes for the SR motor drive, the new method does not involve short flux patterns, a change of the motor winding configuration, or the use of a bipolar current drive. Thus, the scheme can be conveniently implemented on any normal type of SR motor drive. In addition, the scheme overcomes the problems associated with torque ripple control in the SR motor by regulating the torque output of the motor within a hysteresis band. Furthermore, the scheme is very simple and can be implemented in real-time with low cost microprocessor hardware.

Global teacher shortage is a serious concern with grave implications for the future of education. This calls for novel ways of addressing teacher roles. The economic benefits of tireless labor inspires the need for teachers who are unlimited by natural human demands, highlighting consideration for the affordances of robotics and Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED) as currently obtainable in other areas of human life. This however demands designing robotic personalities that can take on independent teacher roles despite strong opinions that robots will not be able to fully replace humans in the classroom of the future. In this article, we argue for a future classroom with independent robot teachers, highlighting the minimum capabilities required of such personalities in terms of personality, instructional delivery, social interaction, and affect. We describe our project on the design of a robot teacher based on these. Possible directions for future system development and studies are highlighted.