Many features have been proposed in on-line signature verification. Generally, these features rely on the position of the on-line signature samples and their dynamic properties, as recorded by a tablet. This paper proposes a novel feature space to describe efficiently on-line signatures. Since producing a signature requires a skeletal arm system and its associated muscles, the new feature space is based on characterizing the movement of the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist joints when signing. As this motion is not directly obtained from a digital tablet, the new features are calculated by means of a virtual skeletal arm (VSA) model, which simulates the architecture of a real arm and forearm. Specifically, the VSA motion is described by its 3D joint position and its joint angles. These anthropomorphic features are worked out from both pen position and orientation through the VSA forward and direct kinematic model. The anthropomorphic features' robustness is proved by achieving state-of-the-art performance with several verifiers and multiple benchmarks on third party signature databases, which were collected with different devices and in different languages and scripts.

In May, Tessa went rogue. The National Eating Disorder Association's chatbot had recently replaced a phone hotline and the handful of staffers who ran it. But although it was designed to deliver a set of approved responses to people who might be at risk of an eating disorder, Tessa instead recommended that they lose weight. "Every single thing that Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder," one woman who reviewed the chatbot wrote on Instagram. "It was not our intention to suggest that Tessa could provide the same type of human connection that the Helpline offered," the nonprofit's CEO, Liz Thompson, told NPR.

As a species, we are excellent at imbuing life into the lifeless--just as we are proficient in giving meaning to the meaningless. One could argue that the ability of our brains to recognize patterns quickly is part of what gives us our humanity. Seeing faces on Mars, yelling at our cars for breaking down and giving animals more agency than they may possess are all results of our psyche. Our penchant for gestalt is important in the ever increasing world of social robots and machines. When it comes to technology and social robotics, the whole is often seen as more meaningful than the sum of the parts. The field of social robotics includes machines that use social behaviors and cues to interact with people.