Everyone knows that Ringo the laborador may be your best friend and an irreplaceable companion, but Dr. Karen Allen of UB’s School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences has proved that not only are pets good for the soul, they’re good for the heart. She has found that pet dogs can be more calming than a spouse in a stressful situation, but that pets can provide similar psychological benefits to human relationships to elderly women who live on their own. Dogs can be trained to do tasks for the handicapped which can eliminate their need for home health aides. For couples who own pets, Allen discovered that human interaction increases greatly amongst pet-owners, which helps to keep blood pressure down. Couples that own pets become less stressed out and calm down faster during conflict than couples who do not. Allen studied 48 stockbrokers who were all taking lisinopril, a drug used to treat hypertension. In the half who used pets as part of their blood-pressure control regimen, the study showed their cardiovascular activity to stay much more stable while under stress.

Rosie, is that you? UB Professors Stuart C. Shapiro, Ph.D., and William J. Rapaport, Ph.D., have used the Semantic Network Processing System (SNePS), a system which makes it possible for a computer to understand human speech in order to create a computer that can really understand. CASSIE (Cognitive Agent of the SNePS System, an Intelligent Entity) employs SnePS, which was developed by UB graduate student Min-Hung Liao, to communicate in natural language. CASSIE can distinguish between statements and beliefs in a conversation and can reason things that it is not directly told during a conversation, which takes place with a keypad and computer screen. Shapiro and Rapaport designed CASSIE in order to better understand how humans comprehend what they read.