Storytelling is an ubiquitous phenomenon in human culture. We tell stories to entertain, explain, and illustrate. The production of novel stories is undeniably an act of creativity in humans. How can an autonomous computer system create novel story content? What can we learn about human creativity in the investigation of computational models of story generation? Relevant past work in story gene...

Barely two weeks after the British press went bananas over cancer research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the US press took a turn. This time, though, the breathtaking results were published in that prestigious medical journal, the New York Times. It’s odd that the media went berserk over this article. The substance was not new — many reporters had written art...

Agile methodologies are based on effective communication with the customer. The ideal case is XP’s on-site customer. Unfortunately, in practice customer representatives are too busy to work with the development team all the time. Moreover, frequently there are many of them and each representative has only partial domain knowledge. To cope with this we introduced to our projects a proxy-customer...

14.1 Members Kenji Ono (Team Leader) Jorji Nonaka (Researcher) Mikio Iizuka (Researcher) Chongke Bi (Postdoctoral Researcher) Daisuke Sakurai (Postdoctoral Researcher) Kazunori Mikami (Technical Staff) Tomohiro Kawanabe (Technical Staff) Seiji Fujino (Senior Visiting Scientist) Naohisa Sakamoto (Visiting Scientist) Masahiro Fujita (Visiting Technician) Kentaro Oku (Visiting Technician) Steve Pe...

User stories allow customers to easily communicate desired specifications as part of Agile Software Development methods. When elicited from groups instead of individuals, the number of stories generated and the comprehensiveness of the stories is likely to increase. We present a 2 X 2 study design involving group vs. individual user story brainstorming with one or two sentence vs. unlimited use...

Motivated by the Hankel determinant evaluation of moment sequences, we study a kind of Pfaffian analogue evaluation. We prove an LU -decomposition analogue for skew-symmetric matrices, called Pfaffian decomposition. We then apply this formula to evaluate Pfaffians related to some moment sequences of classical orthogonal polynomials. In particular we obtain a product formula for a kind of q-Cata...

The ‘radioactive dice’ experiment is a commonly used classroom analogue to model the decay of radioactive nuclei. However, the value of the half-life obtained from this experiment differs significantly from that calculated for real nuclei decaying exponentially with the same decay constant. This article attempts to explain the discrepancy and suggests modifications to the experiment to minimize...

Male and female high school and college students viewed a DVD about a love story. Youth who more readily empathized with media characters were more likely to perceive same-sex characters as role models and were better able to understand the story content. The findings suggest that fantasy empathy, in which viewers become deeply involved in narratives, may hold a key regarding the influence of m...

In 1986, Mills and Robbins observed by computer the continued fraction expansion of certain algebraic power series over a finite field. Incidentally, they came across a particular equation of degree four in characteristic p = 13. This equation has an analogue for all primes p ≥ 5. There are two patterns for the continued fraction of the solution of this equation, according to the residue of p m...

$EVWUDFW Digital image interpolation techniques are frequently used to enlarge pictures, i.e. zooming in, and they are upon increasingly demand for developing product applications using digital still cameras. One common difficulty with conventional interpolation techniques is that of preserving details, i.e. edges, and at the same time smoothing the data for not introducing spurious artifacts. ...