For the systematic evolution of interdisciplinary socio-technical systems, such as business intelligence (BI), artifacts are needed that comprehensively address multifaceted challenges. To support these strategic improvement initiatives, we proposed a BI maturity model (MM) in prior research. In this paper, we develop an approach to measure maturity of BI in organizations, thereby operationaliz...

Automated people counting has multiple applications: referring passengers to vehicles with empty seats, gathering statistical information for railway companies to improve their distribution of vehicles, etc. In this paper, a people counting algorithm for public transport vehicles is presented. First, head-shoulder contours are detected by adaboost classification of a combination of a histogram ...

The transition energy from galactic to extragalactic cosmic ray sources is still uncertain, but it should be associated either with the region of the spectrum known as the second knee or with the ankle. The baseline design of the Pierre Auger Observatory was optimized for the highest energies. The surface array is fully efficient above 3 × 10 eV and, even if the hybrid mode can extend this rang...

and sheds light on attempts by traditional tattooists to retain a vital presence in the modern-to-postmodern transitional periods. Explaining the values, beliefs and practices associated with tattooing during the pre-modern period, it discusses how these are shaped and modified by modern cultural practices, and how they are being impacted by globalization. While drawing on historical and cross-...

This thesis aims to construct, evaluate, and apply a cognitive proto-model which accounts for the trickery involved in the fabrication ofjust one type of psychic ability, namely; macro-PK. This cognitive proto-model describes how an observer analyses a demonstration of ostensible macro-PK. The model accounts for how an observer: construes such phenomena as either a magic trick or a display of g...

In this paper we describe a system for automatic people counting in crowded environments. The approach we propose is a counting-by-detection method based on depth imagery. It is designed to be deployed as an autonomous appliance for crowd analysis in video surveillance application scenarios. Our system performs foreground/background segmentation on depth image streams in order to coarsely segme...

There is evidence from the empirical sciences that ‘happiness’ – understood in the social scientists’ sense of ‘positive affect’– leads to prosocial behaviour: the happiest amongst us are more likely to help others. There is also scientific evidence of a genetic component to positive affect: genetic differences can account for some of the observed variances in positive affect. Let us think of ‘...

This paper presents two novel approaches for people counting in crowded and open environments that combine the information gathered by multiple views. Multiple camera are used to expand the field of view as well as to mitigate the problem of occlusion that commonly affects the performance of counting methods using single cameras. The first approach is regarded as a direct approach and it attemp...