Employing a software product line presents a systematic approach for the reuse of software assets. This is achieved by the explicit modeling of variability, i.e., the description of points of variation and variants within the development artifacts. To derive concrete products from the reusable assets, dependencies between variants have to be considered when binding the overall variability. Cons...

In this paper, we strive to answer two questions: What is the current state of 3D hand pose estimation from depth images? And, what are the next challenges that need to be tackled? Following the successful Hands In the Million Challenge (HIM2017), we investigate the top 10 state-ofthe-art methods on three tasks: single frame 3D pose estimation, 3D hand tracking, and hand pose estimation during ...

The evolution in space and time of crime risk and criminal density is modeled by a coupled system of partial differential equations, and solved with a semi-implicit method using finite differences. Under appropriate conditions, isolated stationary hot spots of high criminal activity form.

The ambiguity around model-based science is witnessed by the proliferation of meanings of the term business model. We argue that a clearer specification of the analytical, theoretical and ontological validity of models is an opportunity to learn about and understand complex organizational phenomena more systematically. We apply this to research on social entrepreneurship and pro-poor business m...

Objective metrics for visual quality assessment often base their reliability on the explicit modeling of the highly non-linear behavior of human perception; as a result, they may be complex and computationally expensive. Conversely, machine learning (ML) paradigms allow to tackle the quality assessment task from a different perspective, as the eventual goal is to mimic quality perception instea...

Three-year-olds sometimes look to the correct location but give an incorrect verbal answer in a false belief task. We examined whether correct eye gaze among 3to 5-yearold children indexed unconscious knowledge or low confidence conscious knowledge. Children “bet” counters on where they thought a story character would go. If children were conscious of the knowledge conveyed by their eye gaze th...

The paper considers some peculiarities of training and using N-gram language models with open vocabulary. It is demonstrated that explicit modeling of the probability distribution of out-of-model (unknown) words is necessary in this case. Two known techniques for this modeling are considered and a new technique with several advantages is proposed. We present experiments which demonstrate the co...

We provide a Hilbert-Mumford Criterion for the action of a reductive group G on a Q-factorial algebraic variety X, partially proving a conjecture stated by A. BiaÃlynicki-Birula. The result allows to construct G-invariant open subsets of X admitting a good quotient by G from certain open subsets admitting a good quotient by a maximal torus T of G. As an application, we indicate an explicit meth...

Exploring agent conversation in the context of fine-grained agent coordination research has raised several intellectual questions. The major issues pertain to interactions between different agent conversations, the representations chosen for different classes of conversations, the explicit modeling of interactions between the conversations, and how to address these interactions. This paper is n...

Current approaches to recognizing discourse relations rely on a combination of shallow, surfacebased features (e.g., bigrams, word pairs), and rather specialized hand-crafted features. As a way to avoid both the shallowness of word-based representations and the lack of coverage of specialized linguistic features, we use a graph-based representation of discourse segments, which allows for a more...