Traditionally, failure detectors have considered a binary model whereby a given process can be either trusted or suspected. This paper defines a family of failure detectors, called accrual failure detectors, that revisits this interaction model. Accrual failure detectors associate to each process a real value representing a suspicion level. An important advantage of accrual failure detectors ov...

There is a widespread belief that exposure to television has harmful effects on children’s cognitive development. While a few studies on historical data contradict this belief most research that uses recent data points to a negative correlation between hours of television viewing and cognitive outcomes. The causality, however, is far from established. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Y...

The nested nature of the sets of measurements obtained for each fetus and pairs of twins within each pregnancy means that the analysis of fetal growth in twin pregnancies is particularly suited to the application of multilevel modelling. The term ‘multilevel modelling’ describes a mixed effects approach in which sets of measurements within each individual and/or individuals within groups form a...

The analysis of benthic assemblages is a valuable tool to describe the ecological status of transitional water ecosystems, but species are extremely sensitive and respond to both microhabitat and seasonal differences. The identification of changes in the composition of the macrobenthic community in specific microhabitats can then be used as an "early warning" for environmental changes which may...

Social interaction (peer) effects are recognized as a potentially important factor in the diffusion of new products. In the case of environmentally friendly goods or technologies, both marketers and policy makers are interested in the presence of causal peer effects due to the social spillovers that can expedite adoption. We study the diffusion of solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in California, a...

j The causal arguments that people typically use to explain the behavior of physical systems contain ambiguities and hidden assumptions which result from imposing a particular point of view on. the behavior of the system. The causality of such an argument is an artifact of imposing this point of view. Usually there exist other equally " valid " but conflicting arguments based on the same eviden...

Esports has gained global popularity in recent years and several companies have started offering live streaming videos of esports games and events. This creates opportunities to develop large scale video understanding systems for new product features and services. We present a technique for detecting highlights from live streaming videos of esports game matches. Most video games use pronounced ...

We present a novel volumetric animation generation framework to create new types of animations from raw 3D surface or point cloud sequence of captured real performances. The framework considers as input time incoherent 3D observations of a moving shape, and is thus particularly suitable for the output of performance capture platforms. In our system, a suitable virtual representation of the acto...

The stability of three-dimensional relativistic semimetals to disorder has recently attracted great attention, but the effect remains elusive for multifold fermions, that are not present in framework quantum field theory. In this paper, we investigate one type so-called triple-point fermions (TPFs), which have pseudospin-1 degrees freedom and topological charges $\pm2$. Specifically, consider o...