Seismic resiliency of new buildings has improved over the years due to enhancements in seismic codes and design practices. However, existing buildings designed and built under earlier codes are vulnerable and require a performance-based screening and retrofit prioritization. The performance modifiers considered are soft story, weak story, and the quality of construction, which are collated thro...

The order in which user stories are implemented can have a significant influence on the overall development cost. The total cost of developing a system is non commutative because of dependencies between user stories. This paper presents a systematic and lightweight method to identify dependencies between user stories, aiding in the reduction of their impact on the overall project cost. Initial ...

Barbara Hayes-Roth, Stanford University and Extempo Systems Inc. In contemplating the possibility of interactive story systems, I begin with two premises, an artistic premise and a technical premise. My artistic premise is that we should strive for an interactive story experience that achieves for the participant the same artistic goals achieved by the great works of fiction in the traditional ...

Introduction My research project consists of building a story generator which will explore the use of reader modelling for plot generation. The project will make use of an emerging body of work at the intersection of literature and psychology that investigates reader engagement. Although there are existing systems that use formal reader models in a narrative generation context, most of them are...

In this paper, necessary and sufficient conditions are stated for the Craig-Sakamoto equation det(I − sA − tB) = det(I − sA)det(I − tB) to hold for all scalars s, t ∈ C. Moreover, spectral properties for matrices A and B that satisfy this equation are investigated.

The concept of development as freedom can be seen as an expansion process of real freedoms people enjoy, associated with their freedom of choices in social, political and economical spheres. Certain international agencies propose that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) allow this development to be reached more efficiently and quickly. While there are success stories galore, there is...

When was the last time you read a newspaper and was bombarded with articles you would rather not see? Current news media shows massive number of news every day. But from tragedies to happy stories, people might want to choose to read only those articles that fit their current mood. The purpose of this project is to present the Magnet News, a Web tool in which users can choose if they want to se...

OBJECTIVE We compared the efficacy of a story-based writing style with that of a fact-based writing style for educational material on brain metastases. METHODS Identical informational content on four topics-radiation therapy, side effects, steroid tapering, and palliative care-was constructed into equivalent story-based and fact-based materials. The content and reader preference for style wer...

In this paper we sketch a multi-step scenario of a teacher and her classroom, who uses a few computer-based learning tools and their attached teaching analytics views. The tools that are described are extensions of the toolset of the authors (ComIn-M and SMALA) and others; the scenarios should thus serve as user-story in the design of future analytical softwares that support the teacher’s manag...

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet starts out as a classic love story: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy and girl get married. Of course, it turns into a tragedy when they realize that their relationship is destined to fail. Surprisingly, many offices in corporate America follow a similar-though less morbid--trend. A 2005 survey revealed that 58% of employees had dated someone at wor...