Recently, virtual personal assistant (VPA) applications have been employed in mobile devices, which provide a natural and convenient interface between human and machines. As the VPA services become popular, consumers demand for a wider service than their scope, so the rapid development becomes more important. This paper introduces a dialog act modeling approach for VPA applications, which is an...

We develop an analytic statistical framework for examining a variety of gene-set enrichment analysis tests. Within this framework, we describe why statistical power for both self-contained and competitive gene set tests is a function of the correlation structure of co-expressed genes, and why this characteristic is undesireable for gene-set analyses. We additionally describe why past gene-set t...

Geotechnical engineering deals with the safe transmittal of loads due to various engineering applications to, and into, the soil or rock mass. The soil and rock mass formations are heterogeneous and generally are subjected to stresses (due to various engineering applications) which are additional to those presently existing in the earth mass from its self weight and geological history. Due to t...

Does the Internet provide a failsafe against media consolidation in the wake of an easing of media ownership rules? This paper posits a model of news outlet selection on the Internet in which consumers experience cognitive costs that increase with the number of options faced. Consistent with psychological evidence, these costs may be reduced by constraining one’s choice set to “safe bets” famil...

Precis: This paper examines the electoral impact of the counting and transfer of lower preference votes on Dail elections since 1922. The relationship between transfers and constituency size is assessed, and it is shown that a constituency size of at least five members is needed before transfers have an even chance of affecting the final result. Only Fine Gael has benefited significantly in net...

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Since the end of the Cold War, the Army has engaged in an unprecedented number of joint contingency operations hinting at future missions aimed at protecting U.S. interests worldwide. To engage and defeat future threats to our national security, the Army must transform itself into a more strategically responsive, lethal force. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of Naval Surface Fire Support ...

In this paper, we introduce a scientific format for text-based data files, which facilitates storing and communicating tabular data sets. The so-called Full-Metadata Format builds on the widely used INI-standard and is based on four principles: readable self-documentation, flexible structure, fail-safe compatibility, and searchability. As a consequence, all metadata required to interpret the ta...

Meinen Eltern "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream.

Mainly for economic and maintainability reasons, more and more dependable real-time systems are built from Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components. To build these systems, a commonly-used assumption is that computers are fail-silent. The goal of our work is to determine the coverage of the fail-silence assumption for computers executing a real-time run-time support built exclusively from COT...