The paper explores the use of virtual worlds to support online role-play as a collaborative activity. This paper describes some of the challenges involved in building online role-play environments in a virtual world and presents some of the ideas being explored by the project in the role-play applications being developed. Finally we explore how this can be used within the context of immersive e...

Content created by users is a public affair. In the cultural field of music, this includes diverse activities of listening, sharing, editing, recording. Jacques Attali predicts that music will become a network of composition, where people actively participate in music-as-process, as a form of collective play [Attali, 1985]. Christopher Small coined the term, musicking, to describe music as a so...

Nowadays, music fans are beginning to massively use mobile digital music players and dedicated software to organize and play large collections of music. In this context, users deal with huge music libraries containing thousands of tracks. Such a huge volume of music easily overwhelms users when selecting the music to listen or when organizing their collections. Music player software with visual...

Multicasting in deflection networks is more difficult than in store-and-forward networks, because of the difficulties in sending multiple copies of the same packet on several output ports. On the other hand, deflected packets stray from their optimal paths and may visit the multicast recipients “accidentally,” not necessary in the order envisioned by the sender. We compare a number of simple mu...

The objective of this project is to forecast sales in euros at 1115 stores owned by Rossmann, a European pharmaceutical company. The input to our algorithm is a feature vector (discussed in section 3) of a single day of data for that store. We tried using a number of algorithms, but mainly gradient boosting, to output the predicted total sales in euros for the given store that day. Rossmann pro...

Background: Much of the work on fish welfare focuses on areas prior to arrival at the home aquarium. Fish owners may have questions regarding the health and well-being of their fish, and they likely return to the point of purchase to get relevant fish health information. Methods: A phone survey was administered to a random sample of North Carolina stores that sell pet fish. The purpose was to d...

An Augmented Knight’s Castle (AKC) play set was adapted so that children with autism can configure programmable elements. This is compared with a non-configurable AKC. When the system is configurable, and when it is switched on, less solitary play and more cooperative play occur. Digital toys and their configurability are key factors in design for children with autism, allowing greater individu...