An empirical interpretation suggests that mixed approaches to software development will benefit from the strengths of both specifying and prototyping. On functionality, robustness, ease of use, and ease of learning mixed approaches led to products of a quality that was at least comparable to the products of specialized approaches based on either specifying or prototyping. Moreover, the Spiral M...

This paper introduces Agent Factory, a cohesive framework supporting a structured approach to the development and deployment of agent-oriented applications. We describe Agent Factory together with an accompanying agent development methodology. We detail the key attributes of Agent Factory, namely: visual design, design reuse, behaviour enactment, migration, and ubiquity. Agent Factory functiona...

Besides providing the relevant information, amusing users has been an important role of the web. Many web sites provide serendipitous (unexpected but relevant) information to draw user traffic. In this paper, we study the representative scenario of mining an amusing quiz. An existing approach leverages a knowledge base to mine an unexpected property then find quiz questions on such property, ba...

In this Lecture we first review the basic properties that make flipped SU(5) a very economical and well motivated unified model, including some recent developments regarding the prediction for αs and new implications for proton decay. Then we sketch the derivation of flipped SU(5) from strings, stressing some new results concerning the cosmological constant, the stability of the no-scale mechan...

More powerful database approaches are needed to support biologists in the efficient use of complex, large scale, and rapidly changing systems biology data. We are engaged in research to advance database strategies for capturing, managing, computing, and searching biological concepts in ways that are presently not possible. The Heuristic Entity Relationship Building Environment (HERBE) project i...

Zero-shot learning, which studies the problem of object classification for categories for which we have no training examples, is gaining increasing attention from community. Most existing ZSL methods exploit deterministic transfer learning via an in-between semantic embedding space. In this paper, we try to attack this problem from a generative probabilistic modelling perspective. We assume for...

During the last ve years, the object-oriented data model Chimera has served as a focus of numerous research activities within the European cooperation project IDEA. Chimera particularly emphasizes the use of deductive and active rules during object-oriented modeling. Apart from a full application design methodology based on Chimera, a number of tools supporting the diierent phases of this metho...

Little is known on the perceptual processes of speaker identification and its relations to the acoustic features of the speaker’s voice. A study of speaker perception and identification by psycho-acoustic experiments was carried out. Statistical analysis of the results suggests that the prototype model is appropriate for explaining the process of speaker identification. It has been also found t...

This paper is about a better understanding on the structure and dynamics of science and the usage of these insights for compensating the typical problems that arises in metadata-driven Digital Libraries. Three science model driven retrieval services are presented: co-word analysis based query expansion, re-ranking via Bradfordizing and author centrality. The services are evaluated with relevanc...