At SOUPS 2013, Bravo-Lillo et al. presented an artificial experiment in which they habituated participants to the contents of a pop-up dialog by asking them to respond to it repeatedly, and then measured participants’ ability to notice when a text field within the dialog changed. The experimental treatments included various attractors: interface elements designed to draw or force users’ attenti...

For one-dimensional growth processes we consider the distribution of the height above a given point of the substrate and study its scale invariance in the limit of large times. We argue that for self-similar growth from a single seed the universal distribution is the Tracy-Widom distribution from the theory of random matrices and that for growth from a flat substrate it is some other, only nume...

We describe a simple one-person card game, patience sorting. Its analysis leads to a broad circle of ideas linking Young tableaux with the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation via the Schensted correspondence. A recent highlight of this area is the work of Baik-Deift-Johansson which yields limiting probability laws via hard analysis of Toeplitz determinants.

The Hammersley process relates to the statistical properties of the maximum length of all up/right paths connecting random points of a given density in the unit square from (0,0) to (1,1). This process can also be interpreted in terms of the height of the polynuclear growth model, or the length of the longest increasing subsequence in a random permutation. The cumulative distribution of the lon...

The expected value of L n , the length of the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation of f1; : : : ; ng, has been studied extensively. This paper presents the results of both Monte Carlo and exact computations that explore the ner structure of the distribution of L n. The results suggested that several of the conjectures that had been made about L n were incorrect, and led to new...

Let the random variable Zn,k denote the number of increasing subsequences of length k in a random permutation from Sn, the symmetric group of permutations of {1, ..., n}. In a recent paper [4] we showed that the weak law of large numbers holds for Zn,kn if kn = o(n 2 5 ); that is, lim n→∞ Zn,kn EZn,kn = 1, in probability. The method of proof employed there used the second moment method and demo...

In recent work of Baik, Deift and Rains convergence of moments was established for the limiting joint distribution of the lengths of the first k rows in random Young tableaux. The main difficulty was obtaining a good estimate for the “tail” of the distribution and this was accomplished through a highly nontrival Riemann-Hilbert analysis. Here we give a simpler derivation. A conjecture is stated...

This paper presents a novel scheme coined AIR (Agent for Image Recognition), acting as an agent, to oversee the image matching and retrieval processes. Firstly, neighboring keypoints within close spatial proximity are examined and used to hypothesize true keypoint matches. While this approach is robust to noise (e.g. a tree) since spatial relation is considered, missing (undetected) keypoints i...