Pair programming is a practice in which two programmers work collaboratively at one computer on the same design, algorithm, or code. Prior research indicates that pair programmers produce higher quality code in essentially half the time taken by solo programmers. Pair programming is becoming increasingly popular in industry and in university curricula. An experiment was run at North Carolina St...

A novel technique of unmasking to repair the degradation in sources separated by spectrogram masking is proposed. Our approach is based on explicit knowledge of the musical audio at note level from a score-audio alignment, which we termed Informed Source Separation (ISS). Such knowledge allows the spectrogram energy to be decomposed into note-based models. We assume that a spectrogram mask for ...

Until recently, there has been very little naturalistic study of what gaming experiences are like, and how gaming fits into people's lives. Using a recently developed structural characteristic taxonomy of video games, this study examined the psycho-structural elements of computer games that motivate gamers to play them. Using Q-Sort methodology, 40 gamers participated in an online Q-sort task. ...

We consider the consensus problem in an n-process shared-memory distributed system when processes are anonymous, i.e., they have no identities and are programmed identically. We present Janus, a new anonymous consensus algorithm that reaches decision after O( √ n) writes in every solo execution. The set of values that can be proposed is unbounded and the algorithm tolerates an arbitrary number ...

This paper reports experimental measurements of productivity and quality in pair programming. The work complements Laurie Williams’ work on collaborative programming, in which Pair Programming and Solo Programming student groups wrote the same programs and then their activities were measured to investigate productivity, quality, etc. In this paper, Pair and Solo industrial programmer groups are...

In this paper, we describe a computer-based solo musical instrument for live performance. We have adapted a Wacom graphic tablet equipped with a stylus transducer and a game joystick to use them as a solo expressive instrument. We have used a formant-synthesis model that can produce a vowel-like singing voice. This instrument allows multidimensional expressive fundamental frequency control and ...

Here we addressed whether even violent video games can improve intergroup attitudes if played cooperatively with an outgroup, in keeping with the Contact Hypothesis. In addition, we examined potential mechanisms of this effect. In Experiment 1 (N = 77), Canadians played a violent video game (Call of Duty: Black Ops) against zombies, either cooperatively or independently (i.e., at the same time ...

We present an empirical study on classical music instrument classification. A methodology with feature extraction and evaluation is proposed and assessed with a number of experiments, whose final stage is to detect instruments in solo passages. In feature selection it is found that similar but different rankings for individual tone classification and solo passage instrument recognition are repo...

We conducted two studies to further our understanding of the dynamics of the programming methods. One is a survey study. We surveyed software professionals in the industry to collect their views on the effectiveness of pair programming versus solo programming. In our second study, we adopted the analytical approach to compare the three modes of programming: solo only, pair only, and a mixture o...