Agile methodologies are based on effective communication with the customer. The ideal case is XP’s on-site customer. Unfortunately, in practice customer representatives are too busy to work with the development team all the time. Moreover, frequently there are many of them and each representative has only partial domain knowledge. To cope with this we introduced to our projects a proxy-customer...

14.1 Members Kenji Ono (Team Leader) Jorji Nonaka (Researcher) Mikio Iizuka (Researcher) Chongke Bi (Postdoctoral Researcher) Daisuke Sakurai (Postdoctoral Researcher) Kazunori Mikami (Technical Staff) Tomohiro Kawanabe (Technical Staff) Seiji Fujino (Senior Visiting Scientist) Naohisa Sakamoto (Visiting Scientist) Masahiro Fujita (Visiting Technician) Kentaro Oku (Visiting Technician) Steve Pe...

User stories allow customers to easily communicate desired specifications as part of Agile Software Development methods. When elicited from groups instead of individuals, the number of stories generated and the comprehensiveness of the stories is likely to increase. We present a 2 X 2 study design involving group vs. individual user story brainstorming with one or two sentence vs. unlimited use...

Motivated by the Hankel determinant evaluation of moment sequences, we study a kind of Pfaffian analogue evaluation. We prove an LU -decomposition analogue for skew-symmetric matrices, called Pfaffian decomposition. We then apply this formula to evaluate Pfaffians related to some moment sequences of classical orthogonal polynomials. In particular we obtain a product formula for a kind of q-Cata...

The ‘radioactive dice’ experiment is a commonly used classroom analogue to model the decay of radioactive nuclei. However, the value of the half-life obtained from this experiment differs significantly from that calculated for real nuclei decaying exponentially with the same decay constant. This article attempts to explain the discrepancy and suggests modifications to the experiment to minimize...

Male and female high school and college students viewed a DVD about a love story. Youth who more readily empathized with media characters were more likely to perceive same-sex characters as role models and were better able to understand the story content. The findings suggest that fantasy empathy, in which viewers become deeply involved in narratives, may hold a key regarding the influence of m...

A bottleneck in mining tutor data is mapping heterogeneous event streams to feature vectors with which to train and test classifiers. To bypass the labor-intensive process of feature engineering, AutoCord learns classifiers directly from a relational database of events logged by a tutor. It searches through a space of classifiers represented as database queries, using a small set of heuristic o...

The main goal of OPC is to offer philosophically subtle and historically sound accounts of central concepts in the history of philosophy. Each volume will be a history of its concept in that it will offer a story about the most significant events in the life of the concept from its original inception through its transformations to its modern use. The point of this narrative is to deepen underst...

Interacting in natural language with virtual actors is an important aspect of the development of future Interactive Storytelling systems. We describe a paradigm for speech interfaces in interactive storytelling based on the notion of influence. In this paradigm, the user is mainly a spectator who is however able to interfere with the course of action by issuing advice to the characters. This is...