Today scientists are producing large volumes of data that they wish to explore and visualize. In this paper we describe a system that combines range-based queries with fast lookup to allow a scientist to quickly and efficiently ask “what if?” questions. Unique to our system is the ability to perform “cumulative queries” that work on both an intraand inter-time step basis. The results of such qu...

Facebook has established itself as one of the major players in social networking, claiming that it helps members connect and share with the people in their lives. But what if the people you want to connect and share with are your artistic collaborators? Can Facebook be used creatively, as a collaborative artistic environment? This paper explores the creative use of Facebook as a tool for creati...

This paper investigates the powerplay in one-day cricket. The rules concerning the powerplay have been tinkered with over the years, and therefore the primary motivation of the paper is the assessment of the impact of the powerplay with respect to scoring. The form of the analysis takes a “what if” approach where powerplay outcomes are substituted with what might have happened had there been no...

In security games, the solution concept commonly used is that of a Stackelberg equilibrium where the defender gets to commit to a mixed strategy. The motivation for this is that the attacker can repeatedly observe the defender’s actions and learn her distribution over actions, before acting himself. If the actions were not observable, Nash (or perhaps correlated) equilibrium would arguably be a...

Research on heuristic functions is all about estimating the length (or cost) of solution paths. But what if there is no such path? Many known heuristics have the ability to detect (some) unsolvable states, but that ability has always been treated as a by-product. No attempt has been made to design heuristics specifically for that purpose, where there is no need to preserve distances. As a case ...

A natural way to benefit from distribution is via asynchronous invocations to methods or services. Upon invocation, a request is enqueued at the destination side and the caller can continue its execution. But a question remains: “what if one wants to manipulate the result of an asynchronous invocation?” First-class futures provide a transparent and easy-to-program answer: a future acts as the p...

We would like to arrive at a single coherent pair of credences in X and X. Perhaps we wish to use these to set our own credences; or perhaps we wish to publish them in a report of the WHO as the collective view of expert epidemiologists; or perhaps we wish to use them in a decision-making process to determine how medical research funding should be allocated in 2018. Given their expertise, we wo...

And what if the only reality in existence was virtual reality? The individual identity in virtual reality has always been studied with regards to individual identity in reality. Indeed, the individual in virtual reality is considered as a real individual to whom we removed fundamental features: spatial unity (Leibniz) and temporal identity or sameness (Ricoeur, 1990). In other words, a virtual ...

Facing a second major event of computational linguistics in Prague in the history of Czech CL – the ACL Annual Meeting in June 2007 – we cannot leave the first such event – COLING 1982 – unmentioned. But alas – most unfortunately, we have to start with very sad news about the then President of the Congress, Professor Ján Horecký, who died on August 11th, 2006 in his hometown Stupava (near Brati...