Exploring the Interactions of Storylines from Informative News Events

Today＇s news readers can be easily overwhelmed by the numerous news articles online. To cope with information overload, online news media publishes timelines for continuously developing news topics. However, the timeline summary does not show the relationship of storylines, and is not intuitive for readers to comprehend the development of a complex news topic. In this paper, we study a novel problem of exploring the interactions of storylines in a news topic. An interaction of two storylines is signified by informative news events that play a key role in both storylines. Storyline interactions can indicate key phases of a news topic, and reveal the latent connections among various aspects of the story. We address the coherence between news articles which is not considered in traditional similarity-based methods, and discover salient storyline interactions to form a clear, global picture of the news topic. User preference can be naturally integrated into our method to generate query-specific results. Comprehensive experiments on ten news topics show the effectiveness of our method over alternative approaches.     

Underactuated fingers controlled by robust and adaptive trajectory following methods

Choosing an appropriate control scheme to alleviate nonlinearities and uncertainties is not a trivial task, especially when models are not easily available and practical evaluation provides the only means for actual performance assessment. Various factors can contribute to these nonlinearities and uncertainties, such as friction and stiction. Thus, this article investigates four different control schemes, namely PID, adaptive, conventional sliding mode control (SMC) and integral sliding mode control (ISMC) which are implemented in the Bristol Elumotion Robot Hand (BERUL) to analyse and overcome the aforementioned problems. The hand has five fingers with 16 joints and all fingers are underactuated. The implementation of the proposed control schemes are challenging since the BERUL fingers have significant friction, stiction and unknown parameters. The fingers are light in weight and fragile. Comparative performance characteristics have shown that the ISMC is the most suitable candidate to provide good experimental trajectory following and positioning control for underactuated BERUL fingers.     

An exploratory study on ontology engineering for software architecture documentation

The usefulness of Software Architecture (SA) documentation depends on how well its Architectural Knowledge (AK) can be retrieved by the stakeholders in a software project. Recent findings show that the use of ontology-based SA documentation is promising. However, different roles in software development have different needs for AK, and building an ontology to suit these needs is challenging. In this paper we describe an approach to build an ontology for SA documentation. This approach involves the use of typical questions for eliciting and constructing an ontology. We outline eight contextual factors, which influence the successful construction of an ontology, especially in complex software projects with diverse AK users. We tested our ‘typical question’ approach in a case study and report how it can be used for acquiring and modeling AK needs.     

LoVis: Local Pattern Visualization for Model Refinement

Linear models are commonly used to identify trends in data. While it is an easy task to build linear models using pre‐selected variables, it is challenging to select the best variables from a large number of alternatives. Most metrics for selecting variables are global in nature, and thus not useful for identifying local patterns. In this work, we present an integrated framework with visual representations that allows the user to incrementally build and verify models in three model spaces that support local pattern discovery and summarization: model complementarity, model diversity, and model representivity. Visual representations are designed and implemented for each of the model spaces. Our visualizations enable the discovery of complementary variables, i.e., those that perform well in modeling different subsets of data points. They also support the isolation of local models based on a diversity measure. Furthermore, the system integrates a hierarchical representation to identify the outlier local trends and the local trends that share similar directions in the model space. A case study on financial risk analysis is discussed, followed by a user study.     

Group‐in‐a‐Box Meta‐Layouts for Topological Clusters and Attribute‐Based Groups: Space‐Efficient Visualizations of Network Communities and Their Ties

An important part of network analysis is understanding community structures like topological clusters and attribute‐based groups. Standard approaches for showing communities using colour, shape, rectangular bounding boxes, convex hulls or force‐directed layout algorithms remain valuable, however our Group‐in‐a‐Box meta‐layouts add a fresh strategy for presenting community membership, internal structure and inter‐cluster relationships. This paper extends the basic Group‐in‐a‐Box meta‐layout, which uses a Treemap substrate of rectangular regions whose size is proportional to community size. When there are numerous inter‐community relationships, the proposed extensions help users view them more clearly: (1) the Croissant–Doughnut meta‐layout applies empirically determined rules for box arrangement to improve space utilization while still showing inter‐community relationships, and (2) the Force‐Directed layout arranges community boxes based on their aggregate ties at the cost of additional space. Our free and open source reference implementation in NodeXL includes heuristics to choose what we have found to be the preferable Group‐in‐a‐Box meta‐layout to show networks with varying numbers or sizes of communities. Case study examples, a pilot comparative user preference study (nine participants), and a readability measure‐based evaluation of 309 Twitter networks demonstrate the utility of the proposed meta‐layouts.     

Public Displays of Play: Studying Online Games in Physical Settings

As research on virtual worlds gains increasing attention in educational, commercial, and military domains, a consideration of how player populations are ‘reassembled’ through social scientific data is a timely matter for communication scholars. This paper describes a large‐scale study of virtual worlds in which participants were recruited at public gaming events, as opposed to through online means, and explores the dynamic relationships between players and contexts of play that this approach makes visible. Challenging conventional approaches to quantitatively driven virtual worlds research, which categorizes players based on their involvement in an online game at a particular point in time, this account demonstrates how players' networked gaming activities are contingent on who they are playing with, where, and when.     

基于国家电网的财务管理系统的开发与研究

随着社会生产力的不断发展,越来越多的企业认识到了财务工作的重要性。企业要利用现代高效的运作方式来开发和管理组织中最重要、最昂贵的资源,实现财务管理的精细化、自动化,提高财务资源的利用率,促进企业的发展。     

浅析电力用户终端的管理现状及对策

当前,电力用户终端管理中出现的问题越来越多,已经影响到供电企业的发展和社会的和谐。如何解决这些问题并建立有效的电力终端管理机制,是目前电力企业面临的首要问题。     

基于QPSO 算法移动机器人轨迹规划与实验

针对移动机器人路径规划问题,提出一种基于QPSO算法的路径规划方法,并用概率论的方法分析了移动机器人路径规划的收敛性,阐明了该方法随均匀分布和正态分布的参数关系和收敛区间;然后根据移动机器人的运动特征提出一种改进的轨迹规划方法。移动机器人平台的实验结果表明了该方法在移动机器人路径规划中的有效性和可行性。     

轨迹空间中基于特征符号搜索算法的非刚体三维运动重建研究

现有研究一般是在正交约束条件下采用最小二乘法来求解三维运动轨迹基重建问题,然而这些算法的性能容易受噪声影响,产生不适定性。为此,通过利用离散线性的方法为三维运动搜索最优轨迹基系数和三维结构,建立了一种基于特征符号搜索算法的三维运动轨迹基重建方法。利用该方法,对一系列单目图像序列进行了重建实验研究,结果表明所提出的方法是可行的,并提高了重建算法的准确性。