Towards a crowdsourced solution for the authoring bottleneck in interactive narratives

Interactive Storytelling research has produced a wealth of technologies that can be employed to create personalised narrative experiences, in which the audience takes a participating rather than observing role. But so far this technology has not led to the production of large scale playable interactive story experiences that realise the ambitions of the field. One main reason for this state of affairs is the difficulty of authoring interactive stories, a task that requires describing a huge amount of story building blocks in a machine friendly fashion. This is not only technically and conceptually more challenging than traditional narrative authoring but also a scalability problem. This thesis examines the authoring bottleneck through a case study and a literature survey and advocates a solution based on crowdsourcing. Prior work has already shown that combining a large number of example stories collected from crowd workers with a system that merges these contributions into a single interactive story can be an effective way to reduce the authorial burden. As a refinement of such an approach, this thesis introduces the novel concept of Crowd Task Adaptation. It argues that in order to maximise the usefulness of the collected stories, a system should dynamically and intelligently analyse the corpus of collected stories and based on this analysis modify the tasks handed out to crowd workers. Two authoring systems, ENIGMA and CROSCAT, which show two radically different approaches of using the Crowd Task Adaptation paradigm have been implemented and are described in this thesis. While ENIGMA adapts tasks through a realtime dialog between crowd workers and the system that is based on what has been learned from previously collected stories, CROSCAT modifies the backstory given to crowd workers in order to optimise the distribution of branching points in the tree structure that combines all collected stories. Two experimental studies of crowdsourced authoring are also presented. They lead to guidelines on how to employ crowdsourced authoring effectively, but more importantly the results of one of the studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the Crowd Task Adaptation approach

Universal Engineering Programmer - An In-house Development Tool For Developing and Testing Implantable Medical Devices In St. Jude Medical

During development and testing of the functionality of the pacemaker and defibrillator device, engineers in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division use an in-house development tool called Universal Engineering Programmer (UEP) to ensure the device functions as expected, before it can be used to test on an animal or a human during the implantation process. In addition, some applications of UEP are incorporated into the official releases of the device product. UEP has been developed and used by engineers across departments in the St. Jude Medical Cardiac Rhythm Management Division (CRMD). This thesis covers the flexible and reusable design and implementation of UEP features, to allow engineers to easily and effectively develop and test the devices

Semantic Debugging

Why does my program fail? We present a novel and general technique to automatically determine failure causes and conditions, using logical properties over input elements: "The program fails if and only if int(⟨length⟩) > len(⟨payload⟩) holds - that is, the given ⟨length⟩ is larger than the ⟨payload⟩ length." Our AVICENNA prototype uses modern techniques for inferring properties of passing and failing inputs and validating and refining hypotheses by having a constraint solver generate supporting test cases to obtain such diagnoses. As a result, AVICENNA produces crisp and expressive diagnoses even for complex failure conditions, considerably improving over the state of the art with diagnoses close to those of human experts

Evolutionary biology of the exploited cephalopod, Nautilus pompilius

Commercial species worldwide are experiencing significant population declines. Marine research is needed to understand species biology in an attempt to sufficiently manage levels of exploitation. Nautilus pompilius is unsustainably fished for the ornamental shell trade and large-scale population losses in the Philippines have been reported. We generated data that are intended to inform legislation to protect N. pompilius from overexploitation. Specifically, we investigated the evolutionary divergence and genetic structure between populations sampled from across the Indo-Pacific. In addition to research into the genetic structure of N. pompilius populations we also addressed the pharmacological responses of neurotransmitters widely used across the animal kingdom. We collected data from the mitochondrial locus cytochrome c oxidase sub unit I (COI) and a novel microsatellite-enriched genomic library to describe the relatedness of N. pompilius populations sampled from across their range. Gene flow between west Australia and the Philippines was modelled using approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) analysis. Initial experiments to determine phylogenetically taxon specific usage of widely used neurotransmitters were conducted by testing for the presence and absence of targeted receptors using specific drugs. Demonstrating sufficient responses to these drugs will confirm the scope for further research into the physiological role played by receptors in N. pompilius, thus allowing us to determine taxonomic relationships at this fundamental level. Finding relatively high protein sequence homologies in cross species comparisons would be informative both on the evolution of nautiloids, and the functional role of receptors across taxa.Results of maximum likelihood phylogenetic analyses show that N. pompilius is divided into three distinct clades, with additional subdivision occurring within two of these clades. Genetic structure is high between Great Barrier Reef individuals, and those of Osprey Reef and Shark Reef in the Coral Sea (FST=0.312, 0.229 respectively). Interestingly, low genetic structure was shown between west Australia and the Philippines (FST=0.015), despite the large geographic scale from which these samples were collected. Further analyses of genetic data collected from west Australia and Philippine samples using ABC indicate that the observed genetic similarity is not the result of current gene flow and that individuals sampled from these regions are indeed genetically isolated. This similarity is explained by large effective population sizes over time suggesting a minor role for genetic drift. The population structure of east Australia and the west Pacific reflects oceanic topographic features. Recorded drug/tissue responses warrant further exploration into this area of their evolution, enabling us to compare biological signalling pathways among taxa and understand the unique nature of Nautilus at this fundamental level.Our data demonstrate widespread substructure and isolation among populations of N. pompilius. Furthermore, we show that local extinction of N. pompilius in the Philippines is possible due to their low levels of migration. These findings reduce gaps in our knowledge of N. pompilius biology that currently inhibit their conservation classification. Results support the case to gain CITES protection for N. pompilius

Semantic Debugging

Why does my program fail? We present a novel and general technique to automatically determine failure causes and conditions, using logical properties over input elements: "The program fails if and only if int(⟨length⟩) > len(⟨payload⟩) holds - that is, the given ⟨length⟩ is larger than the ⟨payload⟩ length." Our AVICENNA prototype uses modern techniques for inferring properties of passing and failing inputs and validating and refining hypotheses by having a constraint solver generate supporting test cases to obtain such diagnoses. As a result, AVICENNA produces crisp and expressive diagnoses even for complex failure conditions, considerably improving over the state of the art with diagnoses close to those of human experts

Abschlussbericht des Verbundprojekts Tools4BPEL

Unternehmensübergreifende Geschäftsprozesse werden zunehmend nach dem Paradigma der Services organisiert. Dabei stellen sich Fragen nach der Komponierbarkeit, Fehlerbehandlung, sowie der Rücksetzbarkeit (Kompensation) im Fehlerfall. In diesem Vorhaben werden Methoden und Werkzeuge zum Umgang mit solchen Fragen entwickelt und am Beispiel der Geschäftsprozess-Modellierungssprache BPEL und im Modellierungswerkzeug der Firma MEGA international erprobt. Es wurde zum einen der Übersetzer BPEL2oWFN entwickelt, der anhand einer Petrinetzsemantik für BPEL einen BPEL-Prozess in ein (offenes) Petrinetz transformiert. Zum anderen wurden Korrektheitskriterien (wie Bedienbarkeit und Verhaltenskompatibilität) für Services erarbeitet, Algorithmen zu ihrer Überprüfung entworfen und in Fiona implementiert. Die Algorithmen sind Petrinetz-basiert. Damit spielen Übersetzung und Analyse eng zusammen und ein vorhandener BPEL-Prozess kann auf bspw. Bedienbarkeit hin untersucht werden. In diesem Vorhaben wurden die Modellierungssprache BPEL4Chor, Choreographie-Erweiterungen für BPMN entwickelt, sowie die Transformation von BPMN nach BPEL angepasst, um den Weg von BPMN nach BPEL4Chor zu unterstützen. Weiterhin wurden Konzepte entwickelt, wie sich partner-übergreifende Fehlerbehandlung, Rücksetzbarkeit, sowie die Autonomie der Partner mittels BPEL4Chor darstellen lassen. BPEL4Chor kann als Standardsprache zur Spezifikation von Protokollen, die zwischen mehreren Partnern ablaufen, verwendet werden. Durch seine enge Verbindung mit BPEL kann BPEL4Chor sehr gut als Startpunkt für eine Webservice-Lösung verwendet werden

Volume 19 - Issue 6 - Friday, October 7, 1983

The Rose Thorn, Rose-Hulman\u27s independent student newspaper.https://scholar.rose-hulman.edu/rosethorn/1781/thumbnail.jp