Proceedings of the 1993 Conference on Intelligent Computer-Aided Training and Virtual Environment Technology

The volume 2 proceedings from the 1993 Conference on Intelligent Computer-Aided Training and Virtual Environment Technology are presented. Topics discussed include intelligent computer assisted training (ICAT) systems architectures, ICAT educational and medical applications, virtual environment (VE) training and assessment, human factors engineering and VE, ICAT theory and natural language processing, ICAT military applications, VE engineering applications, ICAT knowledge acquisition processes and applications, and ICAT aerospace applications

Proceedings of the 1993 Conference on Intelligent Computer-Aided Training and Virtual Environment Technology, Volume 1

These proceedings are organized in the same manner as the conference's contributed sessions, with the papers grouped by topic area. These areas are as follows: VE (virtual environment) training for Space Flight, Virtual Environment Hardware, Knowledge Aquisition for ICAT (Intelligent Computer-Aided Training) & VE, Multimedia in ICAT Systems, VE in Training & Education (1 & 2), Virtual Environment Software (1 & 2), Models in ICAT systems, ICAT Commercial Applications, ICAT Architectures & Authoring Systems, ICAT Education & Medical Applications, Assessing VE for Training, VE & Human Systems (1 & 2), ICAT Theory & Natural Language, ICAT Applications in the Military, VE Applications in Engineering, Knowledge Acquisition for ICAT, and ICAT Applications in Aerospace

Proceedings of the 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the SMC2010 - 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference, July 21st - July 24th 2010

Essays in Financial Economics

In my dissertation, I dive into three specific areas in financial economics. Chapter 1 of my Ph.D. dissertation studies how the boom in off-exchange trading at the market close affects the close price discovery. In recent years, investment banks like Goldman Sachs have started a guaranteed close business where investors looking to buy or sell shares of a certain stock can get a guarantee from the bank to execute their orders at the close price set on the primary exchange. Using the TAQ data and a quasi-experimental shock from NYSE fee cut, we find that when the fraction of trades through guaranteed close increases, the informativeness of close price increases. We develop a model where investors choose which venue to trade in. A bank conducting guaranteed close business competes with the exchange on transaction fees, and gains profit from trading strategically utilizing the order flow information. The bank\u27s trading activity concentrates the price-relevant information into the exchange. Consequently, the guaranteed close improves price discovery at the market close. Chapter 2 of my Ph.D. dissertation studies the long-term effects of experiencing high levels of job demands on the aging and mortality of CEOs. The estimation exploits variation in industry crises and takeover protection. First, we apply neural-network based ML techniques to assess visible signs of aging in pictures of CEOs. We estimate that exposure to a distress shock during the Great Recession increases CEOs\u27 apparent age by one year over the next decade. Second, using hand-collected data on the dates of birth and death for 1,605 CEOs of large, publicly-listed U.S. firms, we estimate the resulting changes in mortality. The hazard estimates indicate that CEOs\u27 lifespandecreases by 1.5 years in response to an industry-wide downturn, and increases by two years when insulated from market discipline via anti-takeover laws. Our findings imply significant health costs of managerial stress, also relative to known health risks. Chapter 3 of my Ph.D. dissertation provides an economically interpretable and easy-to-calculate approximation to optimal portfolio choice over the life cycle. The standard literature that solves the numerical optimal portfolio policy requires complicated backward induction, making it hard to apply for providing financial advice. Real-world financial advisors, on the other hand, tend to neglect the risky nature of human capital and offer advice that is not truly optimal. We bridge the gap by first using a reduced-form regression to predict discount rates of future incomes over an agent\u27s life. Our prediction method achieves an R-squared of more than 90% over a wide range of simulations. Furthermore, by plugging the discount rates we predict into Merton (1969) formula, we obtain an approximate solution that has an average difference within 2% when compared to optimal solution solved through backward induction

Attention Restraint, Working Memory Capacity, and Mind Wandering: Do Emotional Valence or Intentionality Matter?

Attention restraint appears to mediate the relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and mind wandering (Kane et al., 2016). Prior work has identifed two dimensions of mind wandering—emotional valence and intentionality. However, less is known about how WMC and attention restraint correlate with these dimensions. Te current study examined the relationship between WMC, attention restraint, and mind wandering by emotional valence and intentionality. A confrmatory factor analysis demonstrated that WMC and attention restraint were strongly correlated, but only attention restraint was related to overall mind wandering, consistent with prior fndings. However, when examining the emotional valence of mind wandering, attention restraint and WMC were related to negatively and positively valenced, but not neutral, mind wandering. Attention restraint was also related to intentional but not unintentional mind wandering. Tese results suggest that WMC and attention restraint predict some, but not all, types of mind wandering

The Eye in Motion: Mid-Victorian Fiction and Moving-Image Technologies

This thesis reads selected works of fiction by three mid-Victorian writers (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot) alongside contemporaneous innovations and developments in moving-image technologies, or what have been referred to by historians of film as ‘pre-cinematic devices’. It looks specifically at the moving panorama, diorama, dissolving magic lantern slides, the kaleidoscope, and persistence of vision devices such as the phenakistiscope and zoetrope, and ranges across scientific writing, journalism, letters, and paintings to demonstrate the scope and popularity of visual motion devices. By exploring this history of optical technologies I show how their display, mechanism, and manual operation contributed to a broader cultural and literary interest in the phenomenological experience of animation, decades before the establishment of cinematography as an industry, technology, and viewing practice. Through a close reading of a range of mid-Victorian novels, this thesis identifies and analyses the literary use of language closely associated with moving-image technologies to argue that the Victorian literary imagination reflected upon, drew from, and incorporated reference to visual and technological animation many decades earlier than critics, focusing usually on early twentieth-century cinema and modernist literature, have allowed. It develops current scholarship on Victorian visual culture and optical technologies by a close reading of the language of moving-image devices—found in advertisements, reviews, and descriptions of their physiological operation and spectacle—alongside the choices Victorian authors made to describe precisely how their characters perceived, how they imagined, remembered, and mentally relived particular scenes and images, and how the readers of their texts were encouraged to imaginatively ‘see’ the animated unfolding of the plot and the material dimensionality of its world through a shared understanding of this language of moving images

Forward and Backward Speech Skimming with the Elastic Audio Slider

this paper is to introduce a new interface and interaction design for interactive audio skimming which is particularly useful for searching and navigating speech documents. The approach builds on our previous work which is summarized in Section 2 together with a general discussion of audio skimming. Section 3 describes how this approach can be extended to improve speech skimming, in particular when trying to move backwards in order to re-listen to some previously heard parts of a file. Section 4 reviews related works and puts them in relationship to our approach. Section 5 concludes the paper with a short summary and an outlook on future wor

Annotierte interaktive nichtlineare Videos - Software Suite, Download- und Cache-Management

Modern Web technology makes the dream of fully interactive and enriched video come true. Nowadays it is possible to organize videos in a non-linear way playing in a sequence unknown in advance. Furthermore, additional information can be added to the video, ranging from short descriptions to animated images and further videos. This affords an easy and efficient to use authoring tool which is capable of the management of the single media objects, as well as a clear arrangement of the links between the parts. Tools of this kind can be found rarely and do mostly not provide the full range of needed functions. While providing an interactive experience to the viewer in the Web player, parallel plot sequences and additional information lead to an increased download volume. This may cause pauses during playback while elements have to be downloaded which are displayed with the video. A good quality of experience for these videos with small waiting times and a playback without interruptions is desired. This work presents the SIVA Suite to create the previously described annotated interactive non-linear videos. We propose a video model for interactivity, non-linearity, and annotations, which is implemented in an XML format, an authoring tool, and a player. Video is the main medium, whereby different scenes are linked to a scene graph. Time controlled additional content called annotations, like text, images, audio files, or videos, is added to the scenes. The user is able to navigate in the scene graph by selecting a button at a button panel. Furthermore, other navigational elements like a table of contents or a keyword search are provided. Besides the SIVA Suite, this thesis presents algorithms and strategies for download and cache management to provide a good quality of experience while watching the annotated interactive non-linear videos. Therefor, we implemented a standard-independent player framework. Integrated into a simulation environment, the framework allows to evaluate algorithms and strategies for the calculation of start-up times, and the selection of elements to pre-fetch into and delete from the cache. Their interaction during the playback of non-linear video contents can be analyzed. The algorithms and strategies can be used to minimize interruptions in the video flow after user interactions. Our extensive evaluation showed that our techniques result in faster start-up times and lesser interruptions in the video flow than those of other players. Knowledge of the structure of an interactive non-linear video can be used to minimize the start-up time at the beginning of a video while minimizing an increase in the overall download volume.Moderne Web-Technologien lassen den Traum von voll interaktiven und bereicherten Videos wahr werden. Heutzutage ist es möglich, Videos in nicht-linearer Art und Weise zu organisieren, welche dann in einer vorher unbekannten Reihenfolge abgespielt werden können. Weiterhin können den Videos Zusatzinformationen in Form von kurzen Beschreibungen über animierte Bilder bis hin zu weiteren Videos hinzugefügt werden. Dies erfordert ein einfach und effizient zu bedienendes Autorenwerkzeug, das in der Lage ist, sowohl einzelne Medien-Objekte zu verwalten, als auch die Verbindungen zwischen den einzelnen Teilen klar darzustellen. Tools dieser Art sind selten und bieten meist nicht den vollen benötigten Funktionsumfang. Während dem Betrachter dieses interaktive Erlebnis im Web Player zur Verfügung gestellt wird, führen parallele Handlungsstränge und zusätzliche Inhalte zu einem erhöhten Download-Volumen. Dies kann zu Pausen während der Wiedergabe führen, in denen Elemente vom Server geladen werden müssen, welche mit dem Video angezeigt werden sollen. Ein gutes Benutzungserlebnis für solche Videos kann durch geringe Wartezeiten und eine unterbrechungsfreie Wiedergabe erreicht werden. Diese Arbeit stellt die SIVA Suite vor, mit der die zuvor beschriebenen annotierten interaktiven nicht-linearen Videos erstellt werden können. Wir bilden Interaktivität, Nichtlinearität und Annotationen in einem Video-Model ab. Dieses wird in unserem XML-Format, Autorentool und Player umgesetzt. Als Leitmedium werden hierbei Videos verwendet, welche aufgeteilt in Szenen zu einer Graphstruktur zusammengefügt werden können. Zeitlich gesteuerte zusätzliche Inhalte, sogenannte Annotationen, wie Texte, Bilder, Audio-Dateien und Videos, werden den Szenen hinzugefügt. Der Betrachter kann im Szenengraph navigieren, indem er in einem bereitgestellten Button-Panel eine Nachfolgeszene auswählt. Andere Navigationselemente sind ein Inhaltsverzeichnis sowie eine Suchfunktion. Neben der SIVA Suite beschreibt diese Arbeit Algorithmen und Strategien für Download und Cache Management, um eine gute Nutzungserfahrung während der Betrachtung der annotierten interaktiven nicht-linearen Videos zu bieten. Ein Webstandard-unabhängiges Playerframework erlaubt es, das Zusammenspiel von Algorithmen und Strategien zu evaluieren, welche für die Berechnung der Start-Zeitpunkte für die Wiedergabe, sowie die Auswahl von vorauszuladenden sowie zu löschenden Elemente verwendet werden. Ziel ist es, Unterbrechungen zu minimieren, wenn der Ablauf des Videos durch Benutzerinteraktion beeinflusst wird. Unsere umfassende Evaluation zeigte, dass es möglich ist, kürzere Startup-Zeiten und weniger Unterbrechungen mit unseren Strategien zu erreichen, als bei der Verwendung der Strategien anderer Player. Die Kenntnis der Struktur des interaktiven nicht-linearen Videos kann dazu verwendet werden, die Startzeit am Anfang der Szenen zu minimieren, während das Download-Volumen nicht erhöht wird