Identifying Entity Types for E-R Diagramming in Developing Data- Intensive Web Applications

Although the Web has become a major enabler for data-intensive business applications such as e-tailing, customer relationship management, and supply chain management, we find that most Web applications are built up in ad hoc fashion, raising the data-related issues of data definition and data integration. This paper proposes a new approach for identifying entity types for E-R diagramming in developing data-rich Web applications. The methodology is founded on elements of Web applications including pages, links, Web application architecture, and business logic modules

Transfer of albedo and local depth variation to photo-textures

Acquisition of displacement and albedo maps for full building façades is a difficult problem and traditionally achieved through a labor intensive artistic process. In this paper, we present a material appearance transfer method, Transfer by Analogy, designed to infer surface detail and diffuse reflectance for textured surfaces like the present in building façades. We begin by acquiring small exemplars (displacement and albedo maps), in accessible areas, where capture conditions can be controlled. We then transfer these properties to a complete phototexture constructed from reference images and captured under diffuse daylight illumination. Our approach allows super-resolution inference of albedo and displacement from information in the photo-texture. When transferring appearance from multiple exemplars to façades containing multiple materials, our approach also sidesteps the need for segmentation. We show how we use these methods to create relightable models with a high degree of texture detail, reproducing the visually rich self-shadowing effects that would normally be difficult to capture using just simple consumer equipment. Copyright © 2012 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

Integrating Occlusion Culling and Hardware Instancing for Efficient Real-Time Rendering of Building Information Models

This paper presents an efficient approach for integrating occlusion culling and hardware instancing. The work is primarily targeted at Building Information Models (BIM), which typically share characteristics addressed by these two acceleration techniques separately – high level of occlusion and frequent reuse of building components. Together, these two acceleration techniques complement each other and allows large and complex BIMs to be rendered in real-time. Specifically, the proposed method takes advantage of temporal coherence and uses a lightweight data transfer strategy to provide an efficient hardware instancing implementation. Compared to only using occlusion culling, additional speedups of 1.25x-1.7x is achieved for rendering large BIMs received from real-world projects. These speedups are measured in viewpoints that represents the worst case scenarios in terms of rendering performance when only occlusion culling is utilized

A PERSPECTIVE ON PROCEDURAL MODELING BASED ON STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

[EN] We introduce a study focused on procedural modeling papers that use methods of structural analysis, especially in its application to historic buildings such as churches and cathedrals. Moreover, we have taken a geometric structure of one of these papers and studied their behavior in a generic simulation tool, thus showing the feasibility of its analysis with non-specialized tools.[ES] Introducimos un estudio centrado en aquellos trabajos de modelado procedural que utilizan métodos de análisis estructural, especialmente en su aplicación para edificios históricos como iglesias y catedrales. Por otra parte, hemos tomado una estructura geométrica de uno de estos artículos y estudiado su comportamiento en una herramienta de simulación genérica, mostrando su factibilidad para realizar análisis con herramientas no especializadas.Fita, JL.; Besuievsky, G.; Patow, GA. (2016). A PERSPECTIVE ON PROCEDURAL MODELING BASED ON STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS. En 8th International congress on archaeology, computer graphics, cultural heritage and innovation. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 264-266. https://doi.org/10.4995/arqueologica8.2015.304526426

Character Networks for Narrative Generation: Structural Balance Theory and the Emergence of Proto-Narratives

This paper models narrative as a complex adaptive system in which the temporal sequence of events constituting a story emerges out of cascading local interactions between nodes in a social network. The approach is not intended as a general theory of narrative, but rather as a particular generative mechanism relevant to several academic communities: (1) literary critics and narrative theorists interested in new models for narrative analysis, (2) artificial intelligence researchers and video game designers interested in new mechanisms for narrative generation, and (3) complex systems theorists interested in novel applications of agent-based modeling and network theory. The paper is divided into two parts. The first part offers examples of research by literary critics on the relationship between social networks of fictional characters and the structure of long-form narratives, particularly novels. The second part provides an example of schematic story generation based on a simulation of the structural balance network model. I will argue that if literary critics can better understand sophisticated narratives by extracting networks from them, then narrative intelligence researchers can benefit by inverting the process, that is, by generating narratives from networks

A Discussion of Interactive Storytelling Techniques for Use in a Serious Game

This report addresses a collection of interactive storytelling systems to provide an overview of state-of-the-art methods of narrative management and of enabling social interaction between users and virtual agents. This is done to inform the construction of a social cues and training demonstrator (a serious game) that enables its users to improve their social behaviour. In this report, a distinction is made between strong story and strong autonomy approaches to narrative management. The former rely on central management of the narrative through drama managers, not giving their agents much freedom. Inversely, the latter focus on the autonomy of agents, without explicit top-down control over the narrative. The autonomy of such agents allows an unscripted narrative to emerge from the user's interaction with the system. The trade-off between a strict storyline and freedom of action in these approaches is called the narrative paradox. It is concluded that a strong autonomy approach can feature social behaviour of agents more easily than a strong story one, because it is inherent with this approach that its agents have more complex models. For the demonstrator, some control over the narrative is required to let its users reach given goals in the created scenarios. Therefore, our future work will focus on creating a hybrid approach that enables agents to direct the story autonomously

The Eco Office: Dynamic and Homeostatic Facades inspired by BIOMORPHIM, BIOMIMICRY, and BIOPHILIA

"Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” ~ William Wordsworth The focus of this dissertation research is to extend and increase an understanding of sustainable building envelope design strategies, with specific focus on transfer of light, air, and heat, within a tropical site setting/context. Biomimetic architecture is a process that is primarily driven by inspiration from natural systems and organisms. Designs and patterns found in nature are often resolved at the “macro” as well as at the “micro/nano” molecular levels, which prompts further investigation into present-day advancements in material science and nanotechnological concepts. Nanotechnology is a way of looking closer at systems and material structures and properties; the translation from biomimetic architecture to the nano-molecular scale of materials thus promotes sustainability in buildings, by providing ways and means to incorporate new technologies and novel material systems into the architectural design of building facades, that will further aid with the successful implementation of passive design strategies, in order to establish comfortable interior lighting, ventilation, and thermal conditions. Extensive literature reviews and material research are utilized for the bio-tonano design process and analyses. Performance of design modules created has been tested using design simulations and reiterative analysis processes. “Taking cues from Nature – creation of responsive (environment and human responsive) architecture” – is the idea that is the primary motivation behind the research focus. The key goal of this research is to propose alternative futures in building envelope design, for a site in Honolulu, which would serve as a digital prototype for similar such investigations into integrating nature-inspired macro and nanotechnology structures and materials into building systems design. Psychophysiology (the mind-body-interaction) and experimental testing is used as part of the final testing and analysis, to assess people’s responses to nature-inspired design and emerging building technologies

Understanding speech in interactive narratives with crowd sourced data

Speech recognition failures and limited vocabulary coverage pose challenges for speech interactions with characters in games. We describe an end-to-end system for automating characters from a large corpus of recorded human game logs, and demonstrate that inferring utterance meaning through a combination of plan recognition and surface texts similarity compensates for recognition and understanding failures significantly better than relying on surface similarity alone.Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game La