Agent Behaviour Simulator (ABS):a platform for urban behaviour development

Computer Graphics have become important for many applicationsand the quality of the produced images have greatly improved. Oneof the interesting remaining problems is the representation of densedynamic environments such as populated cities. Although recentlywe saw some successfulwork on the rendering such environments,the real?time simulation of virtual cities populated by thousands ofintelligent animated agents is still very challenging.In this paperwe describe a platformthat aims to accelerate the developmentof agent behaviours. The platform makes it easy to enterlocal rules and callbacks which govern the individual behaviours.It automatically performs the routine tasks such as collision detectionallowing the user to concentrate on defining the more involvedtasks. The platform is based on a 2D-grid with a four-layered structure.The two first layers are used to compute the collision detectionagainst the environment and other agents and the last two are usedfor more complex behaviours.A set of visualisation tools is incorporated that allows the testingof the real?time simulation. The choices made for the visualisationallow the user to better understand the way agents move inside theworld and how they take decisions, so that the user can evaluate ifit simulates the expected behaviour.Experimentation with the system has shown that behaviours inenvironments with thousands of agents can be developed and visualisedin effortlessly

Cycles inside cycles: Spanish regional aggregation

This paper sets out a comprehensive framework to identify regional business cycles within Spain and analyses their stylised features and the degree of synchronization present among them and the Spanish economy. We show that the regional cycles are quite heterogeneous although they display some degree of synchronization that can be partially explained using macroeconomic variables. We also propose a dynamic factor model to cluster the regional comovements and Önd out if the country cycle is simply the aggregation of the regional ones. We Önd that the Spanish business cycle is not shared by the seventeen regions, but is the sum of the di§erent regional behaviours. The implications derived from our results are useful both for policy makers and analysts.

¿Una historia de entonces? el régimen franquista en el cine de Garci: Asignatura pendiente (1977) y Tiovivo c.1950 (2004)

I Congreso Internacional de Historia y Cine: 5, 6, 7 y 8 de Septiembre de 2007

Automatic HDRI generation of dynamic environments

of the human shapes (inset). (b) HDRI generation using the presented method, HCM is removed using a variance image, VI. (c) HDRI of a dynamic scene (larger image) with LCM (leaves). (d) HDRI after LCM removal using an uncertainty measure, UI. (e, top) VI segmentation. (e, bottom) UI segmentation.