28,263 research outputs found
Narrative Generation in Entertainment: Using Artificial Intelligence Planning
From the field of artificial intelligence (AI) there is a growing stream of technology capable of being embedded in software that will reshape the way we interact with our environment in our everyday lives. This âAI softwareâ is often used to tackle more mundane tasks that are otherwise dangerous or meticulous for a human to accomplish. One particular area, explored in this paper, is for AI software to assist in supporting the enjoyable aspects of the lives of humans. Entertainment is one of these aspects, and often includes storytelling in some form no matter what the type of media, including television, films, video games, etc. This paper aims to explore the ability of AI software to automate the story-creation and story-telling process. This is part of the field of Automatic Narrative Generator (ANG), which aims to produce intuitive interfaces to support people (without any previous programming experience) to use tools to generate stories, based on their ideas of the kind of characters, intentions, events and spaces they want to be in the story. The paper includes details of such AI software created by the author that can be downloaded and used by the reader for this purpose. Applications of this kind of technology include the automatic generation of story lines for âsoap operasâ
Orbit counting in conjugacy classes for free groups acting on trees
In this paper we study the action of the fundamental group of a finite metric
graph on its universal covering tree. We assume the graph is finite, connected
and the degree of each vertex is at least three. Further, we assume an
irrationality condition on the edge lengths. We obtain an asymptotic for the
number of elements in a fixed conjugacy class for which the associated
displacement of a given base vertex in the universal covering tree is at most
. Under a mild extra assumption we also obtain a polynomial error term.Comment: 13 pages, additional section discusses error terms, revised
expositio
Comment: On Random Scan Gibbs Samplers
Comment on ``On Random Scan Gibbs Samplers'' [arXiv:0808.3852]Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-STS252B the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Visual Object Tracking: The Initialisation Problem
Model initialisation is an important component of object tracking. Tracking
algorithms are generally provided with the first frame of a sequence and a
bounding box (BB) indicating the location of the object. This BB may contain a
large number of background pixels in addition to the object and can lead to
parts-based tracking algorithms initialising their object models in background
regions of the BB. In this paper, we tackle this as a missing labels problem,
marking pixels sufficiently away from the BB as belonging to the background and
learning the labels of the unknown pixels. Three techniques, One-Class SVM
(OC-SVM), Sampled-Based Background Model (SBBM) (a novel background model based
on pixel samples), and Learning Based Digital Matting (LBDM), are adapted to
the problem. These are evaluated with leave-one-video-out cross-validation on
the VOT2016 tracking benchmark. Our evaluation shows both OC-SVMs and SBBM are
capable of providing a good level of segmentation accuracy but are too
parameter-dependent to be used in real-world scenarios. We show that LBDM
achieves significantly increased performance with parameters selected by cross
validation and we show that it is robust to parameter variation.Comment: 15th Conference on Computer and Robot Vision (CRV 2018). Source code
available at https://github.com/georgedeath/initialisation-proble
Forecasting Cross-Section Stock Returns using Theoretical Prices Estimated from an Econometric Model
We contribute to the debate over whether forecastable stock returns reflect an unexploited profit opportunity or rationally reflect risk differentials. We test whether agents could earn excess returns by selecting stocks which have a low market price compared to an estimate of the fundamental value obtained from an econometric model. The criterion for stock picking is one which could actually have been implemented by agents operating in real time. We show that statistically significant, and quantitatively substantial excess returns are delivered by portfolios of stocks which are cheap relative to our estimate of fundamental value. There is no evidence that the underpriced stocks are relatively risky and hence the excess returns cannot easily be interpreted as an equilibrium compensation for risk.Excess returns, Trading rule, Efficient markets, present value model, stock prices
The valuation of self-funded retirement villages in Australia
Changing demographics will see an increasing demand for self-funded sector retirement villages in Australia. As such, valuers can expect to be more involved in providing valuation advice in this sector, although the central issue remains that retirement villages are complex businesses. They have been described as management intensive operating businesses with a substantial real estate element. As a result the valuation process in this sector requires a different type of analysis, in comparison to the traditional real estate based investment.This paper provides an analysis of recent trends in the demand for retirement villages and examine current practise with respect to valuation thereof. It emphasises the need for a greater awareness of the ‘business enterprise value’ component and provides a framework within which the components of value can be better understood. The purpose of the paper is to provide a foundation for a greater reliability with respect to valuation advice.<br /
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