Query: The impacts of brand trust, customer satisfaction, and brand loyalty on word-of-mouth

Relevant passages:
An examination of the determinants of customer loyalty in mobile commerce contexts <=SEP=> While the importance of customer loyalty has been recognized in marketing literature for at least three decades, the development and empirical validation of a customer loyalty model in a mobile commerce (m-commerce) context had not been addressed. The purpose of our study was to develop and validate such a customer loyalty model. Based on IS and marketing literature, a comprehensive set of constructs and hypotheses were compiled with a methodology for testing them. A questionnaire was constructed and data were collected from 255 users of m-commerce systems in Taiwan. Structural modeling techniques were then applied to analyze the data. The results indicated that customer loyalty was affected by perceived value, trust, habit, and customer satisfaction, with customer satisfaction playing a crucial intervening role in the relationship of perceived value and trust to loyalty. Based on the findings, its implications and limitations are discussed. # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Principles and practice in reporting structural equation analyses. <=SEP=> Principles for reporting analyses using structural equation modeling are reviewed, with the goal of supplying readers with complete and accurate information. It is recommended that every report give a detailed justification of the model used, along with plausible alternatives and an account of identifiability. Nonnormality and missing data problems should also be addressed. A complete set of parameters and their standard errors is desirable, and it will often be convenient to supply the correlation matrix and discrepancies, as well as goodness-of-fit indices, so that readers can exercise independent critical judgment. A survey of fairly representative studies compares recent practice with the principles of reporting recommended here.

154-2008: Understanding Your Customer: Segmentation Techniques for Gaining Customer Insight and Predicting Risk in the Telecom Industry <=SEP=> The explosion of customer data in the last twenty years has increased the need for data mining aimed at customer relationship management (CRM) and understanding the customer. It is well known that the telecom sector consists of customers with a wide array of customer behaviors. These customers pose different risks, making it imperative to implement different treatment strategies to maximize shareholder profit and improve revenue generation. Segmentation is the process of developing meaningful customer groups that are similar based on individual account characteristics and behaviors. The goal of segmentation is to know your customer better and to apply that knowledge to increase profitability, reduce operational cost, and enhance customer service. Segmentation can provide a multidimensional view of the customer for better treatment targeting. An improved understanding of customer risk and behaviors enables more effective portfolio management and the proactive application of targeted treatments to lift account profitability. In this paper we outline several segmentation techniques using SAS Enterprise MinerTM. INTRODUCTION Rapid advances in computer technology and an explosion of data collection systems over the last thirty years make it more critical for business to understand their customers. Companies employing data driven analytical strategies often enjoy a competitive advantage. Many organizations across several industries widely employ analytical models to gain a better understanding of their customers. They use these models to predict a wide array of events such as behavioral risk, fraud, or the likelihood of response. Regardless of the predictive variable, a single model may not perform optimally across the target population because there may be distinct segments with different characteristics inherent in the population. Segmentation may be done judgmentally based on experience, but such segmentation schema is limited to the use of only a few variables at best. True multivariate segmentation with the goal of identifying the different segments in your population is best achieved through the use of cluster analysis. Clustering and profiling of the customer base can answer the following questions: ♦ Who are my customers? ♦ How profitable are my customers? ♦ Who are my least profitable customers? ♦ Why are my customers leaving? ♦ What do my best customers look like? This paper discusses the use of SAS Enterprise Miner to segment a population of customers using cluster analysis and decision trees. Focus is placed on the methodology rather than the results to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of customer data. Other statistical strategies are presented in this paper which could be employed in the pursuit of further customer intelligence. It has been said that statistical cluster analysis is as much art as it is science because it is performed without the benefit of well established statistical criteria. Data Mining and Predictive Modeling SAS Global Forum 2008

Causality : Models , Reasoning , and Inference <=SEP=> For most researchers in the ever growing fields of probabilistic graphical models, belief networks, causal influence and probabilistic inference, ACM Turing award winner Dr. Pearl and his seminary papers on causality are well-known and acknowledged. Representation and determination of Causality, the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first, is a challenging problem. Over the years, Dr. pearl has written significantly on both Art and Science of Cause and Effect. In this book on "Causality: Models, Reasoning and Inference", the inventor of Bayesian belief networks discusses and elaborates on his earlier workings including but not limited to Reasoning with Cause and Effect, Causal inference in statistics, Simpson's paradox, Causal Diagrams for Empirical Research, Robustness of Causal Claims, Causes and explanations, and Probabilities of causation Bounds and identification.

Information Systems Success: The Quest for the Dependent Variable <=SEP=> A large number of studies have been conducted during the last decade and a half attempting to identify those factors that contribute to information systems success. However, the dependent variable in these studies—I/S success —has been an elusive one to define. Different researchers have addressed different aspects of success, making comparisons difficult and the prospect of building a cumulative tradition for I/S research similarly elusive. To organize this diverse research, as well as to present a more integrated view of the concept of I/S success, a comprehensive taxonomy is introduced. This taxonomy posits six major dimensions or categories of I/S success—SYSTEM OUALITY, INFORMATION QUALITY, USE, USER SATISFACTION, INDIVIDUAL IMPACT, and ORGANIZATIONAL IMPACT. Using these dimensions, both conceptual and empirical studies are then reviewed (a total of 180 articles are cited) and organized according to the dimensions of the taxonomy. Finally, the many aspects of I/S success are drawn together into a descriptive model and its implications for future I/S research are discussed.

Just Feels Good : Customers ’ Affective Response to Touch and Its Influence on Persuasion <=SEP=> Prior research has assumed that touch has a persuasive effect only if it provides attribute or structural information about a product. Under this view, the role of touch as a persuasive tool is limited. The main purpose of this research is to investigate the persuasive influence of touch as an affective tool in the absence of useful product-related information. The authors find that for people who are motivated to touch because it is fun or interesting, a communication that incorporates touch leads to increased affective response and increased persuasion, particularly when the touch provides neutral or positive sensory feedback. People who are not motivated to touch for fun will also be persuaded by a communication that incorporates touch when they are able to make sense of how the touch is related to the message. The authors explore the effectiveness of different types of touch in generating an affective response, and they replicate the effects on attitudes and behavior in a real-world setting. This research suggests that the marketing implications of touch are more substantial than previously believed. The authors present research implications for direct marketing, product packaging, point-of-purchase displays, and print advertising.

Portfolio Choice and the Bayesian Kelly Criterion <=SEP=> We derive optimal gambling and investment policies for cases in which the underlying stochastic process has parameter values that are unobserved random variables. For the objective of maximizing logarithmic utility when the underlying stochastic process is a simple random walk in a random environment, we show that a state-dependent control is optimal, which is a generalization of the celebrated Kelly strategy: The optimal strategy is to bet a fraction of current wealth equal to a linear function of the posterior mean increment. To approximate more general stochastic processes, we consider a continuous-time analog involving Brownian motion. To analyze the continuous-time problem, we study the diffusion limit of random walks in a random environment. We prove that they converge weakly to a Kiefer process, or tied-down Brownian sheet. We then find conditions under which the discrete-time process converges to a diffusion, and analyze the resulting process. We analyze in detail the case of the natural conjugate prior, where the success probability has a beta distribution, and show that the resulting limiting diffusion can be viewed as a rescaled Brownian motion. These results allow explicit computation of the optimal control policies for the continuoustime gambling and investment problems without resorting to continuous-time stochastic-control procedures. Moreover they also allow an explicit quantitative evaluation of the financial value of randomness, the financial gain of perfect information and the financial cost of learning in the Bayesian problem.

Vibration parameter estimation using FMCW radar <=SEP=> Vibration sensing is essential in many applications. Traditional vibration sensors are contact based. With the advance of low-cost and highly integrated CMOS radars, another class of non-contact vibration sensors is emerging. In this paper, we present detailed analysis on obtaining vibration parameters using frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radars. We establish the Cramer Rao lower bounds (CRLB) of the parameter estimation problem and propose an estimation algorithm that achieves the bounds in simulations. These analysis show that vibration sensing using FMCW radars can easily achieve sub-Hertz frequency accuracy and micrometer level amplitude accuracy.

Using Multi-Locators to Increase the Robustness of Web Test Cases <=SEP=> The main reason for the fragility of web test cases is the inability of web element locators to work correctly when the web page DOM evolves. Web elements locators are used in web test cases to identify all the GUI objects to operate upon and eventually to retrieve web page content that is compared against some oracle in order to decide whether the test case has passed or not. Hence, web element locators play an extremely important role in web testing and when a web element locator gets broken developers have to spend substantial time and effort to repair it. While algorithms exist to produce robust web element locators to be used in web test scripts, no algorithm is perfect and different algorithms are exposed to different fragilities when the software evolves. Based on such observation, we propose a new type of locator, named multi-locator, which selects the best locator among a candidate set of locators produced by different algorithms. Such selection is based on a voting procedure that assigns different voting weights to different locator generation algorithms. Experimental results obtained on six web applications, for which a subsequent release was available, show that the multi-locator is more robust than the single locators (about -30% of broken locators w.r.t. the most robust kind of single locator) and that the execution overhead required by the multiple queries done with different locators is negligible (2-3% at most).

lncDML: Identification of long non-coding RNAs by Deep Metric Learning <=SEP=> The next-generation sequencing technologies provide a great deal of transcripts for bioinformatics research. Specially, because of the regulation of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) in various cellular processes, the research on IncRNAs is in full swing. And the solution of IncRNAs identification is the basis for the in-depth study of its functions. In this study, we present an approach to identify the IncRNAs from large scale transcripts, named IncDML which is completely different from previous identification methods. In our model, we extract signal to noise ratio (SNR) and k-mer from transcripts sequences as features. Firstly, we just use the SNR to cluster the original dataset to three parts. In this process, we achieve preliminary identification effect to some extent. Then abandoning traditional feature selection, we directly measure the relationship between each pair of samples by deep metric learning for each part of data. Finally, a novel classifier based on complex network is applied to achieve the final identification. The experiment results show that IncDML is a very effective method for identifying IncRNAs.

ERP system implementation in SMEs: exploring the influences of the SME context <=SEP=> Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

Job Resources Boost Work Engagement , Particularly When Job Demands Are High <=SEP=> This study of 805 Finnish teachers working in elementary, secondary, and vocational schools tested 2 interaction hypotheses. On the basis of the job demands–resources model, the authors predicted that job resources act as buffers and diminish the negative relationship between pupil misbehavior and work engagement. In addition, using conservation of resources theory, the authors hypothesized that job resources particularly influence work engagement when teachers are confronted with high levels of pupil misconduct. In line with these hypotheses, moderated structural equation modeling analyses resulted in 14 out of 18 possible 2-way interaction effects. In particular, supervisor support, innovativeness, appreciation, and organizational climate were important job resources that helped teachers cope with demanding interactions with students.

Superior thermal conductivity of single-layer graphene. <=SEP=> We report the measurement of the thermal conductivity of a suspended single-layer graphene. The room temperature values of the thermal conductivity in the range approximately (4.84+/-0.44)x10(3) to (5.30+/-0.48)x10(3) W/mK were extracted for a single-layer graphene from the dependence of the Raman G peak frequency on the excitation laser power and independently measured G peak temperature coefficient. The extremely high value of the thermal conductivity suggests that graphene can outperform carbon nanotubes in heat conduction. The superb thermal conduction property of graphene is beneficial for the proposed electronic applications and establishes graphene as an excellent material for thermal management.

Asymmetric Cryptography for Mobile Devices <=SEP=> This paper is meant to give the reader a general overview about the application of asymmetric cryptography in communication, particular in mobile devices. The basics principles of a cryptosystem are addressed, as well as the idea of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. The functional principles of RSA encryption and the DiffieHellman key exchange scheme, as well as the general idea of digital signatures are shortly described. Furthermore some challenges and solution approaches for the application of asymmetric encryption in low power mobile devices are named. On completing, some the future developments in cryptography are shortly described.

Interpreting Semantic Relations in Noun Compounds via Verb Semantics <=SEP=> We propose a novel method for automatically interpreting compound nouns based on a predefined set of semantic relations. First we map verb tokens in sentential contexts to a fixed set of seed verbs using WordNet::Similarity and Moby’s Thesaurus. We then match the sentences with semantic relations based on the semantics of the seed verbs and grammatical roles of the head noun and modifier. Based on the semantics of the matched sentences, we then build a classifier using TiMBL. The performance of our final system at interpreting NCs is 52.6%.

An Empirical Study on Android-Related Vulnerabilities <=SEP=> Mobile devices are used more and more in everyday life. They are our cameras, wallets, and keys. Basically, they embed most of our private information in our pocket. For this and other reasons, mobile devices, and in particular the software that runs on them, are considered first-class citizens in the software-vulnerabilities landscape. Several studies investigated the software-vulnerabilities phenomenon in the context of mobile apps and, more in general, mobile devices. Most of these studies focused on vulnerabilities that could affect mobile apps, while just few investigated vulnerabilities affecting the underlying platform on which mobile apps run: the Operating System (OS). Also, these studies have been run on a very limited set of vulnerabilities. In this paper we present the largest study at date investigating Android-related vulnerabilities, with a specific focus on the ones affecting the Android OS. In particular, we (i) define a detailed taxonomy of the types of Android-related vulnerability, (ii) investigate the layers and subsystems from the Android OS affected by vulnerabilities, and (iii) study the survivability of vulnerabilities (i.e., the number of days between the vulnerability introduction and its fixing). Our findings could help OS and apps developers in focusing their verification & validation activities, and researchers in building vulnerability detection tools tailored for the mobile world.

Preventing Fairness Gerrymandering: Auditing and Learning for Subgroup Fairness <=SEP=> We introduce a new family of fairness definitions that interpolate between statistical and individual notions of fairness, obtaining some of the best properties of each. We show that checking whether these notions are satisfied is computationally hard in the worst case, but give practical oracle-efficient algorithms for learning subject to these constraints, and confirm our findings with experiments.

A Simple Introduction to Maximum Entropy Models for Natural Language Processing <=SEP=> Many problems in natural language processing can be viewed as lin guistic classi cation problems in which linguistic contexts are used to pre dict linguistic classes Maximum entropy models o er a clean way to com bine diverse pieces of contextual evidence in order to estimate the proba bility of a certain linguistic class occurring with a certain linguistic con text This report demonstrates the use of a particular maximum entropy model on an example problem and then proves some relevant mathemat ical facts about the model in a simple and accessible manner This report also describes an existing procedure called Generalized Iterative Scaling which estimates the parameters of this particular model The goal of this report is to provide enough detail to re implement the maximum entropy models described in Ratnaparkhi Reynar and Ratnaparkhi Ratnaparkhi and also to provide a simple explanation of the max imum entropy formalism Introduction Many problems in natural language processing NLP can be re formulated as statistical classi cation problems in which the task is to estimate the probability of class a occurring with context b or p a b Contexts in NLP tasks usually include words and the exact context depends on the nature of the task for some tasks the context b may consist of just a single word while for others b may consist of several words and their associated syntactic labels Large text corpora usually contain some information about the cooccurrence of a s and b s but never enough to completely specify p a b for all possible a b pairs since the words in b are typically sparse The problem is then to nd a method for using the sparse evidence about the a s and b s to reliably estimate a probability model p a b Consider the Principle of Maximum Entropy Jaynes Good which states that the correct distribution p a b is that which maximizes en tropy or uncertainty subject to the constraints which represent evidence i e the facts known to the experimenter Jaynes discusses its advan tages in making inferences on the basis of partial information we must use that probability distribution which has maximum entropy sub ject to whatever is known This is the only unbiased assignment we can make to use any other would amount to arbitrary assumption of information which by hypothesis we do not have More explicitly if A denotes the set of possible classes and B denotes the set of possible contexts p should maximize the entropy H p X

Improved Deep Metric Learning with Multi-class N-pair Loss Objective <=SEP=> Deep metric learning has gained much popularity in recent years, following the success of deep learning. However, existing frameworks of deep metric learning based on contrastive loss and triplet loss often suffer from slow convergence, partially because they employ only one negative example while not interacting with the other negative classes in each update. In this paper, we propose to address this problem with a new metric learning objective called multi-class N -pair loss. The proposed objective function firstly generalizes triplet loss by allowing joint comparison among more than one negative examples – more specifically, N -1 negative examples – and secondly reduces the computational burden of evaluating deep embedding vectors via an efficient batch construction strategy using only N pairs of examples, instead of (N+1)×N . We demonstrate the superiority of our proposed loss to the triplet loss as well as other competing loss functions for a variety of tasks on several visual recognition benchmark, including fine-grained object recognition and verification, image clustering and retrieval, and face verification and identification.

A second order accurate projection method for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations on non-graded adaptive grids <=SEP=> We present an unconditionally stable second order accurate projection method for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations on non-graded adaptive Cartesian grids. We employ quadtree and octree data structures as an efficient means to represent the grid. We use the supra-convergent Poisson solver of [C.-H. Min, F. Gibou, H. Ceniceros, A supra-convergent finite difference scheme for the variable coefficient Poisson equation on fully adaptive grids, CAM report 05-29, J. Comput. Phys. (in press)], a second order accurate semi-Lagrangian method to update the momentum equation, an unconditionally stable backward difference scheme to treat the diffusion term and a new method that guarantees the stability of the projection step on highly non-graded grids. We sample all the variables at the grid nodes, producing a scheme that is straightforward to implement. We propose two and three-dimensional examples to demonstrate second order accuracy for the velocity field and the divergence free condition in the L and L1 norms. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Monte Carlo Model of Light Propagation in Tissue <=SEP=> The Monte Carlo method is rapidly becoming the model of choice for simulating light transport in tissue. This paper provides all the details necessary for implementation of a Monte Carlo program. Variance reduction schemes that improve the efficiency of the Monte Carlo method are discussed. Analytic expressions facilitating convolution calculations for finite flat and Gaussian beams are included. Useful validation benchmarks are presented.

A design and development of an intelligent jammer and jamming detection methodologies using machine learning approach <=SEP=> Nowadays, the utilization of mobile phones has increased rapidly. Due to this evolution schools, mosques, prisons, etc., require silence and security. This is achieved by using the mobile phone jammers. An intelligent mobile jammer is designed for allowing only the emergency calls by utilizing the microcontroller. Here, the jammer utilizes the successive approximation for reducing the transmission power. However, it requires few modifications. Therefore in this paper, an improved successive approximation based on divide and conquer algorithm is proposed in order to design the improved intelligent mobile jammer and reduce transmission power. Subsequently, the proposed jammer is analysed based on the different scenarios and frequency bands to illustrate their performance effectiveness. Furthermore, the normal activities are distinguished from jamming by using machine learning-based detection system according to the various parameters. Finally, the proposed algorithm is compared with conventional algorithms to demonstrate its performance efficiency in terms of detection accuracy.

Compressing Recurrent Neural Networks with Tensor Ring for Action Recognition <=SEP=> Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and their variants, such as Long-Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks, have achieved promising performance in sequential data modeling. The hidden layers in RNNs can be regarded as the memory units, which are helpful in storing information in sequential contexts. However, when dealing with high dimensional input data, such as video and text, the input-to-hidden linear transformation in RNNs brings high memory usage and huge computational cost. This makes the training of RNNs very difficult. To address this challenge, we propose a novel compact LSTM model, named as TR-LSTM, by utilizing the low-rank tensor ring decomposition (TRD) to reformulate the input-to-hidden transformation. Compared with other tensor decomposition methods, TRLSTM is more stable. In addition, TR-LSTM can complete an end-to-end training and also provide a fundamental building block for RNNs in handling large input data. Experiments on real-world action recognition datasets have demonstrated the promising performance of the proposed TR-LSTM compared with the tensortrain LSTM and other state-of-the-art competitors.

Quo Vadis , Atlas-Based Segmentation? <=SEP=> 

Temporal Modular Networks for Retrieving Complex Compositional Activities in Videos <=SEP=> A major challenge in computer vision is scaling activity understanding to the long tail of complex activities without requiring collecting large quantities of data for new actions. The task of video retrieval using natural language descriptions seeks to address this through rich, unconstrained supervision about complex activities. However, while this formulation offers hope of leveraging underlying compositional structure in activity descriptions, existing approaches typically do not explicitly model compositional reasoning. In this work, we introduce an approach for explicitly and dynamically reasoning about compositional natural language descriptions of activity in videos. We take a modular neural network approach that, given a natural language query, extracts the semantic structure to assemble a compositional neural network layout and corresponding network modules. We show that this approach is able to achieve state-of-the-art results on the DiDeMo video retrieval dataset.

Multivalued logics: a uniform approach to reasoning in artificial intelligence <=SEP=> This paper describes a uniform formalization of much of the current work in artificial intelligence on inference systems. We show that many of these systems, including first-order theorem provers, assumption-based truth maintenance systems (ATMSS), and unimplemented formal systems such as default logic or circumscription, can be subsumed under a single general framework. We begin by defining this framework, which is based on a mathematical structure known as a bilattice. We present a formal definition of inference using this structure and show that this definition generalizes work involving ATMSS and some simple nonmonotonic logics. Following the theoretical description, we describe a constructive approach to inference in this setting; the resulting generalization of both conventional inference and ATMSS is achieved without incurring any substantial computational overhead. We show that our approach can also be used to implement a default reasoner, and discuss a combination of default and ATMS methods that enables us to formally describe an “incremental” default reasoning system. This incremental system does not need to perform consistency checks before drawing tentative conclusions, but can instead adjust its beliefs when a default premise or conclusion is overturned in the face of convincing contradictory evidence. The system is therefore much more computationally viable than earlier approaches. Finally, we discuss the implementation of our ideas. We begin by considering general issues that need to be addressed when implementing a multivalued approach such as that we are proposing, and then turn to specific examples showing the results of an existing implementation. This single implementation is used to solve a digital simulation task using first-order logic, a diagnostic task using ATMSS as suggested by de Kleer and Williams, a problem in default reasoning as in Reiter’s default logic or McCarthy’s circumscription, and to solve the same problem more efficiently by combining default methods with justification information. All of these applications use the same general-purpose bilattice theorem prover and differ only in the choice of bilattice being considered.

Automics: souvenir generating photoware for theme parks <=SEP=> Automics is a photo-souvenir service which utilises mobile devices to support the capture, sharing and annotation of digital images amongst groups of visitors to theme parks. The prototype service mixes individual and group photo-capture with existing in-park, on-ride photo services, to allow users to create printed photo-stories. Herein we discuss initial fieldwork in theme parks that grounded the design of Automics, our development of the service prototype, and its real-world evaluation with theme park visitors. We relate our findings on user experience of the service to a literature on mobile photoware, finding implications for the design of souvenir services.

A DIRT-T A PPROACH TO U NSUPERVISED D OMAIN <=SEP=> Domain adaptation refers to the problem of leveraging labeled data in a source domain to learn an accurate model in a target domain where labels are scarce or unavailable. A recent approach for finding a common representation of the two domains is via domain adversarial training (Ganin & Lempitsky, 2015), which attempts to induce a feature extractor that matches the source and target feature distributions in some feature space. However, domain adversarial training faces two critical limitations: 1) if the feature extraction function has high-capacity, then feature distribution matching is a weak constraint, 2) in non-conservative domain adaptation (where no single classifier can perform well in both the source and target domains), training the model to do well on the source domain hurts performance on the target domain. In this paper, we address these issues through the lens of the cluster assumption, i.e., decision boundaries should not cross high-density data regions. We propose two novel and related models: 1) the Virtual Adversarial Domain Adaptation (VADA) model, which combines domain adversarial training with a penalty term that punishes violation of the cluster assumption; 2) the Decision-boundary Iterative Refinement Training with a Teacher (DIRT-T)1 model, which takes the VADA model as initialization and employs natural gradient steps to further minimize the cluster assumption violation. Extensive empirical results demonstrate that the combination of these two models significantly improve the state-of-the-art performance on the digit, traffic sign, and Wi-Fi recognition domain adaptation benchmarks.

SCRUM: An extension pattern language for hyper productive software development <=SEP=> The patterns of the SCRUM development method are presented as an extension pattern language to the existing organizational pattern languages. In the last few years, the SCRUM development method has rapidly gained recognition as an effective tool to hyper-productive software development. However, when SCRUM patterns are combined with other existing organizational patterns, they lead to highly adaptive, yet well-structured software development organizations. Also, decomposing SCRUM into patterns can guide adoption of only those parts of SCRUM that are applicable to a specific situation.

Goal-based trajectory analysis for unusual behaviour detection in intelligent surveillance <=SEP=> In a typical surveillance installation, a human operator has to constantly monitor a large array of video feeds for suspicious behaviour. As the number of cameras increases, information overload makes manual surveillance increasingly difficult, adding to other confounding factors such as human fatigue and boredom. The objective of an intelligent vision-based surveillance system is to automate the monitoring and event detection components of surveillance, alerting the operator only when unusual behaviour or other events of interest are detected. While most traditional methods for trajectory-based unusual behaviour detection rely on low-level trajectory features such as flow vectors or control points, this paper builds upon a recently introduced approach that makes use of higher-level features of intentionality. Individuals in the scene are modelled as intentional agents, and unusual behaviour is detected by evaluating the explicability of the agent’s trajectory with respect to known spatial goals. The proposed method extends the original goal-based approach in three ways: first, the spatial scene structure is learned in a training phase; second, a region transition model is learned to describe normal movement patterns between spatial regions; and third, classification of trajectories in progress is performed in a probabilistic framework using particle filtering. Experimental validation on three published third-party datasets demonstrates the validity of the proposed approach.