justin

Personalised product design using virtual interactive techniques

Today I read a published paper “Personalised product design using virtual interactive techniques”

The abstract is:

Use of Virtual Interactive Techniques for personalized product design is described in this paper. Usually products are designed and built by considering general usage patterns and Prototyping is used to mimic the static or working behaviour of an actual product before manufacturing the product. The user does not have any control on the design of the product. Personalized design postpones design to a later stage. It allows for personalized selection of individual components by the user. This is implemented by displaying the individual components over a physical model constructed using Cardboard or Thermocol in the actual size and shape of the original product. The components of the equipment or product such as screen, buttons etc. are then projected using a projector connected to the computer into the physical model. Users can interact with the prototype like the original working equipment and they can select, shape, position the individual components displayed on the interaction panel using simple hand gestures. Computer Vision techniques as well as sound processing techniques are used to detect and recognize the user gestures captured using a web camera and microphone.

Multidimensional Online Robot Motion

Today I read a published paper “Multidimensional Online Robot Motion”

The abstract is:

We consider three related problems of robot movement in arbitrary dimensions: coverage, search, and navigation. For each problem, a spherical robot is asked to accomplish a motion-related task in an unknown environment whose geometry is learned by the robot during navigation. The robot is assumed to have tactile and global positioning sensors. We view these problems from the perspective of (non-linear) competitiveness as defined by Gabriely and Rimon. We first show that in 3 dimensions and higher, there is no upper bound on competitiveness: every online algorithm can do arbitrarily badly compared to the optimal. We then modify the problems by assuming a fixed clearance parameter. We are able to give optimally competitive algorithms under this assumption.

Electrotactile vision substitution for 3D trajectory following

Today I read a published paper “Electrotactile vision substitution for 3D trajectory following”

The abstract is:

Navigation for blind persons represents a challenge for researchers in vision substitution. In this field, one of the used techniques to navigate is guidance. In this study, we develop a new approach for 3D trajectory following in which the requested task is to track a light path using computer input devices (keyboard and mouse) or a rigid body handled in front of a stereoscopic camera. The light path is visualized either on direct vision or by way of a electro-stimulation device, the Tongue Display Unit, a 12×12 matrix of electrodes. We improve our method by a series of experiments in which the effect of the modality of perception and that of the input device. Preliminary results indicated a close correlation between the stimulated and recorded trajectories.

Speckle Reduction using Stochastic Distances

Today I read a published paper “Speckle Reduction using Stochastic Distances”

The abstract is:

This paper presents a new approach for filter design based on stochastic distances and tests between distributions. A window is defined around each pixel, samples are compared and only those which pass a goodness-of-fit test are used to compute the filtered value. The technique is applied to intensity Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, using the Gamma model with varying number of looks allowing, thus, changes in heterogeneity. Modified Nagao-Matsuyama windows are used to define the samples. The proposal is compared with the Lee’s filter which is considered a standard, using a protocol based on simulation. Among the criteria used to quantify the quality of filters, we employ the equivalent number of looks (related to the signal-to-noise ratio), line contrast, and edge preservation. Moreover, we also assessed the filters by the Universal Image Quality Index and the Pearson’s correlation between edges.

Neural Architectures for Robot Intelligence

Today I read a published paper “Neural Architectures for Robot Intelligence”

The abstract is:

We argue that the direct experimental approaches to elucidate the architecture of higher brains may benefit from insights gained from exploring the possibilities and limits of artificial control architectures for robot systems. We present some of our recent work that has been motivated by that view and that is centered around the study of various aspects of hand actions since these are intimately linked with many higher cognitive abilities. As examples, we report on the development of a modular system for the recognition of continuous hand postures based on neural nets, the use of vision and tactile sensing for guiding prehensile movements of a multifingered hand, and the recognition and use of hand gestures for robot teaching. Regarding the issue of learning, we propose to view real-world learning from the perspective of data mining and to focus more strongly on the imitation of observed actions instead of purely reinforcement-based exploration. As a concrete example of such an effort we report on the status of an ongoing project in our lab in which a robot equipped with an attention system with a neurally inspired architecture is taught actions by using hand gestures in conjunction with speech commands. We point out some of the lessons learnt from this system, and discuss how systems of this kind can contribute to the study of issues at the junction between natural and artificial cognitive systems.

Computational Properties of Fiction Writing and Collaborative Work

Today I read a published paper titled “Computational Properties of Fiction Writing and Collaborative Work”

The abstract is:

From the earliest days of computing, there have been tools to help shape narrative. Spell-checking, word counts, and readability analysis, give today’s novelists tools that Dickens, Austen, and Shakespeare could only have dreamt of. However, such tools have focused on the word, or phrase levels. In the last decade, research focus has shifted to support for collaborative editing of documents. This work considers more sophisticated attempts to visualise the semantics, pace and rhythm within a narrative through data mining. We describe real life applications in two related domains.

Fast View Frustum Culling of Spatial Object by Analytical Bounding Bin

Today I read a published paper “Fast View Frustum Culling of Spatial Object by Analytical Bounding Bin”

The abstract is:

It is a common sense to apply the VFC (view frustum culling) of spatial object to bounding cube of the object in 3D graphics. The accuracy of VFC can not be guaranteed even in cube rotated three-dimensionally. In this paper is proposed a method which is able to carry out more precise and fast VFC of any spatial object in the image domain of cube by an analytic mapping, and is demonstrated the effect of the method for terrain block on global surface.

Today I read a paper titled “A Novel Implementation of QuickHull Algorithm on the GPU”

The abstract is:

We present a novel GPU-accelerated implementation of the QuickHull algorithm for calculating convex hulls of planar point sets.

We also describe a practical solution to demonstrate how to efficiently implement a typical Divide-and-Conquer algorithm on the GPU.

We highly utilize the parallel primitives provided by the library Thrust such as the parallel segmented scan for better efficiency and simplicity.

To evaluate the performance of our implementation, we carry out four groups of experimental tests using two groups of point sets in two modes on the GPU K20c.

Experimental results indicate that: our implementation can achieve the speedups of up to 10.98x over the state-of-art CPU-based convex hull implementation Qhull [16].

In addition, our implementation can find the convex hull of 20M points in about 0.2 seconds.

Today I read a paper titled “Evolutionary Stable Strategies in Games with Fuzzy Payoffs”

The abstract is:

Evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a key concept in evolutionary game theory. ESS provides an evolutionary stability criterion for biological, social and economical behaviors.

In this paper, we develop a new approach to evaluate ESS in symmetric two player games with fuzzy payoffs.

Particularly, every strategy is assigned a fuzzy membership that describes to what degree it is an ESS in presence of uncertainty.

The fuzzy set of ESS characterize the nature of ESS.

The proposed approach avoids loss of any information that happens by the defuzzification method in games and handles uncertainty of payoffs through all steps of finding an ESS.

We use the satisfaction function to compare fuzzy payoffs, and adopts the fuzzy decision rule to obtain the membership function of the fuzzy set of ESS.

The theorem shows the relation between fuzzy ESS and fuzzy Nash quilibrium.

The numerical results illustrate the proposed method is an appropriate generalization of ESS to fuzzy payoff games.