Consider the Darkness

Fighting through the darkness.

flexibility and self-direction but also its daunting stress levels, has been both a blessing and a burden in my battle with depression. Depression, in turn, has not made it any easier to meet the challenges of academic life. I am fortunate to work in a department and at an institution that see younger faculty members as individuals to be invested in and supported. But the cost of depression to ...

Melatonin―the Hormone of Darkness

Into Darkness

Visual navigation of mobile robots has become a core capability that enables many interesting applications from planetary exploration to self-driving cars. While systems built on passive cameras have been shown to be robust in well-lit scenes, they cannot handle the range of conditions associated with a full diurnal cycle. Lidar, which is fairly invariant to ambient lighting conditions, offers ...

Darkness filling-in: a neural model of darkness induction

A model of darkness induction based on a neural filling-in mechanism is proposed. The model borrows principles from both Land's Retinex theory and BCS/FCS filling-in model of Grossberg and colleagues. The main novel assumption of the induction model is that darkness filling-in signals, which originate at luminance borders, are partially blocked when they try to cross other borders. The percenta...

Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy for the Treatment of Darkness Phobia

Virtual reality (VR) exposure therapy is a common treatment for phobia and the efficacy of this technique has proved. The darkness phobia is one of the most common disorders among the children. This is the first research about the darkness phobia and using VR to treat the patients. The VR system designed in this article is composed from two parts: Mechatronic devices and graphics unit. As a chi...