Qualitative formalisms suited to express qualitative temporal or spatial relationships between entities, have gained wide acceptance as a useful way of abstracting from the real world. The question remains how to describe spatio-temporal concepts, such as the interaction between moving objects, adequately within a qualitative calculus and more specifically how to use this in expert systems. Wit...

We present a method for melody detection in polyphonic musical signals based on a model of the human auditory system. First, a set of pitch candidates is obtained for each frame, based on the output of an ear model and periodicity detection using correlograms. Trajectories of the most salient pitches are then constructed. Next, note candidates are obtained by trajectory segmentation (in terms o...

INTRODUCTION Robotic therapy, with its unique advantages over a human therapist, is an appealing option to minimize patients’ recovery time. Massed practice and means of amplifying its positive effectsvia a robotic interface (i.e., error augmentation of the patient’s reaching trajectory) has been extensively studied. However, even with utilizing suchneuro-rehabilitation paradigms, therapy robot...

Lexical choices in descriptions of the spatial world around us are affected not only by geometry, but also by variables such as situational context and the extent to which the spatial relations between the objects referred to are seen as consistent with their typical function. In a study of how people describe complex scenes with multiple objects we examined whether descriptive choices (both lo...

Trajectory optimization involves both the optimization of inputs and the feedback regulation of the resulting trajectories. This article covers the main points of adapting trajectory optimization to the numerical routines in discrete mechanics. We start with a brief description of discrete mechanics and variational integrators and then move on to linearization, estimation, local projections in ...

In this paper we consider the output synchronization problem for heterogeneous networks of linear agents. The network’s communication infrastructure provides each agent with a linear combination of its own output relative to that of neighboring agents, and it allows the agents to exchange information about their own internal observer estimates. We design decentralized controllers based on setti...

Driver expectation is about driver’s objective response and expectation for various traffic environments. It might directly influence the driving safety and traffic operation. This paper discusses in enough detail the shaping mechanism of driver expectation while considers road geometer parameters, driver behavior and vehicle performance in mountainous road. Combined various geometer parameters...

(1) ∂tu = a∆u− f0(u, t) + g0(x, t), u|∂Ω = 0 (or ∂u/∂ν|∂Ω = 0) where u = u(x, t) = (u, . . . , u ), x ∈ Ω b R, t ≥ 0, f0(v, s) = (f 0 , . . . , f 0 ), (v, s) ∈ R × R+, g0(x, s) = (g 0 , . . . , g 0 ), x ∈ Ω, s ≥ 0. We assume that the matrix a and the functions f0, g0 satisfy some general conditions (see Section 2). These conditions provide the existence of a solution u of the Cauchy problem for...

In this note we follow the historical development of the ideas that led to the formulation of String Theory. We start from the inspired guess of Veneziano and its extension to the scattering of N scalar particles, then we describe how the study of its factorization properties allowed to identify the physical spectrum making the string worldsheet manifest and finally we discuss how the critical ...