In my first lecture I listed seven questions about reasons that seemed to require answers. These were: Relational Character: Reasons are reasons for an agent. How is this relational character to be understood? Ground of Truth: In virtue of what are claims about reasons true, when they are true? Does the idea that claims about reasons are true or false, independent of our opinions about them, an...

The last five years have seen a profusion of innovative solutions to one of the most challenging tasks in character synthesis: hair simulation. This class covers both recent and novel research ideas in hair animation and rendering, and presents time tested industrial practices that resulted in spectacular imagery. The course is aimed at an intermediate level and addresses the special-effects de...

Until now, the majority of advanced image synthesis systems were implemented in highly performant C/C++ languages. Not many of these systems are available publicly with source code, and those which are can be difficult to analyse and improve due to focus on optimization expected in production systems. JaTrac — a global illumination renderer we introduce in this paper has been developed as a too...

This paper presents an account of two tools which enable realistic parallel performance estimates to be obtained in reasonable time. The first tool, PERFORM (performance estimator for RISC microprocessors), is a general purpose package for sequential program performance estimation on modem RISC microprocessor nodes with complex memory hierarchies. The novelty of the tool is that we have chosen ...

Zielonka’s theorem, established 25 years ago, states that any regular language closed under commutation is the language of an asynchronous automaton (a tuple of automata, one per process, exchanging information when performing common actions). Since then, constructing asynchronous automata has been simplified and improved [6, 20, 7, 12, 8, 4, 2, 21, 22]. We first survey these constructions and ...

Retrospective dose assessments may be carried out for a number of purposes such as demonstrating compliance with dose limits or investigating possible health implications of past events that led to releases of radioactive materials to the environment. The purpose of the assessment has a major impact on what is assessed and how the assessment is carried out. Any dose assessment requires informat...

Nearly six years ago Ira Mellman, then Editor-in-Chief of the JCB, published an editorial entitled "Providing realistic access" (1). It described the Journal's efforts to reconcile its subscription-based business model with the goal of providing public access to scholarly journal content. Since then, developments in the public-access movement are bringing us closer to the ideal of universal pub...

This paper describes a technique to accurately simulate a balloon expanding and bursting. Physical simulation is achieved through use of a spring-damper model with point masses to represent the surface of the balloon. Visual characteristics of the balloon, such as variable opacity and variable shininess are also addressed by this approach using material attributes in the SGI lighting model. Spr...

We propose methods of employing autocognitive inference as a realistic, feasible way for an agent to make many inferences about its own mind and about the world that have often been regarded in the past as depending on nonmonotonic reasoning. The keys to realism are (1) to use a computable notion of knowing; and (2) to employ specific, realistic assumptions about the sources of our knowledge, r...

We present a model of leptogenesis that preserves lepton number. The model maintains the important feature of more traditional leptogenesis scenarios: The decaying particles that provide the CP violation necessary for baryogenesis also provide the explanation for the smallness of the neutrino Yukawa couplings. This model clearly demonstrates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, neutrinos need...