This paper aims at reporting the recent progress of research on and development of our intelligent robot KeJia. The long-term goal of this effort is to develop human-level intelligence for domestic robots. The effort covers research issues ranging from hardware design, perception and high-level cognitive functions. RoboCup@Home competition, besides other case studies, is taken as a main test-be...

The goal of the PennySort benchmark is to reflect the progress done by technology, in particular, evolvement of I/O OS subsystems and file systems. This benchmark measures what data volume can be sorted for “one penny” on a system, which cost is distributed over three years. This work decribes how to build a cost-effective system for this competition, using our high-performance external algorit...

A public process has been in place in the United States for six years to establish an HDTV terrestrial broadcasting standard. The process, having moved through a planning phase, a competition phase, and an examination phase, has now entered a cooperation phase. Remarkable progress has been made — a testament to the process. During the next few months, the American digital HDTV terrestrial broad...

We present a dynamic extension of the classic static model of Bertrand price competition that allows competing duopolists to undertake cost-reducing investments in an attempt to “leapfrog” their rival to attain low-cost leadership — at least temporarily. We show that leapfrogging occurs in equilibrium, resolving the Bertrand investment paradox., i.e. leapfrogging explains why firms have an ex a...

Starting in 1998, the electricity market in England and Wales will be opened up to full competition, and all consumers will be allowed to choose their electricity supplier. This promises to result in lower prices, but there will be additional transactions costs exceeding £100 million a year for the first five years. Relative to a counterfactual without competition, there are likely to be large ...

The recent progress in artificial intelligence is allowing assistive systems like the voice-based assistant, virtual agents to become more personalized and adaptable. The role of these systems is also shifting from being a mere assistant to a personal companion. However ‘personal companionship’ being a subjective term lies open to interpretation, thus posing a challenge for the creators of thes...

Despite all theoretically and empirically motivated criticism of GDP as a social welfare and progress indicator, its role in economics, public policy, politics and society continues to be influential. To resolve this paradox, one has to recognize that many economists accept the criticism of the GDP indicator but deny its relevance. This paper evaluates the reasons for denial. This entails five ...

This paper describes an efficient yet accurate methodology for estimating system damping. The proposed technique is based on linear dynamic system theory and the Hilbert damping analysis. The proposed technique requires capacitor switching waveforms only. The detected envelope of the intrinsic transient portion of the voltage waveform after capacitor bank energizing and its decay rate along wit...

in order to evaluate competition among some weed species and canola, a field experiment in astan ghods razavi's field in mashhad was done on 2007-2008. thirty 50×50 cm quadrates were used in two times (stem and flower production) to measure the canola dry weight, leaf area index and canola and weeds density with destruction and thirty similar quadrates were used for counting weed species a...