Skateparks are undeniably youth-orientated spaces where contoured bowls, smooth concrete, steep ramps and angled ledges carry the embodied expectation that the sole purpose of the space is for skateboarding. Upon close inspection though, visible signs and traces reveal other activities occurring – meeting up, hanging out, hooking up, dropping out, graffiti-ing and worshiping, to name a few. Thi...

We develop an algorithm to enable a personal robot to conduct one of the common tasks in our daily life – moving the objects to a specific place. One typical application scenario of this algorithm is to load a variety of kitchen items such as the plates, mugs, and bowls etc. into a dishwasher. For newly seen objects and their destination container (e.g. the dishwahser), our algorithm features a...

In the model of Chain Inflation, a sequential chain of coupled scalar fields drives inflation. We consider a multidimensional potential with a large number of bowls, or local minima, separated by energy barriers: inflation takes place as the system tunnels from the highest energy bowl to another bowl of lower energy, and so on until it reaches the zero energy ground state. Such a scenario can b...