This paper describes technologies we have developed to perform autonomous large-scale off-world excavation. A scale dragline excavator of size similar to that required for lunar excavation was made capable of autonomous control. Systems have been put in place to allow remote operation of the machine from anywhere in the world. Algorithms have been developed for complete autonomous digging and d...

This article defines and discusses placeless organizations as sites and generators of learning on a large scale. The emphasis is on how placeless organizations structure themselves to carry out social transformation—necessarily involving intensive learning—on a national or global scale. The argument is made that place is not a necessary component of such activity and that lack of a sense of pla...

This papers extends in three ways our previous work about efficient operations on Multi-valued Decision Diagrams (MDD) for building Constraint Programming models. First, we improve the existing methods for transforming a set of tuples, Global Cut Seeds or sequences of tuples into MDDs. Then, we present in-place algorithms for adding and deleting tuples from an MDD. Finally, we describe an incre...

Place and Route Techniques for FPGA Architecture Advancement

A measurement 1,2 is presented of diffractive dijet production in deep-inelastic scattering (DIS) interactions at HERA of the type ep→ eXY , where the X system is separated by a large rapidity gap from a low-mass leading baryonic system Y . The data are consistent with QCD factorisation in diffractive DIS and yield tight constraints on both shape and normalisation of the diffractive gluon distr...

Dominant theories of hippocampal function propose that place cell representations are formed during an animal's first encounter with a novel environment and are subsequently replayed during off-line states to support consolidation and future behaviour. Here we report that viewing the delivery of food to an unvisited portion of an environment leads to off-line pre-activation of place cells seque...

Since their discovery, the strikingly regular and spatially stable firing of entorhinal grid cells has attracted the attention of experimentalists and theoreticians alike. The bulk of this work has focused either on the assumption that the principal role of grid cells is to support path integration or the extent to which their multiple firing locations can drive the sparse activity of hippocamp...

In mammals, the so-called "seat of the cognitive map" is located in place cells within the hippocampus. Recent work suggests that the shape of place cell fields might be defined by the animals' natural movement; in rats the fields appear to be laterally compressed (meaning that the spatial map of the animal is more highly resolved in the horizontal dimensions than in the vertical), whereas the ...