In the early 1980s, I used Stan Rosenschein’s functional language REX to servo Flakey’s two wheels to set points of speed and direction that were functions of sonar readings. This let Flakey drive along hallways with no dead reckoning or planning whatsoever. It seemed miraculous at the time; a situated automaton that knew things without needing any models. However, I thought of it as (sensor-dr...

Continuity of care (COC) has a proven relationship with health care outcomes. However, evidence regarding an association between COC and avoidable hospitalization for elderly patients with asthma is insufficient.A retrospective cohort study was performed using Taiwanese National Health Insurance claim data from 2004 to 2013. Patients were retrospectively followed for 2 years; the COC index (COC...

This paper describes a class of lightweight structures known as compliant shell mechanisms. These are novel reconfigurable solutions for advanced structures, such as morphing shells and deployable membranes. They have local, discrete corrugations, which articulate and deform to achieve dramatic changes in the overall shape of the shell. The unique kinematics are considered by highlighting examp...

Still today, industrial robot assembly tasks are executed by replaying a preprogrammed trajectory, making them vulnerable to geometric uncertainties in the environment. Therefore, industrial assembly tasks are executed in expensive structured environments, which limits the use of robots to high volume and repetitive tasks, where the cost of the structured environment becomes relatively small. B...

Automation of application provisioning is one of the key aspects of Cloud Computing. Standards such as the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) provide a means to model application topologies which can be provisioned fully automatically. Many automated provisioning engines require that these topologies are complete in the sense of specifying all application, p...

Metadata management is an essential enabling factor for geospatial assets because discovery, retrieval, and actual usage of the latter are tightly bound to the quality of these descriptions. Unfortunately, the multi-faceted landscape of metadata formats, requirements, and conventions makes it difficult to identify editing tools that can be easily tailored to the specificities of a given project...

Ever since the introduction of version 2.0 of the CORBA specification, that architecture enjoys ever-increasing popularity. There are two reasons for this, both due to the underlying principles of CORBA – easy interoperability between different ORB products and the possibility of cooperation with other (sub)systems. However, for the first advantage to come to bear, it is paramount that the IDL ...

Analyses of representative organisational structures and their implications for management of organisations’ websites reveals that the various roles of developers and users of the system and content are of prime importance. Typically, policy and mandated procedures are used within organisations to enforce standards that deliver compliance, usability, and accessibility. A poorly presented organi...

We present a database of code-switched conversational human– machine dialog in English–Hindi and English–Spanish. We leveraged HALEF, an open-source standards-compliant cloudbased dialog system to capture audio and video of bilingual crowd workers as they interacted with the system. We designed conversational items with intra-sentential code-switched machine prompts, and examine its efficacy in...