With machine learning successfully applied to new daunting problems almost every day, general AI starts looking like an attainable goal (LeCun et al., 2015). However, most current research focuses instead on important but narrow applications, such as image classification or machine translation. We believe this to be largely due to the lack of objective ways to measure progress towards broad mac...

Our work addresses issues related to the cohabitation of service robots and people in unstructured environments. We propose new planning techniques to empower robot means-end reasoning with the capability of taking into account human intentions and preferences. We also address the problem of human activity recognition in instrumented environments. We employ a constraint-based approach to realiz...

The goal of this dissertation is to present a new symmetric block cipher called 2DCARotate, based on two-dimensional cellular automata and certain non-affine rotations of squares. This cipher is characterised by a simple construction that can be implemented as simple logic circuit. The specific cellular automata used, and carefully selected non-affine geometric rotations provide an easy way to ...

Rational: Smoking kills more than one billion current smokers worldwide prematurely due to various tobacco-related diseases. Smoking contributes to multiple well-documented adverse health effects, including heart disease, pulmonary disease and lung and other cancers in both industrialized and developing countries. Tobacco smoking is a leading cause of preventable disease and death. If the curre...

“Ambient Intelligence (AmI)” is a rapidly growing multi-disciplinary field allowing many areas of research to converge towards having a real beneficial influence in our society. The basic idea behind AmI is that by enriching an environment with technology (sensors, processors, actuators, information terminals, and other devices interconnected through a network), a system can be built such that ...

Canadian History Podcasts Janis Thiessen (bio) PODCASTING HAS TAKEN OFF AMONG CANADIAN ACADEMICS, particularly during the remote learning required by COVID-19 pandemic, both as a tool of research dissemination and classroom instruction. I am fortunate to collaborate with two experts in digital history: Kent Davies Kimberley Moore University Winnipeg's Oral Centre.1 Some years ago, when was prep...

INTRODUCTION Child farm safety has been identified as a key public health concern in Australia. To date, communication strategies for child farm safety have primarily targeted rural based adults as custodians of children, and because the greatest proportion of deaths occur in pre-school children. However, emerging international literature acknowledges the importance of understanding the percept...

introduction: fruits and vegetables have special importance as a very important part of the human food supply. and from the beginnings of life, man has used these products to supply a part of his food. nowadays, horticultural products are widely used in the diet. cherry is one of the deciduous trees in the temperate regions, which is potassium rich. use of oxalic acid significantly reduces fros...

We present a generalization of temporal-difference networks to include temporally abstract options on the links of the question network. Temporal-difference (TD) networks have been proposed as a way of representing and learning a wide variety of predictions about the interaction between an agent and its environment. These predictions are compositional in that their targets are defined in terms ...

The most difficult to control segment that affects directly safety and quality of chilled meats is the actual chill chain. Application of an optimised management for chilled distribution requires continuous monitoring and control of storage conditions from production to consumption. A novel chill chain management policy, coded “Safety Monitoring and Assurance System” (SMAS) is applied, allowing...