In this paper we propose a design space exploration method targeting reconfigurable architectures that takes place at the algorithmic level and aims to rapidly highlight architectures that present good performance vs. flexibility tradeoffs. The exploration flow is based on a functional model to describe the architectures that the designer wants to compare. The paper mainly focuses on the projec...

Previous research suggests that children infer the presence of unobserved causes when objects appear to move spontaneously. Are such inferences limited to motion events or do children assume that unexplained physical events have causes more generally? Here we introduce an apparently spontaneous event and ask whether, even in the absence of spatiotemporal and co-variation cues linking the events...

This study investigated how environmental design shapes perceptual-motor exploration, when meta-stable regions of performance are created. Here, we examined how creating meta-stable regions of performance could destabilize pre-existing skills, favoring greater exploration of performance environments, exemplified in this study by climbing surfaces. In this investigation we manipulated hold orien...

This paper presents a longitudinal case of Motorola’s R&D subsidiary in Beijing over the period 1998–2008. Through the construction of key events and changes, the paper unfolds the evolutionary process of Motorola’s R&D capability in China, and explores the mechanisms driving that evolution. We find that this R&D subsidiary evolved through four stages: from a local adaption unit performing adap...

Global Aerospace Corporation (GAC) is developing a revolutionary system architecture for exploration of planetary atmospheres and surfaces from atmospheric altitudes. The work is supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). The innovative system architecture relies upon the use of Directed Aerial Robot Explorers (DAREs), which essentially are longduration-flight autonomous ball...

We consider the problem of exploration of an anonymous, port-labelled, undirected graph with n nodes, m edges, by a single mobile agent. Initially the agent does not know the topology of the graph nor any of the global parameters. Moreover, the agent does not know the incoming port when entering to a vertex thus it cannot backtrack its moves. We study a (Ma,Mw)-agent model with two types of mem...

Global Aerospace Corporation (GAC) is developing a revolutionary system architecture for exploration of planetary atmospheres and surfaces from atmospheric altitudes. The work is supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). The innovative system architecture relies upon the use of Directed Aerial Robot Explorers (DAREs), which essentially are long-duration-flight autonomous bal...

As addressing climate change becomes a high priority it seems likely that there will be a surge in interest in deploying nuclear power. Other fuel bases are too dirty (coal), too expensive (oil, natural gas) or too speculative (solar, wind) to completely supply the energy needs of the global economy. To the extent that the global society does in fact choose to expand nuclear power there will be...

Harmony Search (HS) and Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) as new swarm intelligent optimization algorithms have received much attention in recent years. Both of them have shown outstanding performance for solving NP-Hard optimization problems. However, they also suffer dramatic performance degradation for some complex high-dimensional optimization problems. Through a lot of experiment...

Different methods have been developed for mineral exploration so far, amongst which biological-based methods known as geomicrobiological studies are of the most recent ones. Geomicrobiology as an interdisciplinary approach has achieved great progresses during the past two decades and involves the study of microbes in a number of fundamental geological processes, both in the past and present. Th...