To react appropriately in hard real-time environments, a system must either employ fast dynamic planning or recall a pre-built reactive response. For complex problems, real-time, accurate dynamic planning may be impossible, and the complete set of possible reactions may be too large to build and store in advance. In this paper, we propose combining offiine and online planning such that a set of...

this paper examines the theoretical rationales and practical aspects of task-based language teaching (tblt) with particular reference to research findings in efl/esl contexts. the definitional scope of the term ‘task’, polarizations in terms of task vs. non-task, and its relation to different language teaching approaches have engendered conceptual and methodological ambiguities.  moreover, fact...

This paper reviews recent progress in the development of a computer-based system for supporting improvised group decision making in risky, time-constrained situations. One goal of this research is to realize a system design which is consonant with cognitively-grounded research on improvisation and which contributes to performance on representative tasks. Some of the issues and challenges involv...

This paper presents a motion optimization system for an industrial quality inspection process where a vision device coupled with a manipulator robot arm is able to perform quality and completeness inspection on a complex solid part. In order to be deployed in an industrial production plant, the proposed system has been engineered and integrated as a module of an offline simulator, called WorkCe...

We propose a new approach for scheduling with strict deadlines and apply this approach to the TimeConstrained Project Scheduling Problem (TCPSP). To be able to meet these deadlines, it is possible to work in overtime or hire additional capacity in regular time or overtime. For this problem, we develop a two stage heuristic. The key of the approach lies in the first stage in which we construct p...

Workstations for digital audio and video applications must support predictable processing, presentation, and transmission of continuous media data while making efficient use of limited hardware resources. We present techniques for managing network resources and processing messages in a predictable fashion. Our solutions use a novel structure for the protocol processing software, and we examine ...

The importance of ICT to all aspects of university business cannot be overemphasised. However the devolved nature of university management, and particularly of research, results in tensions between the central university ICT services (including elearning), striving to provide resilient and cost-effective services for all, and the academic communities that need agile and leading-edge ICTs to ser...

The game of soccer is one of the main focuses of the RoboCup competitions, being a fun and entertaining research environment for the development of autonomous multi-agent cooperative systems. For an autonomous robot to be able to play soccer, first it has to perceive the surrounding world and extract only the relevant information in the game context. Therefore, the vision system of a robotic so...