This thesis presents the development of a novel robotically effected plastic foam sculpting system for rapid prototyping and manufacturing purposes. The developed system is capable of rapidly sculpting physical objects out of expanded and extruded polystyrene using an electrically heated Nichrome sculpting tool. An overview of current conventional rapid prototyping systems indicated that the ma...

While it has been widely assumed that punctuation may play a critical role in parsing, there has been relatively little direct empirical investigation of its effects. Most researchers have either avoided the use of punctuation or have simply assumed that it will serve a disambiguating role. There has been little or no consideration of how ’disambiguation’ might occur or whether it is equally ef...

A multi-robot system, like a robot formation, contains information that is distributed throughout the system. As the collective increases in numbers or explores distant or difficult areas, obtaining collective situational awareness becomes critical. We propose a method for extracting system and environmental information distributed over a collective of robots. Introduction and Background Endsle...

Train timetabling is a process of assigning suitable arrival and departure times to trains at the stations they visit and at key track junctions. It is desirable that the timetable focusses on passenger preferences and is operationally viable and profitable for the Train Operating Companies (TOCs). Many hard and soft constraints need to be considered relating to the track capacities, set of tra...

in many seismological applications, the earth is considered as a perfectly elastic, homogeneous, and isotropic body. although this assumption is approximately valid, it is known that seismic waves pass through the real earth that is anelastic, inhomogeneous and anisotropic.  we consider four processes that can reduce wave amplitude, i.e.: geometrical spreading, scattering, multi-pathing, and an...

One of the difficulties in seeing beneath salt is that the migration velocity in the salt and above is not well known. This can lead to defocusing of migration images beneath the salt. In this paper we show that reduced-time migration (RTM) and interferometric migration (IM) can mitigate this problem. Reduced-time migration shifts the data with the time difference between the calculated arrival...

Sprouse, Wagers, & Phillips (in press) carried out two experiments in which they measured individual differences in memory to test processing accounts of island effects. They found that these individual differences failed to predict the magnitude of island effects and construe these findings as counterevidence to processing-based accounts of island effects. Here, we take up several problems wit...

This paper discusses the integration of two different machine learning approaches to modeling language, NL-Soar and analogical modeling (AM). The resulting hybrid system is capable of functionality that is not possible when using only one of the systems in isolation. After a brief introduction of each system, an explanation is given of how AM is used to provide information useful to NL-Soar for...

In three experiments using a speeded grammaticality judgement task the question was investigated of what role morphological ambiguity plays for syntactic ambiguity resolution. The stimuli were German verb-final clauses which are locally ambiguous between a subject-object and an object-subject reading and where the ambiguity is not caused by phrase-structural differences but by differing case-as...