Programming by demonstration seeks to allow people to communicate algorithms easily to computers. The world in which the communication takes place, and the set of actions that can be performed in that world, both influence the efficiency and correctness of the transmitted algorithms, and the extent to which efficiency and correctness can be guaranteed. This paper discusses the effects of differ...

The syntactic wellformedness constraints of XML (opening and closing tags nest properly) imply that XML processors face the challenge to efficiently handle data that takes the shape of ordered, unranked trees. Although RDBMSs have originally been designed to manage table-shaped data, we propose their use as XML and XPath processors. In our setup, the database system employs a relational XML doc...

This paper introduces the concept of metaphorical structurer as a way of conciliating user interface development by demonstration and by generation so that advantages of both approaches are exploited together. It basically consists of substituting part or whole of the contents of a preliminary presentation model by a set of pre-defined specifications attached to a presentation and behavior. Thi...

Robot assistants will only reach a mass consumer market when they are easy to use. This applies especially to the way a user programs it’s robot system. The only approach that enables a non expert robot user to teach a system complex tasks is programming by demonstration. This paper explains the basic concepts for mapping typical human actions performed in a household to a robot system: the rec...

Programming by demonstration techniques have been investigated to facilitate and speed up the setup of new robot tasks. Kinesthetic teaching (KT), i.e., teaching by physically guiding a robot in the execution of a motion, has been adopted in industrial scenarios for its ease of use. In the work described here, we analyse and discuss limits and drawbacks of KT and suggest the adoption of a set o...

-Rewriting systems are popular in end-user prcgramming because complex behavior can be described with few or no abstractions or variables. However, rewriting systems have been limited t o manipulating non-rotatable objects on a grid, such as in Agentsheets or Stageeast Creator. Systems that allow free-form movement of objects must use other techniques, such as the sequential programming by demo...

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is an important instrument to boost the performance of business processes. In this paper, the Product-Based Design (PBD) method is presented that is especially suitable to reengineer processes that support information-intensive products such as bonds, mortgages, and loans. Aside from the treatment of its theoretical properties and the differences with prevai...

We present an experimental demonstration of quantum-optical coherence tomography. The technique makes use of an entangled twin-photon light source to carry out axial optical sectioning. It is compared to conventional optical coherence tomography. The immunity of the quantum version to dispersion, as well as a factor of 2 enhancement in resolution, is experimentally demonstrated.