Unpowered bipedal devices which walk down gentle slopes have been in development, initially as toys, for more than one hundred years. Here we describe three powered robots based on these ramp-walking toys. Humanoid walking robots usually rely heavily on complicated feedback control strategies, have a limited learning ability, have gaits that look somewhat artificial, and use relatively more ene...

Concerns about an imminent influenza pandemic have been intensified after the emergence of the new influenza A(H1N1) v strain. Mathematical modeling was employed on recent epidemiological data from Mexico in order to assess the impact of intervention strategies on the spread of influenza A(H1N1)v in the setting of the European region. When initiating the intervention of 100% school closure in a...

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When neutrinos travel through a normal matter medium, the electron neutrinos couple differently to gravity compared to the other neutrinos, due to the presence of electrons in the medium and the absence of the other charged leptons. We calculate the momentum-dependent part of the matter-induced gravitational couplings of the neutrinos under such conditions, which arise at order g/M W , and dete...

Due to a large size of lecture theaters and associated multiple sound sources, the common beamforming techniques cannot be straightforwardly applied in those environments. Other difficulties include significant propagation delays between the microphones and the directionality mismatch between speakers and microphones. These problems are particularly emphasized in the distance lecturing environm...

This paper presents a system of speaker localization for a purpose of speaker tracking by camera. The authors use the information given by the two microphones, placed in opposition, to determine the position of the active speaker in trying to supervise the audio-visual recording. To achieve the speaker localization task, the authors have proposed and employed two methods, which are called respe...

This paper presents a self-supervised method for detecting the active speaker in a multi-person spoken interaction scenario. We argue that this capability is a fundamental prerequisite for any artificial cognitive system attempting to acquire language in social settings. Our methods are able to detect an arbitrary number of possibly overlapping active speakers based exclusively on visual inform...

This article describes a novel add-on for powered wheelchairs that is composed of a gaze-driven control system and a navigation support system. The add-on was tested by three users. All of the users were individuals with severe disabilities and no possibility of moving independently. The system is an add-on to a standard power wheelchair and can be customized for different levels of support acc...

Electrical stimulation has been used for over 25 years to restore breathing to patients with high quadriplegia causing respiratory paralysis and patients with central alveolar hypoventilation. Three groups have developed electrical pacing systems for long-term support of respiration in humans. These systems consist of electrodes implanted on the phrenic nerves, connected by leads to a stimulato...

Aggregated power consumption of homenetwork devices such as home-gateway, home-server, settop box is rapidly increased because these devices are operated in powered-on state to support anyone, anywhere, anytime services. But power utilization of these devices is very low because there is much idle time under powered-on state. To reduce the overall power consumption in homenetwork, we are develo...