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„from stable to table“
(2008)
XPERSIF: a software integration framework & architecture for robotic learning by experimentation
(2008)
The integration of independently-developed applications into an efficient system, particularly in a distributed setting, is the core issue addressed in this work. Cooperation between researchers across various field boundaries in order to solve complex problems has become commonplace. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of such efforts, individual applications are developed independent of the integration process. The integration of individual applications into a fully-functioning architecture is a complex and multifaceted task. This thesis extends a component-based architecture, previously developed by the authors, to allow the integration of various software applications which are deployed in a distributed setting. The test bed for the framework is the EU project XPERO, the goal of which is robot learning by experimentation. The task at hand is the integration of the required applications, such as planning of experiments, perception of parametrized features, robot motion control and knowledge-based learning, into a coherent cognitive architecture. This allows a mobile robot to use the methods involved in experimentation in order to learn about its environment. To meet the challenge of developing this architecture within a distributed, heterogeneous environment, the authors specified, defined, developed, implemented and tested a component-based architecture called XPERSIF. The architecture comprises loosely-coupled, autonomous components that offer services through their well-defined interfaces and form a service-oriented architecture. The Ice middleware is used in the communication layer. Its deployment facilitates the necessary refactoring of concepts. One fully specified and detailed use case is the successful integration of the XPERSim simulator which constitutes one of the kernel components of XPERO.The results of this work demonstrate that the proposed architecture is robust and flexible, and can be successfully scaled to allow the complete integration of the necessary applications, thus enabling robot learning by experimentation. The design supports composability, thus allowing components to be grouped together in order to provide an aggregate service. Distributed simulation enabled real time tele-observation of the simulated experiment. Results show that incorporating the XPERSim simulator has substantially enhanced the speed of research and the information flow within the cognitive learning loop.
Nowadays Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are used in many fields of research, e.g. to create prototypes of hardware or in applications where hardware functionality has to be changed more frequently. Boolean circuits, which can be implemented by FPGAs are the compiled result of hardware description languages such as Verilog or VHDL. Odin II is a tool, which supports developers in the research of FPGA based applications and FPGA architecture exploration by providing a framework for compilation and verification. In combination with the tools ABC, T-VPACK and VPR, Odin II is part of a CAD flow, which compiles Verilog source code that targets specific hardware resources. This paper describes the development of a graphical user interface as part of Odin II. The goal is to visualize the results of these tools in order to explore the changing structure during the compilation and optimization processes, which can be helpful to research new FPGA architectures and improve the workflow.
The Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration defines Global Skill Partnerships (GSP) as an innovative means of strengthen skills development among origin countries and countries of destination in mutually beneficial manner. However, GSPs are very limited in number and scope, and empirical analyses of them are, to date, relatively rare. This study helps fill this gap in data by presenting and examining existing GSPs or GSP-like approaches (e.g., transnational training partnerships). The aim of the study is to take stock of the various conceptual discourses on and practical experience with transnational skill partnerships. Using Kosovo as a case study, the study details the structure of such partnerships and the processes they entail. It documents the experience of those involved and catalogues the factors contributing to success. On this basis, the authors propose a means of categorizing the various practices that will help structure the empirical diversity of such approaches and render them conceptually feasible: Transnational Skills and Mobility Partnerships (TSMP).
Tracelets and Specifications
(2017)
In the accompanying paper [1] the authors study a model of concurrent programs in terms of events and a dependence relation, i.e., a set of arrows, between them. There also two simplifying interface models are presented; they abstract in different ways from the intricate network of internal points and arrows of program components. This report supplements [1] by presenting full proofs for the properties of the interface models, in particular, that both models exhibit homomorphic behaviour w.r.t. sequential and concurrent composition. [1] B. Möller, C.A.R. Hoare, M.E. Müller, G. Struth: A discrete geometric model of concurrent program execution. In H. Zhu, J. Bowen: Proc. UTP 16. LNCS 10134. Springer 2017, 1-25
Formal concept analysis (FCA) as introduced in [4] deals with contexts and concepts. Roughly speaking, a context is an environment that is equipped with some kind of "knowledge". Such contexts are also known as information or knowledge representation systems where the knowledge consists of (intensional) descriptions relating sets of objects to sets of properties. Given extsensional and intensional descriptions (the latter one in terms of binary attributes), they can be arranged in a taxonomy or concept lattice.
Technology Transfer in Developing Countries: Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) in China
(1994)
This work provides a short but technical introduction to the main building blocks of a blockchain. It argues that a blockchain is not a revolutionary technology but rather a clever combination of three fields: cryptography, decentralization and game theory. In addition, it summaries the differences between a public, private and federate blockchain model and the two prominent consensus mechanism Proof-of-Work (POW) and Proof-of-Stake (POS).
Population ageing and growing prevalence of disability have resulted in a growing need for personal care and assistance. The insufficient supply of personal care workers and the rising costs of long-term care have turned this phenomenon into a greater social concern. This has resulted in a growing interest in assistive technology in general, and assistive robots in particular, as a means of substituting or supplementing the care provided by humans, and as a means of increasing the independence and overall quality of life of persons with special needs. Although many assistive robots have been developed in research labs world-wide, very few are commercially available. One of the reasons for this, is the cost. One way of optimising cost is to develop solutions that address specific needs of users. As a precursor to this, it is important to identify gaps between what the users need and what the technology (assistive robots) currently provides. This information is obtained through technology mapping.
The current literature lacks a mapping between user needs and assistive robots, at the level of individual systems. The user needs are not expressed in uniform terminology across studies, which makes comparison of results difficult. In this research work, we have illustrated the technology mapping of assistive robots using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). ICF provides standard terminology for expressing user needs in detail. Expressing the assistive functions of robots also in ICF terminology facilitates communication between different stakeholders (rehabilitation professionals, robotics researchers, etc.).
We also investigated existing taxonomies for assistive robots. It was observed that there is no widely accepted taxonomy for classifying assistive robots. However, there exists an international standard, ISO 9999, which classifies commercially available assistive products. The applicability of the latest revision of ISO 9999 standard for classifying mobility assistance robots has been studied. A partial classification of assistive robots based on ISO 9999 is suggested. The taxonomy and technology mapping are illustrated with the help of four robots that have the potential to provide mobility assistance. These are the SmartCane, the SmartWalker, MAid and Care-O-bot (R) 3. SmartCane, SmartWalker and MAid provide assistance by supporting physical movement. Care-O-bot (R) 3 provides assistance by reducing the need to move.
SISAL: User manual
(1990)
This paper describes the security mechanisms of several wireless building automation technologies, namely ZigBee, EnOcean, ZWave, KNX, FS20, and Home-Matic. It is shown that none of the technologies provides the necessary measure ofsecurity that should be expected in building automation systems. One of the conclusions drawn is that software embedded in systems that are build for a lifetime of twenty years or more needs to be updatable.
Recent work in image captioning and scene-segmentation has shown significant results in the context of scene-understanding. However, most of these developments have not been extrapolated to research areas such as robotics. In this work we review the current state-ofthe- art models, datasets and metrics in image captioning and scenesegmentation. We introduce an anomaly detection dataset for the purpose of robotic applications, and we present a deep learning architecture that describes and classifies anomalous situations. We report a METEOR score of 16.2 and a classification accuracy of 97 %.
The roadmap for quality and innovation through open educational practices has been conceived as a number of steps, a conceptual document, which can be used by organisations, leaners or professionals in order to improve their open educational practices. After the development of the core concept of the OPAL project, the guidelines for OEP, it became clear that these guidelines, would have to play an important part on the roadmap exercise, because they represent the very essence of how to foster and stimulate open educational practices. The roadmap therefore is meant to be an instrument, a tool which helps the different stakeholders to use the guidelines for their own context and purpose.
Emotional communication is a key element of habilitation care of persons with dementia. It is, therefore, highly preferable for assistive robots that are used to supplement human care provided to persons with dementia, to possess the ability to recognize and respond to emotions expressed by those who are being cared-for. Facial expressions are one of the key modalities through which emotions are conveyed. This work focuses on computer vision-based recognition of facial expressions of emotions conveyed by the elderly.
Although there has been much work on automatic facial expression recognition, the algorithms have been experimentally validated primarily on young faces. The facial expressions on older faces has been totally excluded. This is due to the fact that the facial expression databases that were available and that have been used in facial expression recognition research so far do not contain images of facial expressions of people above the age of 65 years. To overcome this problem, we adopt a recently published database, namely, the FACES database, which was developed to address exactly the same problem in the area of human behavioural research. The FACES database contains 2052 images of six different facial expressions, with almost identical and systematic representation of the young, middle-aged and older age-groups.
In this work, we evaluate and compare the performance of two of the existing imagebased approaches for facial expression recognition, over a broad spectrum of age ranging from 19 to 80 years. The evaluated systems use Gabor filters and uniform local binary patterns (LBP) for feature extraction, and AdaBoost.MH with multi-threshold stump learner for expression classification. We have experimentally validated the hypotheses that facial expression recognition systems trained only on young faces perform poorly on middle-aged and older faces, and that such systems confuse ageing-related facial features on neutral faces with other expressions of emotions. We also identified that, among the three age-groups, the middle-aged group provides the best generalization performance across the entire age spectrum. The performance of the systems was also compared to the performance of humans in recognizing facial expressions of emotions. Some similarities were observed, such as, difficulty in recognizing the expressions on older faces, and difficulty in recognizing the expression of sadness.
The findings of our work establish the need for developing approaches for facial expression recognition that are robust to the effects of ageing on the face. The scientific results of our work can be used as a basis to guide future research in this direction.
Data management is a challenge in both scientific and technical environments. Therefore researchers have developed a special interest in this field. Modern approaches (i.e. Subversion, CVS) already offer authoring and versioning in distributed systems. However this might be insufficient in a vast number of scenarios, where not only the data resulting from a process, but also data which describes the process that generated those results is crucial.
Business process infrastructures like BPMS (Business Process Management Systems) and WfMS (Workflow Management Systems) traditionally focus on the automation of processes predefined at design time. This approach is well suited for routine tasks which are processed repeatedly and which are described by a predefined control flow. In contrast, knowledge-intensive work is more goal and data-driven and less control-flow oriented. Knowledge workers need the flexibility to decide dynamically at run-time and based on current context information on the best next process step to achieve a given goal. Obviously, in most practical scenarios, these decisions are complex and cannot be anticipated and modeled completely in a predefined process model. Therefore, adaptive and dynamic process management techniques are necessary to augment the control-flow oriented part of process management (which is still a need also for knowledge workers) with flexible, context-dependent, goaloriented support.
Rural areas often lack affordable broadband Internet connectivity, mainly due to the CAPEX and especially OPEX of traditional operator equipment [HEKN11]. This digital divide limits the access to knowledge, health care and other services for billions of people. Different approaches to close this gap were discussed in the last decade [SPNB08]. In most rural areas satellite bandwidth is expensive and cellular networks (3G,4G) as well as WiMAX suffer from the usually low population density making it hard to amortize the costs of a base station [SPNB08].
For many practical problems an efficient solution of the one-dimensional shallow water equations (Saint-Venant equations) is important, especially when large networks of rivers, channels or pipes are considered. In order to test and develop numerical methods four test problems are formulated. These tests include the well known dam break and hydraulic jump problems and two steady state problems with varying channel bottom, channel width and friction.
This report summarises and integrates two different tracks of research for the purpose of envisioning and preparing a joint research project proposal. Soft- and hardware systems have become increasingly complex and act "concurrently", both with respect to memory access (i.e. information flow) and computational resources (i.e. "services"). The software development metaphor of cloud-storage, cloud-computing and service-oriented design has been anticipated by artificial intelligence (AI) research at least 30 years ago (parallel and distributed computation already dates back to the 1950’s and 1970s). What is known as a "service" today is what in AI is known as the capability of an agent; and the problem of information flow and consistency has been a headstone of information processing ever since. Based on a real-world robotics application we demonstrate how an increasingly abstract description of collaborating or competing agents correspond to a set of concurrent processes.