An investigation of non-spatial cognitive abilities in an asocial corvid, the Clark\u27s nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana)

A great deal of research suggests that the cognitive abilities of birds in the family Corvidae (crows and jays) are comparable in many aspects to that of apes. Scientists have posited competing hypotheses to explain how complex cognitive abilities arise in a species or group of animals. One such hypothesis, the social-intelligence hypothesis, states that the demands of living in a large, dynamic group drive an animal\u27s need for complex cognitive skills. The ecological-intelligence hypothesis, predicts that generalist foragers develop more highly flexible behaviors and a wider cognitive repertoire than specialist foragers. To date, cognitive research on corvids has focused on corvids that are highly social and are generalist foragers. From a comparative standpoint, I examined the cognitive abilities of a corvid that is relatively asocial and a specialist forager. The Clarks\u27 nutcracker (Nucifraga columbiana) is thought to be perhaps the least social corvid, and it largely specializes on the seeds of one species of pine (Pinus edulis). I tested nutcrackers using several tasks in three broad areas of cognition: inferential reasoning, numerical discrimination, and social intelligence. These experiments represent novel tests of cognitive abilities in this species. I found that the nutcrackers performed in a similar manner as social mammals and corvid birds, in all three areas of cognition. This suggests that social group size may not have a large impact on the development of a broad range of problem solving skills. Rather, ecological pressures associated with finding, extracting, caching and protecting seeds from pilferage may have influenced the development of complex cognition in this species

Incorporating video into Google MSV

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 52).Mobile Street View is a compelling application but suffers from significant latency problems, especially in limited bandwidth circumstances. Currently, the application uses static images to display street level information. Utilizing video in addition to images has the potential to improve the Street View user experience. In this paper, we examine the design and performance of mobile Street View and consider how to use video to reduce user visible latency. Video also allows for alternate navigation methods which could improve the application's ease of use. We created a prototype on Android to examine the plausibility of incorporating video into mobile Street View. Comparing the performance of our video prototype to the traditional step-by-step Street View approach, we found a 4x increase in the speed of viewing an entire street. For the video prototype I also found significant improvement in both user visible latencies and useful screen time. Additionally, I found that the time to fetch video chunks was less than the time to display them.by Christina Wright.M.Eng

Virtual Field Trip via Digital Storytelling

Digital storytelling is a practice of combining digital content such as 3-dimensional images, text, sound, images, and video to create a short story. It is the intersection between the old art of storytelling and access to powerful technologies. This project will be a step to experiment the development and effectiveness of digital storytelling and hopefully ignite a source of motivation and encourages others to tap into their interests and skills to develop their own digital storytelling and expand ICT usage in this country. School children look forward to traditional field trips. However, such trips are costly. VFT aims to reduce if not eliminate the constraints that traditional field trips face such as money, time, energy, resources, distance and inaccessible area. To fit the time frame, the VFT is created only for small selected areas in the KL Bird Park even though the KL Bird Park is not that big because some of the areas are not suitable to take panoramic pictures. The development of the VFT is adapted from QTVR Creation Steps by Kitchens (2006). The procedure consists of defining the problem statements and goals, literature review and research, creating image content through taking photos at the site, transforming the photos to QTVR node through stitching, design and construct prototype, inserting interactivity such as hotspots, delivering the output, and last but not least, evaluation. The final output of the project is the KL Bird Park Virtual Field Trip which consists of a photo based 3D panoramic images for each scene from the site which are linked to one another and also hotspots which are placed on the panoramic images to reveal the birds' information with one click on the hotspots. The informal evaluation of the final output that was conducted shows an overwhelming response and acceptance. All of the respondents would like to see more of this type of VFT in the future

A stratified rendering algorithm for virtual walkthroughs of large environments

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-74).by Rebecca Wen Fei Xiong.M.S

Web Processing Services for Forestry and Environmental Applications

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.Nowadays spatial processing on the web is becoming a requirement for more and more web applications. The use of processes helps to find solutions to a wide range of spatial problems and extends the common functionality of Web GIS. There are many open source technologies that can be implemented in each component of a Web GIS application. Forestry and environmental problems, with their strong territorial implications, are especially suitable to be analyzed applying these technologies. In order to create an application with spatial processes, we propose a framework with a layered service-based architecture. It is layered because its structure is divided in a set of functional layers: the user layer (geoportal or client), the service layer (inside the server) and the data layer (spatial database). The access and processing of spatial data is accomplished through adequate service standards of OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium): Web Map Services (WMS), Web Feature Services (WFS), Web Coverage Services (WCS) and Web Processing Services (WPS). We implement a complete forestry – related application from scratch that offers access, visualization, querying and processing of spatial data and an active user interaction. The key of the application is WPS. Additionally, other processing solutions (like making queries with the spatial database) are discussed. In brief, this work presents an overview of the current technology and possible solutions for integrating spatial processes on the web and proposes some guidelines to implement them in a fully working system

Resource Management in Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC)

This PhD thesis investigates the effective ways of managing the resources of a Multi-Access Edge Computing Platform (MEC) in 5th Generation Mobile Communication (5G) networks. The main characteristics of MEC include distributed nature, proximity to users, and high availability. Based on these key features, solutions have been proposed for effective resource management. In this research, two aspects of resource management in MEC have been addressed. They are the computational resource and the caching resource which corresponds to the services provided by the MEC. MEC is a new 5G enabling technology proposed to reduce latency by bringing cloud computing capability closer to end-user Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices. MEC would support latency-critical user applications such as driverless cars and e-health. These applications will depend on resources and services provided by the MEC. However, MEC has limited computational and storage resources compared to the cloud. Therefore, it is important to ensure a reliable MEC network communication during resource provisioning by eradicating the chances of deadlock. Deadlock may occur due to a huge number of devices contending for a limited amount of resources if adequate measures are not put in place. It is crucial to eradicate deadlock while scheduling and provisioning resources on MEC to achieve a highly reliable and readily available system to support latency-critical applications. In this research, a deadlock avoidance resource provisioning algorithm has been proposed for industrial IoT devices using MEC platforms to ensure higher reliability of network interactions. The proposed scheme incorporates Banker’s resource-request algorithm using Software Defined Networking (SDN) to reduce communication overhead. Simulation and experimental results have shown that system deadlock can be prevented by applying the proposed algorithm which ultimately leads to a more reliable network interaction between mobile stations and MEC platforms. Additionally, this research explores the use of MEC as a caching platform as it is proclaimed as a key technology for reducing service processing delays in 5G networks. Caching on MEC decreases service latency and improve data content access by allowing direct content delivery through the edge without fetching data from the remote server. Caching on MEC is also deemed as an effective approach that guarantees more reachability due to proximity to endusers. In this regard, a novel hybrid content caching algorithm has been proposed for MEC platforms to increase their caching efficiency. The proposed algorithm is a unification of a modified Belady’s algorithm and a distributed cooperative caching algorithm to improve data access while reducing latency. A polynomial fit algorithm with Lagrange interpolation is employed to predict future request references for Belady’s algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm obtains 4% more cache hits due to its selective caching approach when compared with case study algorithms. Results also show that the use of a cooperative algorithm can improve the total cache hits up to 80%. Furthermore, this thesis has also explored another predictive caching scheme to further improve caching efficiency. The motivation was to investigate another predictive caching approach as an improvement to the formal. A Predictive Collaborative Replacement (PCR) caching framework has been proposed as a result which consists of three schemes. Each of the schemes addresses a particular problem. The proactive predictive scheme has been proposed to address the problem of continuous change in cache popularity trends. The collaborative scheme addresses the problem of cache redundancy in the collaborative space. Finally, the replacement scheme is a solution to evict cold cache blocks and increase hit ratio. Simulation experiment has shown that the replacement scheme achieves 3% more cache hits than existing replacement algorithms such as Least Recently Used, Multi Queue and Frequency-based replacement. PCR algorithm has been tested using a real dataset (MovieLens20M dataset) and compared with an existing contemporary predictive algorithm. Results show that PCR performs better with a 25% increase in hit ratio and a 10% CPU utilization overhead

Process makes perfect

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. [71]-[72]).This thesis presents a software architecture for developing art and design tools that automatically capture the artist's interaction and records the entire creative process. The software uses the artist's interaction with the digital medium as its true data-type and streams the data to a database. Over time, a large, searchable, knowledge bank of artisan technique would accrue. Querying this knowledge bank allows quick access to a wide array of user-interface interactions, artistic gestures, and annotations. Additionally, the design tools utilize annotation, search, and playback software to make viewing artistic processes richer and more useful. Using interaction with the medium as a searchable data-type and having useful means to view the data allows artists to query and review each other's artistic technique. This thesis applies this principle toward prototyping a new creative learning and tutorial software platform on the web.Marc Schwartz.S.M

A Data Grid Replica Management System With Local And Global Multi-Objective Optimization

Sejajar dengan perkembangan ujikaji saintifik dengan skala dan kompleksitinya, permintaan terhadap perkongsian. fail data yang cekap dan kos yang efektif bagi menyelesaikan masalah skala besar telah kian meningkat. Namun, penyediaan akses yang berkesan untuk pengagihan data yang sangat besar dan meluas adalah mencabar dan menjadi satu masalah besar di dalam domain. Salah satu penyelesaian utama bagi masalah ini adalah dengan membuat replika data, yang mana membuat beberapa salinan identiti (replika) dari fail data yang sarna di lokasi yang grid berbeza, yakni menambahbaik data tersedia dan keboleh-harapan data. As the scale and complexity of the scientific collaboration experiments grows, the demand to an efficient and cost-effective data files sharing for solving large scale problems is increased. Yet, providing efficient access to huge and widely distributed data is still a considerable challenge and becoming a big problem in the domain. One of the main solutions to the problem is that of data replication, which creates multiple identical copies (replicas) of the same data file at different sites on the grid, and thus the data availability and data reliability are enhanced

Design of Immersive Online Hotel Walkthrough System Using Image-Based (Concentric Mosaics) Rendering

Conventional hotel booking websites only represents their services in 2D photos to show their facilities. 2D photos are just static photos that cannot be move and rotate. Imagebased virtual walkthrough for the hospitality industry is a potential technology to attract more customers. In this project, a research will be carried out to create an Image-based rendering (IBR) virtual walkthrough and panoramic-based walkthrough by using only Macromedia Flash Professional 8, Photovista Panorama 3.0 and Reality Studio for the interaction of the images. The web-based of the image-based are using the Macromedia Dreamweaver Professional 8. The images will be displayed in Adobe Flash Player 8 or higher. In making image-based walkthrough, a concentric mosaic technique is used while image mosaicing technique is applied in panoramic-based walkthrough. A comparison of the both walkthrough is compared. The study is also focus on the comparison between number of pictures and smoothness of the walkthrough. There are advantages of using different techniques such as image-based walkthrough is a real time walkthrough since the user can walk around right, left, forward and backward whereas the panoramic-based cannot experience real time walkthrough because the user can only view 360 degrees from a fixed spot

A Pedestal of Power: Analyzing Consciousness in Nonhuman Animals

Humans have an understanding of a concept called consciousness. This idea of consciousness has been the main separating factor between animals and humans regarding humankind\u27s purported superiority of intelligence: humans are conscious and other animals are not. Specifically, it is self-consciousness, awareness of oneself as oneself, that is. Yet extensive research throughout the last few decades shows that this may not be the case. Animals and humans alike show a variety of forms of consciousness and self-consciousness based on the structure of their bodies, brains, habitats and other contributing factors of survival. Hence, I will argue that humans are not the only beings on this Earth that have the ability of sophisticated consciousness and even self-awareness that we take as the result of a seemingly higher power of intelligence. To do so, I will examine a variety of cases where animals show various levels of consciousness. These animals include the four types of great apes, dolphins, horses, corvids, cephalopod mollusks, cows, lions, and canines. Such examples of higher consciousness derived from these animals include a being\u27s understanding of self, creating non-heritage based friendships, tool-making abilities, functional memory usage, and spatial awareness. Humans must now act upon this inheritance of knowledge regarding animal consciousness. If we know that other animals behold higher levels of intelligence, we must learn to treat them justly