From a Competition for Self-Driving Miniature Cars to a Standardized Experimental Platform: Concept, Models, Architecture, and Evaluation

Context: Competitions for self-driving cars facilitated the development and research in the domain of autonomous vehicles towards potential solutions for the future mobility. Objective: Miniature vehicles can bridge the gap between simulation-based evaluations of algorithms relying on simplified models, and those time-consuming vehicle tests on real-scale proving grounds. Method: This article combines findings from a systematic literature review, an in-depth analysis of results and technical concepts from contestants in a competition for self-driving miniature cars, and experiences of participating in the 2013 competition for self-driving cars. Results: A simulation-based development platform for real-scale vehicles has been adapted to support the development of a self-driving miniature car. Furthermore, a standardized platform was designed and realized to enable research and experiments in the context of future mobility solutions. Conclusion: A clear separation between algorithm conceptualization and validation in a model-based simulation environment enabled efficient and riskless experiments and validation. The design of a reusable, low-cost, and energy-efficient hardware architecture utilizing a standardized software/hardware interface enables experiments, which would otherwise require resources like a large real-scale test track.Comment: 17 pages, 19 figues, 2 table

Internet and Users. Who is the Reader?

Internet has turned into a fundamental component of everyday life, as it plays a major role in advancing the globalization process. Globalization was fostered by the idea of creating equalaccess opportunities for all and facilitating communication worldwide. Using internet as the core platform, billions of people try to access and benefit from this opportunity through search engines, service providers, websites and social media. However, given the profound difference between internet and user’s languages, users end up on relying on search engines and tools to translate their ideas into a computer-readable language and derive information from them. In order to provide the best possible services, search engines and social media need to accumulate comprehensive data on each user’s identity. The challenge is that once they are fed with convenient information on each user, they tend to personalize the idea they grasp of him or her based on their given regulations and policies, which in the mid- and long-term results in managing users’ access to information.. By applying the reader-response theory, this paper seeks to focus on the challenges stemming from the adoption of users’ personalized profiles by Google, Facebook and Amazon as the most common part of users’ performance in internet. It also explores how the reading differences of the users and the tools result not only in personalized versions of users, but also engender an unrecognized virtual in-betweenness of users’ own perception of themselves and the tools’ perception of users

What does semantic tiling of the cortex tell us about semantics?

Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computational and implementation levels to support neural encoding and decoding, this approach ignores Marr's algorithmic level, central for understanding the mechanisms that implement cognition, in general, and conceptual processing, in particular. Following decades of research in cognitive science and neuroscience, what do we know so far about the representation and processing mechanisms that implement conceptual abilities? Most basically, much is known about the mechanisms associated with: (1) features and frame representations, (2) grounded, abstract, and linguistic representations, (3) knowledge-based inference, (4) concept composition, and (5) conceptual flexibility. Rather than explaining these fundamental representation and processing mechanisms, semantic tiles simply provide a trace of their activity over a relatively short time period within a specific learning context. Establishing the mechanisms that implement conceptual processing in the brain will require more than mapping it to cortical (and sub-cortical) activity, with process models from cognitive science likely to play central roles in specifying the intervening mechanisms. More generally, neuroscience will not achieve its basic goals until it establishes algorithmic-level mechanisms that contribute essential explanations to how the brain works, going beyond simply establishing the brain areas that respond to various task conditions