17,887 research outputs found
Sketching sonic interactions by imitation-driven sound synthesis
Sketching is at the core of every design activity. In visual design, pencil and paper are the preferred tools to produce sketches for their simplicity and immediacy. Analogue tools for sonic sketching do not exist yet, although voice and gesture are embodied abilities commonly exploited to communicate sound concepts. The EU project SkAT-VG aims to support vocal sketching with computeraided technologies that can be easily accessed, understood and controlled through vocal and gestural imitations. This imitation-driven sound synthesis approach is meant to overcome the ephemerality and timbral limitations of human voice and gesture, allowing to produce more refined sonic sketches and to think about sound in a more designerly way. This paper presents two main outcomes of the project: The Sound Design Toolkit, a palette of basic sound synthesis models grounded on ecological perception and physical description of sound-producing phenomena, and SkAT-Studio, a visual framework based on sound design workflows organized in stages of input, analysis, mapping, synthesis, and output. The integration of these two software packages provides an environment in which sound designers can go from concepts, through exploration and mocking-up, to prototyping in sonic interaction design, taking advantage of all the possibilities of- fered by vocal and gestural imitations in every step of the process
Air Traffic Management Safety Challenges
The primary goal of the Air Traffic Management (ATM) system is to control accident risk. ATM
safety has improved over the decades for many reasons, from better equipment to additional
safety defences. But ATM safety targets, improving on current performance, are now extremely
demanding. Safety analysts and aviation decision-makers have to make safety assessments
based on statistically incomplete evidence. If future risks cannot be estimated with precision,
then how is safety to be assured with traffic growth and operational/technical changes? What
are the design implications for the USA’s ‘Next Generation Air Transportation System’
(NextGen) and Europe’s Single European Sky ATM Research Programme (SESAR)? ATM
accident precursors arise from (eg) pilot/controller workload, miscommunication, and lack of upto-
date information. Can these accident precursors confidently be ‘designed out’ by (eg) better
system knowledge across ATM participants, automatic safety checks, and machine rather than
voice communication? Future potentially hazardous situations could be as ‘messy’ in system
terms as the Überlingen mid-air collision. Are ATM safety regulation policies fit for purpose: is it
more and more difficult to innovate, to introduce new technologies and novel operational
concepts? Must regulators be more active, eg more inspections and monitoring of real
operational and organisational practices
Enroute flight planning: Evaluating design concepts for the development of cooperative problem-solving concepts
The goals of this research were to develop design concepts to support the task of enroute flight planning. And within this context, to explore and evaluate general design concepts and principles to guide the development of cooperative problem solving systems. A detailed model is to be developed of the cognitive processes involved in flight planning. Included in this model will be the identification of individual differences of subjects. Of particular interest will be differences between pilots and dispatchers. The effect will be studied of the effect on performance of tools that support planning at different levels of abstraction. In order to conduct this research, the Flight Planning Testbed (FPT) was developed, a fully functional testbed environment for studying advanced design concepts for tools to aid in flight planning
AMTV headway sensor and safety design
A headway sensing system for an automated mixed traffic vehicle (AMTV) employing an array of optical proximity sensor elements is described, and its performance is presented in terms of object detection profiles. The problem of sensing in turns is explored experimentally and requirements for future turn sensors are discussed. A recommended headway sensor configuration, employing multiple source elements in the focal plane of one lens operating together with a similar detector unit, is described. Alternative concepts including laser radar, ultrasonic sensing, imaging techniques, and radar are compared to the present proximity sensor approach. Design concepts for an AMTV body which will minimize the probability of injury to pedestrians or passengers in the event of a collision are presented
Verifiably-safe software-defined networks for CPS
Next generation cyber-physical systems (CPS) are expected to be deployed in domains which require scalability as well as performance under dynamic conditions. This scale and dynamicity will require that CPS communication networks be programmatic (i.e., not requiring manual intervention at any stage), but still maintain iron-clad safety guarantees. Software-defined networking standards like OpenFlow provide a means for scalably building tailor-made network architectures, but there is no guarantee that these systems are safe, correct, or secure. In this work we propose a methodology and accompanying tools for specifying and modeling distributed systems such that existing formal verification techniques can be transparently used to analyze critical requirements and properties prior to system implementation. We demonstrate this methodology by iteratively modeling and verifying an OpenFlow learning switch network with respect to network correctness, network convergence, and mobility-related properties. We posit that a design strategy based on the complementary pairing of software-defined networking and formal verification would enable the CPS community to build next-generation systems without sacrificing the safety and reliability that these systems must deliver
Milton Keynes: an outline cost-benefit study
This is a preliminary survey of some of the factors which would need to
be investigated in the design and cost-benefit analysis of alternative
transport systems for Milton Keynes. It outlines the framework within which
further work can be developed and provides some order-of-magnitude estimates
for basic elements in the transport cost-benefit equations
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