A Developmental Organization for Robot Behavior

This paper focuses on exploring how learning and development can be structured in synthetic (robot) systems. We present a developmental assembler for constructing reusable and temporally extended actions in a sequence. The discussion adopts the traditions of dynamic pattern theory in which behavior is an artifact of coupled dynamical systems with a number of controllable degrees of freedom. In our model, the events that delineate control decisions are derived from the pattern of (dis)equilibria on a working subset of sensorimotor policies. We show how this architecture can be used to accomplish sequential knowledge gathering and representation tasks and provide examples of the kind of developmental milestones that this approach has already produced in our lab

The NorduGrid architecture and tools

The NorduGrid project designed a Grid architecture with the primary goal to meet the requirements of production tasks of the LHC experiments. While it is meant to be a rather generic Grid system, it puts emphasis on batch processing suitable for problems encountered in High Energy Physics. The NorduGrid architecture implementation uses the \globus{} as the foundation for various components, developed by the project. While introducing new services, the NorduGrid does not modify the Globus tools, such that the two can eventually co-exist. The NorduGrid topology is decentralized, avoiding a single point of failure. The NorduGrid architecture is thus a light-weight, non-invasive and dynamic one, while robust and scalable, capable of meeting most challenging tasks of High Energy Physics.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 9 pages,LaTeX, 4 figures. PSN MOAT00

A Case for Cooperative and Incentive-Based Coupling of Distributed Clusters

Research interest in Grid computing has grown significantly over the past five years. Management of distributed resources is one of the key issues in Grid computing. Central to management of resources is the effectiveness of resource allocation as it determines the overall utility of the system. The current approaches to superscheduling in a grid environment are non-coordinated since application level schedulers or brokers make scheduling decisions independently of the others in the system. Clearly, this can exacerbate the load sharing and utilization problems of distributed resources due to suboptimal schedules that are likely to occur. To overcome these limitations, we propose a mechanism for coordinated sharing of distributed clusters based on computational economy. The resulting environment, called \emph{Grid-Federation}, allows the transparent use of resources from the federation when local resources are insufficient to meet its users' requirements. The use of computational economy methodology in coordinating resource allocation not only facilitates the QoS based scheduling, but also enhances utility delivered by resources.Comment: 22 pages, extended version of the conference paper published at IEEE Cluster'05, Boston, M