Multimedia information technology and the annotation of video

The state of the art in multimedia information technology has not progressed to the point where a single solution is available to meet all reasonable needs of documentalists and users of video archives. In general, we do not have an optimistic view of the usability of new technology in this domain, but digitization and digital power can be expected to cause a small revolution in the area of video archiving. The volume of data leads to two views of the future: on the pessimistic side, overload of data will cause lack of annotation capacity, and on the optimistic side, there will be enough data from which to learn selected concepts that can be deployed to support automatic annotation. At the threshold of this interesting era, we make an attempt to describe the state of the art in technology. We sample the progress in text, sound, and image processing, as well as in machine learning

Auction-Based Task Allocation and Motion Planning for Multi-Robot Systems with Human Supervision

This paper presents a task allocation strategy for a multi-robot system with a human supervisor. The multi-robot system consists of a team of heterogeneous robots with different capabilities that operate in a dynamic scenario that can change in the robots’ capabilities or in the operational requirements. The human supervisor can intervene in the operation scenario by approving the final plan before its execution or forcing a robot to execute a specific task. The proposed task allocation strategy leverages an auction-based method in combination with a sampling-based multi-goal motion planning. The latter is used to evaluate the costs of execution of tasks based on realistic features of paths. The proposed architecture enables the allocation of tasks accounting for priorities and precedence constraints, as well as the quick re-allocation of tasks after a dynamic perturbation occurs –a crucial feature when the human supervisor preempts the outcome of the algorithm and makes manual adjustments. An extensive simulation campaign in a rescue scenario validates our approach in dynamic scenarios comprising a sensor failure of a robot, a total failure of a robot, and a human-driven re-allocation. We highlight the benefits of the proposed multi-goal strategy by comparing it with single-goal motion planning strategies at the state of the art. Finally, we provide evidence for the system efficiency by demonstrating the powerful synergistic combination of the auction-based allocation and the multi-goal motion planning approach

Translanguaging and Visuality: Translingual Practices in Literary Art

Translanguaging is a resource for linguistic creativity in communication and for critical engagement with one’s sociolinguistic or sociocultural reality. This article examines how translanguaging operates in two visual art installations by the contemporary Chinese artist Xu Bing. Square Word Calligraphy takes a visual turn on translanguaging by inventing a hybrid calligraphy that incorporates English words into the orthographic frame of Chinese. By physically tracing the alphabet through the character, viewers gain an embodied translingual experience, which encompasses an intercultural imaginary negotiating and transcending the English-Chinese divide. By contrast, Post Testament demonstrates an intralingual mode of translanguaging, whereby a biblical text is inflected with heterogeneous registers and rendered ineffectual as coherent discourse. Here the encounter and intertwining of text registers create a transformative space replete with ambiguity and mayhem. In these radical works of language art, translanguaging delineates borders while simultaneously interrogating them, creating liminal zones and articulating a politics of (mis)recognition, (un)readability, and (in)communicability.published_or_final_versio

ACHIEVING AUTONOMIC SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE USING CASE BASED REASONING

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables composition of large and complex computational units out of the available atomic services. However, implementation of SOA, for its dynamic nature, could bring about challenges in terms of service discovery, service interaction, service composition, robustness, etc. In the near future, SOA will often need to dynamically re-configuring and re-organizing its topologies of interactions between the web services because of some unpredictable events, such as crashes or network problems, which will cause service unavailability. Complexity and dynamism of the current and future global network system require service architecture that is capable of autonomously changing its structure and functionality to meet dynamic changes in the requirements and environment with little human intervention. This then needs to motivate the research described throughout this thesis. In this thesis, the idea of introducing autonomy and adapting case-based reasoning into SOA in order to extend the intelligence and capability of SOA is contributed and elaborated. It is conducted by proposing architecture of an autonomic SOA framework based on case-based reasoning and the architectural considerations of autonomic computing paradigm. It is then followed by developing and analyzing formal models of the proposed architecture using Petri Net. The framework is also tested and analyzed through case studies, simulation, and prototype development. The case studies show feasibility to employing case-based reasoning and autonomic computing into SOA domain and the simulation results show believability that it would increase the intelligence, capability, usability and robustness of SOA. It was shown that SOA can be improved to cope with dynamic environment and services unavailability by incorporating case-based reasoning and autonomic computing paradigm to monitor and analyze events and service requests, then to plan and execute the appropriate actions using the knowledge stored in knowledge database

Some resonances between Eastern thought and Integral Biomathics in the framework of the WLIMES formalism for modelling living systems

Forty-two years ago, Capra published “The Tao of Physics” (Capra, 1975). In this book (page 17) he writes: “The exploration of the atomic and subatomic world in the twentieth century has …. necessitated a radical revision of many of our basic concepts” and that, unlike ‘classical’ physics, the sub-atomic and quantum “modern physics” shows resonances with Eastern thoughts and “leads us to a view of the world which is very similar to the views held by mystics of all ages and traditions.“ This article stresses an analogous situation in biology with respect to a new theoretical approach for studying living systems, Integral Biomathics (IB), which also exhibits some resonances with Eastern thought. Stepping on earlier research in cybernetics1 and theoretical biology,2 IB has been developed since 2011 by over 100 scientists from a number of disciplines who have been exploring a substantial set of theoretical frameworks. From that effort, the need for a robust core model utilizing advanced mathematics and computation adequate for understanding the behavior of organisms as dynamic wholes was identified. At this end, the authors of this article have proposed WLIMES (Ehresmann and Simeonov, 2012), a formal theory for modeling living systems integrating both the Memory Evolutive Systems (Ehresmann and Vanbremeersch, 2007) and the Wandering Logic Intelligence (Simeonov, 2002b). Its principles will be recalled here with respect to their resonances to Eastern thought

Spoken-word production in Korean: A non-word masked priming and phonological Stroop task investigation

Speech production studies have shown that phonological unit initially used to fill the metrical frame during phonological encoding is language specific, that is, a phoneme for English and Dutch, an atonal syllable for Mandarin Chinese, and a mora for Japanese. However, only a few studies chronometrically investigated speech production in Korean, and they obtained mixed results. Korean is particularly interesting as there might be both phonemic and syllabic influences during phonological encoding. The purpose of this study is to further examine the initial phonological preparation unit in Korean, employing a masked priming task (Experiment 1) and a phonological Stroop task (Experiment 2). The results showed that significant onset (and onset-plus, that is, consonant-vowel [CV]) effects were found in both experiments, but there was no compelling evidence for a prominent role for the syllable. When the prime words were presented in three different forms related to the targets, namely, without any change, with re-syllabified codas, and with nasalised codas, there were no significant differences in facilitation among the three forms. Alternatively, it is also possible that participants may not have had sufficient time to process the primes up to the point that re-syllabification or nasalisation could have been carried out. In addition, the results of a Stroop task demonstrated that the onset phoneme effect was not driven by any orthographic influence. These findings suggest that the onset segment and not the syllable is the initial (or proximate) phonological unit used in the segment-to-frame encoding process during speech planning in Korean