A Formalism for Visual Query Interface Design

The massive volumes and the huge variety of large knowledge bases make information exploration and analysis difficult. An important activity is data filtering and selection, in which both querying and visualization play important roles. Interfaces for data exploration environments normally include both, integrating them as tightly as possible. But many features of information exploration environments, such as visual representation of queries, visualization of query results, interactive data selection from visualizations, have only been studied separately. The intrinsic connections between them have not been described formally. The lack of formal descriptions inhibits the development of techniques that produce new representations for queries, and natural integration of visual query specification with query result visualization. This thesis describes a formalism that describes the basic components of information exploration and and their relationships in information exploration environments. The key aspect of the formalism is that it unifies querying and visualization within a single framework, which provides a foundation for designing and analysing visual query interfaces. Various innovative designs of visual query representations can be derived from the formalism. Simply comparing them with existing ones is not enough, it is more important to discover why one visual representation is better or worse than another. To do this it is necessary to understand users’ cognitive activities, and to know how these cognitive activities are enhanced or inhibited by different presentations of a query so that novel interfaces can be created and improved based on user testing. This thesis presents a new experimental methodology for evaluating query representations, which uses stimulus onset asynchrony to separate different aspects of query comprehension. This methodology was used to evaluate a new visual query representation based on Karnaugh maps, and showing that there are two qualitatively different approaches to comprehension: deductive and inductive. The Karnaugh map representation scales extremely well with query complexity, and the experiment shows that its good scaling properties occur because it strongly facilitates inductive comprehension

Experiments in Competence Acquisition for Autonomous Mobile Robots

Institute of Perception, Action and BehaviourThis thesis addresses the problem of intelligent control of autonomous mobile robots, particularly under circumstances unforeseen by the designer.As the range of applications for autonomous robots widens and increasingly includes operation in unknown environments (exploration) and tasks which are not clearly specifiable a priori (maintenance work), this question is becoming more and more important. It is argued that in order to achieve such flexibility in unforeseen situations it is necessary to equip a mobile robot with the ability to autonomously acquire the necessary task achieving competences, through interaction with the world. Using mobile robots equipped with self-organising, behaviour-based controllers,experiments in the autonomous acquisition of motor competences and navigational skills were conducted to investigate the viability of this approach. A controller architecture is presented that allows extremely fast acquisition of motor competence such as obstacle avoidance, wall and corridor following and deadend escape: these skills are obtained in less than five learning steps,performed in under one minute of real time. This is considerably faster than previous approaches. Because the effective wiring between sensors and actuators is determined autonomously by the robot, sensors and actuators may initially be wired up arbitrarily,which reduces the risk of human error during the setting up phase of the robot. For the first time it was demonstrated that robots also become able to autonomously recover from unforeseen situations such as changes in the robot's morphology, the environment or the task. Rule-based approaches to error recovery obviously cannot offer recovery from unforeseen errors,as error situations covered by such approaches have to be identified beforehand. A robust and fast map building architecture is presented that enables mobile robots to autonomously construct internal representations of their environment, using self-organising feature maps. After a short training time the robots are able to use these self-organising feature maps successfully for location recognition. For the first time the staged acquisition of multiple competences in mobile robots is presented.First obtaining fundamental motor competences such as wall following and deadend escape (primary skills), the robots use these in a second stage to learn higher levels of competence such as the navigational task of location recognition (secondary skills). Besides laying the foundation of autonomous, staged acquisition of high level competences, this approach has the interesting property of securely grounding secondary skills in the robot's own experience, as these secondary skills are defined in terms of the primary ones

Measurements, Models, Systems and Design

531 s.

Analysis and resynthesis of polyphonic music

This thesis examines applications of Digital Signal Processing to the analysis, transformation, and resynthesis of musical audio. First I give an overview of the human perception of music. I then examine in detail the requirements for a system that can analyse, transcribe, process, and resynthesise monaural polyphonic music. I then describe and compare the possible hardware and software platforms. After this I describe a prototype hybrid system that attempts to carry out these tasks using a method based on additive synthesis. Next I present results from its application to a variety of musical examples, and critically assess its performance and limitations. I then address these issues in the design of a second system based on Gabor wavelets. I conclude by summarising the research and outlining suggestions for future developments

La Salle University Undergraduate Catalog 2002-2003

Issued for La Salle University 2002-2003https://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/course_catalogs/1176/thumbnail.jp

2013 Oklahoma Research Day Full Program

This document contains all abstracts from the 2013 Oklahoma Research Day held at the University of Central Oklahoma