On Relaxing Metric Information in Linear Temporal Logic

Metric LTL formulas rely on the next operator to encode time distances, whereas qualitative LTL formulas use only the until operator. This paper shows how to transform any metric LTL formula M into a qualitative formula Q, such that Q is satisfiable if and only if M is satisfiable over words with variability bounded with respect to the largest distances used in M (i.e., occurrences of next), but the size of Q is independent of such distances. Besides the theoretical interest, this result can help simplify the verification of systems with time-granularity heterogeneity, where large distances are required to express the coarse-grain dynamics in terms of fine-grain time units.Comment: Minor change

LNCS

Imprecision in timing can sometimes be beneficial: Metric interval temporal logic (MITL), disabling the expression of punctuality constraints, was shown to translate to timed automata, yielding an elementary decision procedure. We show how this principle extends to other forms of dense-time specification using regular expressions. By providing a clean, automaton-based formal framework for non-punctual languages, we are able to recover and extend several results in timed systems. Metric interval regular expressions (MIRE) are introduced, providing regular expressions with non-singular duration constraints. We obtain that MIRE are expressively complete relative to a class of one-clock timed automata, which can be determinized using additional clocks. Metric interval dynamic logic (MIDL) is then defined using MIRE as temporal modalities. We show that MIDL generalizes known extensions of MITL, while translating to timed automata at comparable cost

Inspiring engagement through the user experience: a project with the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery

2014 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.This project focused on user experience to create a plan for a web application that would increase engagement with the audience of a local museum. With the support of the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, the researcher performed user experience research to create an interactive feature on the museum's website that can showcase the experiences and history and science content the museum has to offer. The project was conducted using a human-centered design framework and focused on engagement and user experience. Activity theory and the user experience framework drove the method. The process started with five stakeholder interviews, then proceeded to four observation sessions, five personas, and rounds of prototyping and testing. The final deliverable to the Fort Collins Museum of Discovery was a project plan - including specific design, content and technology recommendations resulting from research and development - they can use to implement the web application on their currently existing site to increase engagement and their audience size

Disabling Travel: Quantifying the Harm of Inaccessible Hotels to Disabled People

During its 2023–2024 term, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide a case with significant implications for the future of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In Acheson Hotels v. Laufer, the Court will determine whether a civil rights “tester” plaintiff has Article III standing to sue a hotel for failing to provide information about the hotel’s accessibility online — in violation of Department of Justice (DOJ) regulations applying the ADA’s requirement of “reasonable modifications in policies, practices, or procedures” — when the plaintiff did not intend to book a hotel reservation. Plaintiff-Respondent Deborah Laufer has not only challenged the failure of Acheson Hotels to provide required information, but has also filed over 600 similar lawsuits, showcasing system-wide violations of the ADA’s “Reservation Rule.” The Reservation Rule (“the Rule”), promulgated in 2010, requires hotels to make accessibility information available “through [their] reservations service[s] in enough detail to reasonably permit individuals with disabilities to assess independently whether a given hotel or guest room meets his or her accessibility needs.” The Rule also requires hotels to deliver accessible rooms in the same manner and during the same hours as inaccessible rooms, to hold accessible rooms for individuals with disabilities, and to guarantee that an accessible room reservation is held for the reserving customer. Among the motivations for the Rule’s passage were widespread complaints related to accessibility in the hotel reservation process. During the Rule’s notice and comment period, which began in 2008, industry representatives advocated for language that required hotels to treat disabled individuals in “a substantially similar manner” to nondisabled guests; the Department did not accept this suggested language, and the Rule instead requires hotels to treat disabled individuals “in the same manner” as nondisabled individuals. Hotels had an 18-month transition period to implement the changes. The American Society of Travel Agents, Inc. (at the time “the world’s largest association of professional travel agencies”) filed a comment with the DOJ in support of “parity in reservations policies” and explained that, to achieve that goal, hotels are best positioned to provide accurate accessibility information. Hotels’ noncompliance with Title III of the ADA, and with the Reservation Rule in particular, is pervasive, and tester plaintiffs play a key role in enforcing the law. The ADA’s enforcement scheme depends in large part on private lawsuits to compensate for the limited resources of its designated enforcement agency, the DOJ. The burdens of filing suit and obtaining injunctive relief, however, are significant for the individuals on whom the ADA relies, the very same individuals who rely on the Act for the opportunity to, as Jacobus tenBroek famously put it, “live in the world.” Because damages are unavailable for violations of the Rule, suits for injunctive relief need to be filed before a problem arises: Injunctive relief is relatively useless for those who are denied accessibility information about public accommodations. Any injunction would take effect long after the disabled traveler needed the accessibility information. These obstacles undermine the affirmative duty that the Reservation Rule places on businesses to acknowledge and account for disabled individuals before those individuals need to book their reservations. Tester litigation helps to secure the services proposed by the Reservation Rule and to deliver on the regulation’s promise of equal efficiency, immediacy, and convenience

Putting Accessible Expression to Bed

In 2011, the Occupy movement began. Occupiers seized space in dozens of public parks and in the American imagination, providing a compelling illustration of an inclusive format of political expression. In the courtroom, protesters sought injunctive relief on First Amendment grounds to protect the tent encampments where Occupiers slept. In 2017, the last of the Occupy litigation ended; but the ramifications the Occupy cases hold for the First Amendment and expressive conduct remain unexamined. This Comment takes an in-depth look at the adjudication of Occupiers’ First Amendment interest in sleeping in public parks. It analyzes the adjudication of the Occupy cases and contends that the pattern of judicial enforcement results from a desire to remove the appearance of disorder associated with houselessness. This Comment argues that the test used to set the scrutiny level for First Amendment expressive activity systematically disadvantages speech by and about houseless persons

Putting Accessible Expression to Bed

In 2011, the Occupy movement began. Occupiers seized space in dozens of public parks and in the American imagination, providing a compelling illustration of an inclusive format of political expression. In the courtroom, protesters sought injunctive relief on First Amendment grounds to protect the tent encampments where Occupiers slept. In 2017, the last of the Occupy litigation ended; but the ramifications the Occupy cases hold for the First Amendment and expressive conduct remain unexamined. This Comment takes an in-depth look at the adjudication of Occupiers’ First Amendment interest in sleeping in public parks. It analyzes the adjudication of the Occupy cases and contends that the pattern of judicial enforcement results from a desire to remove the appearance of disorder associated with houselessness. This Comment argues that the test used to set the scrutiny level for First Amendment expressive activity systematically disadvantages speech by and about houseless persons

Being correct is not enough: efficient verification using robust linear temporal logic

While most approaches in formal methods address system correctness, ensuring robustness has remained a challenge. In this paper we present and study the logic rLTL which provides a means to formally reason about both correctness and robustness in system design. Furthermore, we identify a large fragment of rLTL for which the verification problem can be efficiently solved, i.e., verification can be done by using an automaton, recognizing the behaviors described by the rLTL formula $\varphi$, of size at most $\mathcal{O} \left( 3^{ |\varphi|} \right)$, where $|\varphi|$ is the length of $\varphi$. This result improves upon the previously known bound of $\mathcal{O}\left(5^{|\varphi|} \right)$ for rLTL verification and is closer to the LTL bound of $\mathcal{O}\left( 2^{|\varphi|} \right)$. The usefulness of this fragment is demonstrated by a number of case studies showing its practical significance in terms of expressiveness, the ability to describe robustness, and the fine-grained information that rLTL brings to the process of system verification. Moreover, these advantages come at a low computational overhead with respect to LTL verification.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1510.08970. v2 notes: Proof on the complexity of translating rLTL formulae to LTL formulae via the rewriting approach. New case study on the scalability of rLTL formulae in the proposed fragment. Accepted to appear in ACM Transactions on Computational Logi

Automatic Content Generation for Video Self Modeling

Video self modeling (VSM) is a behavioral intervention technique in which a learner models a target behavior by watching a video of him or herself. Its effectiveness in rehabilitation and education has been repeatedly demonstrated but technical challenges remain in creating video contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that re-renders new talking-head sequences suitable to be used for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorder. After the raw footage is captured, a new speech track is either synthesized using text-to-speech or selected based on voice similarity from a database of clean speeches. Voice conversion is then applied to match the new speech to the original voice. Time markers extracted from the original and new speech track are used to re-sample the video track for lip synchronization. We use an adaptive re-sampling strategy to minimize motion jitter, and apply bilinear and optical-flow based interpolation to ensure the image quality. Both objective measurements and subjective evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed techniques

The Future Airport: Experiments and Innovative Technologies

Zooming in on the micro-processes involved in developing and user testing new technologies for airports, this article works with the notion of experiments as a way to understand iterative practices and future (re)orientations. In doing so, I aim to think through experiences and experiments with applied anthropology and corporate ethnography within a dialogic framework of 1) current airport industry efforts of re-visioning stakeholder collaboration and airport re-branding and 2) the attempts of a Danish start-up company to create market disruption through innovative technology development. Although the experiments take place at different scales and are performed in different ways, I contend that they must be considered within a common frame in order to tease out their interconnectedness, particularly with regards to experimental confines and motivations. Based on some relatively raw case material, this article unfolds the different layers of experiments and the underlying assumptions that they make apparent