1,064 research outputs found
Detection of bimanual gestures everywhere: why it matters, what we need and what is missing
Bimanual gestures are of the utmost importance for the study of motor
coordination in humans and in everyday activities. A reliable detection of
bimanual gestures in unconstrained environments is fundamental for their
clinical study and to assess common activities of daily living. This paper
investigates techniques for a reliable, unconstrained detection and
classification of bimanual gestures. It assumes the availability of inertial
data originating from the two hands/arms, builds upon a previously developed
technique for gesture modelling based on Gaussian Mixture Modelling (GMM) and
Gaussian Mixture Regression (GMR), and compares different modelling and
classification techniques, which are based on a number of assumptions inspired
by literature about how bimanual gestures are represented and modelled in the
brain. Experiments show results related to 5 everyday bimanual activities,
which have been selected on the basis of three main parameters: (not)
constraining the two hands by a physical tool, (not) requiring a specific
sequence of single-hand gestures, being recursive (or not). In the best
performing combination of modeling approach and classification technique, five
out of five activities are recognized up to an accuracy of 97%, a precision of
82% and a level of recall of 100%.Comment: Submitted to Robotics and Autonomous Systems (Elsevier
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Republican Monsters: The Cultural Construction of American Positivist Criminology, 1767-1920
This dissertation examines the history of and cultural influences on positivist criminology in the United States. From Benjamin Rush to the present day, the U.S. has produced an extensive corpus of empirical and theoretical studies that seeks to discern an objective, scientifically-grounded basis for criminal behavior. American positivist criminology has drawn on numerous subfields and theories, including rational choice / economic theory, biology, and psychology, but in all cases, maintains that a purely scientific explanation of offending is possible. This study proceeds from the perspective that divisions between scientific and non-scientific thought are untenable. Drawing on scholarship in literary criticism and sociology, I argue that positivist criminology confronts an inherent contradiction in purporting to develop a purely scientific account of phenomena that are defined by the moral and cultural sentiments of a society. I thus hypothesize that positivist criminology is in fact reliant on the irrational and fictive cultural tropes and images of crime that it claims to exorcize. The dissertation proceeds by reviewing the literature on the history of criminology, developing a set of functional types or tropes for character analysis, and then examining four separate periods in the development of scientific criminology: eighteenth century studies of rational action, nineteenth century studies of defective reasoning, early twentieth century studies of race and crime, and the development of scientifically informed criminalistics programs. Each of these cases captures a different period and focus in the development of scientific criminology. In threading continuity between these cases, I show how criminological positivism is consistently reliant on culturally informed tropes and characters to render itself sensible and coherent
The Internet of Things Will Thrive by 2025
This report is the latest research report in a sustained effort throughout 2014 by the Pew Research Center Internet Project to mark the 25th anniversary of the creation of the World Wide Web by Sir Tim Berners-LeeThis current report is an analysis of opinions about the likely expansion of the Internet of Things (sometimes called the Cloud of Things), a catchall phrase for the array of devices, appliances, vehicles, wearable material, and sensor-laden parts of the environment that connect to each other and feed data back and forth. It covers the over 1,600 responses that were offered specifically about our question about where the Internet of Things would stand by the year 2025. The report is the next in a series of eight Pew Research and Elon University analyses to be issued this year in which experts will share their expectations about the future of such things as privacy, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. It includes some of the best and most provocative of the predictions survey respondents made when specifically asked to share their views about the evolution of embedded and wearable computing and the Internet of Things
Major Challenges for the Modern Chemistry in Particular and Science in General
In the past few hundred years, science has exerted an enormous influence on the way the world appears to human observers. Despite phenomenal accomplishments of science, science nowadays faces numerous challenges that threaten its continued success. As scientific inventions become embedded within human societies, the challenges are further multiplied. In this critical review, some of the critical challenges for the field of modern chemistry are discussed, including: (a) interlinking theoretical knowledge and experimental approaches; (b) implementing the principles of sustainability at the roots of the chemical design; (c) defining science from a philosophical perspective that acknowledges both pragmatic and realistic aspects thereof; (d) instigating interdisciplinary research; (e) learning to recognize and appreciate the aesthetic aspects of scientific knowledge and methodology, and promote truly inspiring education in chemistry. In the conclusion, I recapitulate that the evolution of human knowledge inherently depends upon our ability to adopt creative problem-solving attitudes, and that challenges will always be present within the scope of scientific interests
Department of Computer Science Activity 1998-2004
This report summarizes much of the research and teaching activity of the Department of Computer Science at Dartmouth College between late 1998 and late 2004. The material for this report was collected as part of the final report for NSF Institutional Infrastructure award EIA-9802068, which funded equipment and technical staff during that six-year period. This equipment and staff supported essentially all of the department\u27s research activity during that period
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Introduction: War and the Body
This chapter places the body at the centre of critical thinking about war and its consequences.
War is fundamentally embodied. The reality of war is not just politics by any other means but politics incarnate, politics written on and experienced through the thinking, feeling bodies of men and women. From steeled combatants to abject victims, war occupies innumerable bodies in a multitude of ways, profoundly shaping lives and ways of being human.
Giving the body an analytic recognition that it warrants and has often been denied in conventional war studies, this chapter brings together new interdisciplinary scholarship that explores the numerous affective, sensory and embodied practices through which war lives and breeds. It focuses on how war is prepared, enacted and reproduced through embodied action, suffering and memory. As such, it promotes new directions in theorising war and transformations in warfare, via an explicit focus on the body
Stepping Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology. Towards an Integrable Model of Life: Accelerating Discovery in the Biological Foundations of Science
The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines
who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative
step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the
world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an
interdisciplinary community of original thinkers.
This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the
transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit
that biology to date has been more fact-oriented and less theoretical than
physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the
science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our
most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from
abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and
demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated
for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology
can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging
new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The
latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known
and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic
means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this
sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort.
The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions
within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the
explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the
abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam;
much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry)
and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized
by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed
are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology
and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as
we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete
and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology
and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge
is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations
that is truly native to living systems.
Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically
recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted
Newtonian mechanics.
This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to
apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between
multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the
basic terms or tools needed.
The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set
of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its
early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”.
This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information
and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology
and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological,
ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science
of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to
be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic
information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic
systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that
there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at
this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches
to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows.
Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical
problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting
Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge
we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to
formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have
today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists
in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time
in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory
of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary
problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and
“soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated
mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project
proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability
of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics,
chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions
require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand
challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal
for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the
INBIOSA program.
The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging
research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The
efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently.
Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and
measured as it progresses
On microelectronic self-learning cognitive chip systems
After a brief review of machine learning techniques and applications, this Ph.D. thesis examines several approaches for implementing machine learning architectures and algorithms into hardware within our laboratory.
From this interdisciplinary background support, we have motivations for novel approaches that we intend to follow as an objective of innovative hardware implementations of dynamically self-reconfigurable logic for enhanced self-adaptive, self-(re)organizing and eventually self-assembling machine learning systems, while developing this new particular area of research.
And after reviewing some relevant background of robotic control methods followed by most recent advanced cognitive controllers, this Ph.D. thesis suggests that amongst many well-known ways of designing operational technologies, the design methodologies of those leading-edge high-tech devices such as cognitive chips that may well lead to intelligent machines exhibiting
conscious phenomena should crucially be restricted to extremely well defined constraints.
Roboticists also need those as specifications to help decide upfront on otherwise infinitely free hardware/software design details.
In addition and most importantly, we propose these specifications as methodological guidelines tightly related to ethics and the nowadays well-identified workings of the human body and of its psyche
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