Ten Conferences WORDS: Open Problems and Conjectures

In connection to the development of the field of Combinatorics on Words, we present a list of open problems and conjectures that were stated during the ten last meetings WORDS. We wish to continually update the present document by adding informations concerning advances in problems solving

Circular critical exponents for Thue-Morse factors

We prove various results about the largest exponent of a repetition in a factor of the Thue-Morse word, when that factor is considered as a circular word. Our results confirm and generalize previous results of Fitzpatrick and Aberkane & Currie

'Children are just lingual': The development of phonology in British Sign Language (BSL)

This paper explores three universal tendencies in spoken language acquisition: consonant and vowel harmony, cluster reduction and systemic simplification, using a corpus of 1018 signs from a single child exposed to British Sign Language from birth. Child signs were recorded from naturalistic deaf parent-deaf child interaction between the ages of 19-24 months. Child errors were analysed by handshape, movement and location segments, as well as the accurate production of prosodic features, using an autosegmental phonology approach. Unadult like forms at this age were observed with 41% of handshapes, 45% of movements and 25% of locations. There were 47% of signs produced with unadult like prosodic features. Analysis of the results concludes that early child signing broadly follows proposed universal tendencies in language acquisition

Collaborative Verification-Driven Engineering of Hybrid Systems

Hybrid systems with both discrete and continuous dynamics are an important model for real-world cyber-physical systems. The key challenge is to ensure their correct functioning w.r.t. safety requirements. Promising techniques to ensure safety seem to be model-driven engineering to develop hybrid systems in a well-defined and traceable manner, and formal verification to prove their correctness. Their combination forms the vision of verification-driven engineering. Often, hybrid systems are rather complex in that they require expertise from many domains (e.g., robotics, control systems, computer science, software engineering, and mechanical engineering). Moreover, despite the remarkable progress in automating formal verification of hybrid systems, the construction of proofs of complex systems often requires nontrivial human guidance, since hybrid systems verification tools solve undecidable problems. It is, thus, not uncommon for development and verification teams to consist of many players with diverse expertise. This paper introduces a verification-driven engineering toolset that extends our previous work on hybrid and arithmetic verification with tools for (i) graphical (UML) and textual modeling of hybrid systems, (ii) exchanging and comparing models and proofs, and (iii) managing verification tasks. This toolset makes it easier to tackle large-scale verification tasks

Cross-National Logo Evaluation Analysis: An Individual Level Approach

The universality of design perception and response is tested using data collected from ten countries: Argentina, Australia, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, and the United States. A Bayesian, finite-mixture, structural-equation model is developed that identifies latent logo clusters while accounting for heterogeneity in evaluations. The concomitant variable approach allows cluster probabilities to be country specific. Rather than a priori defined clusters, our procedure provides a posteriori cross-national logo clusters based on consumer response similarity. To compare the a posteriori cross-national logo clusters, our approach is integrated with Steenkamp and Baumgartner’s (1998) measurement invariance methodology. Our model reduces the ten countries to three cross-national clusters that respond differently to logo design dimensions: the West, Asia, and Russia. The dimensions underlying design are found to be similar across countries, suggesting that elaborateness, naturalness, and harmony are universal design dimensions. Responses (affect, shared meaning, subjective familiarity, and true and false recognition) to logo design dimensions (elaborateness, naturalness, and harmony) and elements (repetition, proportion, and parallelism) are also relatively consistent, although we find minor differences across clusters. Our results suggest that managers can implement a global logo strategy, but they also can optimize logos for specific countries if desired.adaptation;standardization;Bayesian;international marketing;design;Gibbs sampling;concomitant variable;logos;mixture models;structural equation models

Navigation/traffic control satellite mission study. Volume 4 - Critical technology, growth and economic summaries Final report

Navigation and traffic control satellite network developmen