Open-standards rich media mobile platform & rapid deployment service creation tool

This paper builds upon the work carried out by Brunel University in the field of "Fast Prototyping And Semi-automated User Interface And Application Generation for Converged Broadcast and Cellular Terminals" [1]. This work involved the development of a service creation application for interactive services on mobile devices and methodologies and tools to speed up and deskill the deployment process. This paper aims at further enhancing these tools and presents an enhanced open standards reference platform for mobile digital TV and rich media services. By using a Scalar Vector Graphics (SVG)-driven Java MIDP application (as opposed to bitmapped raster graphics-driven MHP), rich media services can be broadcast to mobile devices running various Java-supported platforms with a user interface scalable to any screen size. Moreover, the Rich Media Mobile Browser is integrated into a service creation tool, therefore enabling rapid testing and deployment of rich mobile media services. The following sections detail the motivation behind the need for a platform which allows for rich media play-out on mobile devices, along with the rich media mobile viewing application and the tools used to create and test rich media with speed and ease

REBA: A Refinement-Based Architecture for Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in Robotics

This paper describes an architecture for robots that combines the complementary strengths of probabilistic graphical models and declarative programming to represent and reason with logic-based and probabilistic descriptions of uncertainty and domain knowledge. An action language is extended to support non-boolean fluents and non-deterministic causal laws. This action language is used to describe tightly-coupled transition diagrams at two levels of granularity, with a fine-resolution transition diagram defined as a refinement of a coarse-resolution transition diagram of the domain. The coarse-resolution system description, and a history that includes (prioritized) defaults, are translated into an Answer Set Prolog (ASP) program. For any given goal, inference in the ASP program provides a plan of abstract actions. To implement each such abstract action, the robot automatically zooms to the part of the fine-resolution transition diagram relevant to this action. A probabilistic representation of the uncertainty in sensing and actuation is then included in this zoomed fine-resolution system description, and used to construct a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). The policy obtained by solving the POMDP is invoked repeatedly to implement the abstract action as a sequence of concrete actions, with the corresponding observations being recorded in the coarse-resolution history and used for subsequent reasoning. The architecture is evaluated in simulation and on a mobile robot moving objects in an indoor domain, to show that it supports reasoning with violation of defaults, noisy observations and unreliable actions, in complex domains.Comment: 72 pages, 14 figure

Binding tactile and visual sensations via unique association by cross-anchoring between double-touching and self-occlusion

Binding is one of the most fundamental cognitive functions, how to find the correspondence of sensations between different modalities such as vision and touch. Without a priori knowledge on this correspondence, binding is regarded to be a formidable issue for a robot since it often perceives multiple physical phenomena in its different modal sensors, therefore it should correctly match the foci of attention in different modalities that may have multiple correspondences each other. We suppose that learning the multimodal representation of the body should be the first step toward binding since the morphological constraints in self-body-observation would make the binding problem tractable. The multimodal sensations are expected to be constrained in perceiving own body so as to configurate the unique parts of the multiple correspondence reflecting its morphology. In this paper, we propose a method to match the foci of attention in vision and touch through the unique association by cross-anchoring different modalities. Simple experiments show the validity of the proposed method