Space exploration: The interstellar goal and Titan demonstration

Automated interstellar space exploration is reviewed. The Titan demonstration mission is discussed. Remote sensing and automated modeling are considered. Nuclear electric propulsion, main orbiting spacecraft, lander/rover, subsatellites, atmospheric probes, powered air vehicles, and a surface science network comprise mission component concepts. Machine, intelligence in space exploration is discussed

Encoding techniques for complex information structures in connectionist systems

Two general information encoding techniques called relative position encoding and pattern similarity association are presented. They are claimed to be a convenient basis for the connectionist implementation of complex, short term information processing of the sort needed in common sense reasoning, semantic/pragmatic interpretation of natural language utterances, and other types of high level cognitive processing. The relationships of the techniques to other connectionist information-structuring methods, and also to methods used in computers, are discussed in detail. The rich inter-relationships of these other connectionist and computer methods are also clarified. The particular, simple forms are discussed that the relative position encoding and pattern similarity association techniques take in the author's own connectionist system, called Conposit, in order to clarify some issues and to provide evidence that the techniques are indeed useful in practice

Areas of Same Cardinal Direction

Cardinal directions, such as North, East, South, and West, are the foundation for qualitative spatial reasoning, a common field of GIS, Artificial Intelligence, and cognitive science. Such cardinal directions capture the relative spatial direction relation between a reference object and a target object, therefore, they are important search criteria in spatial databases. The projection-based model for such direction relations has been well investigated for point-like objects, yielding a relation algebra with strong inference power. The Direction Relation Matrix defines the simple region-to-region direction relations by approximating the reference object to a minimum bounding rectangle. Models that capture the direction between extended objects fall short when the two objects are close to each other. For instance, the forty-eight contiguous states of the US are colloquially considered to be South of Canada, yet they include regions that are to the North of some parts of Canada. This research considers the cardinal direction as a field that is distributed through space and may take on varying values depending on the location within a reference object. Therefore, the fundamental unit of space, the point, is used as a reference to form a point-based cardinal direction model. The model applies to capture the direction relation between point-to-region and region-to-region configurations. As such, the reference object is portioned into areas of same cardinal direction with respect to the target object. This thesis demonstrates there is a set of 106 cardinal point-to-region relations, which can be normalized by considering mirroring and 90° rotations, to a subset of 22 relations. The differentiating factor of the model is that a set of base relations defines the direction relation anywhere in the field, and the conceptual neighborhood graph of the base relations offers the opportunity to exploit the strong inference of point-based direction reasoning for simple regions of arbitrary shape. Considers the tiles and pockets of same cardinal direction, while a coarse model provides a union of all possible qualitative direction values between a reference region and a target region

Zero-gravity movement studies

The use of computer graphics to simulate the movement of articulated animals and mechanisms has a number of uses ranging over many fields. Human motion simulation systems can be useful in education, medicine, anatomy, physiology, and dance. In biomechanics, computer displays help to understand and analyze performance. Simulations can be used to help understand the effect of external or internal forces. Similarly, zero-gravity simulation systems should provide a means of designing and exploring the capabilities of hypothetical zero-gravity situations before actually carrying out such actions. The advantage of using a simulation of the motion is that one can experiment with variations of a maneuver before attempting to teach it to an individual. The zero-gravity motion simulation problem can be divided into two broad areas: human movement and behavior in zero-gravity, and simulation of articulated mechanisms

Operating procedure for the production of the Global Human Settlement Layer from Landsat data of the epochs 1975, 1990, 2000, and 2014

A new global information baseline describing the spatial evolution of the human settlements in the past 40 years is presented. It is the most spatially global detailed data available today dedicated to human settlements, and it shows the greatest temporal depth. The core processing methodology relies on a new supervised classification paradigm based on symbolic machine learning. The information is extracted from Landsat image records organized in four collections corresponding to the epochs 1975, 1990, 2000, and 2014. The experiment reported here is the first known attempt to exploit global Multispectral Scanner data for historical land cover assessment. As primary goal, the Landsat-made Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) reports about the presence of built-up areas in the different epochs at the spatial resolution allowed by the Landsat sensor. Preliminary tests confirm that the quality of the information on built-up areas delivered by GHSL is better than other available global information layers extracted by automatic processing from Earth Observation data. An experimental multiple-class land-cover product is also produced from the epoch 2014 collection using low-resolution space-derived products as training set. The classification schema of the settlement distinguishes built-up areas based on vegetation contents and volume of buildings, the latter estimated from integration of SRTM and ASTER-GDEM data. On the overall, the experiment demonstrated a step forward in production of land cover information from global fine-scale satellite data using automatic and reproducible methodology.JRC.G.2-Global security and crisis managemen

Measures of Similarity Between Objects Based on Qualitative Shape Descriptions

A computational approach for comparing qualitative shape descriptions (QSDs) of objects within digital images is presented. First, the dissimilarity of qualitative features of shape is measured: (i) intuitively using conceptual neighbourhood diagrams; and (ii) mathematically using interval distances. Then, a similarity measure between QSDs is defined and tested using images of different categories of the MPEG-7-CE-Shape-1 library, images of tiles used to build mosaics, and a collection of Clipart images. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the similarity measure defined, which is invariant to translations, rotations and scaling, and which implicitly manages deformation of shape parts and incompleteness

Qualitative Spatial Configuration Queries Towards Next Generation Access Methods for GIS

For a long time survey, management, and provision of geographic information in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have mainly had an authoritative nature. Today the trend is changing and such an authoritative geographic information source is now accompanied by a public and freely available one which is usually referred to as Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI). Actually, the term VGI does not refer only to the mere geographic information, but, more generally, to the whole process which assumes the engagement of volunteers to collect and maintain such information in freely accessible GIS. The quick spread of VGI gives new relevance to a well-known challenge: developing new methods and techniques to ease down the interaction between users and GIS. Indeed, in spite of continuous improvements, GIS mainly provide interfaces tailored for experts, denying the casual user usually a non-expert the possibility to access VGI information. One main obstacle resides in the different ways GIS and humans deal with spatial information: GIS mainly encode spatial information in a quantitative format, whereas human beings typically prefer a qualitative and relational approach. For example, we use expressions like the lake is to the right-hand side of the wood or is there a supermarket close to the university? which qualitatively locate a spatial entity with respect to another. Nowadays, such a gap in representation has to be plugged by the user, who has to learn about the system structure and to encode his requests in a form suitable to the system. Contrarily, enabling gis to explicitly deal with qualitative spatial information allows for shifting the translation effort to the system side. Thus, to facilitate the interaction with human beings, GIS have to be enhanced with tools for efficiently handling qualitative spatial information. The work presented in this thesis addresses the problem of enabling Qualitative Spatial Configuration Queries (QSCQs) in GIS. A QSCQ is a spatial database query which allows for an automatic mapping of spatial descriptions produced by humans: A user naturally expresses his request of spatial information by drawing a sketch map or producing a verbal description. The qualitative information conveyed by such descriptions is automatically extracted and encoded into a QSCQ. The focus of this work is on two main challenges: First, the development of a framework that allows for managing in a spatial database the variety of spatial aspects that might be enclosed in a spatial description produced by a human. Second, the conception of Qualitative Spatial Access Methods (QSAMs): algorithms and data structures tailored for efficiently solving QSCQs. The main objective of a QSAM is that of countering the exponential explosion in terms of storage space occurring when switching from a quantitative to a qualitative spatial representation while keeping query response time acceptable

HandMeThat: Human-Robot Communication in Physical and Social Environments

We introduce HandMeThat, a benchmark for a holistic evaluation of instruction understanding and following in physical and social environments. While previous datasets primarily focused on language grounding and planning, HandMeThat considers the resolution of human instructions with ambiguities based on the physical (object states and relations) and social (human actions and goals) information. HandMeThat contains 10,000 episodes of human-robot interactions. In each episode, the robot first observes a trajectory of human actions towards her internal goal. Next, the robot receives a human instruction and should take actions to accomplish the subgoal set through the instruction. In this paper, we present a textual interface for our benchmark, where the robot interacts with a virtual environment through textual commands. We evaluate several baseline models on HandMeThat, and show that both offline and online reinforcement learning algorithms perform poorly on HandMeThat, suggesting significant room for future work on physical and social human-robot communications and interactions.Comment: NeurIPS 2022 (Dataset and Benchmark Track). First two authors contributed equally. Project page: http://handmethat.csail.mit.edu

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

A survey of qualitative spatial representations

Representation and reasoning with qualitative spatial relations is an important problem in artificial intelligence and has wide applications in the fields of geographic information system, computer vision, autonomous robot navigation, natural language understanding, spatial databases and so on. The reasons for this interest in using qualitative spatial relations include cognitive comprehensibility, efficiency and computational facility. This paper summarizes progress in qualitative spatial representation by describing key calculi representing different types of spatial relationships. The paper concludes with a discussion of current research and glimpse of future work