Gravitational Waves: completeness and connectedness by geodesics

Only few months ago some physicists gave the official announcement that gravitational waves exist, but, from a geometrical point of view, they have always been ``real objects'' and their properties have been widely investigated. The aim of this talk is introducing generalized plane waves and discussing some of their properties such as geodesic connectedness and geodesic completeness.Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Cautious NMPC with Gaussian Process Dynamics for Autonomous Miniature Race Cars

This paper presents an adaptive high performance control method for autonomous miniature race cars. Racing dynamics are notoriously hard to model from first principles, which is addressed by means of a cautious nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) approach that learns to improve its dynamics model from data and safely increases racing performance. The approach makes use of a Gaussian Process (GP) and takes residual model uncertainty into account through a chance constrained formulation. We present a sparse GP approximation with dynamically adjusting inducing inputs, enabling a real-time implementable controller. The formulation is demonstrated in simulations, which show significant improvement with respect to both lap time and constraint satisfaction compared to an NMPC without model learning

Learning virtually or virtually learning? : a survey to gauge students’ use and perception of Blackboard and VLEs

This report presents the findings of a survey of students’ use and perception of Blackboard and VLEs as part of their learning in art and design higher education. In November 2007 a consultative process began through which the scope and design of the survey were decided. An on-line questionnaire was designed and piloted, and eventually responded to by 256 students across UAL during spring of 2008. This data was supplemented by data from a focus group interview held in June 2008

Towers for commuting endomorphisms, and combinatorial applications

We give an elementary proof of a generalization of Rokhlin's lemma for commuting non-invertible measure-preserving transformations, and we present several combinatorial applications.Comment: 13 pages. Referee's comments incorporated. To appear in Annales de l'Institut Fourie

Developing teaching identities : An evaluation of the UAL postgraduate certificate - teaching in HE

This report has two aims. Firstly, it is an evaluation report of the first run of a new course run by the Centre for Learning and Teaching in Art and Design (cltad). The second aim is to begin to report on a longitudinal study of a small sample of individuals entering into a career in teaching in Higher Arts Education. This strand of the study is not concluded in this report, but preliminary findings from the cohort regarding their professional identities at this point in time are included