Integrated sensor and controller framework : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Information and Telecommunications Engineering at Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

This thesis presents a software platform to integrate sensors, controllers, actuators and instrumentation within a common framework. This provides a flexible, reusable, reconfigurable and sealable system for designers to use as a base for any sensing and control platform. The purpose of the framework is to decrease system development time, and allow more time to be spent on designing the control algorithms, rather than implementing the system. The architecture is generic, and finds application in many areas such as home, office and factory automation, process and environmental monitoring, surveillance and robotics. The framework uses a data driven design, which separates the data storage areas (dataslots) from the components of the framework that process the data (processors). By separating all the components of the framework in this way, it allows a flexible configuration. When a processor places data into a dataslot, the dataslot queues all the processors that use that data to run. A system that is based on this framework is configured by a text file. All the components are defined in the file, with the interactions between them. The system can be thought of as multiple boxes, with the text file defining how these boxes are connected together. This allows rapid configuration of the system, as separate text files can be maintained for different configurations. A text file is used for the configuration instead of a graphical environment to simplify the development process, and to reduce development time. One potential limitation of the approach of separating the computational components is an increased overhead or latency. It is acknowledged that this is an important consideration in many control applications, so the framework is designed to minimise the latency through implementation of prioritized queues and multitasking. This prevents one slow component from degrading the performance of the rest of the system. The operation of the framework is demonstrated through a range of different applications. These show some of the key features including: acquiring data, handling multiple dataslots that a processor reads from or writes to, controlling actuators, how the virtual instrumentation works, network communications, where controllers fit into the framework, data logging, image and video dataslots. timers and dynamically linked libraries. A number of experiments show the framework under real conditions. The framework's data passing mechanisms are demonstrated, a simple control and data logging application is shown and an image processing application is shown to demonstrate the system under load. The latency of the framework is also determined. These illustrate how the framework would operate under different hardware and software applications. Work can still be done on the framework, as extra features can be added to improve the usability. Overall, this thesis presents a flexible system to integrate sensors, actuators, instrumentation and controllers that can be utilised in a wide range of applications

A Tractable Extension of Linear Indexed Grammars

It has been shown that Linear Indexed Grammars can be processed in polynomial time by exploiting constraints which make possible the extensive use of structure-sharing. This paper describes a formalism that is more powerful than Linear Indexed Grammar, but which can also be processed in polynomial time using similar techniques. The formalism, which we refer to as Partially Linear PATR manipulates feature structures rather than stacks.Comment: 8 pages LaTeX, uses eaclap.sty, to appear in EACL-9

Distributional composition using higher-order dependency vectors

This paper concerns how to apply compositional methods to vectors based on grammatical dependency relation vectors. We demonstrate the potential of a novel approach which uses higher-order grammatical dependency relations as features. We apply the approach to adjective-noun compounds with promising results in the prediction of the vectors for (held-out) observed phrases

Learning to predict distributions of words across domains

Although the distributional hypothesis has been applied successfully in many natural language processing tasks, systems using distributional information have been limited to a single domain because the distribution of a word can vary between domains as the word’s predominant meaning changes. However, if it were possible to predict how the distribution of a word changes from one domain to another, the predictions could be used to adapt a system trained in one domain to work in another. We propose an unsupervised method to predict the distribution of a word in one domain, given its distribution in another domain. We evaluate our method on two tasks: cross-domain part-of-speech tagging and cross-domain sentiment classification. In both tasks, our method significantly outperforms competitive baselines and returns results that are statistically comparable to current state-of-the-art methods, while requiring no task-specific customisations

Quantum mechanics of topological solitons

Topological solitons - are of broad interest in physics. They are objects with localised energy and stability ensured by their topological properties. It is possible to create them during phase transitions which break some sym- metry in a frustrated system. They are ubiquitous in condensed matter, ranging from monopole excitations in spin ices to vortices in superconduc- tors. In such situations, their behaviour has been extensively studied. Less well understood and yet equally interesting are the symmetry-breaking phase transitions that could produce topological defects is the early universe. Grand unified theories generically admit the creation of cosmic strings and monopoles, amongst other objects. There is no reason to expect that the behaviour of such objects should be classical or, indeed, supersymmetric, so to fully understand the behaviour of these theories it is necessary to study the quantum properties of the associated topological defects. Unfortunately, the standard analytical tools for studying quantum field theory - including perturbation theory - do not work so well when applied to topological defects. Motivated by this realisation, this thesis presents numerical techniques for the study of topological solitons in quantum field theory. Calculations are carried out nonperturbatively within the framework of lattice Monte Carlo simulations. Methods are demonstrated which use correlation functions to study the mass, interaction form factors, dispersion relations and excitations of quantum topological solitons. Results are compared to exact expressions obtained from integrability, and to previous work using less sophisticated numerical techniques. The techniques developed are applied to the prototypical kink soliton and to the 't Hooft-Polyakov monopole

Evaluation of LTAG parsing with supertag compaction

One of the biggest concerns that has been raised over the feasibility of using large-scale LTAGs in NLP is the amount of redundancy within a grammar¿s elementary tree set. This has led to various proposals on how best to represent grammars in a way that makes them compact and easily maintained (Vijay-Shanker and Schabes, 1992; Becker, 1993; Becker, 1994; Evans, Gazdar and Weir, 1995; Candito, 1996). Unfortunately, while this work can help to make the storage of grammars more efficient, it does nothing to prevent the problem reappearing when the grammar is processed by a parser and the complete set of trees is reproduced. In this paper we are concerned with an approach that addresses this problem of computational redundancy in the trees, and evaluate its effectiveness

D-Tree Grammars

DTG are designed to share some of the advantages of TAG while overcoming some of its limitations. DTG involve two composition operations called subsertion and sister-adjunction. The most distinctive feature of DTG is that, unlike TAG, there is complete uniformity in the way that the two DTG operations relate lexical items: subsertion always corresponds to complementation and sister-adjunction to modification. Furthermore, DTG, unlike TAG, can provide a uniform analysis for em wh-movement in English and Kashmiri, despite the fact that the em wh element in Kashmiri appears in sentence-second position, and not sentence-initial position as in English.Comment: Latex source, needs aclap.sty, 8 pages, to appear in ACL-9

Personality, Lifetime Earnings, and Retirement Wealth

Studies of adolescents and young adults have shown that schooling impacts economic outcomes beyond its impact on cognitive ability. Research has also shown that the personality trait of conscientiousness predicts health outcomes, academic outcomes, and divorce. Using the Big Five taxonomy of personality traits, this study examines whether non-cognitive traits are related to economic success over the life course. Examining Health and Retirement Study survey data linked to Social Security records on over 10,000 adults age 50 and over, we investigate the relationship of personality traits to economic outcomes. Controlling for cognitive ability and background variables, do more conscientious and emotionally stable adults have higher lifetime earnings, and is this due to higher annual earnings, longer work lives, or both? Do more conscientious adults save a higher proportion of their earnings for retirement, and does conscientiousness of each partner in a married couple matter? Do conscientiousness and emotional stability interact such that the effects of conscientiousness are greater among less emotionally stable adults?

Automaton-based parsing for lexicalized grammars

In wide-coverage lexicalized grammars many of the elementary structures have substructures in common. This means that during parsing some of the computation associated with different structures is duplicated. This paper explores ways in which the grammar can be precompiled into finite state automata so that some of this shared structure results in shared computation at run-time. 1 Introduction This paper investigates grammar precompilation techniques aimed at improving the parsing performance of lexicalized grammars. In a wide-coverage lexicalized grammar, such as the XTAG grammar (XTAG-Group, 1995), many of the elementary structures 1 have substructures in common. If such structures are viewed as independent by a parsing algorithm, the computation associated with their shared structure may be duplicated. This paper explores ways in which the grammar can be precompiled so that some of this shared structure results in shared computation at run-time. We assume as a starting point a co..