How Do You Like Me in This: User Embodiment Preferences for Companion Agents

We investigate the relationship between the embodiment of an artificial companion and user perception and interaction with it. In a Wizard of Oz study, 42 users interacted with one of two embodiments: a physical robot or a virtual agent on a screen through a role-play of secretarial tasks in an office, with the companion providing essential assistance. Findings showed that participants in both condition groups when given the choice would prefer to interact with the robot companion, mainly for its greater physical or social presence. Subjects also found the robot less annoying and talked to it more naturally. However, this preference for the robotic embodiment is not reflected in the users’ actual rating of the companion or their interaction with it. We reflect on this contradiction and conclude that in a task-based context a user focuses much more on a companion’s behaviour than its embodiment. This underlines the feasibility of our efforts in creating companions that migrate between embodiments while maintaining a consistent identity from the user’s point of view

Feed-forward Torque Control of Interior Permanent Magnet Brushless AC Drive for Traction Applications

This paper presents a feed-forward torque control (FTC) technique for interior permanent magnet (IPM) brushless AC (BLAC) drives in traction applications. It is shown that by adopting the Newton-Raphson iterative method for solving the proposed high-order nonlinear relationship between the torque demand, flux-linkage and desirable dq-axis currents, FTC with due account of nonlinear machine parameters can be achieved for IPM BLAC drives. It is also proven that the comparison between the reference voltage magnitudes under maximum torque per ampere (MTPA) and field-weakening (FW) operations together with online base speed determination can be utilized for FW operation activation to achieve full exploitation of the available DC-link voltage during the transition between the constant torque and FW operation regions. Since both the dqaxis current references and the base speed for FW operation activation are computed online, the proposed FTC technique provides flexibility for online parameter update or estimation and is able to cope with wide DC-link voltage variation. The proposed FTC strategy is experimentally validated by measurements on a 10kW wide constant power speed range (CPSR) IPM BLAC machine drive

Predicting the Next Best View for 3D Mesh Refinement

3D reconstruction is a core task in many applications such as robot navigation or sites inspections. Finding the best poses to capture part of the scene is one of the most challenging topic that goes under the name of Next Best View. Recently, many volumetric methods have been proposed; they choose the Next Best View by reasoning over a 3D voxelized space and by finding which pose minimizes the uncertainty decoded into the voxels. Such methods are effective, but they do not scale well since the underlaying representation requires a huge amount of memory. In this paper we propose a novel mesh-based approach which focuses on the worst reconstructed region of the environment mesh. We define a photo-consistent index to evaluate the 3D mesh accuracy, and an energy function over the worst regions of the mesh which takes into account the mutual parallax with respect to the previous cameras, the angle of incidence of the viewing ray to the surface and the visibility of the region. We test our approach over a well known dataset and achieve state-of-the-art results.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, to be published in IAS-1

Transrectal Prostate Biopsy and Fiducial Marker Placement in a Standart 1.5T Magnetic Resonance Imaging Scanner

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Purpose: We investigated the accuracy and feasibility of a system that provides transrectal needle access to the prostate concurrent with 1.5 Tesla MRI which previously has not been possible. Materials and Methods: In 5 patients with previously diagnosed prostate cancer, MRI guided intraprostatic placement of gold fiducial markers (4 procedures) and/or prostate biopsy (3 procedures) was performed using local anesthesia. Results: Mean procedure duration was 76 minutes and all patients tolerated the intervention well. Procedure related adverse events included self-limited hematuria and hematochezia following 3 of 8 procedures (all resolved in less than 1 week). Mean needle placement accuracy was 1.9 mm for the fiducial marker placement studies and 1.8 mm for the biopsy procedures. Mean fiducial marker placement accuracy was 4.8 mm and the mean fiducial marker placement accuracy transverse to the needle direction was 2.6 mm. All patients who underwent the procedure were able to complete their course of radiotherapy without delay or complication. Conclusions: While studies of clinical usefulness are warranted, transrectal 1.5 T MRI guided prostate biopsy and fiducial marker placement is feasible using this system, providing new opportunities for image guided diagnostic and therapeutic prostate interventions

Autobiography as unconventional history: Constructing the author

The experience of historians as autobiographers has led them to reconsider the nature of historical knowledge and the function of the historian as an intermediary between the past and present. In the new theoretical context of the social sciences and historiography, we can take this proposal further and consider autobiography as a valid form of history—or, at least, as ‘unconventional history’, understood as negotiations with history that transcend or subvert traditional chronological monographs, posit the ‘subjective’ as a useful form of knowledge, and engage the constructed nature of the text. Taking this hypothesis as a starting point, this article reads historians' autobiographical texts to explore if we can/should continue to defend the classic distinction between subject and object, historian scientist and historian author. In this article I compare the work of several historian autobiographers that permit us to identify different methodologies in approaching the story of the self that also reflects different theoretical conceptions of history. I argue that historians that may be considered ‘constructionist’, such as Fernand Braudel, Annie Kriegel, George Duby, and Eric Hobsbawm, design their autobiographies in the same way they articulate their historical texts: by foregrounding objectivity and establishing critical distance between the subject—the historian who narrates the story—and the object—one's own life. Unconventional or experimental approaches, such as those espoused by Robert Rosenstone, Dominick LaCapra, or Clifford Geertz, result in more self-conscious autobiographies, which are, paradoxically, often more realistic and more revealing of the epistemological nature of life writing. ----------------- La experiencia de los historiadores como autobiógrafos les ha llevado a reconsiderar la naturaleza del conocimiento histórico y la función del historiador como un intermediario entre el pasado y el presente. En el nuevo contexto teórico de las ciencias sociales y la historiografía podemos tomar esta propuesta más allá y considerar la autobiografía como una forma válida de historia-o, al menos, de historia ‘poco convencional’-, entendida como negociaciones con la historia que trascienden o subvierten las tradicionales monografías cronológicas, plantean lo "subjetivo" como una forma útil de conocimiento y participan de la naturaleza construida del texto. Tomando esta hipótesis como punto de partida, este artículo lee los textos autobiográficos de los historiadores para explorar si se puede / debe seguir defendiendo la clásica distinción entre sujeto y objeto, historiador científico e historiador escritor. En este artículo comparo el trabajo de varios historiadores autobiógrafos que nos permiten identificar las diferentes metodologías para acercarse a la historia del yo y que también reflejan las diferentes concepciones teóricas de la historia. Sostengo que los historiadores que pueden considerarse "constructivistas", como Fernand Braudel, Annie Kriegel, George Duby y Eric Hobsbawm, diseñan sus autobiografías de la misma forma que articulan sus textos históricos: poniendo en primer plano la objetividad y estableciendo una distancia crítica entre el sujeto -el historiador que narra la historia-y el objeto- la vida de cada uno. Enfoques no convencionales o experimentales, como los expuestos por Robert Rosenstone, Dominick LaCapra, o Clifford Geertz, resultan autobiografías más autoconscientes, que son, paradójicamente, a menudo más realistas y más reveladoras de la naturaleza epistemológica de la escritura de la vida

The Epistemology of Intentionality: Notional Constituents vs. Direct Grasp

Franz Brentano is well known for highlighting the importance of intentionality, but he said curiously little about the nature of intentionality. According to Mark Textor, there is a deep reason for this: Brentano took intentionality to be a conceptual primitive the nature of which is revealed only in direct grasp. Although there is certainly textual support for this interpretation, it appears in tension with Brentano’s repeated attempts to analyze intentionality in terms of ‘notional constituents’ – aspects of intentionality which cannot come apart in reality but which can be conceptually distinguished. After bringing out this tension, I explore some options for resolving it, ultimately offering my own favored interpretation

The ArgoNeuT Detector in the NuMI Low-Energy beam line at Fermilab

The ArgoNeuT liquid argon time projection chamber has collected thousands of neutrino and antineutrino events during an extended run period in the NuMI beam-line at Fermilab. This paper focuses on the main aspects of the detector layout and related technical features, including the cryogenic equipment, time projection chamber, read-out electronics, and off-line data treatment. The detector commissioning phase, physics run, and first neutrino event displays are also reported. The characterization of the main working parameters of the detector during data-taking, the ionization electron drift velocity and lifetime in liquid argon, as obtained from through-going muon data complete the present report.Comment: 43 pages, 27 figures, 5 tables - update referenc

Ontology of core data mining entities

In this article, we present OntoDM-core, an ontology of core data mining entities. OntoDM-core defines themost essential datamining entities in a three-layered ontological structure comprising of a specification, an implementation and an application layer. It provides a representational framework for the description of mining structured data, and in addition provides taxonomies of datasets, data mining tasks, generalizations, data mining algorithms and constraints, based on the type of data. OntoDM-core is designed to support a wide range of applications/use cases, such as semantic annotation of data mining algorithms, datasets and results; annotation of QSAR studies in the context of drug discovery investigations; and disambiguation of terms in text mining. The ontology has been thoroughly assessed following the practices in ontology engineering, is fully interoperable with many domain resources and is easy to extend

Generating SQL queries from visual specifications

Abstract: Structured Query Language (SQL) is the most widely used declarative language for accessing relational databases, and an essential topic in introductory database courses in higher learning institutions. Despite the intuitiveness of SQL, formulating and comprehending written queries can be confusing, especially for undergraduate students. One major reason for this is that the simple syntax of SQL is often misleading and hard to comprehend. A number of tools have been developed to aid the comprehension of queries and improve the mental models of students concerning the underlying logic of SQL. Some of these tools employed visualisation and animation in their approach to aid the comprehension of SQL. This paper presents an interactive comprehension aid based on visualisation, specifically designed to support the SQL SELECT statement, an area identified in the literature as problematic for students. The visualisation tool uses visual specifications depicting SQL operations to build queries. This is expected to reduce the cognitive load of a student who is learning SQL. We have shown with an online survey that adopting visual specifications in teaching systems assist students in attaining a richer learning experience in introductory database courses

Vitamin D receptor ChIP-seq in primary CD4+ cells: relationship to serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and autoimmune disease

PMCID: PMC3710212This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited