Magnetic Actuators and Suspension for Space Vibration Control

The research on microgravity vibration isolation performed at the University of Virginia is summarized. This research on microgravity vibration isolation was focused in three areas: (1) the development of new actuators for use in microgravity isolation; (2) the design of controllers for multiple-degree-of-freedom active isolation; and (3) the construction of a single-degree-of-freedom test rig with umbilicals. Described are the design and testing of a large stroke linear actuator; the conceptual design and analysis of a redundant coarse-fine six-degree-of-freedom actuator; an investigation of the control issues of active microgravity isolation; a methodology for the design of multiple-degree-of-freedom isolation control systems using modern control theory; and the design and testing of a single-degree-of-freedom test rig with umbilicals

Enhanced image annotations based on spatial information extraction and ontologies

Current research on image annotation often represents images in terms of labelled regions or objects, but pays little attention to the spatial positions or relationships between those regions or objects. To be effective, general purpose image retrieval systems require images with comprehensive annotations describing fully the content of the image. Much research is being done on automatic image annotation schemes but few authors address the issue of spatial annotations directly. This paper begins with a brief analysis of real picture queries to librarians showing how spatial terms are used to formulate queries. The paper is then concerned with the development of an enhanced automatic image annotation system, which extracts spatial information about objects in the image. The approach uses region boundaries and region labels to generate annotations describing absolute object positions and also relative positions between pairs of objects. A domain ontology and spatial information ontology are also used to extract more complex information about the relative closeness of objects to the viewer

Legislatively Directed Judicial Activism: Some Reflections on the Meaning of the Civil Justice Reform Act

With the Civil Justice Reform Act (CJRA), Congress attempted to further a trend that the federal judiciary had undertaken largely on its own initiative. Sensing a critical need to address the mounting expense and delay of federal civil litigation, Congress, like the judiciary, sought to increase the degree of early and active involvement of judges in the adjudicatory process. The result of this mandate has been a further emphasis on the role of the judge as a case manager. As a necessary corollary, the liberty and self-determination of individual litigants-ideals that have historically been seen as philosophical cornerstones of the Anglo-American adjudicative process-have been correspondingly diminished. In this Article, the authors examine the departure from the philosophical moorings of the Anglo-American system of justice that implementation of the CJRA represents and consider whether the gains to be achieved by the Act, if successful, offset the potential costs to the litigants that the Act imposes

Legislatively Directed Judicial Activism: Some Reflections on the Meaning of the Civil Justice Reform Act, 28 U. Mich. J.L. Reform 305 (1995)

With the Civil Justice Reform Act (CJRA), Congress attempted to further a trend that the federal judiciary had undertaken largely on its own initiative. Sensing a critical need to address the mounting expense and delay of federal civil litigation, Congress, like the judiciary, sought to increase the degree of early and active involvement of judges in the adjudicatory process. The result of this mandate has been a further emphasis on the role of the judge as a case manager. As a necessary corollary, the liberty and self-determination of individual litigants-ideals that have historically been seen as philosophical cornerstones of the Anglo-American adjudicative process-have been correspondingly diminished. In this Article, the authors examine the departure from the philosophical moorings of the Anglo-American system of justice that implementation of the CJRA represents and consider whether the gains to be achieved by the Act, if successful, offset the potential costs to the litigants that the Act imposes

CubeSat Measures World's First Ice Cloud Map to Support Climate Research

Virginia Diodes, Inc. received NASA SBIR Awards to fund research and development for a lesser developed region of the electromagnetic spectrumterahertz waves. Their work led to funding from NASA ESTO, and the resulting CubeSat (named IceCube) captured the worlds first ice cloud map, which will contribute to our understanding of Earths climat

Hulton Abbey Skeletal Digitisation Project JISC / Academy Distributed e-Learning (DeL) Programme II

The aim of this project was to produce a digitised record/resources from skeletal material recovered from a well publicised excavation of historical importance in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. This excavation took place at Hulton Abbey and produced a published book as part of its work. Whilst the initial aim of this project was to produce digitised resources which will be actively used for forensic science teaching at Staffordshire University and Reading University these can equally and readily be adopted by other organisations and institutions. In addition, due to the interdisciplinary interest in this work, the potential for re-purposing and re-use of these digitised resources is enormous. Due to the anatomical nature of the skeletal excavations there is potential for use in anthropological and biological (e.g. disease) studies and there is also historical and religious sociological and cultural applications as well as in photographic studies, computing and e-learning technologies

Video shot boundary detection: seven years of TRECVid activity

Shot boundary detection (SBD) is the process of automatically detecting the boundaries between shots in video. It is a problem which has attracted much attention since video became available in digital form as it is an essential pre-processing step to almost all video analysis, indexing, summarisation, search, and other content-based operations. Automatic SBD was one of the tracks of activity within the annual TRECVid benchmarking exercise, each year from 2001 to 2007 inclusive. Over those seven years we have seen 57 different research groups from across the world work to determine the best approaches to SBD while using a common dataset and common scoring metrics. In this paper we present an overview of the TRECVid shot boundary detection task, a high-level overview of the most significant of the approaches taken, and a comparison of performances, focussing on one year (2005) as an example