The PAMELA Storage and Control Unit

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Linear Bellman combination for control of character animation

Controllers are necessary for physically-based synthesis of character animation. However, creating controllers requires either manual tuning or expensive computer optimization. We introduce linear Bellman combination as a method for reusing existing controllers. Given a set of controllers for related tasks, this combination creates a controller that performs a new task. It naturally weights the contribution of each component controller by its relevance to the current state and goal of the system. We demonstrate that linear Bellman combination outperforms naive combination often succeeding where naive combination fails. Furthermore, this combination is provably optimal for a new task if the component controllers are also optimal for related tasks. We demonstrate the applicability of linear Bellman combination to interactive character control of stepping motions and acrobatic maneuvers.Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game LabNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 2007043041)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-0810888)Adobe SystemsPixar (Firm

Sailing for Science: on board experiences for transferring knowledge on Historical Oceanography for Future Innovation

Smart, sustainable and inclusive Blue Growth means also knowing past technology and the paths followed by ancients in order to understand and monitor marine environments. In general, history of Science is a matter that is not enough explored and explained or promoted in high schools or university official programmes, and, usually, scientist do not consider it as an important part of their curricula. However, bad or good ideas, abandoned or forgotten beliefs, concepts, opinions, do still have a great potential for inspiring present and future scientists, no matter in which historical period they may have been formulated: they should be always be taken into consideration, critically examined and observed by a very close point of view, not just as part of the intellectual framework of some obsolete ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ with limited access except for the chosen few. Moreover, history of Science should be transmitted in a more practical way, with hands-on labs showing the limits and challenges that prior generations of ocean explorers, investigators and seafarers had to face in order to answer to crucial questions as self-orientation in open sea, understanding main currents and waves, predicting meteorological conditions for a safe navigation. Oceanography is a relatively young branch of science, and still needs further approvals and knowledge (National Science Foundation, 2000). The Scientific Dissemination Group (SDG) “La Spezia Gulf of Science” – made up by Research Centres, Schools and Cultural associations located in La Spezia (Liguria, Italy) - has a decadal experience in initiatives aimed at people and groups of people of all ages, who are keen on science or who can be guided in any case to take an interest in scientific matters (Locritani et al., 2015). Amongst the SDG activities, the tight relationship with the Historical Oceanography Society, the Italian Navy and the Naval Technical Museum (that collects a rich heritage of civilization, technology and culture witnesses, related to the naval history of seamanship from the origins up to nowadays), allowed the creation of a special educational format based on Historical Oceanography, for university and high school students as an integration for their curriculum. The Historical Oceanography Society has provided the major knowledges included in the ancient volumes of its archive, thanks to the availability of its members that also held theoretical and practical lessons during the course. The present paper will describe the one-week special course (about 60 hours of theory and practice with technical visits to Research centres and Museums) that has been planned to be carried out on board of the Italian Training Navy Ship (A. Vespucci) and has been organized in order to give the hints about on board life, as well as theoretical lessons on modern and historical oceanography, hands-on labs on oceanographic instruments from public and private collections, physiology of diving techniques and astronomy. The general aim of this course has been, hence, to give to excellent students all those technological but also creative and imaginative features of our past.PublishedVienna1TM. Formazion

Disrupted in Schizophrenia 1 Regulates Neuronal Progenitor Proliferation via Modulation of GSK3β/β-Catenin Signaling

The Disrupted in Schizophrenia 1 (DISC1) gene is disrupted by a balanced chromosomal translocation (1; 11) (q42; q14.3) in a Scottish family with a high incidence of major depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. Subsequent studies provided indications that DISC1 plays a role in brain development. Here, we demonstrate that suppression of DISC1 expression reduces neural progenitor proliferation, leading to premature cell cycle exit and differentiation. Several lines of evidence suggest that DISC1 mediates this function by regulating GSK3β. First, DISC1 inhibits GSK3β activity through direct physical interaction, which reduces β-catenin phosphorylation and stabilizes β-catenin. Importantly, expression of stabilized β-catenin overrides the impairment of progenitor proliferation caused by DISC1 loss of function. Furthermore, GSK3 inhibitors normalize progenitor proliferation and behavioral defects caused by DISC1 loss of function. Together, these results implicate DISC1 in GSK3β/β-catenin signaling pathways and provide a framework for understanding how alterations in this pathway may contribute to the etiology of psychiatric disorders.National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (U.S.) (Young Investigator Award)Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Postdoctoral Award)Human Frontier Science Program (Strasbourg, France) (Fellowship)Singleton FellowshipNational Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant NS37007

Efficient Explicit Constructions of Multipartite Secret Sharing Schemes

Multipartite secret sharing schemes are those having a multipartite access structure, in which the set of participants is divided into several parts and all participants in the same part play an equivalent role. Secret sharing schemes for multipartite access structures have received considerable attention due to the fact that multipartite secret sharing can be seen as a natural and useful generalization of threshold secret sharing. This work deals with efficient and explicit constructions of ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes, while most of the known constructions are either inefficient or randomized. Most ideal multipartite secret sharing schemes in the literature can be classified as either hierarchical or compartmented. The main results are the constructions for ideal hierarchical access structures, a family that contains every ideal hierarchical access structure as a particular case such as the disjunctive hierarchical threshold access structure and the conjunctive hierarchical threshold access structure, the constructions for three families of compartmented access structures, and the constructions for two families compartmented access structures with compartments. On the basis of the relationship between multipartite secret sharing schemes, polymatroids, and matroids, the problem of how to construct a scheme realizing a multipartite access structure can be transformed to the problem of how to find a representation of a matroid from a presentation of its associated polymatroid. In this paper, we give efficient algorithms to find representations of the matroids associated to several families of multipartite access structures. More precisely, based on know results about integer polymatroids, for each of those families of access structures above, we give an efficient method to find a representation of the integer polymatroid over some finite field, and then over some finite extension of that field, we give an efficient method to find a presentation of the matroid associated to the integer polymatroid. Finally, we construct ideal linear schemes realizing those families of multipartite access structures by efficient methods