Information acquisition using eye-gaze tracking for person-following with mobile robots

In the effort of developing natural means for human-robot interaction (HRI), signifcant amount of research has been focusing on Person-Following (PF) for mobile robots. PF, which generally consists of detecting, recognizing and following people, is believed to be one of the required functionalities for most future robots that share their environments with their human companions. Research in this field is mostly directed towards fully automating this functionality, which makes the challenge even more tedious. Focusing on this challenge leads research to divert from other challenges that coexist in any PF system. A natural PF functionality consists of a number of tasks that are required to be implemented in the system. However, in more realistic life scenarios, not all the tasks required for PF need to be automated. Instead, some of these tasks can be operated by human operators and therefore require natural means of interaction and information acquisition. In order to highlight all the tasks that are believed to exist in any PF system, this paper introduces a novel taxonomy for PF. Also, in order to provide a natural means for HRI, TeleGaze is used for information acquisition in the implementation of the taxonomy. TeleGaze was previously developed by the authors as a means of natural HRI for teleoperation through eye-gaze tracking. Using TeleGaze in the aid of developing PF systems is believed to show the feasibility of achieving a realistic information acquisition in a natural way

Network Coding Over SATCOM: Lessons Learned

Satellite networks provide unique challenges that can restrict users' quality of service. For example, high packet erasure rates and large latencies can cause significant disruptions to applications such as video streaming or voice-over-IP. Network coding is one promising technique that has been shown to help improve performance, especially in these environments. However, implementing any form of network code can be challenging. This paper will use an example of a generation-based network code and a sliding-window network code to help highlight the benefits and drawbacks of using one over the other. In-order packet delivery delay, as well as network efficiency, will be used as metrics to help differentiate between the two approaches. Furthermore, lessoned learned during the course of our research will be provided in an attempt to help the reader understand when and where network coding provides its benefits.Comment: Accepted to WiSATS 201

Living with flexible exchange rates:

This overview paper examines two main issues. The first is why the exchange rate matters, especially for emerging market economies. The second is under what circumstances and how countries have dealt with the challenges posed by the exchange rate in recent years in the context of inflation targeting. We find that emerging market economies, being more exposed to the influence of the exchange rate, are likely to accord the exchange rate a bigger role in policy assessment and decision-making. However, even with the greater emphasis on the exchange rate, the emerging market economies under review have not acted in contradiction to their announced inflation targets. Furthermore, recent experience shows that having to keep an eye on the exchange rate is also a fact of life in industrial economies, inflation targeting or not.inflation targeting emerging markets exchange rate

Fast convergence of imaginary time evolution tensor network algorithms by recycling the environment

We propose an environment recycling scheme to speed up a class of tensor network algorithms that produce an approximation to the ground state of a local Hamiltonian by simulating an evolution in imaginary time. Specifically, we consider the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm applied to infinite systems in 1D and 2D, where the ground state is encoded, respectively, in a matrix product state (MPS) and in a projected entangled-pair state (PEPS). An important ingredient of the TEBD algorithm (and a main computational bottleneck, especially with PEPS in 2D) is the computation of the so-called environment, which is used to determine how to optimally truncate the bond indices of the tensor network so that their dimension is kept constant. In current algorithms, the environment is computed at each step of the imaginary time evolution, to account for the changes that the time evolution introduces in the many-body state represented by the tensor network. Our key insight is that close to convergence, most of the changes in the environment are due to a change in the choice of gauge in the bond indices of the tensor network, and not in the many-body state. Indeed, a consistent choice of gauge in the bond indices confirms that the environment is essentially the same over many time steps and can thus be re-used, leading to very substantial computational savings. We demonstrate the resulting approach in 1D and 2D by computing the ground state of the quantum Ising model in a transverse magnetic field.Comment: 17 pages, 28 figure

Buoyancy and g-modes in young superfluid neutron stars

We consider the local dynamics of a realistic neutron star core, including composition gradients, superfluidity and thermal effects. The main focus is on the gravity g-modes, which are supported by composition stratification and thermal gradients. We derive the equations that govern this problem in full detail, paying particular attention to the input that needs to be provided through the equation of state and distinguishing between normal and superfluid regions. The analysis highlights a number of key issues that should be kept in mind whenever equation of state data is compiled from nuclear physics for use in neutron star calculations. We provide explicit results for a particular stellar model and a specific nucleonic equation of state, making use of cooling simulations to show how the local wave spectrum evolves as the star ages. Our results show that the composition gradient is effectively dominated by the muons whenever they are present. When the star cools below the superfluid transition, the support for g-modes at lower densities (where there are no muons) is entirely thermal. We confirm the recent suggestion that the g-modes in this region may be unstable, but our results indicate that this instability will be weak and would only be present for a brief period of the star's life. Our analysis accounts for the presence of thermal excitations encoded in entrainment between the entropy and the superfluid component. Finally, we discuss the complete spectrum, including the normal sound waves and, in superfluid regions, the second sound.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, submitted to MNRA