The Chansonniers of Nicholas Du Chemin (1549-1551): A Digital Forum for Renaissance Music Books

The digital environment offers much that might advance the study, teaching, and performance of early music. Focusing on a neglected but important repertory of chansons from mid-sixteenth-century Paris, this unique project will put old books before a diverse audience of modern scholars and musicians in ways that will prompt renewed understanding of these cultural artifacts and their meanings. Our work will advance scholarship and serious study of Renaissance music in several related ways, offering a searchable image archive, an innovative electronic display for music books, commentaries and examples, and tools for research, transcription and collaboration

Integrating Recognition and Decision Making to Close the Interaction Loop for Autonomous Systems

Intelligent systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in daily life. Mobile devices are providing machine-generated support to users, robots are coming out of their cages in manufacturing to interact with co-workers, and cars with various degrees of self-driving capabilities operate amongst pedestrians and the driver. However, these interactive intelligent systems\u27 effectiveness depends on their understanding and recognition of human activities and goals, as well as their responses to people in a timely manner. The average person does not follow instructions step-by-step or act in a formulaic manner, but instead varies the order of actions and timing when performing a given task. People explore their surroundings, make mistakes, and may interrupt an activity to handle more urgent matters. The decisions that an autonomous intelligent system makes should account for such noise and variance regardless of the form of interaction, which includes adapting action choices and possibly its own goals.While most people take these aspects of interaction for granted, they are complex and involve many specific tasks that have primarily been studied independently within artificial intelligence. This results in open-loop interactive experiences where the user must perform a fixed input command or the intelligent system performs a hard-coded output response---one of the components of the interaction cannot adapt with respect to the other for longer-term back-and-forth interactions. This dissertation explores how developments in plan recognition, activity recognition, intent recognition, and autonomous planning can work together to develop more adaptive interactive experiences between autonomous intelligent systems and the people around them. In particular, we consider a unifying perspective of recognition algorithms that provides sufficient information to dynamically produce short-term automated planning problems, and we present ways to run these algorithms faster for the real-time needs of interaction. This exploration leads to the introduction of the Planning and Recognition Together Close the Interaction Loop (PReTCIL) framework that serves as a first step towards identifying how we can address the problem of closing the interaction loop, in addition to new questions that need to be considered

Bulk Composition of GJ 1214b and other sub-Neptune exoplanets

GJ1214b stands out among the detected low-mass exoplanets, because it is, so far, the only one amenable to transmission spectroscopy. Up to date there is no consensus about the composition of its envelope although most studies suggest a high molecular weight atmosphere. In particular, it is unclear if hydrogen and helium are present or if the atmosphere is water dominated. Here, we present results on the composition of the envelope obtained by using an internal structure and evolutionary model to fit the mass and radius data. By examining all possible mixtures of water and H/He, with the corresponding opacities, we find that the bulk amount of H/He of GJ1214b is at most 7% by mass. In general, we find the radius of warm sub-Neptunes to be most sensitive to the amount of H/He. We note that all (Kepler-11b,c,d,f, Kepler-18b, Kepler-20b, 55Cnc-e, Kepler-36c and Kepler-68b) but two (Kepler-11e and Kepler-30b) of the discovered low-mass planets so far have less than 10% H/He. In fact, Kepler-11e and Kepler-30b have 10-18% and 5-15% bulk H/He. Conversely, little can be determined about the H2O or rocky content of sub-Neptune planets. We find that although a 100% water composition fits the data for GJ1214b, based on formation constraints the presence of heavier refractory material on this planet is expected, and hence, so is a component lighter than water required. A robust determination by transmission spectroscopy of the composition of the upper atmosphere of GJ1214b will help determine the extent of compositional segregation between the atmosphere and envelope.Comment: Updated the masses and radii of the Kepler-11 system, added Kepler-30b as well in the analysis. Accepted in ApJ, 39 pages, 9 figure

Rotating pressure measurement system using an on board calibration standard

A computer-controlled multichannel pressure measurement system was developed to acquire detailed flow field measurements on board the Large Low Speed Centrifugal Compressor Research Facility at the NASA Lewis Research Center. A pneumatic slip ring seal assembly is used to transfer calibration pressures to a reference standard transducer on board the compressor rotor in order to measure very low differential pressures with the high accuracy required. A unique data acquisition system was designed and built to convert the analog signal from the reference transducer to the variable frequency required by the multichannel pressure measurement system and also to provide an output for temperature control of the reference transducer. The system also monitors changes in test cell barometric pressure and rotating seal leakage and provides an on screen warning to the operator if limits are exceeded. The methods used for the selection and testing of the the reference transducer are discussed, and the data acquisition system hardware and software design are described. The calculated and experimental data for the system measurement accuracy are also presented