Gaze and Gestures in Telepresence: multimodality, embodiment, and roles of collaboration

This paper proposes a controlled experiment to further investigate the usefulness of gaze awareness and gesture recognition in the support of collaborative work at a distance. We propose to redesign experiments conducted several years ago with more recent technology that would: a) enable to better study of the integration of communication modalities, b) allow users to freely move while collaborating at a distance and c) avoid asymmetries of communication between collaborators.Comment: Position paper, International Workshop New Frontiers in Telepresence 2010, part of CSCW2010, Savannah, GA, USA, 7th of February, 2010. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/events/nft2010

Improving PWR core simulations by Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis and Bayesian inference

A Monte Carlo-based Bayesian inference model is applied to the prediction of reactor operation parameters of a PWR nuclear power plant. In this non-perturbative framework, high-dimensional covariance information describing the uncertainty of microscopic nuclear data is combined with measured reactor operation data in order to provide statistically sound, well founded uncertainty estimates of integral parameters, such as the boron letdown curve and the burnup-dependent reactor power distribution. The performance of this methodology is assessed in a blind test approach, where we use measurements of a given reactor cycle to improve the prediction of the subsequent cycle. As it turns out, the resulting improvement of the prediction quality is impressive. In particular, the prediction uncertainty of the boron letdown curve, which is of utmost importance for the planning of the reactor cycle length, can be reduced by one order of magnitude by including the boron concentration measurement information of the previous cycle in the analysis. Additionally, we present first results of non-perturbative nuclear-data updating and show that predictions obtained with the updated libraries are consistent with those induced by Bayesian inference applied directly to the integral observables.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure