Measurement of the Non-Common Vertex Error of a Double Corner Cube

ABSTRACT The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) requires the control of the optical path of each interferometer with picometer accuracy. Laser metrology gauges are used to measure the path lengths to the fiiducial corner cubes at the siderostats. Due to the geometry of SIM a single corner cube does not have sufficient acceptance angle to work with all the gauges. Therefore SIM employs a double corner cube. Current fabrication methods are in fact not capable of producing such a double corner cube with vertices having sufficient commonality. The plan for SIM is to measure the non-commonalty of the vertices and correct for the error in orbit. SIM requires that the non-common vertex error (NCVE) of the double corner cube to be less than 6 µm. The required accuracy for the knowledge of the NCVE is less than 1 µm. This paper explains a method of measuring non-common vertices of a brassboard double corner cube with sub-micron accuracy. The results of such a measurement will be presented

Harnessing models of users’ goals to mediate clarification dialog in spoken language systems

Abstract. Speaker-independent speech recognition systems are being used with increasing frequency for command and control applications. To date, users of such systems must contend with the fragility of recognition with subtle changes in language usage and environmental acoustics. We describe work on coupling speech recognition systems with temporal probabilistic user models that provide inferences about the intentions associated with utterances. The methods can be employed to enhance the robustness of speech recognition systems by endowing the systems with an ability to reason about the costs and benefits of action in a setting and to make decisions about the best action to take given uncertainty about the meaning behind acoustic signals. The methods have been implemented in the form of a dialog clarification module that can be integrated with legacy spoken command and control systems. We describe representation and inference procedures and present details on the operation of an implemented spoken command and control development environment named DeepListener

Uncertainty, Utility, and Misunderstanding: A Decision-Theoretic Perspective on Grounding in Conversational Systems

Uncertainty plays a central role in the handling of misunderstanding in dialog. People engaged in conversation typically take a sequence of actions to establish and maintain mutual understanding---a process referred to as grounding. We explore representations and control strategies for grounding utterances founded on performing explicit probabilistic inference about failures in communication. The methods are informed by psychological studies and founded on principles of decision making under uncertainty. We delineate four distinct levels of analysis for representing uncertainty and describe a computational framework for guiding action in an automated conversational system. We demonstrate how the framework captures grounding behavior by facilitating collaborative resolution of uncertainty as implemented in a spoken interactive dialog prototype called the Bayesian Receptionist

Beyond Repair: Testing the Limits of the Conversational Repair System

Schlangen D, Fernández R. Beyond Repair: Testing the Limits of the Conversational Repair System. In: Keizer S, Bunt H, Paek T, eds. Proceedings of the 8th SIGdial Workshop on Discourse and Dialogue. Antwerp, Belgium; 2007: 51-54