The beginning of computer science in Argentina – Clementina - (1961-1966) : A personal experience

1957 marked the beginning of modern education in computing in Argentina. I was lucky enough to live this part of the history. After issuing an international bid that year, all members of a special commission from the University of Buenos Aires selected the Ferranti Mercury computer to be purchased for the University. Once installed in 1961, an Institute of Calculus1 was created with the aim of improving the use and professional and technical applications of the machine. Almost at the same time, a new course of study was organized, the Scientific Computist2. Those three events, promoted by our teacher and mentor Manuel Sadosky, set the start point of education assisted by computers in our country. The work at the Institute covered three fields: problem solving, research and teaching. Several Working Teams were organized looking to solve “real problems” in different disciplines: Mathematical Economics, Operations Research, Statistics, Linguistics, Applied Mechanics, Numerical Analysis, Electronic Engineering and Programming Systems. The architecture, structure, operation, languages and other characteristics of the machine, quite advanced for the time, determined the specific area of each of the working teams. After the military coup of 1966 disrupted several institutions, the University and several of its working teams, especially our Institute, the Institute stopped all of its operations. The Mercury computer era came to an abrupt end in our country. 90% of the members of the Institute, scientists, professors and highly trained professionals, resigned and many of them left the country taking their knowledge and expertise abroad.2nd IFIP Conference on the History of Computing and EducationRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

The beginning of computer science in Argentina – Clementina - (1961-1966) : A personal experience

1957 marked the beginning of modern education in computing in Argentina. I was lucky enough to live this part of the history. After issuing an international bid that year, all members of a special commission from the University of Buenos Aires selected the Ferranti Mercury computer to be purchased for the University. Once installed in 1961, an Institute of Calculus1 was created with the aim of improving the use and professional and technical applications of the machine. Almost at the same time, a new course of study was organized, the Scientific Computist2. Those three events, promoted by our teacher and mentor Manuel Sadosky, set the start point of education assisted by computers in our country. The work at the Institute covered three fields: problem solving, research and teaching. Several Working Teams were organized looking to solve “real problems” in different disciplines: Mathematical Economics, Operations Research, Statistics, Linguistics, Applied Mechanics, Numerical Analysis, Electronic Engineering and Programming Systems. The architecture, structure, operation, languages and other characteristics of the machine, quite advanced for the time, determined the specific area of each of the working teams. After the military coup of 1966 disrupted several institutions, the University and several of its working teams, especially our Institute, the Institute stopped all of its operations. The Mercury computer era came to an abrupt end in our country. 90% of the members of the Institute, scientists, professors and highly trained professionals, resigned and many of them left the country taking their knowledge and expertise abroad.2nd IFIP Conference on the History of Computing and EducationRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Hypersensitive transport in a phase model with multiplicative stimulus

In a simple system with periodic symmetric potential, the phase model under effect of strong multiplicative noise or periodic square wave, we found a giant response, in the form of directed flux, to an ultrasmall dc signal. The resulting flux demonstrates a bell-shaped dependence on multiplicative noise correlation time and occurs even in the case of large (compared to the signal) additive noise.Comment: 3 EPS figures, submitted to Phys.Lett.

Motion and emotion estimation for robotic autism intervention.

Robots have recently emerged as a novel approach to treating autism spectrum disorder (ASD). A robot can be programmed to interact with children with ASD in order to reinforce positive social skills in a non-threatening environment. In prior work, robots were employed in interaction sessions with ASD children, but their sensory and learning abilities were limited, while a human therapist was heavily involved in “puppeteering” the robot. The objective of this work is to create the next-generation autism robot that includes several new interactive and decision-making capabilities that are not found in prior technology. Two of the main features that this robot would need to have is the ability to quantitatively estimate the patient’s motion performance and to correctly classify their emotions. This would allow for the potential diagnosis of autism and the ability to help autistic patients practice their skills. Therefore, in this thesis, we engineered components for a human-robot interaction system and confirmed them in experiments with the robots Baxter and Zeno, the sensors Empatica E4 and Kinect, and, finally, the open-source pose estimation software OpenPose. The Empatica E4 wristband is a wearable device that collects physiological measurements in real time from a test subject. Measurements were collected from ASD patients during human-robot interaction activities. Using this data and labels of attentiveness from a trained coder, a classifier was developed that provides a prediction of the patient’s level of engagement. The classifier outputs this prediction to a robot or supervising adult, allowing for decisions during intervention activities to keep the attention of the patient with autism. The CMU Perceptual Computing Lab’s OpenPose software package enables body, face, and hand tracking using an RGB camera (e.g., web camera) or an RGB-D camera (e.g., Microsoft Kinect). Integrating OpenPose with a robot allows the robot to collect information on user motion intent and perform motion imitation. In this work, we developed such a teleoperation interface with the Baxter robot. Finally, a novel algorithm, called Segment-based Online Dynamic Time Warping (SoDTW), and metric are proposed to help in the diagnosis of ASD. Social Robot Zeno, a childlike robot developed by Hanson Robotics, was used to test this algorithm and metric. Using the proposed algorithm, it is possible to classify a subject’s motion into different speeds or to use the resulting SoDTW score to evaluate the subject’s abilities

A variational principle for two-fluid models

A variational principle for two-fluid mixtures is proposed. The Lagrangian is constructed as the difference between the kinetic energy of the mixture and a thermodynamic potential conjugated to the internal energy with respect to the relative velocity of phases. The equations of motion and a set of Rankine-Hugoniot conditions are obtained. It is proved also that the convexity of the internal energy guarantees the hyperbolicity of the one-dimensional equations of motion linearized at rest.Comment: 7 page

Comparison of three-dimensional and two-dimensional statistical mechanics of shear layers for flow between two parallel plates

It is shown that the averaged velocity profiles predicted by statistical mechanics of point vortices and statistical mechanics of vortex lines are practically indistinguishable for a shear flow between two parallel walls