Multi-contact vertical ladder climbing with an HRP-2 humanoid

We describe the research and the integration methods we developed to make the HRP-2 humanoid robot climb vertical industrial-norm ladders. We use our multi-contact planner and multi-objective closed-loop control formulated as a QP (quadratic program). First, a set of contacts to climb the ladder is planned off-line (automatically or by the user). These contacts are provided as an input for a finite state machine. The latter builds supplementary tasks that account for geometric uncertainties and specific grasps procedures to be added to the QP controller. The latter provides instant desired states in terms of joint accelerations and contact forces to be tracked by the embedded low-level motor controllers. Our trials revealed that hardware changes are necessary, and parts of software must be made more robust. Yet, we confirmed that HRP-2 has the kinematic and power capabilities to climb real industrial ladders, such as those found in nuclear power plants and large scale manufacturing factories (e.g. aircraft, shipyard) and construction sites.     

Examining the predictive relationship between personality and emotion traits and students’ agent-directed emotions: towards emotionally-adaptive agent-based learning environments

The current study examined the relationships between learners’ (\(N = 123\)) personality traits, the emotions they typically experience while studying (trait studying emotions), and the emotions they reported experiencing as a result of interacting with four pedagogical agents (agent-directed emotions) in MetaTutor, an advanced multi-agent learning environment. Overall, significant relationships between a subset of trait emotions (trait anger, trait anxiety) and personality traits (agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) were found for four agent-directed emotions (enjoyment, pride, boredom, and neutral) though the relationships differed between pedagogical agents. These results demonstrate that some trait emotions and personality traits can be used to predict learners’ emotions directed toward specific pedagogical agents (with different roles). Results provide suggestions for adapting pedagogical agents to support learners’ (with certain characteristics; e.g., high in neuroticism or agreeableness) experience of adaptive emotions (e.g., enjoyment) and minimize their experience on non-adaptive emotions (e.g., boredom). Such an approach presents a scalable and easily implementable method for creating emotionally-adaptive, agent-based learning environments, and improving learner-pedagogical agent interactions in order to support learning.     

A method to select a successful interoperability solution through a simulation approach

Enterprise applications and software systems need to be interoperable in order to achieve seamless business across organizational boundaries and thus realize virtual networked organizations. Our proposition can be considered as an interoperability project selection approach and is based on three steps: (1) Modelling both collaborative business processes and potential related interoperability projects; (2) Evaluating the accessibility of each project regarding the current state of the organization; (3) Simulating each project and assessing the associated performance. These results are finally projected on a comparison matrix used as a decision support to select the most appropriate interoperability solution. An application case extracted from the French aerospace sector demonstrates the applicability and the benefits of the proposition.     

The EU data protection reform and the challenges of big data: remaining uncertainties and ways forward

As the first broad reform of the EU data protection legislation is being achieved, and notwithstanding EU institutions’ confident discourse, scepticism remains about the reform’s ability to safeguard the fundamental right to data protection in the face of evolving data processing techniques underlying so-called big data. Yet, one might wonder whether the cause for this difficulty should be ascribed mainly to technological progresses that the law finds it hard to deal with or rather to the policy choices embedded in the legal reform itself. Indeed, a new data protection enforcement model is being adopted, which relies heavily on risk assessment and management by the data controllers themselves. Likewise, data protection authorities see their supervisory role significantly weakened. These developments and the underlying rationality are discussed. Given the limitations of the risk-based approach as currently devised, we suggest that it be reappraised in consideration of risk regulatory experiences in other domains.     

Blind digital watermarking in PDF documents using Spread Transform Dither Modulation

In this paper, a blind digital watermarking scheme for Portable Document Format (PDF) documents is proposed. The proposed method is based on a variant Quantization Index Modulation (QIM) method called Spread Transform Dither Modulation (STDM). Each bit of the secret message is embedded into a group of characters, more specifically in their x-coordinate values. The method exhibits experiments of two opposite objectives: transparency and robustness, and is motivated to present an acceptable distortion value that shows sufficient robustness under high density noises attacks while preserving sufficient transparency.     

Prediction of visual attention with deep CNN on artificially degraded videos for studies of attention of patients with Dementia

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Studies of visual attention of patients with Dementia such as Parkinson’s Disease Dementia and Alzheimer Disease is a promising way for non-invasive...     

From software extensions to product lines of dataflow programs

Dataflow programs are widely used. Each program is a directed graph where nodes are computations and edges indicate the flow of data. In prior work, we reverse-engineered legacy dataflow programs by deriving their optimized implementations from a simple specification graph using graph transformations called refinements and optimizations. In MDE speak, our derivations were PIM-to-PSM mappings. In this paper, we show how extensions complement refinements, optimizations, and PIM-to-PSM derivations to make the process of reverse engineering complex legacy dataflow programs tractable. We explain how optional functionality in transformations can be encoded, thereby enabling us to encode product lines of transformations as well as product lines of dataflow programs. We describe the implementation of extensions in the \(\mathtt{ReFlO}\) tool and present two non-trivial case studies as evidence of our work’s generality.     

Homotopy-based surface reconstruction with application to?acoustic signals

This work introduces a new algorithm for surface reconstruction in ℝ³ from spatially arranged one-dimensional cross sections embedded in ℝ³. This is generally the case with acoustic signals that pierce an object non-destructively. Continuous deformations (homotopies) that smoothly reconstruct information between any pair of successive cross sections are derived. The zero level set of the resulting homotopy field generates the desired surface. Four types of homotopies are suggested that are well suited to generate a smooth surface. We also provide derivation of necessary higher order homotopies that can generate a C ² surface. An algorithm to generate surface from acoustic sonar signals is presented with results. Reconstruction accuracies of the homotopies are compared by means of simulations performed on basic geometric primitives.     

A Novel Approach Makes Higher Order Wavelets Really Efficient for Radiosity

Since wavelets were introduced in the radiosity algorithm ⁵, surprisingly little research has been devoted to higher order wavelets and their use in radiosity algorithms. A previous study ¹³ has shown that wavelet radiosity, and especially higher order wavelet radiosity was not bringing significant improvements over hierarchical radiosity and was having a very important extra memory cost, thus prohibiting any effective computation. In this paper, we present a new implementation of wavelets in the radiosity algorithm, that is substantially different from previous implementations in several key areas (refinement oracle, link storage, resolution algorithm). We show that, with this implementation, higher order wavelets are actually bringing an improvement over standard hierarchical radiosity and lower order wavelets.