Sketch‐to‐Design: Context‐Based Part Assembly

Designing 3D objects from scratch is difficult, especially when the user intent is fuzzy and lacks a clear target form. We facilitate design by providing reference and inspiration from existing model contexts. We rethink model design as navigating through different possible combinations of part assemblies based on a large collection of pre‐segmented 3D models. We propose an interactive sketch‐to‐design system, where the user sketches prominent features of parts to combine. The sketched strokes are analysed individually, and more importantly, in context with the other parts to generate relevant shape suggestions via adesign galleryinterface. As a modelling session progresses and more parts get selected, contextual cues become increasingly dominant, and the model quickly converges to a final form. As a key enabler, we use pre‐learned part‐based contextual information to allow the user to quickly explore different combinations of parts. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach for efficiently designing new variations from existing shape collections.     

Folksonomy‐Based Recommender Systems: A State‐of‐the‐Art Review

Collaborative tagging systems, also known as folksonomies, have grown in popularity over the Web on account of their simplicity to organize several types of content (e.g., Web pages, pictures, and video) using open‐ended tags. The rapid adoption of these systems has led to an increasing amount of users providing information about themselves and, at the same time, a growing and rich corpus of social knowledge that can be exploited by recommendation technologies. In this context, tripartite relationships between users, resources, and tags contained in folksonomies set new challenges for knowledge discovery approaches to be applied for the purposes of assisting users through recommendation systems. This review aims at providing a comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of folksonomy‐based recommender systems. Current recommendation approaches stemming from fields such as user modeling, collaborative filtering, content, and link‐analysis are reviewed and discussed to provide a starting point for researchers in the field as well as explore future research lines.     

State‐of‐the‐art: software inspections after 25 years

Software inspections, which were originally developed by Michael Fagan in 1976, are an important means to verify and achieve sufficient quality in many software projects today. Since Fagan's initial work, the importance of software inspections has been long recognized by software developers and many organizations. Various proposals have been made by researchers in the hope of improving Fagan's inspection method. The proposals include structural changes to the process and several types of support for the inspection process. Most of the proposals have been empirically investigated in different studies. This is a review paper focusing on the software inspection process in the light of Fagan's inspection method and it summarizes and reviews other types of software inspection processes that have emerged in the last 25 years. This paper also addresses important issues related to the inspection process and examines experimental studies and their findings that are of interest with the purpose of identifying future avenues of research in software inspection. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

C‐LOD: Context‐aware Material Level‐of‐Detail applied to Mobile Graphics

Attention‐based Level‐Of–Detail (LOD) managers downgrade the quality of areas that are expected to go unnoticed by an observer to economize on computational resources. The perceptibility of lowered visual fidelity is determined by the accuracy of the attention model that assigns quality levels. Most previous attention based LOD managers do not take into account saliency provoked by context, failing to provide consistently accurate attention predictions. In this work, we extend a recent high level saliency model with four additional components yielding more accurate predictions: an object‐intrinsic factor accounting for canonical form of objects, an object‐context factor for contextual isolation of objects, a feature uniqueness term that accounts for the number of salient features in an image, and a temporal context that generates recurring fixations for objects inconsistent with the context. We conduct a perceptual experiment to acquire the weighting factors to initialize our model. We design C‐LOD, a LOD manager that maintains a constant frame rate on mobile devices by dynamically re‐adjusting material quality on secondary visual features of non‐attended objects. In a proof of concept study we establish that by incorporating C‐LOD, complex effects such as parallax occlusion mapping usually omitted in mobile devices can now be employed, without overloading GPU capability and, at the same time, conserving battery power.     

3D Skeletons: A State‐of‐the‐Art Report

Given a shape, a skeleton is a thin centered structure which jointly describes the topology and the geometry of the shape. Skeletons provide an alternative to classical boundary or volumetric representations, which is especially effective for applications where one needs to reason about, and manipulate, the structure of a shape. These skeleton properties make them powerful tools for many types of shape analysis and processing tasks. For a given shape, several skeleton types can be defined, each having its own properties, advantages, and drawbacks. Similarly, a large number of methods exist to compute a given skeleton type, each having its own requirements, advantages, and limitations. While using skeletons for two‐dimensional (2D) shapes is a relatively well covered area, developments in the skeletonization of three‐dimensional (3D) shapes make these tasks challenging for both researchers and practitioners. This survey presents an overview of 3D shape skeletonization. We start by presenting the definition and properties of various types of 3D skeletons. We propose a taxonomy of 3D skeletons which allows us to further analyze and compare them with respect to their properties. We next overview methods and techniques used to compute all described 3D skeleton types, and discuss their assumptions, advantages, and limitations. Finally, we describe several applications of 3D skeletons, which illustrate their added value for different shape analysis and processing tasks.     

Stability‐ and performance‐robustness tradeoffs: MIMO mixed‐µ vs complex‐µ design

We present a non‐trivial case study designed to highlight some of the practical issues that arise when using mixed‐µ or complex‐µ robust synthesis methodologies. By considering a multi‐input multi‐output three‐cart mass–spring–dashpot (MSD) with uncertain parameters and dynamics, it is demonstrated that optimized performance (disturbance‐rejection) is reduced as the level of uncertainty in one or two real parameters is increased. Comparisons are made (a) in the frequency domain, (b) by RMS values of key signals and (c) in time‐domain simulations. The mixed‐µ controllers designed are shown to yield superior performance as compared with the classical complex‐µ design. The singular value decomposition analysis shows the directionality changes resulting from different uncertainty levels and from the use of different frequency weights. The nominal and marginal stability regions of the closed‐loop system are studied and discussed, illustrating how stability margins can be extended at the cost of reducing performance. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Letter: Mechanisms for on/off currents in dual‐gate a‐Si:H thin‐film transistors using indium‐tin‐oxide top‐gate electrodes

Abstract— Two types of dual‐gate a‐Si:H TFTs were made with transparent indium‐tin‐oxide (ITO) top‐gate electrodes of different lengths to investigate the static characteristics of these devices. By changing the length of the ITO top gate, we found that the variations in the on‐currents of these dual‐gate TFTs with dual‐gate driving are due to the high resistance of the parasitic intrinsic a‐Si:H regions between the back electron channel and the source/drain contact. In the off‐state of the dual‐gate‐driven TFTs, the Poole‐Frenkel effect is also enhanced due to back‐channel hole accumulation in the vicinity of the source/drain contact. Furthermore, we observed for the first time that under illumination the dual‐gate‐driven a‐Si:H TFTs exhibit extremely low photo‐leakage currents, much lower than that of single‐gate‐driven TFTs in a certain range (reverse subthreshold region) of negative gate voltages. The high on/off current ratio under backside illumination makes dual‐gate TFTs suitable devices for use as switching elements in liquid‐crystal displays (LCDs) or for other applications.     

Making in‐Front‐of Cars Transparent: Sharing First‐Person‐Views via Dashcam

Visual obstruction caused by a preceding vehicle is one of the key factors threatening driving safety. One possible solution is to share the first‐person‐view of the preceding vehicle to unveil the blocked field‐of‐view of the following vehicle. However, the geometric inconsistency caused by the camera‐eye discrepancy renders view sharing between different cars a very challenging task. In this paper, we present a first‐person‐perspective image rendering algorithm to solve this problem. Firstly, we contour unobstructed view as the transferred region, then by iteratively estimating local homography transformations and performing perspective‐adaptive warping using the estimated transformations, we are able to locally adjust the shape of the unobstructed view so that its perspective and boundary could be matched to that of the occluded region. Thus, the composited view is seamless in both the perceived perspective and photometric appearance, creating an impression as if the preceding vehicle is transparent. Our system improves the driver's visibility and thus relieves the burden on the driver, which in turn increases comfort. We demonstrate the usability and stability of our system by performing its evaluation with several challenging data sets collected from real‐world driving scenarios.     

ManyLoDs: Parallel Many‐View Level‐of‐Detail Selection for Real‐Time Global Illumination

Level‐of‐Detail structures are a key component for scalable rendering. Built from raw 3D data, these structures are often defined as Bounding Volume Hierarchies, providing coarse‐to‐fine adaptive approximations that are well‐adapted for many‐view rasterization. Here, the total number of pixels in each view is usually low, while the cost of choosing the appropriate LoD for each view is high. This task represents a challenge for existing GPU algorithms. We propose ManyLoDs, a new GPU algorithm to efficiently compute many LoDs from a Bounding Volume Hierarchy in parallel by balancing the workload within and among LoDs. Our approach is not specific to a particular rendering technique, can be used on lazy representations such as polygon soups, and can handle dynamic scenes. We apply our method to various many‐view rasterization applications, including Instant Radiosity, Point‐Based Global Illumination, and reflection/refraction mapping. For each of these, we achieve real‐time performance in complex scenes at high resolutions.     

ProcDef: Local‐to‐global Deformation for Skeleton‐free Character Animation

Animations of characters with flexible bodies such as jellyfish, snails, and, hearts are difficult to design using traditional skeleton‐based approaches. A standard approach is keyframing, but adjusting the shape of the flexible body for each key frame is tedious. In addition, the character cannot dynamically adjust its motion to respond to the environment or user input. This paper introduces a new procedural deformation framework (ProcDef) for designing and driving animations of such flexible objects. Our approach is to synthesize global motions procedurally by integrating local deformations. ProcDef provides an efficient design scheme for local deformation patterns; the user can control the orientation and magnitude of local deformations as well as the propagation of deformation signals by specifying line charts and volumetric fields. We also present a fast and robust deformation algorithm based on shape‐matching dynamics and show some example animations to illustrate the feasibility of our framework.     

Reflecting on Connecting: Meta‐Analysis of Differences Between Computer‐Mediated and Face‐to‐Face Self‐Disclosure

Self‐disclosure is a key concept in computer‐mediated communication (CMC) theory and research, but disagreement exists about the impact of CMC, relative to face‐to‐face (FtF) communication, on self‐disclosure. We conducted a meta‐analysis of studies comparing self‐disclosure in CMC and FtF communication to summarize and clarify existing research. We also examined potential moderators of this difference—measure of self‐disclosure, study design (survey or experiment), interaction context (task or social), type of CMC (text‐based or video‐based), and interaction length. Overall, self‐disclosure was higher in FtF communication than in CMC. Measure of self‐disclosure, study design, and type of CMC moderated this difference. Findings suggest mixed support for predictions derived from key CMC theories and a need for CMC theory to more explicitly address self‐disclosure.     

Model‐to‐model and model‐to‐text: looking for the automation of VigilAgent

VigilAgent is a methodology for the development of agent‐oriented monitoring applications that uses agents as the key abstraction elements of the involved models. It has not been developed from scratch, but it reuses fragments from Prometheus and INGENIAS methodologies for modelling tasks and the ICARO framework for implementation purposes. As VigilAgent intends to automate as much as possible the development process, it exploits. Model transformation techniques are one of the key aspects of the model‐driven development approach. A model‐to‐model transformation is used to facilitate the interoperability between Prometheus and INGENIAS methodologies. Also, a model‐to‐text transformation is performed to generate ICARO code from the INGENIAS model. A case study based on access control is used to illustrate the fundamentals of the model‐to‐model and model‐to‐text transformations implemented in VigilAgent.     

Active‐matrix organic light‐emitting displays employing two thin‐film‐transistor a‐Si:H pixels on flexible stainless‐steel foil

Abstract— An active‐matrix organic light‐emitting diode (AMOLED) display driven by hydrogenated amorphous‐silicon thin‐film transistors (a‐Si:H TFTs) on flexible, stainless‐steel foil was demonstrated. The 2‐TFT voltage‐programmed pixel circuits were fabricated using a standard a‐Si:H process at maximum temperature of 280°C in a bottom‐gate staggered source‐drain geometry. The 70‐ppi monochrome display consists of (48 × 4) × 48 subpixels of 92 ×369 μm each, with an aperture ratio of 48%. The a‐Si:H TFT pixel circuits drive top‐emitting green electrophosphorescent OLEDs to a peak luminance of 2000 cd/m².     

Advances towards high‐resolution pack‐and‐go displays: A survey

Abstract— Tiled displays provide high resolution and large scale simultaneously. Projectors can project on any available surface. Thus, it is possible to create a large high‐resolution display by simply tiling multiple projectors on any available regular surface. The tremendous advancement in projection technology has made projectors portable and affordable. One can envision displays made of multiple such projectors that can be packed in one's car trunk, carried from one location to another, deployed at each location easily to create a seamless high‐resolution display, and, finally, dismantled in minutes to be taken to the next location — essentially a pack‐and‐go display. Several challenges must be overcome in order to realize such pack‐and‐go displays. These include allowing for imperfect uncalibrated devices, uneven non‐diffused display surfaces, and a layman user via complete automation in deployment that requires no user invention. We described the advances we have made in addressing these challenges for the most common case of planar display surfaces. First, we present a technique to allow imperfect projectors. Next, we present a technique to allow a photometrically uncalibrated camera. Finally, we present a novel distributed architecture that renders critical display capabilities such as self‐calibration, scalability, and reconfigurability without any user intervention. These advances are important milestones towards the development of easy‐to‐use multi‐projector displays that can be deployed anywhere and by anyone.     

Touch‐screen panel integrated into 12.1‐in. a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD

Abstract— A touch‐screen‐panel (TSP) embedded 12.1‐in. LCD employing a standard existing a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD process has been successfully developed. Compared with conventional external touch‐screen panels, which use additional components to detect touch events, the new internal TSP exhibits a clearer image and improved touch feeling, as well as increased sensing speed using discrete sensing lines to enable higher‐speed sensing functions including handwriting. The new internal digital switching TSP can be fabricated with low cost because it does not require any additional process steps compared to a standard a‐Si:H TFT‐LCD.     

Charge‐recombination processes in oligomer‐ and polymer‐based light‐emitting diodes: A molecular picture

Abstract— An overview of our recent work on the mechanisms of singlet and triplet exciton formation in electroluminescent π‐conjugated materials will be presented. According to simple spin statistics, only one‐fourth of the excitons are formed as singlets. However, deviations from that statistics can occur if the initially formed triplet charge‐transfer (CT) excited states are amenable to intersystem crossing or dissociation. Although the electronic couplings between the CT states and the neutral exciton states are expected to be largest for the lowest singlet and triplet excitons (S¹ and T¹, respectively), the possibility for direct recombination into T¹ is always very small due to the large exchange energy. In small molecules, spin statistics is expected to be observed because both singlet and triplet exciton formations proceed via higher‐lying S_n/T_n states with similar electronic couplings and fast formation rates. In extended conjugated chains, however, that the ¹CT → S¹ pathway is faster while the ³CT → ^Tn channels become much slower, opening the route to intersystem crossing or dissociation among the ³CT states.     

Harvesting Robots for High‐value Crops: State‐of‐the‐art Review and Challenges Ahead

This review article analyzes state‐of‐the‐art and future perspectives for harvesting robots in high‐value crops. The objectives were to characterize the crop environment relevant for robotic harvesting, to perform a literature review on the state‐of‐the‐art of harvesting robots using quantitative measures, and to reflect on the crop environment and literature review to formulate challenges and directions for future research and development. Harvesting robots were reviewed regarding the crop harvested in a production environment, performance indicators, design process techniques used, hardware design decisions, and algorithm characteristics. On average, localization success was 85%, detachment success was 75%, harvest success was 66%, fruit damage was 5%, peduncle damage was 45%, and cycle time was 33 s. A kiwi harvesting robot achieved the shortest cycle time of 1 s. Moreover, the performance of harvesting robots did not improve in the past three decades, and none of these 50 robots was commercialized. Four future challenges with R&D directions were identified to realize a positive trend in performance and to successfully implement harvesting robots in practice: (1) simplifying the task, (2) enhancing the robot, (3) defining requirements and measuring performance, and (4) considering additional requirements for successful implementation. This review article may provide new directions for future automation projects in high‐value crops.     

Scalable peer‐to‐peer networking architecture: DIVINE

This paper describes the issues that are involved in designing and implementing a large‐scale cooperative object database server for a collaborative virtual environment. The focus of the paper is about the way to handle the distributing factors and the communication model among nodes within a collaborative virtual environment. Within the system, all objects are decentralized and scattered among three tiers of object databases. By limiting the knowledge and refining the tasks for each server, the network and processor workload can be reduced. The objective of the system is to provide a virtual environment for distributed computing that is k‐fault tolerant and subject to expansion without the interruption of services. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.