Deformable Motion: Squeezing into Cluttered Environments

We present an interactive method that allows animated characters to navigate through cluttered environments. Our characters are equipped with a variety of motion skills to clear obstacles, narrow passages, and highly constrained environment features. Our control method incorporates a behavior model into well‐known, standard path planning algorithms. Our behavior model, called deformable motion, consists of a graph of motion capture fragments. The key idea of our approach is to add flexibility on motion fragments such that we can situate them into a cluttered environment via constraint‐based formulation. We demonstrate our deformable motion for realtime interactive navigation and global path planning in highly constrained virtual environments.     

复杂环境下基于边缘扩张的条形码定位方法

条形码识别技术已广泛应用于人们日常生活和工业生产中.针对基于图像处理的条形码定位和识别过程中会受到光照环境、画面内容、镜头对焦等因素的影响导致识别效果不理想的问题,提出了一种利用边缘特性对条形码图像进行扩张处理与判别的定位方法.首先使用改进的Sobel算子提取图像的边缘特征,对条形码边缘进行区域扩张处理,以增大连通性;...     

Bringing Commercial Games into the Classroom

One of the challenges facing us when we try to bring commercial materials such as video games into the classroom to be used as educational tools is to identify appropriate strategies of collaboration with teachers, families, and even industries. This paper explores how multimedia contexts can be created in which children become active participants in a digital universe where multiple technologies are present (so that video games are just one of several digital tools). We present several examples derived from specific projects carried out in formal and informal educational contexts, in action research and from ethnographical perspectives. As participant observers in and outside the classroom, we designed workshops as innovative educational contexts; all the sessions were video and audio recorded. Our analysis adopted a socio-cultural perspective. Several preliminary results clearly appeared: (a) Children playing commercial games inside and outside classrooms produce different writing texts depending of the context in which they are generated; (b) using video games combined with other digital technologies seems to be an effective way of introducing children to the content and structure of games considered as dynamic systems; (c) using and reflecting on video games in and outside the school, via discussions in digital media such as blogs or pictures, can contribute to the development of digital literacies as a way of using multimodal discourses. Our main goal at this moment is to design digital materials capable of supporting teachers’ and families’ use of games and in particular, to reveal the rules that organize their structure, codes and symbolic universe.     

Strongdeco: Expansion of analytical,strongly correlated quantum states into a many-body basis

We provide a Mathematica code for decomposing strongly correlated quantum states described by a first-quantized, analytical wave function into many-body Fock states. Within them, the single-particle occupations refer to the subset of Fock–Darwin functions with no nodes. Such states, commonly appearing in two-dimensional systems subjected to gauge fields, were first discussed in the context of quantum Hall physics and are nowadays very relevant in the field of ultracold quantum gases. As important examples, we explicitly apply our decomposition scheme to the prominent Laughlin and Pfaffian states. This allows for easily calculating the overlap between arbitrary states with these highly correlated test states, and thus provides a useful tool to classify correlated quantum systems. Furthermore, we can directly read off the angular momentum distribution of a state from its decomposition. Finally we make use of our code to calculate the normalization factors for Laughlin?s famous quasi-particle/quasi-hole excitations, from which we gain insight into the intriguing fractional behavior of these excitations.Program summaryProgram title: StrongdecoCatalogue identifier: AELA_v1_0Program summary URL: http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AELA_v1_0.htmlProgram obtainable from: CPC Program Library, Queen?s University, Belfast, N. IrelandLicensing provisions: Standard CPC licence, http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/licence/licence.htmlNo. of lines in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 5475No. of bytes in distributed program, including test data, etc.: 31 071Distribution format: tar.gzProgramming language: MathematicaComputer: Any computer on which Mathematica can be installedOperating system: Linux, Windows, MacClassification: 2.9Nature of problem: Analysis of strongly correlated quantum states.Solution method: The program makes use of the tools developed in Mathematica to deal with multivariate polynomials to decompose analytical strongly correlated states of bosons and fermions into a standard many-body basis. Operations with polynomials, determinants and permanents are the basic tools.Running time: The distributed notebook takes a couple of minutes to run.     

融合查询扩展和动态匹配的集外词检测

目前关键词检测面临的一个主要挑战是集外词问题。由于集外词发音的不确定性导致其检测性能与集内词相差很多。对此,本文提出了一种融合查询扩展和动态匹配的方法来改善集外词检测的性能。首先比较了基于联合多元模型的查询扩展和基于最小编辑距离的动态匹配。考虑到二者潜在的互补性,采用两种融合方法：一种方法是结果融合,分别应用查询扩展和动态匹配并行的检测集外词,然后合并检测结果;另一种是置信度融合,融合最小编辑距离和发音得分构成混合置信度进行集外词的检出与确认。实验结果表明,第二种融合方法的效果更好,系统的品质因数相对提升了19.8%。     

以商业办公为用途的旧工业建筑改造策略研究

办公用途与旧工业建筑改造的新功能相结合已成为建筑改造的一种趋势,文章正是对这一改造形式进行全方位的探讨。通过对改造过程中难点问题的分析,提出可实施的改造策略,实现对城市旧工业建筑用途的全面提升。     

Guest Editors' Introduction: Cross-Reality Environments

In this article, we define cross-reality as the union between ubiquitous sensor/actuator networks and shared online virtual worlds-a place where collective human perception meets the machines' view of pervasive computing. We describe how five of the articles in this issue expand on aspects of this theme.     

SAGE: Semantic Annotation of Georeferenced Environments

The emergence of portable 3D mapping systems are revolutionizing the way we generate digital 3D models of environments. These systems are human-centric and require the user to hold or carry the device while continuously walking and mapping an environment. In this paper, we adapt this unique coexistence of man and machines to propose SAGE (Semantic Annotation of Georeferenced Environments). SAGE consists of a portable 3D mobile mapping system and a smartphone that enables the user to assign semantic content to georeferenced 3D point clouds while scanning a scene. The proposed system contains several components including touchless speech acquisition, background noise adaptation, real time audio and vibrotactile feedback, automatic speech recognition, distributed clock synchronization, 3D annotation localization, user interaction, and interactive visualization. The most crucial advantage of SAGE technology is that it can be used to infer dynamic activities within an environment. Such activities are difficult to be identified with existing post-processing semantic annotation techniques. The capability of SAGE leads to many promising applications such as intelligent scene classification, place recognition and navigational aid tasks. We conduct several experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.     

Multiple Metaphor Environments: designing for diversity

This paper advances a proposition for the engineering of interactive computer-based environments capable of exhibiting alternative interactive embodiments to cope with diversity in users, interaction platforms and usage contexts. Such systems are referred to as Multiple Metaphor Environments (MME). The theoretical underpinnings of an MME rely on a conception of HCI design as mapping functions in a machine-oriented language (target domain) to symbols in a user-oriented language (source domain), and vice versa. Such a conception, which is rooted in developments in communication theory and the philosophy of language, constitutes the baseline for formulating a proposal for the design of MME. The proposal comprises a set of engineering principles, process-oriented guidelines and design techniques intended to facilitate a detailed account of how interactive systems could be designed to cope with diversity. To aid the articulation of the various properties of MME, we refer to concrete case studies that provide exemplars of novel insights and promising design practices towards the specification of MME.     

Federating Process-Centered Environments: The Oz Experience

We describe two models for federating process-centered environments (PCEs): homogeneous federation among distinct instances of the same environment framework enacting the same or different process models, and heterogeneous federation among diverse process enactment systems. We identify the requirements and consider possible architectures for each model, although we concentrate primarily on the homogeneous case. The bulk of the paper presents our choice of architecture, and corresponding infrastructure, for homogeneous federation among MARVEL environment instances as realized in the OZ system. We briefly consider how a single MARVEL environment, or an OZ federation of MARVEL environments, might be integrated into a heterogeneous federation based on ProcessWall's facilities for interoperating PCEs.     

Boundary Negotiations: Electronic Environments as Interface

Boundaries have long been a concern of literacy scholars, who are very much interested in how individuals cross boundaries and gain membership/genre expertise in new activity systems. Consequently, much attention and research has focused on issues of transition and transference: entering the academic community and acquiring academic literacy, writing across the disciplines, moving from undergraduate to graduate school, or transitioning from school to workplace settings. Less attention has been paid to boundary interactions involving other activity systems, especially those associated with home and popular culture. Drawing upon genre theory, I explore how the popular discourses and literacy practices prevalent in today's media-savvy, image-literate culture intersect and interact with academic discourses and literacy practices in electronic environments. Understanding how popular culture and classroom genres intersect via the interface of technology can help students use what they already know (i.e., apply the various literacy skills they already practice) in learning new strategies and new conceptions—in short, new literacies.     

SmartTools: A Generator of Interactive Environments Tools

SmartTools is a development environment generator that provides a structure editor and semantic tools as main features. The well-known visitor pattern technique is commonly used for designing semantic analysis, it has been automated and extended. SmartTools is easy to use thanks to its graphical user interface designed with the Java Swing APIs. It is built with an open architecture convinient for a partial or total integration of SmartTools in other environments. It makes the addition of new software components in SmartTools easy. As a result of the modular architecture, we built a distributed instance of SmartTools which required minimal effort. Being open to the XML technologies offers all the features of SmartTools to any language defined with those technologies. But most of all, with its open architecture, SmartTools takes advantage of all the developments made around those technologies, like DOM, through the XML APIs. The fast development of SmartTools (which is a young project, one year old) validates our choices of being open and generic. The main goal of this tool is to provide help and support for designing software development environments for programming languages as well as application languages defined with XML technologies.     

NetWorkSpace: A Coordination System for High-Productivity Environments

As languages and systems for rapid prototyping and application development have grown in popularity and the problems that they are being used to solve have grown in size, so has the need for enhancing them with a coordination facility to support distributed and parallel computations and the creation of application ensembles. We describe NetWorkSpace, a coordination facility based on the fundamental concept of a variable/value binding. NetWorkSpace is implemented as an open source server with clients available for a variety of environments. We present an overview of its design, implementation, performance and usage case studies.     

Sensing Assessment in Unknown Environments: A Survey

This paper surveys sensing assessment solutions from the literature with a particular focus on techniques which can be used in unknown environments, including the following: sensor fault detection and identification (FDI), sensor or source evaluation, and isolating poorly sensed regions. Each approach is evaluated in terms of its ability to perform sensing assessment tasks in unknown environments and its coverage of the range of potential sensing problems. These tasks include sensing problem detection and characterization, as well as performance evaluation (e.g., estimating accuracy or reliability), for a sensor or group of sensors. This survey shows that over 40 existing approaches are focused on either detection and identification of traditional sensor faults (e.g., drift or physical damage) in known environments or evaluation of the reliability of a source (e.g., sensor or agent). Only eight approaches surveyed have tackled environment-dependent problems (e.g., exteroceptive sensor FDI, miscalibration, or use of an inappropriate sensor) in a useful manner for unknown environments. Even less work (two studies) appears to have been done on isolating poorly sensed regions. The survey concludes with a list of opportunities for future research, including developing methods for detecting and characterizing environment-dependent problems and creating comprehensive sensing assessment systems.