Cognitive,social and teaching presence in a virtual world and a text chat

Using a framework of cognitive, social, and teaching presence, the nature of learning experiences in a three-dimensional virtual world environment (Second Life) and a text-chat learning environment without visuals (TeachNet) were investigated. A mixed method of code frequencies, coherence graphs, interviews, and a survey was used. The results revealed that the TeachNet debates included more cognitive presence codes that indicate higher levels of cognitive processing than in SL debates. The teams were significantly different from each other in the collaboration style for developing arguments and in the ways to use utterances associated with cognitive, social, and teaching presences, and the groups’ collaboration style became more established with more experience with the tasks. The three critical factors–tool, tasks and group cohesion–that affect cognitive, teaching, and social presence are discussed.     

Stick-slip motion control based on cutter location data for an orthogonal-type robot

In this article, a new desktop orthogonal-type robot, which has the capacity of stick-slip motion control based on cutter location data, is presented for lapping small metallic molds with a curved surface. The robot consists of three single-axis devices with a high position resolution of 1 μm. A thin wooden stick tool with a ball-end shape is attached to the tip of the z-axis. In order to improve the lapping performance, a novel stick-slip motion control method is developed in the control system. The small stick-slip motion is orthogonally generated in the direction of the tool’s movement. The effectiveness of stick-slip motion control is examined through an actual lapping test of an LED lens cavity.     

New dissimilarity measure for recognizing noisy subsequence trees

Tree is a data structure used to express various objects such as semistructured data and genes. When objects are represented as trees, computing tree similarity is essential for pattern recognition and retrieval. This paper considers the noisy subsequence tree recognition problem whose purpose is to recognize the original tree, given its noisy subsequence tree. Previous research on this problem relied on constrained tree edit distance to measure the dissimilarity. However, the number of relabelings must be predetermined to compute it. This paper proposes a new dissimilarity measure for this problem. Our dissimilarity measure is obtained by counting the node edit operations included in the unit‐cost tree edit distance that contribute to the matching of node labels. The number of relabelings need not be specified to compute our dissimilarity measure. Moreover, our measure achieves more accurate recognition performance and faster execution speed than the constrained tree edit distance. Our measure is also useful to solve the tree inclusion problem which is the problem of deciding whether a tree includes another tree and shows the extent of approximate tree inclusion when a tree incompletely includes another tree. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

iOS application for quadrotor remote control

With the progress of electronics technology, the development of civilian UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) applications becomes possible. In addition, smartphones have rapidly gained popularity and become very important due to the simple operability and mobility. Hence, there is a need to have an easy and flexible way to control a UAV using such technology. In this study, a remote controller using an iOS device is developed for a quadrotor to enable remote control with easy operations. Four basic programs for obtaining compass information, controlling a gimbal, autopilot function for return, and video preview function are developed and implemented for an iOS device. The basic functionalities of the programs are evaluated and confirmed through experiments using a quadrotor and an iOS device.     

Control of three-link underactuated manipulators using a switching method of fuzzy energy regions

In general, manipulators used for industry and in academic laboratories have actuators to drive each joint. On the other hand, underactuated manipulators handled by our research have some passive or free joints without actuators and brakes. We recently developed a switching method of fuzzy energy regions to control such manipulators. In such a method, it is necessary to design parameters related to energy regions and the gains of some partly stable controllers based on the computed torque method. Here, the switching method is applied for a three-link underactuated manipulator. We optimize such design parameters related to fuzzy energy regions by a genetic algorithm. The effectiveness of the present method is illustrated with some simulations. This work was presented in part at the 12th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 25–27, 2007     

Variational Bayes solution of linear neural networks and its generalization performance

It is well known that in unidentifiable models, the Bayes estimation provides much better generalization performance than the maximum likelihood (ML) estimation. However, its accurate approximation by Markov chain Monte Carlo methods requires huge computational costs. As an alternative, a tractable approximation method, called the variational Bayes (VB) approach, has recently been proposed and has been attracting attention. Its advantage over the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, often used for realizing the ML estimation, has been experimentally shown in many applications; nevertheless, it has not yet been theoretically shown. In this letter, through analysis of the simplest unidentifiable models, we theoretically show some properties of the VB approach. We first prove that in three-layer linear neural networks, the VB approach is asymptotically equivalent to a positive-part James-Stein type shrinkage estimation. Then we theoretically clarify its free energy, generalization error, and training error. Comparing them with those of the ML estimation and the Bayes estimation, we discuss the advantage of the VB approach. We also show that unlike in the Bayes estimation, the free energy and the generalization error are less simply related with each other and that in typical cases, the VB free energy well approximates the Bayes one, while the VB generalization error significantly differs from the Bayes one.     

Pattern recognition as conceptual morphogenesis

Pattern recognition is our mental activity in which we formulate, select, modify, and adjust our concepts or our frames of reference so that we can see a ``form' in objects. We can tentatively formulate this viewpoint as the principle of minimum entropy (or entropy-like function). Different algorithms in clustering and pattern recognition are given new interpretations in the light of this unifying principle.     

On intractability of the classUP

The classUP [V] is the class of sets accepted by polynomial-time nondeterministic Turing machines which have at most one accepting path for every input. The complexity of this class closely relates to that of computing inverses ofone-way functions, where a one-way function is a one-to-one, length-increasing, and polynomial-time computable function whose inverse cannot be computed within polynomial time. It is known [GS], [K] that there exists a one-way function if and only ifP UP. In this paper the intractability of sets inUP is investigated in terms of polynomial-time reducibility to a sparse set. It is shown thatUP has a set that is _m ^P -reducible to no sparse set ifP UP. We interpret this structural property in the relation with approximation algorithms: it is shown that ifP UP, thenUP has a set with no 1-APT approximation and, furthermore,UP has a set that is not _m ^P -reducible to any set with a 1-APT approximation. The implication of this result in the study of one-way functions is also discussed. In order to prove the main theorem, we introduce a variation of tree-pruning methods.This paper was written while the author visited the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Santa Barbara. This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant CCR-8611980.