The New Frontier Issues for Cognition Technology

Cognitive engineering has developed enormously over the last fifteen years. Yet, despite many excellent research projects and publications, its full potential has not been embraced into mainstream system design. This paper will examine the reasons for this failure and argue that the problem is not simply inertia or lack of education. There are strong organisational influences that cause resistance to this particular approach. The discipline itself has characteristics that make it fragile in the modern corporate structure. In addition, the cognitive engineers themselves are not blameless in the equation. They appear to have done exactly what they criticise the engineering community for doing: they have packaged their product in a manner that is not ‘user friendly’ to its target population, not structured to suit its application, and not output in the format required. Suggestions will be made to rectify the situation: a list of actions is proposed for practising cognitive engineers to make their product more likely to enjoy widespread uptake.     

三峡升船机船厢室底板沉降监测 变形数据分析

三峡升船机是目前世界上规模最大和技术难度最高的升船机,其底板高程为50 m。为监测该底板在施工期间的沉降情况并研究沉降对升船机土建施工、埋件及设备安装的影响,对沉降监测数据及原因进行了分析,建立了变形与影响因素之间的数学模型。研究表明：该底板沉降呈周期性变化且在±2 mm左右,其影响可以忽略不计。     

三峡库尾泥沙资源化现状及建议

本文对三峡水库库尾河段河道特性、入库砂石资源特性、采砂现状及存在的问题等方面进行了研究分析,在此基础上,对三峡水库库尾采砂发展规划提出了建议。     

三峡水电站调峰运用探析

对2003年三峡水电站投产以来的调峰运行情况进行分析总结,并结合三峡水库调度原则、梯级枢纽特性、电站机组运行特点、电网系统要求等相关因素对三峡水电站在进入正常运行期后的调峰运用进行了探讨和分析。     

Predicting social cues during online discussions: Effects of evaluations and knowledge content

This study examined whether evaluations (agreements, disagreements), knowledge content (new ideas, justifications), or social cues (SCs) in recent messages affected a current message’s positive or negative SC during asynchronous, online discussions. Using statistical discourse analysis, we modeled 894 messages by 183 participants on 60 high school mathematics topics (typically eight people posted per topic) on a mathematics problem solving website not connected to any class or school. Results showed that recent agreements increased the likelihood of positive SC, whereas justifications reduced it. Disagreements increased the likelihood of negative SC, whereas new ideas reduced it. Meanwhile, recent positive or negative SCs did not affect the likelihood of a subsequent SC. Together, these results suggest that judicious use of positive SCs rather than negative SCs during disagreements can help students both construct knowledge and maintain social relationships.     

Interactive Ray Tracing of Large Models Using Voxel Hierarchies

We propose an efficient approach for interactive visualization of massive models with CPU ray tracing. A voxel‐based hierarchical level‐of‐detail (LOD) framework is employed to minimize rendering time and required system memory. In a pre‐processing phase, a compressed out‐of‐core data structure is constructed, which contains the original primitives of the model and the LOD voxels, organized into a kd‐tree. During rendering, data is loaded asynchronously to ensure a smooth inspection of the model regardless of the available I/O bandwidth. With our technique, we are able to explore data sets consisting of hundreds of millions of triangles in real‐time on a desktop PC with a quad‐core CPU.     

Enhanced Texture‐Based Terrain Synthesis on Graphics Hardware

Curvilinear features extracted from a 2D user‐sketched feature map have been used successfully to constraint a patch‐based texture synthesis of real landscapes. This map‐based user interface does not give fine control over the height profile of the generated terrain. We propose a new texture‐based terrain synthesis framework controllable by a terrain sketching interface. We enhance the realism of the generated landscapes by using a novel patch merging method that reduces boundary artefacts caused by overlapping terrain patches. A more constrained synthesis process is used to produce landscapes that better match user requirements. The high computational cost of texture synthesis is reduced with a parallel implementation on graphics hardware. Our GPU‐accelerated solution provides a significant speedup depending on the size of the example terrain. We show experimentally that our framework is more successful in generating realistic landscapes than current example‐based terrain synthesis methods. We conclude that texture‐based terrain synthesis combined with sketching provides an excellent solution to the user control and realism challenges of virtual landscape generation.     

Pre‐convolved Radiance Caching

The incident indirect light over a range of image pixels is often coherent. Two common approaches to exploit this inter‐pixel coherence to improve rendering performance are Irradiance Caching and Radiance Caching. Both compute incident indirect light only for a small subset of pixels (the cache), and later interpolate between pixels. Irradiance Caching uses scalar values that can be interpolated efficiently, but cannot account for shading variations caused by normal and reflectance variation between cache items. Radiance Caching maintains directional information, e.g., to allow highlights between cache items, but at the cost of storing and evaluating a Spherical Harmonics (SH) function per pixel. The arithmetic and bandwidth cost for this evaluation is linear in the number of coefficients and can be substantial. In this paper, we propose a method to replace it by an efficient per‐cache item pre‐filtering based on MIP maps — such as previously done for environment maps — leading to a single constant‐time lookup per pixel. Additionally, per‐cache item geometry statistics stored in distance‐MIP maps are used to improve the quality of each pixel's lookup. Our approximate interactive global illumination approach is an order of magnitude faster than Radiance Caching with Phong BRDFs and can be combined with Monte Carlo‐raytracing, Point‐based Global Illumination or Instant Radiosity.     

GPU Shape Grammars

GPU Shape Grammars provide a solution for interactive procedural generation, tuning and visualization of massive environment elements for both video games and production rendering. Our technique generates detailed models without explicit geometry storage. To this end we reformulate the grammar expansion for generation of detailed models at the tesselation control and geometry shader stages. Using the geometry generation capabilities of modern graphics hardware, our technique generated massive, highly detailed models. GPU Shape Grammars integrate within a scalable framework by introducing automatic generation of levels of detail at reduced cost. We apply our solution for interactive generation and rendering of scenes containing thousands of buildings and trees.     

ISHair: Importance Sampling for Hair Scattering

We present an importance sampling method for the bidirectional scattering distribution function (bsdf) of hair. Our method is based on the multi‐lobe hair scattering model presented by Sadeghi et al. [ [SPJT10] ]. We reduce noise by drawing samples from a distribution that approximates the bsdf well. Our algorithm is efficient and easy to implement, since the sampling process requires only the evaluation of a few analytic functions, with no significant memory overhead or need for precomputation. We tested our method in a research raytracer and a production renderer based on micropolygon rasterization. We show significant improvements for rendering direct illumination using multiple importance sampling and for rendering indirect illumination using path tracing.