With the introduction of low-cost wireless communication many new applications have been made possible; applications where systems can collaboratively learn and get wiser without human supervision. One potential application is automated monitoring for fault isolation in mobile mechatronic systems such as commercial vehicles. The paper proposes an agent design that is based on uploading software agents to a fleet of mechatronic systems. Each agent searches for interesting state representations of a system and reports them to a central server application. The states from the fleet of systems can then be used to form a consensus from which it can be possible to detect deviations and even locating a fault.

This paper presents a simulator that is being developed to study the performance of certain types of vehicle navigation. The performance metric looks at a likelihood of accomplishing a task and the cost of the strategy – measuring both robustness and efficiency. We present results involving only autonomous control strategies, yet the simulator will be used to compare human performance in completing the same task.

This paper introduces the IRIS mobile robot project. IRIS is a largely student designed and implemented mobile robot platform created to provide a mechanism for classroom explorations of topics in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and robotics. It has been designed to be used by students from middle school through college.

We present the design and deployment of a physical computing platform developed for a crossdisciplinary introduction to biology and computer science. Using the accessible Arduino interface as its foundation, students instantiate increasingly nuanced physical interactions with the environment. Biological and computational ideas receive equal attention through three layered projects that span from circuit design through the co-evolution of predator-prey robot behaviors. The low-overhead platform presented here scales to support sophisticated projects at surprisingly modest time-and-money costs

For the past several years, we have been using robots in our introductory computer science course. Although this has been challenging for many reasons, it has also been very rewarding on a number of fronts, both for the students and for us. However, in order for this to occur, we had to adapt to what we perceived as “chaotic code.” In this paper we describe lessons learned by watching what the students do, where they have trouble, and what they enjoy. Further, we discuss what the implications of focusing on creativity has had on teaching and assessment.

In visual metaphor processing, one object, the target, is compared to and understood in terms of another object, the source. Several studies suggest that perceptual similarity between two objects enhances a conceptual link between the two. However, little is known about how perceptual features contribute to the establishment of this link. In the present experiment we investigated the processing of the four possible combinations of conceptually and perceptually similar picture pairs using a same-different task. In order to determine whether particular processes are bound to a particular time range, we manipulated the delay between the two successively presented pictures. We expected perceptual processing effects at a short delay and conceptual processing effects at a longer delay. We did not find evidence for this expectation. However, the results did show that (i) it took participants longer to give a ‘different’ response if two objects shared perceptual features than when they did not; (ii) this presence of perceptual similarity also resulted in more response errors; and (iii) if objects shared only perceptual features, participants in the long delay condition produced more erroneous responses than the participants in the short delay condition did. These results are discussed in light of metaphor processing models.

There are multiple and even interacting dimensions along which shape representation schemes may be compared and contrasted. In this paper, we focus on the following ques- tion. Are the building blocks in a compositional model lo- calized in space (e.g. as in part based representations) or are they holistic simplifications (e.g. as in spectral representa- tions)? Existing shape representation schemes prefer one or the other. We propose a new shape representation paradigm that encompasses both choices.

How is shape represented during spatial tasks such as mental rotation? This research investigated the format of mental representations of 3-D shapes during mental rotation. Specifically, we tested the extent to which visual information, such as color, is represented during mental rotation using methods ranging from reaction time studies, verbal protocol analysis, and eyetracking. Another set of studies examined whether people use piecemeal or holistic strategies to rotate complex objects. Results show that individuals with good rotation ability do not represent color during mental rotation and rotate whole shapes; whereas poor rotators do represent color and rotate individual pieces of the shape using piecemeal strategies. This work contributes to theories about cognitive shape processing by showing that different information processing strategies may be one cause of individual differences in mentally rotation performance.

In this study we show that humans form very similar perceptual spaces when they explore parametrically-defined shell-shaped objects visually or haptically. A physical object space was generated by varying three shape parameters. Sighted participants explored pictures of these objects while blindfolded participants haptically explored 3D printouts of the objects. Similarity ratings were performed and analyzed using multidimensional scaling (MDS) techniques. Visual and haptic similarity ratings highly correlate and resulted in very similar visual and haptic MDS maps providing evidence for one shared perceptual space underlying both modalities. To investigate to which degree these results are transferrable to natural objects, we performed the same visual and haptic similarity ratings and multidimensional scaling analyses using a set of natural sea shells.

Although the various VA methods do Challenges for Global Health (Varmus et al. 2003) have not predict causes of deaths with vague symptoms as helped to reinforce the need for evidence-based global accurately as laboratory diagnostics can, verbal autopsy health priorities. Accurate health metrics and improved can predict causes of death with distinct symptoms with statistics can provide crucial decision-making inputs that some degree of accuracy (WHO 2007). For some areas of enable more efficient allocation of scarce financial the world verbal autopsies provide the only information resources towards the most pressing health needs (Murray about mortality currently available. Provided they can and Frenk 2008). Mortality statistics are a widely-used match or improve upon the accuracy of physician-coded resource for setting spending priorities, but out of 192 VA and expert algorithms, data-driven methods should be countries worldwide, only 23 have high-quality death used because they require less time from doctors or registration data, and 75 have no cause-specific mortality medical experts, and may provide valid reproducible fraction information at all (King and Lu 2008).