Here are three smart tricks, based on an understanding of frictional forces, to beat a slippery slope. I don't know who invented this crazy challenge, but the idea is to put someone in a carved-out ice bowl and see if they can get out. The bowl is shaped like the inside of a sphere, so the higher up the sides you go, the steeper it gets. If you think an icy sidewalk is slippery, try going uphill on an icy sidewalk. What do you do when faced with a problem like this?

Multi-agent human-robot co-manipulation is a poorly understood process with many inputs that potentially affect agent behavior. This paper explores one such input known as interaction force. Interaction force is potentially a primary component in communication that occurs during co-manipulation. There are, however, many different perspectives and definitions of interaction force in the literature. Therefore, a decomposition of interaction force is proposed that provides a consistent way of ascertaining the state of an agent relative to the group for multi-agent co-manipulation. This proposed method extends a current definition from one to four degrees of freedom, does not rely on a predefined object path, and is independent of the number of agents acting on the system and their locations and input wrenches (forces and torques). In addition, all of the necessary measures can be obtained by a self-contained robotic system, allowing for a more flexible and adaptive approach for future co-manipulation robot controllers.

We propose a concept map based approach to assessing freely generated student responses. The proposed approach is based on a novel automated tuple extraction system, DT-OpenIE, for automatically extracting concept maps from student responses. The DT-OpenIE system is significantly better in terms of concept map quality for assessment purposes than state-of-the-art open information extraction (IE) systems such as Ollie or Stanford as evidenced by our experimental results. The concept map based approach can significantly improve tracking student's mastery level in an automated tutoring environment such as DeepTutor where students interact with the automated tutor using natural language because the concept maps can be used not only to generate a holistic score assessing the accuracy of a student response but also enable diagnostic feedback.

It's been quite some time since I've looked at the physics of a video game. Perhaps it's because I haven't played too many games lately. But whatever the reason, I decided to look at one of my all time favorite mobile games--Bad Piggies. In case you aren't familiar with the game, it's completely different than the Angry Birds games even though it uses the same pigs. The idea in Rovio's Bad Piggies is to build different vehicles to help the pigs get from one point to another. Although the game has its flaws, it's still fun.