206601195
The Role of Discourse Structure and Response Time in Multimodal Communication
In an ongoing project on multimodal communication in humans and agents [1], we investigate the interaction between two linguistic modalities (prosody and dialog structure) and two non-linguistic modalities (eye gaze and facial expressions). The goal is to gain a better understanding of the use of communicative channels in discourse and can subsequently aid the development of more effective animated conversational agents. We studied conversations between humans involved in the Map Task scenario whereby an Instruction Giver (IG) navigates an Instruction Follower (IF) from a starting point to an end point on a map [2].
11533272
The Impact of Conversational Navigational Guides on the Learning, Use, and Perceptions of Users of a Web Site
Knowledge management systems will presumably benefit from intelligent interfaces, including those with animated conversational agents. One of the functions of an animated conversational agent is to serve as a navigational guide that nudges the user how to use the interface in a productive way. This is a different function from delivering the content of the material. We conducted a study on college students who used a web facility in one of four navigational guide conditions: Full Guide (speech and face), Voice Guide, Print Guide, and No Guide. The web site was the Human Use Regulatory Affairs Advisor (HURAA), a web-based facility that provides help and training on research ethics, based on documents and regulations in United States Federal agencies. The college students used HURAA to complete a number of learning modules and document retrieval tasks. There was no significant facilitation of any of the guides on several measures of learning and performance, compared with the No Guide condition. This result suggests that the potential benefits of conversational guides are not ubiquitous, but they may save time and increase learning under specific conditions that are yet to be isolated.
10389145
Reactive mobile manipulation using dynamic trajectory tracking
A solution to the trajectory tracking problem for mobile manipulators is proposed, that allows for the base to be influenced by a reactive, obstacle avoidance behavior. Given a trajectory for the gripper to follow, a tracking algorithm for the manipulator is designed, and at the same time the base motions are generated in such a way that the base is coordinated with the gripper. Furthermore, it is shown that the method allows arbitrary upper and lower bounds on the gripper-base distance to be set and this can be achieved without introducing deadlocks into the system. The solution also ensures that the control effort, spent on slow base motions, is kept small.
12307619
The use of visual search for knowledge gathering in image decision support
This paper presents a new method of knowledge gathering for decision support in image understanding based on information extracted from the dynamics of saccadic eye movements. The framework involves the construction of a generic image feature extraction library, from which the feature extractors that are most relevant to the visual assessment by domain experts are determined automatically through factor analysis. The dynamics of the visual search are analyzed by using the Markov model for providing training information to novices on how and where to look for image features. The validity of the framework has been evaluated in a clinical scenario whereby the pulmonary vascular distribution on Computed Tomography images was assessed by experienced radiologists as a potential indicator of heart failure. The performance of the system has been demonstrated by training four novices to follow the visual assessment behavior of two experienced observers. In all cases, the accuracy of the students improved from near random decision making (33%) to accuracies ranging from 50% to 68%.
30531140
A Comparative Study of Several Cluster Number Selection Criteria
The selection of the number of clusters is an important and challenging issue in cluster analysis. In this paper we perform an experimental comparison of several criteria for determining the number of clusters based on Gaussian mixture model. The criteria that we consider include Akaike’s information criterion (AIC), the consistent Akaike’s information criterion (CAIC), the minimum description length (MDL) criterion which formally coincides with the Bayesian inference criterion (BIC), and two model selection methods driven from Bayesian Ying-Yang (BYY) harmony learning: harmony empirical learning criterion (BYY-HEC) and harmony data smoothing criterion (BYY-HDS). We investigate these methods on synthetic data sets of different sample size and the iris data set. The results of experiments illustrate that BYY-HDS has the best overall success rate and obviously outperforms other methods for small sample size. CAIC and MDL tend to underestimate the number of clusters, while AIC and BYY-HEC tend to overestimate the number of clusters especially in the case of small sample size.
10956379
DraXRouter: global routing in X-architecture with dynamic resource assignment
In recent years, the X-architecture is introduced to obtain better performance for integrated circuit physical design. This paper reformulates the global routing problem in X-architecture under the liquid routing model. Then, a dynamic resource assignment (Dra) method is presented to reduce potential vias. At last, a global router called DraXRouter, is designed, in which we adopt a dynamic-tabulist-based tree construction algorithm and a stochastic optimization strategy to gain high quality routing solution. Tested on ISPD'98 benchmarks, DraXRouter achieves better routing performance compared with two recent global routers.
40136335
On Rearrangeability of Multirate Clos Networks
Chung and Ross [SIAM J. Comput., 20 (1991), pp. 726--736] conjectured that the multirate three-stage Clos network C(n,2n-1,r) is rearrangeable in the general discrete bandwidth case; i.e., each connection has a weight chosen from a given finite set {p1, p2,. . .,pk} where $1 \geq p_1 > p_2 > \cdots > p_k > 0$ and pi is an integer multiple of pi, denoted by $p_k \mid p_i$, for $1 \leq i \leq k-1$. In this paper, we prove that multirate three-stage Clos network C(n,2n-1,r) is rearrangeable when each connection has a weight chosen from a given finite set {p1, p2,. . .,pk} where $1 \geq p_1 > p_2 > \cdots > p_{h} > 1/2 \geq p_{h+1} > \cdots > p_k > 0$ and ph+2 | ph+1,ph+3 |ph+2,. . . ,pk | ph+1. We also prove that C(n,2n-1,r) is two-rate rearrangeable and $C(n, \lceil \frac{7n}{3} \rceil, r)$ is three-rate rearrangeable.