20652786
The iterative development of a tangible pin-board to symmetrically link physical and digital documents
There is an asymmetry in many tangible interfaces: while physical objects can be used to manipulate digital information, the reverse is often not possible—the digital world cannot push back. We introduce a new push-back tangible technology, a pin-board that physically ejects paper documents. This is realized by extending the Pin&Play technology to support ‘pouts’, addressable pin-like devices that can remove themselves from a board using muscle wire actuators. We describe how this technology has been developed through two iterations of prototyping, application and formative study. An initial study revealed how potential mismatches between the physical and digital characteristics of pouts caused difficulties with users predicting pop-out events and reasoning about the state of pouts. This led us to extend pouts to reveal more of their internal state, an approach verified through a second study. It also raises more general issues for the design of pushback tangible technologies and ubiquitous interfaces.
8169680
PINS push in and POUTS pop out: creating a tangible pin-board that ejects physical documents
There is an asymmetry in many tangible interfaces: while phicons can be used to manipulate digital information, the reverse is often not possible - the digital world cannot push back. We describe a tangible pin-board that pushes back by physically ejecting paper documents when they are digitally deleted. This is realized using pouts, addressable pin-like devices that communicate with a Pin&Play board and that can eject themselves by contracting an internal Muscle Wire actuator to trigger a mechanical latch. To demonstrate and begin to evaluate the technology we have developed an initial application of pouts involving a game where online players vote to eject physical pictures from a pin-board.
31564735
Improve the service quality of multi-agent system: ontology management
The association of ontology with services enables service providers to export their services and also enables clients to declare desired services so that new service providers can serve existing clients. Changes and enhancements can be kept track of through the ontology management. The ontology management platform in our system not only declares semantics of agent services, but also provides interface specification for clients to use such a system with semantic information provided.
38856756
Music Manuscript Tracing
This paper presents an ongoing project working on an optical handwritten music manuscript recognition system. A brief background of Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is presented, together with a discussion on some of the main obstacles in this domain. An earlier OMR prototype for printed music scores is described, with illustrations of the low-level pre-processing and segmentation routines, followed by a discussion on its limitations for handwritten manuscripts processing, which led to the development of a stroke-based segmentation approach using mathematical morphology. The pre-processing sub-systems consist of a list of automated processes, including thresholding, deskewing, basic layout analysis and general normalization parameters such as the stave line thickness and spacing. High-level domain knowledge enhancements, output format and future directions are outlined.
41815623
Looking for Arbitrage or Term Structures in Frictional Markets
In this paper we consider a frictional market with finitely many securities and finite and discrete future times. The frictions under consideration include fixed and proportional transaction costs, bid-ask spreads, and taxes. In such a market, we find that whether there exists an arbitrage opportunity does not dependent on the fixed transaction costs. Under a reasonable assumption, the no-arbitrage is equivalent to the condition that the optimal value of some linear programming problem is zero, and to the existence of a so-called consistent term structure. These results permit us to identify and to find arbitrage and consistent term structures in polynomial time. Two linear programming problems are proposed, each of which can identify and find the arbitrage opportunity or the consistent term structure if either exists.
27124087
An Autonomous Sensor for 3D Reconstruction
We describe an automated approach to the reconstruction of 3D interiors from laser range data and digital images. This is achieved using a scanning laser rangefinder and digital camera that are mounted on an autonomous mobile platform known as the AEST. The objective is to reproduce complete interiors that are accurate enough for surveying, virtual studio and Augmented Reality applications. The AEST selects and navigates to a series of capture points to progressively reconstruct a 3D textured model to the required degree of accuracy. Navigation and structural information is used to register the data from each new capture point relative to the partial model. The user interface is a web browser with a radio link to the AEST. Results can be viewed in a VRML window as they are obtained. The AEST has been developed in EU-ACTS project RESOLV.
22708219
Automated Paper-Based Watermark Extraction and Processing
The boom of digital market and rapid expansion and demand of digital content consumption have many requirements for automated content processing, cataloguing, authenticating, indexing, etc.. Digital watermarking and fingerprinting techniques are being explored to authenticate and detect features in digital objects. This is similar to the analogue paper-based watermarking technique that was invented in the 13th century in Italy for the identification of the workers. This paper presents a framework for the digitisation, extraction and graphical representation of paper-based watermark designs. With a general overview of the framework by Hiary and Ng (2005), the paper focuses on automated processes which determine the configuration of processing parameters in order to allow optimal content processing without time-consuming manual intervention. With a machine readable graphical representation of the watermark, cataloguing and indexing of these heritage resources can be enhanced with the ease of digital content retrieval functionalities for scholarly usages and many other advantages of digital technologies including distribution and preservation