17905377
FLANNEL: adding computation to electronic mail during transmission
In this paper, we describe FLANNEL, an architecture for adding computational capabilities to email. FLANNEL allows email to be modified by an application while in transit between sender and receiver. This modification is done without modification to the endpoints---mail clients---at either end. This paper also describes interaction techniques that we have developed to allow senders of email to quickly and easily select computations to be performed by FLANNEL. Through, our experience, we explain the properties that applications must have in order to be successful in the context of FLANNEL.
29526990
The orbital browser: composing ubicomp services using only rotation and selection
Most ubiquitous computing environments are designed as collections of highly distributed and heterogeneous services. In this paper we describe a user interface, the Orbital Browser, which reduces the complexity of ubicomp service composition to two simple end-user operations: rotation and selection. We discuss the design requirements imposed by service composition and how we addressed them with our system.
1624330
Recipes for digital living [ubiquitous computing in consumer electronics]
As networked devices become increasingly ubiquitous, the potential benefits to users increase exponentially. However, this potential can't be fully realized if it is entirely up to developers and manufacturers to expose the combined functionality buried in the expanding network. Recipes for digital living - created and modified by users themselves - offer an easy-to-understand, logically consistent way to capture and share the various ensembles possible in the expanding world of networked components.
1987929
Using speakeasy for ad hoc peer-to-peer collaboration
Peer-to-peer systems appear promising in terms of their ability to support ad hoc, spontaneous collaboration. However, current peer-to-peer systems suffer from several deficiencies that diminish their ability to support this domain, such as inflexibility in terms of discovery protocols, network usage, and data transports. We have developed the Speakeasy framework, which addresses these issues, and supports these types of applications. We show how Speakeasy addresses the shortcomings of current peer-to-peer systems, and describe a demonstration application, called Casca, that supports ad hoc peer-to-peer collaboration by taking advantages of the mechanisms provided by Speakeasy.
668272
First Results in the Coordination of Heterogeneous Robots for Large-Scale Assembly
While many multi-robot systems rely on fortuitous cooperation between agents, some tasks, such as the assembly of large structures, require tighter coordination. We present a general software architecture for coordinating heterogeneous robots that allows for both autonomy of the individual agents as well as explicit coordination. This paper presents recent results with three robots with very different configurations. Working as a team, these robots are able to perform a high-precision docking task that none could achieve individually.
9064289
Automatic Pattern Embedding in Protein Structure Models
This article describes an implementation of a set of rules for automatically embedding a minimal functional sequence pattern in a structural hidden Markov model. The final product is a library of wide ranging fold models with encoded information about the functional families.
11264916
Learning language using genetic algorithms
Strict pattern-based methods of grammar induction are often frustrated by the apparently inexhaustible variety of novel word combinations in large corpora. Statistical methods offer a possible solution by allowing frequent well-formed expressions to overwhelm the infrequent ungrammatical ones. They also have the desirable property of being able to construct robust grammars from positive instances alone. Unfortunately, the “zero-frequency” problem entails assigning a small probability to all possible word patterns, thus ungrammatical n-grams become as probable as unseen grammatical ones. Further, such grammars are unable to take advantage of inherent lexical properties that should allow infrequent words to inherit the syntactic properties of the class to which they belong.
10464813
Building Semantic Tools for Concept-based Learning Spaces: Knowledge Bases of Strongly-Structured Models for Scientific Concepts in Advanced Digital Libraries
Applying conventional principles of knowledge organization, representation, and other semantic tools, we have constructed a model for scientific concepts and employed knowledge bases and visualization tools to represent knowledge concerning scientific concepts. Strongly-structured models, such as the integration of a taxonomy (or thesaurus) with metadata (or attribute-value pairs) and domain-specific markup languages, as well as specialized models for learning scientific concepts, focus on such attributes as objective representations, operational semantics, use, and interrelationships of concepts. All of these play important roles in constructing representations of knowledge in most domains of science. Instructional activities for undergraduate teaching and learning are greatly facilitated with the use of such integrated semantic tools.
1211760
Heuristic Search Value Iteration for POMDPs
We present a novel POMDP planning algorithm called heuristic search value iteration (HSVI). HSVI is an anytime algorithm that returns a policy and a provable bound on its regret with respect to the optimal policy. HSVI gets its power by combining two well-known techniques: attention-focusing search heuristics and piecewise linear convex representations of the value function. HSVI's soundness and convergence have been proven. On some bench-mark problems from the literature, HSVI displays speedups of greater than 100 with respect to other state-of-the-art POMDP value iteration algorithms. We also apply HSVI to a new rover exploration problem 10 times larger than most POMDP problems in the literature.