Towards human motion capture from a camera mounted on a mobile robot

This article describes a multiple feature data fusion applied to a particle filter for marker-less human motion capture (HMC) by using a single camera devoted to an assistant mobile robot. Particle filters have proved to be well suited to this robotic context. Like numerous approaches, the principle relies on the projection of the model's silhouette of the tracked human limbs and appearance features located on the model surface, to validate the particles (associated configurations) which correspond to the best model-to-image fits. Our particle filter based HMC system is improved and extended in two ways. First, our estimation process is based on the so-called AUXILIARY scheme which has been surprisingly seldom exploited for tracking purpose. This scheme is shown to outperform conventional particle filters as it limits drastically the well-known burst in term of particles when considering high dimensional state-space. The second line of investigation concerns data fusion. Data fusion is considered both in the importance and measurement functions with some degree of adaptability depending on the current human posture and the environmental context encountered by the robot. Implementation and experiments on indoor sequences acquired by an assistant mobile robot highlight the relevance and versatility of our HMC system. Extensions are finally discussed.     

Online Text Prediction with Recurrent Neural Networks

Arithmetic coding is one of the most outstanding techniques for lossless data compression. It attains its good performance with the help of a probability model which indicates at each step the probability of occurrence of each possible input symbol given the current context. The better this model, the greater the compression ratio achieved. This work analyses the use of discrete-time recurrent neural networks and their capability for predicting the next symbol in a sequence in order to implement that model. The focus of this study is on online prediction, a task much harder than the classical offline grammatical inference with neural networks. The results obtained show that recurrent neural networks have no problem when the sequences come from the output of a finite-state machine, easily giving high compression ratios. When compressing real texts, however, the dynamics of the sequences seem to be too complex to be learned online correctly by the net.     

Distributed planning and control systems for the virtual enterprise: organizational requirements and development life-cycle

This paper describes the requirements analysis and system specification of an Order Promise module to be used as part of a broader Decision Support System for production and operations planning of a Virtual Enterprise. This work is part of a broader project with a particular focus on the microelectronics industry which is a good example of Virtual Enterprise, and where a quick response to the customers needs and to unpredictable changes in production conditions is considered a major factor for success. First, the analysis and specification are presented within a development framework that involves the study of organizational issues of semiconductor enterprises. The use of ontological engineering for supporting the communication and shared understanding of the system concepts is explained and a virtual enterprise ontology is outlined. Following the clarification of the concept of virtual enterprise, the generic techno-organizational requirements for the information system are derived. Finally, a specification of the global planning module and a more detailed one regarding the order promise module is presented.     

An adaptive learning approach for 3-D surface reconstruction from point clouds.

In this paper, we propose a multiresolution approach for surface reconstruction from clouds of unorganized points representing an object surface in 3-D space. The proposed method uses a set of mesh operators and simple rules for selective mesh refinement, with a strategy based on Kohonen's self-organizing map (SOM). Basically, a self-adaptive scheme is used for iteratively moving vertices of an initial simple mesh in the direction of the set of points, ideally the object boundary. Successive refinement and motion of vertices are applied leading to a more detailed surface, in a multiresolution, iterative scheme. Reconstruction was experimented on with several point sets, including different shapes and sizes. Results show generated meshes very close to object final shapes. We include measures of performance and discuss robustness.     

IP Squared: Internet Standards and Intellectual Property

Standards-development organizations (SDOs) comprise participants from large and small companies, academia, and the open source community. The participants come with varying backgrounds with regard to copyright and patents in the areas that are being standardized, and the SDOs must deal with these issues in ways that both satisfy the participants (and their employers) and result in useful standards. Each SDO — including the IEEE — has its own intellectual property (IP) policy. This issue, we look at how the IETF handles IP, in an overview cowritten by an attorney who has represented the IETF for some years and the current IETF Chair.     

Impacts in multibody systems: modeling and experiments

This paper outlines a novel approach to the modeling and analysis of impact involving multibody systems. This approach is based on an analysis of energy absorption and restitution during impact, using a decomposition of the kinetic energy, which decouples the parts associated with the spaces of admissible and constrained motions of the underlying unilateral constraints. Such a decomposition turns out to be useful in the analysis of energy dissipation during impact, and leads to a generalized definition of the energetic coefficient of restitution, which targets particularly collisions in multibody systems. The applicability of the approach reported is investigated by conducting an experimental study on a robotic testbed. It is shown that impact between multibody systems is considerably affected not only by the local dynamics characteristics of the interacting bodies, but also the configuration of the whole multibody system. The results reported here show that our decomposition can offer a sound characterization of impact in several problems of multibody systems.     

ManyEyes: a site for visualization at internet scale

We describe the design and deployment of Many Eyes, a public web site where users may upload data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on discussions. The goal of the site is to support collaboration around visualizations at a large scale by fostering a social style of data analysis in which visualizations not only serve as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a medium to spur discussion among users. To support this goal, the site includes novel mechanisms for end-user creation of visualizations and asynchronous collaboration around those visualizations. In addition to describing these technologies, we provide a preliminary report on the activity of our users.     

Guidelines for the incremental identification of aspects in requirements specifications

The desired principle of separation of concerns in software development can be jeopardized by the so-called crosscutting concerns, which tend to be scattered over (and tangled with) the functionality of the modular units of a system. The correct identification of such concerns (and their encapsulation into separate artifacts) is thereby considered a way to improve software understanding and evolution. Pursuing a proper management of concerns from the requirements engineering stage can greatly benefit the entire software life-cycle. In this paper, we propose conceptual guidelines on how to perform the identification of crosscutting concerns in the process of building requirements specifications. We argue that the identification must be carried out in an incremental way, to encapsulate apart the crosscutting concerns even if they have not emerged completely yet.