Active exploration of novel environments is known to increase plasticity in animals, promoting long-term potentiation in the hippocampus and enhancing memory formation. These effects can occur during as well as after exploration. In humans novelty's effects on memory have been investigated with other methods, but never in an active exploration paradigm. We therefore investigated whether active ...

Telecommunications addresses the tyranny of distance for international and domestic trade communities by providing information linkages both internally and externally to an organisation. These global networks give firms the opportunity to gain strategic advantages such as the strengthening of trading partner relationships and the redesigning of internal procedures to improve overall efficiency ...

This paper presents an efficient and robust geometric algorithm that classifies and detects all possible types of torus/sphere intersections, including all degenerate conic sections (circles) and singular intersections. Given a torus and a sphere, we treat one surface as an obstacle and the other surface as the envelope surface of a moving ball. In this case, the Configuration space (C-space) o...

When to stop exploring is crucial in contexts where learning manage time and uncertainty critical for carrying out successful initiatives (e.g., innovation, personnel recruitment, vaccine discovery). We investigate analytically experimentally the exploration-exploitation trade-offs such contexts. A “two-way” sequential search task proposed, classical trade-off decisions with finite-horizon coup...

Action recognition from still images is an important task of computer vision applications such as image annotation, robotic navigation, video surveillance and several others. Existing approaches mainly rely on either bag-of-feature representations or articulated body-part models. However, the relationship between the action and the image segments is still substantially unexplored. For this reas...