We investigate the online exploration problem of a shortsighted mobile robot moving in an unknown cellular room without obstacles. The robot has a very limited sensor; it can determine only which of the four cells adjacent to its current position are free and which are blocked, i. e., unaccessible for the robot. Therefore, the robot must enter a cell in order to explore it. The robot has to vis...

During the development process of complex embedded systems there typically is a large number of architectural decisions that engineers are facing. Each of them can influence the properties of the end result (i.e.: cost, performance, etc.). A systematic process that supports this decision making is often referred to as Design Space Exploration (DSE). The need for computer-aided DSE methods was r...

Despite a growing body of evidence linking personality to life-history variation and fitness, the behavioural mechanisms underlying these relationships remain poorly understood. One mechanism thought to play a key role is how individuals respond to risk. Relatively reactive and proactive (or shy and bold) personality types are expected to differ in how they manage the inherent trade-off between...

Design space exploration is the simultaneous analysis of problem and solution spaces for a specific domain or application scope. Performing this activity as part of the architectural design is beneficial, especially for software platforms, which are shared across organizations. Exploring the design space of software platforms in a multi-product and multi-domain context is not trivial, and only ...

In this paper, we present a new methodology to rapidly explore the large design space encountered in hardware/software systems. The proposed methodology is based on a fast and accurate estimation approach. It has been implemented as an extension to a hardware/software codesign flow to enable the exploration of a large number of multiprocessor architecture solutions from the very start of the de...

In this paper we propose a design space exploration method targeting reconfigurable architectures that takes place at the algorithmic level and aims to rapidly highlight architectures that present good performance vs. flexibility tradeoffs. The exploration flow is based on a functional model to describe the architectures that the designer wants to compare. The paper mainly focuses on the projec...

Previous research suggests that children infer the presence of unobserved causes when objects appear to move spontaneously. Are such inferences limited to motion events or do children assume that unexplained physical events have causes more generally? Here we introduce an apparently spontaneous event and ask whether, even in the absence of spatiotemporal and co-variation cues linking the events...

This study investigated how environmental design shapes perceptual-motor exploration, when meta-stable regions of performance are created. Here, we examined how creating meta-stable regions of performance could destabilize pre-existing skills, favoring greater exploration of performance environments, exemplified in this study by climbing surfaces. In this investigation we manipulated hold orien...

Ocean biogeochemical provinces have historically been used to characterize regions of similar biogeography, allowing for large-scale comparisons and the definition possible management units. Recent studies shown that ocean color (OC) may be as a proxy range physical biological parameters, more direct approach in defining monitoring provinces. The current work investigates whether OC-derived (ar...