Database of human motion has been widely used for recognizing human motion and synthesizing humanoid motions. In this paper, we propose a data structure for storing and extracting human motion data and demonstrate that the database can be applied to the recognition and motion synthesis problems in robotics. We develop an efficient method for building a human motion database from a collection of...

During recent years, question answering (QA) has grown from simple passage retrieval and information extraction to very complex approaches that incorporate deep question and document analysis, reasoning, planning, and sophisticated uses of knowledge resources. Most existing QA systems combine rule-based, knowledge-based and statistical components, and are highly optimized for a particular style...

I use data from the University of California to empirically examine the role of social learning in employees’ choices of health plans. The basic empirical strategy starts with the observation that if social learning is important, decisions should appear to be correlated across employees within the same department. I present evidence of considerable “clustering” on health plans within department...

We consider a dynamic planning problem for paratransit transportation. The focus is on a decision to take one day ahead: which requests to serve with own vehicles, and which requests to subcontract to taxis? We call this problem the Day-ahead Paratransit Planning problem. The developed model is a non-standard two-stage integer recourse model. Both stages consist of two consecutive optimization ...

We describe a novel method whereby a particle filter is used to create a potential field for robot control without prior clustering. We show an application of this technique to control a team of mobile robots to cooperatively locate and track a moving target. The particle filter models a probability distribution over the estimated location of the target, providing robust tracking despite freque...

The most underdiagnosed water-borne bacterial zoonosis in the world is Leptospirosis which especially impacts tropical and humid regions. According to World Health Organization (WHO), the number of human cases is not known precisely. Available reports showed that worldwide incidences vary from 0.1-1 per 100 000 per year in temperate climates to 10-100 per 100 000 in the humid tropics. Pathogeni...

Sampling-based motion planners are an effective means for generating collision-free motion paths. However, the quality of these motion paths (with respect to quality measures such as path length, clearance, smoothness or energy) is often notoriously low, especially in high-dimensional configuration spaces. We introduce a simple algorithm for merging an arbitrary number of input motion paths int...

This paper reports on an experimental approach to find a modularized artificial neural network solution for the UCI letters recognition problem. Our experiments have been carried out in two parts. We investigate directed task decomposition using expert knowledge and clustering approaches to find the subtasks for the modules of the network. We next investigate processes to combine the modules ef...

Methods Three year stepped wedge cluster RCT of a feedback intervention in 16 English/Welsh Hospitals (16 ITUs; 44 Acute Care of the Elderly [ACE] wards, routinely implementing a national cleanyourhands campaign), testing null hypothesis that intervention no more effective than routine practice. Intervention-based on Goal & Control theories. Repeating 4 week cycle of 20 mins observation, feedba...

We describe a bottom-up chart realization algorithm adapted for use with Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG), and show how it can be used to efficiently realize a wide range of coordination phenomena, including argument cluster coordination and gapping. The algorithm has been implemented as an extension to the OpenNLP open source CCG parser. As an avenue for future exploration, we also suggest...