quality inspection is an indispensable part of modern industrial manufacturing. steel as a major industry requires constant surveillance and supervision through its various stages of production. continuous casting is a critical step in the steel manufacturing process in which molten steel is solidified into a semi-finished product called slab. once the slab is released from the casting unit, th...

A long-standing open question concerns the cost or effort involved in processing scalar implicatures (SIs). When we hear “Some of the boxes are red”, we go beyond the literal meaning of “some” and infer that not all of the boxes are red. According to the Default view [1] hearers compute these kinds of SIs (generalized conversational implicatures) quickly, costlessly, and automatically. In contr...

The growing complexity and number of software projects requires both increasingly more experienced developers, testers and other specialists as well as a larger number of persons to fill these roles. This leads to increased personnel and management costs and also makes effort and cost estimation at task and activity levels more difficult for software development companies. An automated solution...

In September 2002, the NOAA Ship RAINIER hosted an experiment to examine the benefit in processing time from adopting CUBE [Calder & Mayer, 2002] and the Navigation Surface [Smith et al., 2002], and to determine whether this methodology could be used in real-time. Using normal survey methodology, data were collected from multiple platforms in Valdez Narrows, AK (~10x10km, 0-300m depth, slope 40...

Addressing security in the software development lifecycle is an ever-present concern for software engineers and organizations. From a management and monitoring perspective, it is difficult to measure 1) the amount of effort being focused on security concerns during active development and 2) the success of security related design and development efforts. Such data is simply not recorded. If reli...

In this paper we discuss the possibility of augmenting existing musical performance by using a novel sensing device termed ‘PegLeg’. This device interprets the movements and motions of a musician during play by allowing the musician to manipulate a sensor in three dimensions. A force sensitive surface allows us to detect, interpret and interface the subtle but integral element of physical “effo...

This paper describes an ongoing research effort to develop a single, unified computational paradigm for conjoint computing, which integrates concepts from symbolic processing, numeric processing and neural network technologies. The result of this research effort will be a new methodology for synthesizing intelligent systems. Neither the symbolic nor neural computational paradigms is sufficientl...

Anhedonia, the lack of interest or pleasure in response to hedonic stimuli or experiences, is a cardinal symptom of depression. This deficit in hedonic processing has been posited to influence depressed individuals' motivation to engage in potentially rewarding experiences. Accumulating evidence indicates that hedonic processing is not a unitary construct but rather consists of an anticipatory ...

Comparison processes contribute to many core phenomena of social cognition research. Whenever humans judge a given target, they rely on comparisons with a pertinent standard. We propose that comparison processes may be so ubiquitous because they reduce mental effort. To investigate this possibility, we used dense-array Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings together with a minimum norm source pr...

In this experiment, subjects had to rate the “prominence” of each of the syllables of 20 versions of the same utterance produced by men, women and children at various levels of vocal effort. The ratings were correlated with measurements of the SPL of the fundamental, spectral emphasis, vowel duration, F0max and F0 rise from the previous syllable. Together with ratings of the perceived vocal eff...