In this paper we present a system to include knowledge in the process of organizing and disseminating heritage using 360 panoramic images. With our solution, data in heterogeneous digital archives are integrated according to a semantic model and are enriched by the contribution of domain experts which specify stories, called narrations, reflecting their knowledge of the heritage. Data in digita...

This paper presents the Nidaros framework for developing location-aware applications that provide location dependent functionality based on the current location of the user. The framework can be used to develop location-dependent advertisement, city guides, guides for tourist attractions, etc. The framework consists of three main components: A runtime system that manages user locations and the ...

This paper considers design methodologies in order to develop voice-enabled interfaces for tour-guide robots to be deployed at the Robotics Exposition of the Swiss National Exhibition (Expo.02). Human-robot voice communication presents new challenges for design of fully autonomous mobile robots, in that interactivity must be robot-initiated in conversation and within a dynamic adverse environme...

In the Colorful Traveling Salesman Problem (CTSP), given a graph G with a (not necessarily distinct) label (color) assigned to each edge, a Hamiltonian tour with the minimum number of different labels is sought. The problem is a variant of the well-known Hamiltonian Cycle problem and has potential applications in telecommunication networks, optical networks, and multimodal transportation networ...

Question answering involves developing methods to extract useful information from large collections of documents. This is done with specialised search engines such as Answer Finder. The aim of Answer Finder is to provide an answer to a question rather than a page listing related documents that may contain the correct answer. So, a question such as"How tall is the Eiffel Tower"would simply retur...

The infrared range finder for a mobile robot has the advantages of the low sensing cost and detecting all objects in front of the mobile robot after sensing. However, it has some non-linear bias errors, the measurement data represents the Gaussian distribution, and the variance of measurement error increases in proportion to distance. This paper set a goal to analyze the characteristics of an i...

Laser range finders are a vital component of high precision targeting engagements. The precise and accurate range-to-target information is an essential variable in the fire control solution of today’s sophisticated weapons. This range information is readily provided by the laser range finder, however, current fielded laser range finders are bulky, heavy, difficult to mount onto weapons, eye haz...

We report on the iterative design of a context-aware tour guide. We employed an informal prototyping tool, Topiary, to help us in the early stage design of the system. By using this electronic support to rapidly prototype ideas and test the prototypes with end users in the field, we efficiently explored the usability issues of map-based navigation techniques. Based on the tests, which involved ...

In his recent, light-hearted article “The Grand Tour”, New Yorker journalist Evan Osnos writes of his time with a Chinese tour group in Europe [12]. Osnos describes a group of thirty eight closelychaperoned tourists undertaking a breakneck bus tour, covering five countries in ten days. He argues that Chinese tourists have formed a distinctively Chinese “grand tour” of Europe. This tour includes...

The Stochastic Eulerian Tour Problem (SETP) seeks the Eulerian tour of minimum expected length on an undirected Eulerian graph, when demand on the arcs that have to be serviced is probabilistic. In an earlier paper, we have shown that the SETP is NP-hard and derived several properties of the optimal tour. In this paper, we develop three constructive heuristics for the SETP. The first two are gr...