30 AI MAGAZINE ■ The staff scheduling problem is a critical problem in the call center (or, more generally, customer contact center) industry. This article describes DIRECTOR, a staff scheduling system for contact centers. DIRECTOR is a constraint-based system that uses AI search techniques to generate schedules that satisfy and optimize a wide range of constraints and service-quality metrics. ...

Laboratory testing of contact phenomena can be prohibitively expensive if the interacting bodies are geometrically complicated. This work demonstrates means to mitigate such problems by exploiting the established observation that two geometrically dissimilar contact pairs may exhibit the same contact mechanics. Specific formulas are derived that allow a complicated Hertzian contact pair to be r...

Estimation of contact state is important to any multi-point interaction that involves frictional stick/slip phenomena. In particular, when there are more kinematic constraints than there are degrees of freedom, some contact interfaces must slip, leading to the need for contact state estimation. Fortunately, supervisory control techniques from adaptive control can be applied to this problem with...

An inexpensive hand-held device for analysis of colorimetric sensor arrays (CSAs) has been developed. The device makes use of a contact image sensor (CIS), technology commonly used in business card scanners, to rapidly collect low-noise colorimetric data for chemical sensing. The lack of moving parts and insensitivity to vibration allow for lower noise and improved scan rates compared to other ...