Adults primarily walk to reach a new location, but why do infants walk? Do infants, like adults, walk to travel to a distant goal? We observed 30 13-month-old and 30 19-month-old infants during natural walking in a laboratory playroom. We characterized the bout structure of walking-when infants start and stop walking-to examine why infants start and stop walking. Locomotor activity was composed...

How do animals in groups organize their work? Division of labour, i.e. the process by which individuals within a group choose which tasks to perform, has been extensively studied in social insects. Variability among individuals within a colony seems to underpin both the decision over which tasks to perform and the amount of effort to invest in a task. Studies have focused mainly on discrete tas...

We consider a team of k identical, oblivious, and semi-synchronous mobile robots that are able to sense (i.e., view) their environment, yet are unable to communicate, and evolve on a constrained path. Previous results in this weak scenario show that initial symmetry yields high lower bounds when problems are to be solved by deterministic robots. In this paper, we initiate research on probabilis...

Let D be a connected region inside a simple polygon, P . We define the angle hull of D, AH(D), to be the set of all points in P that can see two points of D at a right angle. We show that the perimeter of AH(D) cannot exceed in length the perimeter of D by more than a factor of 2. This upper bound is tight. Our result can be generalized to angles different from 90◦, and to settings where region...

We propose an abstract framework for Design Space Exploration (DSE) in the context of model-based embedded system development. The goal is to enable the integration of a set of concrete DSE methods addressing different system characteristics and design goals while still having a common understanding of design artifacts.

Examining the relevance of 'animal personality' involves linking consistent among- and within-individual behavioural variation to fitness in the wild. Studies aiming to do this typically assay personality in captivity and rely on the assumption that measures of traits in the laboratory reflect their expression in nature. We examined this rarely tested assumption by comparing laboratory and fiel...

The multi-robot exploration problem is to explore an unknown graph of size n and depth d with k robots starting from the same node. For known graphs a traversal of all nodes takes at most O(d + n/k) steps. The ratio between the time until cooperating robots explore an unknown graph and the optimal traversal of a known graph is called the competitive exploration time ratio. It is known that for ...

The Dolatabad area located in SE Iran is a well-endowed terrain owning several chromite mineralized zones. These chromite ore bodies are all hosted in a colored mélange complex zone comprising harzburgite, dunite, and pyroxenite. These deposits are irregular in shape, and are distributed as small lenses along colored mélange zones. The area has a great potential for discovering further chromite...