Over the past decade, housing costs have risen faster than incomes. The need for affordable rental housing has well outpaced the number of available units as well as funding allocations at the federal level. Local regulation and land use policies that increase the cost of subsidized, mixed-income housing construction and preservation have contributed to the affordability problem. To meet the af...

Recently, width-based planning methods have been shown to yield state-of-the-art results in the Atari 2600 video games. For this, the states were associated with the (RAM) memory states of the simulator. In this work, we consider the same planning problem but using the screen instead. By using the same visual inputs, the planning results can be compared with those of humans and learning methods...

This paper describes two techniques aimed at design-driven product innovation. Both techniques focus on providing a different, initially disruptive, perspective form which to approach a design assignment. As a result, sticky meanings and conventions are shaken loose, opening up avenues for considering new meanings that set the stage for design-driven product innovation.. Workshop results sugges...

Rendering translucent materials in real time is usually done by using surface diffusion and/or (translucent) shadow maps. The downsides of these approaches are, that surface diffusion cannot handle translucency effects that show up when rendering thin objects, and that translucent shadow maps are only available for point light sources. Furthermore, translucent shadow maps introduce limitations ...

This brief document describes the procedure by which the individual images in the Frontier Fields program have been aligned in order to enable the self-calibration procedure (which will be described in a separate document). Along with this document, we will release the FORTRAN source code (hst2galign) that accomplishes the alignment. The source code is provided as-is, with no guarantee that it ...

We present a method for searching for achordal open paths (snakes) in n-dimensional hypercube graphs (the box). Our technique first obtains a set of exemplary snakes using an evolutionary algorithm. These snakes are then analyzed to define a pruning model that constrains the search space. A depth-first search of the constrained solution space has established new lower bounds for the length of t...

This contribution sets out the necessity to re-imagine the notion of deafness in order to open up the potentials of this multifaceted cultural and linguistic phenomenon for technology design. The paper challenges common normative assumptions about deafness that are derived from some audiometric hearing “norm” and therefore bound our imagination by drawing attention to inabilities, difficulties ...

This article was written is response to a request from the editor-in-chief as a result of my receiving the Governor’s Award in Scientific Awareness. My goal is to provide a glimpse into a 40 plus year research career that was predominately focused on the role of thromboxane A2 and its receptor (TP) in physiologic and pathophysiologic processes in the cardiovascular system. It also enumerates th...

In this paper, we study the application of the box counting method (BCM) to estimate the fractal dimension of 3D plant foliage. We use artificial crowns with known theoretical fractal dimension to characterize the accuracy of the BCM and we extend the approach to 3D digitized plants. In particular, errors are experimentally characterized for the estimated values of the fractal dimension. Result...

The box counting method for fractal dimension estimation had not been applied to large or colour images thus far due to the processing time required. In this letter we present a fast, easy to implement and very easily expandable to any number of dimensions variation, the box merging method. It is applied here in RGB images which are considered as sets in 5-D space.