The tradeoff between pursuing a known reward (exploitation) and sampling unknown, potentially better opportunities (exploration) is a fundamental challenge faced by all adaptive organisms. Theories formalize the value of exploration (gathering information) as an information bonus. However, this may be difficult to compute; a simpler alternative is to increase decision noise, driving random expl...

This paper describes and compares five CSP based and two CSP related process-oriented motion control system implementations that are made for our Production Cell demonstration setup. Five implementations are software-based and two are FPGA hardware-based. All implementations were originally made with different purposes and investigating different areas of the design space for embedded control s...

Condition-based maintenance is recognized as a better health management strategy than regularly planned inspections as used nowadays by most companies. In practice, it is however difficult to implement because it means being able to predict the time to go before a failure occurs. This prediction relies on knowing the current health status of the system’s components and on predicting how compone...

This paper describes two experiments designed to (1) ascertain whether the way in which architectural plans are displayed on a computer screen influences the quality of their correction by humans, and (2) identify the visual exploration strategies adopted in this type of task. Results of the first "spot the difference" experiment showed that superimposing the plans yielded better error correcti...

Autonomic characteristics of panickers, blood phobics, and nonanxious controls were compared with a variety of cardiovascular measures, including spectral analysis of the cardiac inter-beat interval time series (derived from the electrocardiogram). Responses to laboratory stressors (shock avoidance and cold face stress) of 16 participants who reported recent occurrences of frequent severe panic...

Using the OMT software engineering methodology, a designer starts by identifying objects from the informal requirements specification. By identifying the relations between these objects, a global object model can be produced. Then, in an iterative process, this initial model is refined into an actual program. In this paper, we argue that the OMT methodology does not really help to analyze the r...

This work addresses the problem of efficient online exploration and mapping using multi-robot teams via a distributed algorithm for planning for multi-robot exploration— distributed sequential greedy assignment (DSGA)—based on the sequential greedy assignment (SGA) algorithm. SGA permits bounds on suboptimality but requires all robots to plan in series. Rather than plan for robots sequentially ...

Music streaming companies collectively serve billions of songs per day. Radio-based music services may intersperse audio advertisements among the songs as a means to generate revenue, much like traditional FM radio. Regardless of the monetization approach, the recommender system should decide when to play content that the listener is known to enjoy (exploit) and content that is novel to the lis...

We study the problem of finding efficient exploration policies for the case in which an agent is momentarily not concerned with exploiting, and instead tries to compute a policy for later use. We first formally define the Optimal Exploration Problem as one of sequential sampling and show that its solutions correspond to paths of minimum expected length in the space of policies. We derive a mode...

We propose a global optimization algorithm based on the Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) sampling framework. In this framework, the objective function is normalized to be a probabilistic density function (pdf), based on which a sequence of annealed target pdfs is designed to asymptotically converge on the set of global optima. A sequential importance sampling (SIS) procedure is performed to simulat...