People seeking academic careers usually pursue degrees in various institutions, looking for the best combinations regarding their intellectual interests, their personal means and the opportunities that arise in their lives. This can be perceived by looking at the stages in the education of current researchers, as recorded in their curricula vitae. We define the academic trajectories of research...

This article presents a pilot study of the use of two new tangible interfaces and virtual worlds for teaching geometry in a secondary school. The first tangible device allows the user to control a virtual object in six degrees of freedom. The second tangible device is used to modify virtual objects, changing attributes such as position, size, rotation and color. A pilot study on using these dev...

The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long – they connect socially distant locations. Recent research on “small worlds” shows that remarkably few long ties are needed to give large and highly clustered populations the “degrees of separation” of a random network, in which information can rapidly diffuse. We test whether this “strength of weak ties” generalizes from simple to complex ...

This module has two parts. The first part is purely conceptual and invites readers to critically evaluate popular claims based on Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment that gave birth to the phrases “small-world property” and “six degrees of separation.” In the second part we use IONTW to explore distances between nodes in several types of networks. We also explore various possible formal definit...

In order to obtain well-proportioned surface quality and high polishing efficiency of free-form mould, a robotic gasbag polishing technique using an improved spinning-inflated-gasbag polishing tool is proposed in this paper. The improved polishing tool consists of three detachable modules, which are the drive, soft rubber gasbag and magnetorheology. The six degrees of freedom industrial robot w...

The presented controller system has been designed and dedicated to the intuitive and instinctive cable driven robot manipulator. The described robot manipulator is the moving platform suspended by the set of six variable-length steel cables. In practice the construction is like a standard inverted Stewart platform the platform is able to move in all six degrees of freedom with respect to its ba...

We present a new approach to path planning, called the \Ariadne's clew algorithm". It is designed to nd paths in high-dimensional continuous spaces and applies to robots with many degrees of freedom in static, as well as dynamic environments | ones where obstacles may move. The Ariadne's clew algorithm comprises two sub-algorithms, called search and explore, applied in an interleaved manner. ex...