pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Combining Brain-Computer Interfaces and Haptics: Detecting Mental Workload to Adapt Haptic Assistance

International audienceIn this paper we introduce the combined use of Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) and Haptic interfaces. We propose to adapt haptic guides based on the mental activity measured by a BCI system. This novel approach is illustrated within a proof-of-concept system: haptic guides are toggled during a path-following task thanks to a mental workload index provided by a BCI. The aim of this system is to provide haptic assistance only when the user's brain activity reflects a high mental workload. A user study conducted with 8 participants shows that our proof-of-concept is operational and exploitable. Results show that activation of haptic guides occurs in the most difficult part of the path-following task. Moreover it allows to increase task performance by 53% by activating assistance only 59% of the time. Taken together, these results suggest that BCI could be used to determine when the user needs assistance during haptic interaction and to enable haptic guides accordingly
The precision of 'haptic' rod length perception is reduced by lack of visual precision

In studies on haptic rod length perception, participants conventionally report their length estimates by placing a visual landmark at a position equal to the rod’s perceived endpoint. We hypothesized that this visual aspect substantially increases the variability of the recorded length judgments. To examine this, we developed a virtual reality length judgment apparatus that provides better visual information. Participants performed a rod length perception task in both the conventional apparatus and the virtual reality apparatus. The variability of the length judgments was found to be higher in the conventional apparatus. We determined that between half and two-thirds of the variance in the conventional apparatus is haptic variance. Thus, vision accounts for between one-third and half of the variance that was previously thought to be haptic variance. Our finding implies that the virtual reality apparatus may be more suitable for studying subtle effects in haptic rod length perception
The theory of scale functions for spectrally negative lévy processes

The purpose of this review article is to give an up to date account of the theory and applications of scale functions for spectrally negative Lévy processes. Our review also includes the first extensive overview of how to work numerically with scale functions. Aside from being well acquainted with the general theory of probability, the reader is assumed to have some elementary knowledge of Lévy processes, in particular a reasonable understanding of the Lévy-Khintchine formula and its relationship to the Lévy-Itô decomposition. We shall also touch on more general topics such as excursion theory and semi-martingale calculus. However, wherever possible, we shall try to focus on key ideas taking a selective stance on the technical details. For the reader who is less familiar with some of the mathematical theories and techniques which are used at various points in this review, we note that all the necessary technical background can be found in the following texts on Lévy processes; (Bertoin, Lévy Processes (1996); Sato, Lévy Processes and Infinitely Divisible Distributions (1999); Kyprianou, Introductory Lectures on Fluctuations of Lévy Processes and Their Applications (2006); Doney, Fluctuation Theory for Lévy Processes (2007)), Applebaum Lévy Processes and Stochastic Calculus (2009)
Extended Security Arguments for Signature Schemes

International audienceThe well-known forking lemma by Pointcheval and Stern has been used to prove the security of the so-called generic signature schemes. These signature schemes are obtained via the Fiat-Shamir transform from three-pass identification schemes. A number of five-pass identifi- cation protocols have been proposed in the last few years. Extending the forking lemma and the Fiat-Shamir transform would allow to ob- tain new signature schemes since, unfortunately, these newly proposed schemes fall outside the original framework. In this paper, we provide an extension of the forking lemma in order to assess the security of what we call n-generic signature schemes. These include signature schemes that are derived from certain (2n + 1)-pass identification schemes. We thus obtain a generic methodology for proving the security of a number of signature schemes derived from recently published five-pass identifica- tion protocols, and potentially for (2n + 1)-pass identification schemes to come
Cross-Entropy Optimisation of Importance Sampling Parameters for Statistical Model Checking

International audienceStatistical model checking avoids the exponential growth of states associated with probabilistic model checking by estimating prop-erties from multiple executions of a system and by giving results within confidence bounds. Rare properties are often very important but pose a particular challenge for simulation-based approaches, hence a key ob-jective under these circumstances is to reduce the number and length of simulations necessary to produce a given level of confidence. Impor-tance sampling is a well-established technique that achieves this, however to maintain the advantages of statistical model checking it is necessary to find good importance sampling distributions without considering the entire state space. Motivated by the above, we present a simple algorithm that uses the notion of cross-entropy to find the optimal parameters for an importance sampling distribution. In contrast to previous work, our algorithm uses a low dimensional vector of parameters to define this distribution and thus avoids the often intractable explicit representation of a transition matrix. We show that our parametrisation leads to a unique optimum and can produce many orders of magnitude improvement in simulation efficiency. We demonstrate the efficacy of our methodology by applying it to models from reliability engineering and biochemistry
A model checker for hierarchical probabilistic real-time systems

Real-life systems are usually hard to control, due to their complicated structures, quantitative time factors and even stochastic behaviors. In this work, we present a model checker to analyze hierarchical probabilistic real-time systems. A modeling language called PRTS is used to specify such systems, and automatic zone-abstraction approach, which is probability preserving, is used to generate finite state MDP. We have implemented PRTS in model checking framework PAT so that friendly user interface can be used to edit, simulate and verify PRTS models. Some experiments are conducted to show our tool’s efficiency.Full Tex
SPT: Storyboard Programming Tool

We present Spt, a tool that helps programmers write low-level data-structure manipulations by combining various forms of insights such as abstract and concrete input-output examples as well as implementation skeletons. When programmers write such manipulations, they typically have a clear high-level intuition about how the manipulation should work, but implementing efficient low-level pointer manipulating code is error-prone. Our tool aims to bridge the gap between the intuition and the corresponding implementation by automatically synthesizing the implementation. The tool frames the synthesis problem as a generalization of an abstract-interpretation based shape analysis, and represents the problem as a set of constraints which are solved efficiently by the Sketch solver. We report the successful evaluation of our tool on synthesizing several linked list and binary search tree manipulations.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CCF-1116362
Flood Historical Data for Flood Risk Estimation\ud
 in Coastal Areas, Eastern Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy

A reconstruction of historical floods occurred along the Amalfi coast, during the last five\ud
7 centuries is presented. The analysis of historical sources allowed to achieve a chronological\ud
8 reconstruction of more than 100 floods, four of which classified as catastrophic events. In this\ud
9 task, the level of information was decisive to carry out space–time identification, estimate the\ud
10 affected area and define the type of damage to the structures, and the environment (e.g. mud\ud
11 flow, debris flow, rock falls, shoreline progradation, fan deltas), which may be relevant for the\ud
12 recognition of similar events within the geologic record. The magnitude of the events was\ud
13 finally estimated, taking into account the size of the areas affected by flooding as well as the\ud
14 type of effects induced on the urban and physical environment and the recurrence intervals
Sufficient condition for ephemeral key-leakage resilient tripartite key exchange

17th Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, ACISP 2012; Wollongong, NSW; Australia; 9 July 2012 through 11 July 2012Tripartite (Diffie-Hellman) Key Exchange (3KE), introduced by Joux (ANTS-IV 2000), represents today the only known class of group key exchange protocols, in which computation of unauthenticated session keys requires one round and proceeds with minimal computation and communication overhead. The first one-round authenticated 3KE version that preserved the unique efficiency properties of the original protocol and strengthened its security towards resilience against leakage of ephemeral (session-dependent) secrets was proposed recently by Manulis, Suzuki, and Ustaoglu (ICISC 2009). In this work we explore sufficient conditions for building such protocols. We define a set of admissible polynomials and show how their construction generically implies 3KE protocols with the desired security and efficiency properties. Our result generalizes the previous 3KE protocol and gives rise to many new authenticated constructions, all of which enjoy forward secrecy and resilience to ephemeral key-leakage under the gap Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. © 2012 Springer-Verlag
Fully Private Revocable Predicate Encryption

We introduce the concept of Revocable Predicate Encryption (RPE), which extends current predicate encryption setting with revocation support: private keys can be used to decrypt an RPE ciphertext only if they match the decryption policy (defined via attributes encoded into the ciphertext and predicates associated with private keys) and were not revoked by the time the ciphertext was created. We formalize the notion of attribute hiding in the presence of revocation and propose an RPE scheme, called AH-RPE, which achieves attribute-hiding under the Decision Linear assumption in the standard model. We then present a stronger privacy notion, termed full hiding, which further cares about privacy of revoked users. We propose another RPE scheme, called FH-RPE, that adopts the Subset Cover Framework and offers full hiding under the Decision Linear assumption in the standard model. The scheme offers very flexible privacy-preserving access control to encrypted data and can be used in sender-local revocation scenarios
Minimizing information leakage of tree-based RFID authentication protocols using alternate tree-walking

The privacy of efficient tree-based RFID authentication protocols is heavily dependent on the branching factor on the top layer. Indefinitely increasing the branching factor, however, is not a viable option. This paper proposes the alternate-tree walking scheme as well as two protocols to circumvent this problem. The privacy of the resulting protocols is shown to be comparable to that of linear-time protocols, where there is no leakage of information, whilst reducing the computational load of the database by one-third of what is required of tree-based protocols during authentication. We also identify and address a limitation in quantifying privacy in RFID protocols
Accelerating BST Methods for Model Reduction with Graphics Processors

Model order reduction of dynamical linear time-invariant system appears in many scientific and engineering applications. Numerically reliable SVD-based methods for this task require O(n3) floating-point arithmetic operations, with n being in the range 103 − 105 for many practical applications. In this paper we investigate the use of graphics processors (GPUs) to accelerate model reduction of large-scale linear systems via Balanced Stochastic Truncation, by off-loading the computationally intensive tasks to this device. Experiments on a hybrid platform consisting of state-of-the-art general-purpose multi-core processors and a GPU illustrate the potential of this approach
Predicting the Position of Attributive Adjectives in the French NP

Cet article est une version révisée de l'article paru dans Student session of the European Summer School for Logic, Language and Information, Copenhague : Danemark (2010)International audienceThis article proposes a quantitative study of the placement alternation for the adjective within the noun phrase in French. Taking the hypothesis that position constraints are mostly preferential as a starting point, we develop a methodology based on statistical inference in order to provide a formal account of the relative importance of different groups of constraints. Results show the relative importance of lexical constraints and that frequency-based and length constraints are the best predictors. This suggests that the placement of adjectives not only depends on our knowledge of lexical items but also on the knowledge of the way in which we use them in discourse, i.e. on usage
Domain-specific textual meta-modelling languages for model driven engineering

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31491-9_20Proceedings of 8th European Conference, ECMFA 2012, Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark, July 2-5, 2012Domain-specific modelling languages are normally defined through general-purpose meta-modelling languages like the MOF. While this is satisfactory for many Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) projects, several researchers have identified the need for domain-specific meta-modelling (DSMM) languages providing customised meta-modelling primitives aimed at the definition of modelling languages in a specific domain, as well as the construction of meta-model families.
In this paper, we discuss the potential of multi-level meta-modelling for the systematic engineering of DSMM architectures. For this purpose, we present: (i) several primitives and techniques to control the meta-modelling facilities offered to the users of the DSMM languages, (ii) a flexible approach to define textual concrete syntaxes for DSMM languages, (iii) extensions to model management languages enabling the practical use of DSMM in MDE, and (iv) an implementation of these ideas in the metaDepth tool.This work was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (project “Go Lite” TIN2011-24139) and the R&D programme of the Madrid Region (project “e-Madrid” S2009/TIC-1650
Comparison of OpAmp based and comparator based switched capacitor filter

Comparator based switched capacitor circuits provide an excellent opportunity to design sampled data systems where the virtual ground condition is detected rather than being continuously forced with negative feedback in Opamp based circuits. This work is an application of this concept to design a 1 st order 330 KHz cutoff frequency Lowpass filter operating at 10 MHz sampling frequency in 0.13μm technology and 1.2 V supply voltage. The Comparator Based Switched Capacitor (CBSC) filter is compared with conventional Two stage Miller compensated Operational amplifier based switched capacitor filter. It is shown that CBSC filter relaxes the constraints like speed ,linearity, gain, stability which would otherwise be hard to satisfy in scaled technologies in Opamp based circuits. The designed CBSC based lowpass filter provides significant power savings compared to traditional Opamp based switched capacitor filter
A multi-objective extremal optimisation approach applied to RFID antenna design

Extremal Optimisation (EO) is a recent nature-inspired meta-heuristic whose search method is especially suitable to solve combinatorial optimisation problems. This paper presents the implementation of a multi-objective version of EO to solve the real-world Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) antenna design problem, which must maximise efficiency and minimise resonant frequency. The approach we take produces novel modified meander line antenna designs. Another important contribution of this work is the incorporation of an inseparable fitness evaluation technique to perform the fitness evaluation of the components of solutions. This is due to the use of the NEC evaluation suite, which works as a black box process. When the results are compared with those generated by previous implementations based on Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) and Differential Evolution (DE), it is evident that our approach is able to obtain competitive results, especially in the generation of antennas with high efficiency. These results indicate that our approach is able to perform well on this problem; however, these results can still be improved, as demonstrated through a manual local search process.Full Tex
Following the WCAG 2.0 techniques: Experiences from designing a WCAG 2.0 checking tool

Published version of a chapter in the book: Computers Helping People with Special Needs. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31522-0_63This paper presents a conceptual analysis of how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and its accompanying documents can be used as a basis for the implementation of an automatic checking tool and the definition of a web accessibility metric. There are two major issues that need to be resolved to derive valid and reliable conclusions from the output of individual tests. First, the relationship of Sufficient Techniques and Common Failures has to be taken into account. Second, the logical combination of the techniques related to a Success Criterion must be represented in the results. The eGovMon project has a lot of experience in specifying and implementing tools for automatic checking of web accessibility. The project is based on the belief that web accessibility evaluation is not an end in itself. Its purpose is to promote web accessibility and initiate improvements
Towards Contextual Action Recognition and Target Localization with Active Allocation of Attention

Exploratory gaze movements are fundamental for gathering the most relevant information regarding the partner during social interactions. We have designed and implemented a system for dynamic attention allocation which is able to actively control gaze movements during a visual action recognition task. During the observation of a partners reaching movement, the robot is able to contextually estimate the goal position of the partner hand and the location in space of the candidate targets, while moving its gaze around with the purpose of optimizing the gathering of information relevant for the task. Experimental results on a simulated environment show that active gaze control provides a relevant advantage with respect to typical passive observation, both in term of estimation precision and of time required for action recognition. © 2012 Springer-Verlag
Systematic Construction of Finite State Automata Using VLSI Spiking Neurons

Spiking neural networks implemented using electronic Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) circuits are promising information processing architectures for carrying out complex cognitive tasks in real-world applications. These circuits are developed using standard silicon technologies, and exploit the analog properties of transistors to emulate the phenomena underlying the computations and the communication in the brain. Neuromorphic multi-neuron systems can provide a low-power and scalable information processing technology, that is optimally suited for advanced and future VLSI processes.
Neuro-inspired navigation strategies shifting for robots: integration of a multiple landmark taxon strategy

Rodents have been widely studied for their adaptive navigation capabilities. They are able to exhibit multiple navigation strategies; some based on simple sensory-motor associations, while others rely on the construction of cognitive maps. We previously proposed a computational model of parallel learning processes during navigation which could reproduce in simulation a wide set of rat behavioral data and which could adaptively control a robot in a changing environment. In this previous robotic implementation the visual approach (or taxon) strategy was how-ever paying attention to the intra-maze landmark only and learned to approach it. Here we replaced this mechanism by a more realistic one where the robot autonomously learns to select relevant landmarks. We show experimentally that the new taxon strategy is efficient, and that it combines robustly with the planning strategy, so as to choose the most efficient strategy given the available sensory informatio
A Pilot Study on Saccadic Adaptation Experiments with Robots

Despite the increasing mutual interest, robotics and cognitive sciences are still lacking common research grounds and comparison methodologies, for a more efficient use of modern technologies in aid of neuroscience research. We employed our humanoid robot for reproducing experiments on saccadic adaptation, on the same experimental setup used for human studies. The behavior of the robot, endowed with advanced sensorimotor skills and high autonomy in its interaction with the surrounding environment, is based on a model of cortical sensorimotor functions. We show how the comparison of robot experimental results with human and computational modeling data allows researchers to validate and assess alternative models of psychophysical phenomena
Design and User Satisfaction of Interactive Maps for Visually Impaired People

International audienceMultimodal interactive maps are a solution for presenting spatial information to visually impaired people. In this paper, we present an interactive multimodal map prototype that is based on a tactile paper map, a multi-touch screen and audio output. We first describe the different steps for designing an interactive map: drawing and printing the tactile paper map, choice of multi-touch technology, interaction technologies and the software architecture. Then we describe the method used to assess user satisfaction. We provide data showing that an interactive map - although based on a unique, elementary, double tap interaction - has been met with a high level of user satisfaction. Interestingly, satisfaction is independent of a user's age, previous visual experience or Braille experience. This prototype will be used as a platform to design advanced interactions for spatial learning
A Computationally Grounded Dynamic Logic of Agency, with an Application to Legal Actions

In this article, we propose a Dynamic Logic of Propositional Control DL-PC in which the concept of \u27seeing to it that\u27 (abbreviated stit) as studied by Belnap, Horty and others can be expressed; more precisely, we capture the concept of the so-called Chellas stit theory and the deliberatibe stit theory, as opposed to Belnap\u27s original achievement stit. In this logic, the sentence \u27group G sees to it that &#966;\u27 is defined in terms of dynamic operators: it is paraphrased as \u27group G is going to execute an action now such that whatever actions the agents outside G can execute at the same time, &#966; is true afterwards\u27. We also prove that the satisfiability problem is decidable. In the second part of the article we extend DL-PC with operators modeling normative concepts, resulting in a logic DL-PCLeg. In particular, we define the concepts of \u27legally seeing to it that\u27 and \u27illegally seeing to it that\u27. We prove that the decidability result for DL-PC transfers to DL-PCLeg