Search results for "Software"
showing 10 items of 7396 documents
Telenoid android robot as an embodied perceptual social regulation medium engaging natural human–humanoid interaction
2014
The present paper aims to validate our research on human-humanoid interaction (HHI) using the minimalist humanoid robot Telenoid. We conducted the human-robot interaction test with 142 young people who had no prior interaction experience with this robot. The main goal is the analysis of the two social dimensions (''Perception'' and ''Believability'') useful for increasing the natural behaviour between users and Telenoid. We administered our custom questionnaire to human subjects in association with a well defined experimental setting (''ordinary and goal-guided task''). A thorough analysis of the questionnaires has been carried out and reliability and internal consistency in correlation bet…
WSNs for structural health monitoring of historical buildings
2009
Monitoring structural health of historical heritage buildings may be a daunting task for civil engineers due to the lack of a pre-existing model for the building stability, and to the presence of strict constraints on monitoring device deployment. This paper reports on the experience maturated during a project regarding the design and implementation of an innovative technological framework for monitoring critical structures in Sicily, Italy. The usage of wireless sensor networks allows for a pervasive observation over the sites of interest in order to minimize the potential damages that natural phenomena may cause to architectural or engineering works. Moreover, the system provides real-tim…
A metamodelling-based approach for method fragment comparison
2006
Several different approaches to Situational Method Engineering exist. They differ in terms of the primary element of the paradigm: the method fragment definition. Here, we introduce four method fragment definitions from the literature and compare their metamodels according to structural and functional criteria. The structural comparison showed a general alignment of some concepts that are sometimes referred with different names while the study of the compositional aspects results in evidence of substantial differences.
An Embedded, FPGA-based Computer Graphics Coprocessor with Native Geometric Algebra Support
2009
The representation of geometric objects and their transformation are the two key aspects in computer graphics applications. Traditionally, computer-intensive matrix calculations are involved in modeling and rendering three-dimensional (3D) scenery. Geometric algebra (aka Clifford algebra) is attracting attention as a natural way to model geometric facts and as a powerful analytical tool for symbolic calculations. In this paper, the architecture of Clifford coprocessor (CliffoSor) is introduced. CliffoSor is an embedded parallel coprocessing core that offers direct hardware support to Clifford algebra operators. A prototype implementation on a programmable gate array (FPGA) board is detailed…
A Dual-Core Coprocessor with Native 4D Clifford Algebra Support
2012
Geometric or Clifford Algebra (CA) is a powerful mathematical tool that is attracting a growing attention in many research fields such as computer graphics, computer vision, robotics and medical imaging for its natural and intuitive way to represent geometric objects and their transformations. This paper introduces the architecture of CliffordCoreDuo, an embedded dual-core coprocessor that offers direct hardware support to four-dimensional (4D) Clifford algebra operations. A prototype implementation on an FPGA board is detailed. Experimental results show a 1.6× average speedup of CliffordCoreDuo in comparison with the baseline mono-core architecture. A potential cycle speedup of about 40× o…
Accelerating Clifford Algebra Operations using GPUs and an OpenCL Code Generator
2015
Clifford Algebra (CA) is a powerful mathematical language that allows for a simple and intuitive representation of geometric objects and their transformations. It has important applications in many research fields, such as computer graphics, robotics, and machine vision. Direct hardware support of Clifford data types and operators is needed to accelerate applications based on Clifford Algebra. This paper proposes a mixed software-hardware system that exploits the computational power of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate Clifford operations. A code generator, namely OpenCLifford, is presented that automatically generates Java and C libraries for the direct support of Clifford ele…
Design Space Exploration of Parallel Embedded Architectures for Native Clifford Algebra Operations
2012
In the past few decades, Geometric or Clifford algebra (CA) has received a growing attention in many research fields, such as robotics, machine vision and computer graphics, as a natural and intuitive way to model geometric objects and their transformations. At the same time, the high dimensionality of Clifford algebra and its computational complexity demand specialized hardware architectures for the direct support of Clifford data types and operators. This paper presents the design space exploration of parallel embedded architectures for native execution of four-dimensional (4D) and five-dimensional (5D) Clifford algebra operations. The design space exploration has been described along wit…
A Study on Classification Methods Applied to Sentiment Analysis
2013
Sentiment analysis is a new area of research in data mining that concerns the detection of opinions and/or sentiments in texts. This work focuses on the application and the comparison of three classification techniques over a text corpus composed of reviews of commercial products in order to detect opinions about them. The chosen domain is about "perfumes", and user opinions composing the corpus are written in Italian language. The proposed approach is completely data-driven: a Term Frequency / Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) terms selection procedure has been applied in order to make computation more efficient, to improve the classification results and to manage some issues related to t…
Embedded Coprocessors for Native Execution of Geometric Algebra Operations
2016
Clifford algebra or geometric algebra (GA) is a simple and intuitive way to model geometric objects and their transformations. Operating in high-dimensional vector spaces with significant computational costs, the practical use of GA requires dedicated software and/or hardware architectures to directly support Clifford data types and operators. In this paper, a family of embedded coprocessors for the native execution of GA operations is presented. The paper shows the evolution of the coprocessor family focusing on the latest two architectures that offer direct hardware support to up to five-dimensional Clifford operations. The proposed coprocessors exploit hardware-oriented representations o…
A Multimodal Interaction Guide for Pervasive Services Access
2007
A pervasive, multimodal virtual guide for a cultural heritage site tour is illustrated. The guide is based on the integration of different technologies such as conversational agents, commonsense reasoning knowledge bases, multimodal interfaces and self-location detection systems. The aim of the work is to offer a more natural, context sensitive access to information with respect to traditional audio/visual pre-recorded guides. A prototype has been developed and implemented on a Qtek 9090 with Windows Mobile 2003 in order to deal with the "Museo Archeologico Regionale di Agrigento" domain.