Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
This paper describes the development of an ontology for autonomous systems, as the initial stage ... more This paper describes the development of an ontology for autonomous systems, as the initial stage of a research programme on autonomous systems' engineering within a model-based control approach. The ontology aims at providing a unified conceptual framework for the autonomous systems' stakeholders, from developers to software engineers. The modular ontology contains both generic and domain-specific concepts for autonomous systems description and engineering. The ontology serves as the basis in a methodology to obtain the autonomous system's conceptual models. The objective is to obtain and to use these models as main input for the autonomous system's model-based control system.
En el presente artículo se muestran las etapas de construcción, implementación y pruebas de un Si... more En el presente artículo se muestran las etapas de construcción, implementación y pruebas de un Sistema de Registro de Datos Vía RFID y Código de Barras. El dispositivo, basado en un microcontrolador, permite registrar y almacenar en tiempo real la información almacenada en una etiqueta de código de barras, así como en tarjetas con tecnología RFID. Datos como: hora y fecha de detección también pueden ser registrados. Como característica adicional, el sistema puede enviar en forma serial la información recabada a una aplicación desarrollada en Visual Basic la cual genera un registro de los datos en formato Microsoft Excel. El objetivo al elaborar el sistema, fue de adquirir experiencia y evaluar la posibilidad de emplear estos elementos en aplicaciones de automatización de procesos a nivel industrial. Los resultados obtenidos dejan ver que la tecnología RFID tiene la ventaja de poder detectar objetos aun sin estar dentro de un ángulo de visión, como es el caso del lector de código de barras. Sin embargo el alcance de detección del lector empleado es relativamente corto: 12 cm. Palabra(s) Clave(s): Código de barras, identificación por radiofrecuencia, sistemas embebidos, Visual Basic.
Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is ... more Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is associated with neurological impairment (Incidence 1:1000 births). The level of the anatomic lesion generally correlates with the neurological deficit and ranges from complete paralysis to minimal or in some cases no motor involvement. Myelomeningocele or Spina bifida can lead to health problems, physical disabilities, and learning problems. Most commonly, associated with paralysis of the lower extremities and neurogenic bladder. Treatment requires multidisciplinary participation. The functional classification that concerns us in this review includes three types and were obtained through gait analysis. Keywords: Spina bifida; instrumental; gait analysis; kinematics and kinetics; orthotics
En este artículo se describe el diseño y la construcción de una banda transportadora modular y po... more En este artículo se describe el diseño y la construcción de una banda transportadora modular y portátil para su uso como apoyo didáctico en cursos de automatización de procesos. El prototipo desarrollado tiene una longitud de 70 cm de largo con 16.5 cm de ancho, su peso es de 1500 g.; estas características hacen que sea fácil de manipular. La banda es accionada por un motor de pasos pudiéndose controlar su avance, retroceso y velocidad. Cuenta una barra de soporte sobre la cual se montan de forma muy simple dispositivos tales como: desviadores, lectores de códigos de barra y sensores de proximidad, entre otros. Las señales digitales de activación del motor y del desviador, así como las que generan los sensores, se encuentran normalizadas a 24 VDC, haciendo a éste compatible con la mayoría de los equipos de control industrial. Tres sistemas como el que se describe, se encuentran en uso y han demostrado ser un apoyo brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Cognitive systems are starting to be deployed as appliances across the technological landscape of... more Cognitive systems are starting to be deployed as appliances across the technological landscape of modern societies. The increasing availability of high performance computing platforms has opened an opportunity for statistics-based cognitive systems that perform quite as humans in certain tasks that resisted the symbolic methods of classic artificial intelligence. Cognitive artefacts appear every day in the media, raising a wave of mild fear concerning artificial intelligence and its impact on society. These systems, performance notwithstanding, are quite brittle and their reduced dependability limips their potential for massive deployment in mission-critical applications -e.g. in autonomous driving or medical diagnosis. In this paper we explore the actual possibility of building cognitive systems using engineering-grade methods that can assure the satisfaction of strict requirements for their operation. The final conclusion will be that, besides the potential improvement provided by...
Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is ... more Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is associated with neurological impairment (Incidence 1:1000 births). The level of the anatomic lesion generally correlates with the neurological deficit and ranges from complete paralysis to minimal or no motor deficit. Myelomeningocele or Spina bifida can lead to health problems, physical disabilities and learning problems. Generally associated paralysis of the lower extremities and sphincters control absence. Treatment includes surgery, braces or other corrective devices, physical therapy. The functional classification that concerns us in this review includes three types.
Cerebral palsy is a pathology whose origin is in the immature nervous system, its common denomina... more Cerebral palsy is a pathology whose origin is in the immature nervous system, its common denominator is the loss of selective motor control, accompanied by other manifestations derived from the neurological injury, such as abnormal tone, balance disorders, and proprioception, so which results in a central motor dysfunction, presenting alterations of muscles and skeleton during the development of the child. Current concepts on biomechanical mechanisms governing normal and pathological gait, have been provided by a tool known as a gait lab, that allows us to obtain a series of data and measurements objectively and accurately. The Gait analysis has allowed us to understand how and why these alterations compromise the normal ambulation, being able to present protocols of treatment much more effective and lasting Cerebral palsy: causes and treatment alternatives, based on the evidence provided by gait analysis 142
Se presenta el diseño y la construccion de un prototipo didáctico que servirá de apoyo para reali... more Se presenta el diseño y la construccion de un prototipo didáctico que servirá de apoyo para realizar prácticas de laboratorio para estudiantes de carreras de ingeniería en el área de control e instrumentación. El equipo basa su funcionamiento en un proceso térmico sobre el cual se puede ejercer control, además cuenta con una serie de sensores que permiten monitorear su comportamiento. Las caracteristicas generales del equipo, asi como los bloques que lo conforman son descritos en el artículo. Finalmente, se presentan gráficas del comportamiento térmico del sistema, asi como los modelos matematicos de la respuesta temporal en distintos puntos de la planta.
An important part of human intelligence, both historically and operationally, is our ability to c... more An important part of human intelligence, both historically and operationally, is our ability to communicate. We learn how to communicate, and maintain our communicative skills, in a society of communicators -a highly effective way to reach and maintain proficiency in this complex skill. Principles that might allow artificial agents to learn language this way are incompletely known at present -the multi-dimensional nature of socio-communicative skills are beyond every machine learning framework so far proposed. Our work begins to address the challenge of proposing a way for observation-based machine learning of natural language and communication. Our framework can learn complex communicative skills with minimal up-front knowledge. The system learns by incrementally producing predictive models of causal relationships in observed data, guided by goal-inference and reasoning using forward-inverse models. We present results from two experiments where our S1 agent learns human communication by observing two humans interacting in a realtime TVstyle interview, using multimodal communicative gesture and situated language to talk about recycling of various materials and objects. S1 can learn multimodal complex language and multimodal communicative acts, a vocabulary of 100 words forming natural sentences with relatively complex sentence structure, including manual deictic reference and anaphora. S1 is seeded only with high-level information about goals of the interviewer and interviewee, and a small ontology; no grammar or other information is provided to S1 a priori. The agent learns the pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of complex utterances spoken and gestures from scratch, by observing the humans compare and contrast the cost and pollution related to recycling aluminum cans, glass bottles, newspaper, plastic, and wood. After 20 hours of observation S1 can perform an unscripted TV interview with a human, in the same style, without making mistakes.
2010 13th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design: Architectures, Methods and Tools, 2010
This paper is going to address the topic of hardware/software systems co-design. The paper will d... more This paper is going to address the topic of hardware/software systems co-design. The paper will develop two points of view. First, it provides a systemtheoretical layout on the problem of designing hardware-software systems. This layout will enable the designer to proceed systematically in optimizing the tradeoff between the desired functionality, available resources and operating conditions. Second, the paper will describe an application of some of the theoretical principles to the design of an embedded automotive system built on a low-cost FPGA.
Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37439)
Spastic hemiplegia (SH) is a type of cerebral palsy characterized by an uncontrolled increase of ... more Spastic hemiplegia (SH) is a type of cerebral palsy characterized by an uncontrolled increase of muscle tone on one side of the body. Superficial dynamic electromyography (SDEMG) signals, illustrate the contributions of the action potentials of motor units on the surface of muscle groups of the lower limbs during gait. This paper studies the SDEMG signals of patients with SH, acquired at the Gait Laboratory of the Hospital Ortopédico Infantil. Time and Frequency domain indicators were determined in order to evaluate the kinematics classification of SH from the electromyographic point of view. The applied indicators were: accumulated energy, non-linear accumulated energy, mean power frequency (MPF), spectral energy, bandwidth and wavelet decomposition. In order to identify the threshold and the error between each pair of types the following was used: one-way ANOVA with p value <0.05, a table of maximum significant differences was constructed from a student-t test of two tails with α = 0.05 and Chernoff and Becker's linear discriminator. Although it was not possible to discriminate between types I and III; a criteria was established that permits to differentiate among patients with SH (Type I, II or IV) with an error ≤1%.
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2013
The BICA 2012 conference main purpose is to take a significant step forward towards the BICA Chal... more The BICA 2012 conference main purpose is to take a significant step forward towards the BICA Challenge -creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind. This challenge apparently calls for a global, multidisciplinary joint effort to develop biologically-inspired dependable agents that perform well enough as to to be fully accepted as autonomous agents by the human society. We say "apparently" because we think that "biologically-inspired" needs to be re-thought due to the mismatch between natural and artificial agent organization and their construction methods: the natural and artificial construction processes. Due to this constructive mismatch and the complexity of the operational requirements of world-deployable machines, the question of dependability becomes a guiding light in the search of the proper architectures of cognitive agents. Models of perception, cognition and action that render self-aware machines will become a critical asset that marks a concrete roadmap to the BICA challenge. • In this talk we will address a proposal concerning a methodology for extracting universal, domain neutral, architectural design patterns from the analysis of biological cognition. This will render a set of design principles and design patterns oriented towards the construction of better machines. Bioinspiration cannot be a one step process if we we are going to to build robust, dependable autonomous agents; we must build solid theories first, departing from natural systems, and supporting our designs of artificial ones.
Los sistemas de control inteligente son básicamente sistemas software. Esto hace que tengan un ci... more Los sistemas de control inteligente son básicamente sistemas software. Esto hace que tengan un ciclo de vida propio compuesto por una serie de fases o etapas: especificación, desarrollo, validación operación, evolución y obsolescencia. La manera en que cada una de estas fases se desarrollará a lo largo de la vida del sistema depende exclusivamente de las decisiones que se tomaron cuando éste todavía no existía. Estas decisiones críticas, adoptadas en las primeras etapas del diseño, son las que dan carácter a muchas de las propiedades importantes de las que goza el sistema de control: rendimiento, eficiencia, atributos de calidad, capacidad de modificación, capacidad de evolución, facilidad de mantenimiento, integración con su entorno, reusabilidad, funcionalidad, dependibilidad, etc. En este artículo se trata de mostrar de qué forma la arquitectura global elegida afecta al sistema de control durante el tiempo que éste permanece en servicio.
Assistive Technologies (AT) are technological solutions that provide a disabled person interactio... more Assistive Technologies (AT) are technological solutions that provide a disabled person interaction and integration with the environment that surrounds them. The devices and solutions provided by AT are generally specific and personalized (ad-hoc) for each patient or group of patients and are seldom intended for massive distribution, making AT solutions expensive and of limited availability. In developing countries, AT are even more sparse and expensive either because of the low overall income and/or the lack of commercial interest of national producers. Therefore, the import of AT solutions is sometimes the only viable choice, insuring a high-cost low-availability scenario. However, technology transfer schemes (demand-pull and supply-push) with universities and technology park institutes can provide an alternative for the design and development of AT. These research centers count with highly qualified personnel and multilateral financial sources, thus being able to support and host AT centers. This is the case of the CETA-USB: Center of Assistive Technology of Simón Bolívar University, in Venezuela. For three years, CETA-USB has been researching, designing and developing AT, with the purpose of offering affordable alternatives to the Venezuelan handicapped community. Its mission is to perform research, development, education and service in order to increase knowledge, satisfy the needs and serve the handicapped community. Its vision is being an integral and multidisciplinary reference center of research, development and service provision of solutions for limited income handicapped people, adapted to the Venezuelan socio-cultural reality. This paper covers the research lines (at undergraduate and graduate level), accomplishments (the center's evolution, publications and projects) and products (communicational, robotic and therapeutic devices, interfaces, etc) obtained by the CETA-USB during the past 3 years. Such experience might be considered useful, as to be shared, promoted and discussed in order to benefit and help disabled and elder people in other places of the world.
The aim of this paper is to pin down the misuse of Heidegger's philosophal insights within t... more The aim of this paper is to pin down the misuse of Heidegger's philosophal insights within the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. In this paper we argue that a central thesis of phenomenology, in Husserl's words,“putting the world between brackets”, has led to a positioning in embodied AI that deeply neglects fundamental representational aspects that are totally necessary for the purpose of building a theory of cognition. The unification of representational and being-in-the-world aspects, are necesary for the explanation and ...
Abstract: Phenomenological states are generally considered sources of intrinsic motivation for au... more Abstract: Phenomenological states are generally considered sources of intrinsic motivation for autonomous biological agents. In this paper we will address the issue of exploiting these states for robust goal-directed systems. We will provide an analysis of consciousness in terms of a precise definition of how an agent” understands” the informational flows entering the agent. This model of consciousness and understanding is based in the analysis and evaluation of phenomenological states along potential trajectories in the phase space of ...
Introduction TcMEPs are widely used for monitoring of corticospinal motor pathways in a variety o... more Introduction TcMEPs are widely used for monitoring of corticospinal motor pathways in a variety of surgical procedures. However, there is no published standard recording technique indicating the optimal electrode placement for recording myogenic responses from the foot. The purpose of our survey was to asses the different foot recording montages used by neurodiagnostic technologists in the surgical setting and which is the preferred recording site. Methods Fifty neurodiagnostic technologists in the USA were sent diagrams of the foot asking them to indicate where they place the recording electrodes on the foot of their patients undergoing a variety of thoracic or lumbar spinal column surgeries. The diagrams sent to the technologists pictured the sole of the foot, the top of the foot, and the medial aspect of the foot. The technologists were instructed to place an X of where they place the recording electrodes for a foot motor evoked potential recording. Twenty technologists submitted their diagrams. The bulk of the data was broken down to show the top three muscles used by the technologists who returned their submissions. All technologists indicated that they used subdermal needle electrodes to record the TcMEPs from the foot. Results The survery showed that TcMEPs were obtained from four different muscles: the Abductor Hallicus Brevis (AHB); Flexor Hallicus Brevis (FHB); Flexor Digitorium Brevis (FDB); and the Abductor Digiti Minimi (ADM). The most commonly used recording montage was AHB-FHB at 65%; followed by AHB-FDB at 20%; and lastly AHB-ADM at 15%. Conclusion Our survey results indicate that the majority of technologists prefer using the AHB-FHB montage to record the TcMEP from the foot. Unfortunately, technologists did not provide reasons for why a particular recording montage was used and the survey did not specifically ask that reasons be provided. These results confirm our suspicion that multiple montages are used to record the foot TcMEP. We postulate that the reason for this is that there is no consensus or guideline indicating which muscle(s) should be used to record the TcMEP. We were also surprised that the majority of the recordings were obtained from two different muscles and not a single muscle. We recognize that the small number of respondents limits our study but we feel that these results provide useful insight and understanding on how technologists in the US record foot TcMEPs. This is an important step in trying to standardize how these recordings should be performed. Further studies are needed to determine the best muscles and montages to record the foot TcMEPs. We are doing a prospective study using the results from this survey to analyze TcMEPs and help determine the optimal recording montage.
Autonomous systems refer to systems capable of operating in a real world environment without any ... more Autonomous systems refer to systems capable of operating in a real world environment without any form of external control for extended periods of time. Autonomy is a desired goal for every system as it improves its performance, safely and profit. Ontologies are a way to conceptualize the knowledge of a specific domain. In this paper an ontology for the description of autonomous systems as well as for its development (engineering) is presented and applied to a process. This ontology is intended to be applied and used to generate final applications following a model driven methodology.
Adaptive agents use feedback as a key strategy to cope with uncertainty and change in their envir... more Adaptive agents use feedback as a key strategy to cope with uncertainty and change in their environments. The information fed back from the sensorimotor loop into the control subsystem can be used to change four different elements of the controller: parameters associated to the control model, the control model itself, the functional organization of the agent and the functional realization of the agent. There are many change alternatives and hence the complexity of the agent's space of potential configurations is daunting. The only viable alternative for space-and time-constrained agents-in practical, economical, evolutionary terms-is to achieve a reduction of the dimensionality of this configuration space. Emotions play a critical role in this reduction. The reduction is achieved by functionalization, interface minimization and by patterning, i.e. by selection among a predefined set of organizational configurations. This analysis lets us state how autonomy emerges from the integration of cognitive, emotional and autonomic systems in strict functional terms: autonomy is achieved by the closure of functional dependency. Emotion-based morphofunctional systems are able to exhibit complex adaptation patterns at a reduced cognitive cost. In this article we show a general model of how emotion supports functional adaptation and how the emotional biological systems operate following this theoretical model. We will also show how this model is also of applicability to the construction of a wide spectrum of artificial systems 1 .
Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development
This paper describes the development of an ontology for autonomous systems, as the initial stage ... more This paper describes the development of an ontology for autonomous systems, as the initial stage of a research programme on autonomous systems' engineering within a model-based control approach. The ontology aims at providing a unified conceptual framework for the autonomous systems' stakeholders, from developers to software engineers. The modular ontology contains both generic and domain-specific concepts for autonomous systems description and engineering. The ontology serves as the basis in a methodology to obtain the autonomous system's conceptual models. The objective is to obtain and to use these models as main input for the autonomous system's model-based control system.
En el presente artículo se muestran las etapas de construcción, implementación y pruebas de un Si... more En el presente artículo se muestran las etapas de construcción, implementación y pruebas de un Sistema de Registro de Datos Vía RFID y Código de Barras. El dispositivo, basado en un microcontrolador, permite registrar y almacenar en tiempo real la información almacenada en una etiqueta de código de barras, así como en tarjetas con tecnología RFID. Datos como: hora y fecha de detección también pueden ser registrados. Como característica adicional, el sistema puede enviar en forma serial la información recabada a una aplicación desarrollada en Visual Basic la cual genera un registro de los datos en formato Microsoft Excel. El objetivo al elaborar el sistema, fue de adquirir experiencia y evaluar la posibilidad de emplear estos elementos en aplicaciones de automatización de procesos a nivel industrial. Los resultados obtenidos dejan ver que la tecnología RFID tiene la ventaja de poder detectar objetos aun sin estar dentro de un ángulo de visión, como es el caso del lector de código de barras. Sin embargo el alcance de detección del lector empleado es relativamente corto: 12 cm. Palabra(s) Clave(s): Código de barras, identificación por radiofrecuencia, sistemas embebidos, Visual Basic.
Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is ... more Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is associated with neurological impairment (Incidence 1:1000 births). The level of the anatomic lesion generally correlates with the neurological deficit and ranges from complete paralysis to minimal or in some cases no motor involvement. Myelomeningocele or Spina bifida can lead to health problems, physical disabilities, and learning problems. Most commonly, associated with paralysis of the lower extremities and neurogenic bladder. Treatment requires multidisciplinary participation. The functional classification that concerns us in this review includes three types and were obtained through gait analysis. Keywords: Spina bifida; instrumental; gait analysis; kinematics and kinetics; orthotics
En este artículo se describe el diseño y la construcción de una banda transportadora modular y po... more En este artículo se describe el diseño y la construcción de una banda transportadora modular y portátil para su uso como apoyo didáctico en cursos de automatización de procesos. El prototipo desarrollado tiene una longitud de 70 cm de largo con 16.5 cm de ancho, su peso es de 1500 g.; estas características hacen que sea fácil de manipular. La banda es accionada por un motor de pasos pudiéndose controlar su avance, retroceso y velocidad. Cuenta una barra de soporte sobre la cual se montan de forma muy simple dispositivos tales como: desviadores, lectores de códigos de barra y sensores de proximidad, entre otros. Las señales digitales de activación del motor y del desviador, así como las que generan los sensores, se encuentran normalizadas a 24 VDC, haciendo a éste compatible con la mayoría de los equipos de control industrial. Tres sistemas como el que se describe, se encuentran en uso y han demostrado ser un apoyo brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Cognitive systems are starting to be deployed as appliances across the technological landscape of... more Cognitive systems are starting to be deployed as appliances across the technological landscape of modern societies. The increasing availability of high performance computing platforms has opened an opportunity for statistics-based cognitive systems that perform quite as humans in certain tasks that resisted the symbolic methods of classic artificial intelligence. Cognitive artefacts appear every day in the media, raising a wave of mild fear concerning artificial intelligence and its impact on society. These systems, performance notwithstanding, are quite brittle and their reduced dependability limips their potential for massive deployment in mission-critical applications -e.g. in autonomous driving or medical diagnosis. In this paper we explore the actual possibility of building cognitive systems using engineering-grade methods that can assure the satisfaction of strict requirements for their operation. The final conclusion will be that, besides the potential improvement provided by...
Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is ... more Myelomeningocele results from failure of the neural tube to close in the developing fetus and is associated with neurological impairment (Incidence 1:1000 births). The level of the anatomic lesion generally correlates with the neurological deficit and ranges from complete paralysis to minimal or no motor deficit. Myelomeningocele or Spina bifida can lead to health problems, physical disabilities and learning problems. Generally associated paralysis of the lower extremities and sphincters control absence. Treatment includes surgery, braces or other corrective devices, physical therapy. The functional classification that concerns us in this review includes three types.
Cerebral palsy is a pathology whose origin is in the immature nervous system, its common denomina... more Cerebral palsy is a pathology whose origin is in the immature nervous system, its common denominator is the loss of selective motor control, accompanied by other manifestations derived from the neurological injury, such as abnormal tone, balance disorders, and proprioception, so which results in a central motor dysfunction, presenting alterations of muscles and skeleton during the development of the child. Current concepts on biomechanical mechanisms governing normal and pathological gait, have been provided by a tool known as a gait lab, that allows us to obtain a series of data and measurements objectively and accurately. The Gait analysis has allowed us to understand how and why these alterations compromise the normal ambulation, being able to present protocols of treatment much more effective and lasting Cerebral palsy: causes and treatment alternatives, based on the evidence provided by gait analysis 142
Se presenta el diseño y la construccion de un prototipo didáctico que servirá de apoyo para reali... more Se presenta el diseño y la construccion de un prototipo didáctico que servirá de apoyo para realizar prácticas de laboratorio para estudiantes de carreras de ingeniería en el área de control e instrumentación. El equipo basa su funcionamiento en un proceso térmico sobre el cual se puede ejercer control, además cuenta con una serie de sensores que permiten monitorear su comportamiento. Las caracteristicas generales del equipo, asi como los bloques que lo conforman son descritos en el artículo. Finalmente, se presentan gráficas del comportamiento térmico del sistema, asi como los modelos matematicos de la respuesta temporal en distintos puntos de la planta.
An important part of human intelligence, both historically and operationally, is our ability to c... more An important part of human intelligence, both historically and operationally, is our ability to communicate. We learn how to communicate, and maintain our communicative skills, in a society of communicators -a highly effective way to reach and maintain proficiency in this complex skill. Principles that might allow artificial agents to learn language this way are incompletely known at present -the multi-dimensional nature of socio-communicative skills are beyond every machine learning framework so far proposed. Our work begins to address the challenge of proposing a way for observation-based machine learning of natural language and communication. Our framework can learn complex communicative skills with minimal up-front knowledge. The system learns by incrementally producing predictive models of causal relationships in observed data, guided by goal-inference and reasoning using forward-inverse models. We present results from two experiments where our S1 agent learns human communication by observing two humans interacting in a realtime TVstyle interview, using multimodal communicative gesture and situated language to talk about recycling of various materials and objects. S1 can learn multimodal complex language and multimodal communicative acts, a vocabulary of 100 words forming natural sentences with relatively complex sentence structure, including manual deictic reference and anaphora. S1 is seeded only with high-level information about goals of the interviewer and interviewee, and a small ontology; no grammar or other information is provided to S1 a priori. The agent learns the pragmatics, semantics, and syntax of complex utterances spoken and gestures from scratch, by observing the humans compare and contrast the cost and pollution related to recycling aluminum cans, glass bottles, newspaper, plastic, and wood. After 20 hours of observation S1 can perform an unscripted TV interview with a human, in the same style, without making mistakes.
2010 13th Euromicro Conference on Digital System Design: Architectures, Methods and Tools, 2010
This paper is going to address the topic of hardware/software systems co-design. The paper will d... more This paper is going to address the topic of hardware/software systems co-design. The paper will develop two points of view. First, it provides a systemtheoretical layout on the problem of designing hardware-software systems. This layout will enable the designer to proceed systematically in optimizing the tradeoff between the desired functionality, available resources and operating conditions. Second, the paper will describe an application of some of the theoretical principles to the design of an embedded automotive system built on a low-cost FPGA.
Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37439)
Spastic hemiplegia (SH) is a type of cerebral palsy characterized by an uncontrolled increase of ... more Spastic hemiplegia (SH) is a type of cerebral palsy characterized by an uncontrolled increase of muscle tone on one side of the body. Superficial dynamic electromyography (SDEMG) signals, illustrate the contributions of the action potentials of motor units on the surface of muscle groups of the lower limbs during gait. This paper studies the SDEMG signals of patients with SH, acquired at the Gait Laboratory of the Hospital Ortopédico Infantil. Time and Frequency domain indicators were determined in order to evaluate the kinematics classification of SH from the electromyographic point of view. The applied indicators were: accumulated energy, non-linear accumulated energy, mean power frequency (MPF), spectral energy, bandwidth and wavelet decomposition. In order to identify the threshold and the error between each pair of types the following was used: one-way ANOVA with p value <0.05, a table of maximum significant differences was constructed from a student-t test of two tails with α = 0.05 and Chernoff and Becker's linear discriminator. Although it was not possible to discriminate between types I and III; a criteria was established that permits to differentiate among patients with SH (Type I, II or IV) with an error ≤1%.
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2013
The BICA 2012 conference main purpose is to take a significant step forward towards the BICA Chal... more The BICA 2012 conference main purpose is to take a significant step forward towards the BICA Challenge -creating a real-life computational equivalent of the human mind. This challenge apparently calls for a global, multidisciplinary joint effort to develop biologically-inspired dependable agents that perform well enough as to to be fully accepted as autonomous agents by the human society. We say "apparently" because we think that "biologically-inspired" needs to be re-thought due to the mismatch between natural and artificial agent organization and their construction methods: the natural and artificial construction processes. Due to this constructive mismatch and the complexity of the operational requirements of world-deployable machines, the question of dependability becomes a guiding light in the search of the proper architectures of cognitive agents. Models of perception, cognition and action that render self-aware machines will become a critical asset that marks a concrete roadmap to the BICA challenge. • In this talk we will address a proposal concerning a methodology for extracting universal, domain neutral, architectural design patterns from the analysis of biological cognition. This will render a set of design principles and design patterns oriented towards the construction of better machines. Bioinspiration cannot be a one step process if we we are going to to build robust, dependable autonomous agents; we must build solid theories first, departing from natural systems, and supporting our designs of artificial ones.
Los sistemas de control inteligente son básicamente sistemas software. Esto hace que tengan un ci... more Los sistemas de control inteligente son básicamente sistemas software. Esto hace que tengan un ciclo de vida propio compuesto por una serie de fases o etapas: especificación, desarrollo, validación operación, evolución y obsolescencia. La manera en que cada una de estas fases se desarrollará a lo largo de la vida del sistema depende exclusivamente de las decisiones que se tomaron cuando éste todavía no existía. Estas decisiones críticas, adoptadas en las primeras etapas del diseño, son las que dan carácter a muchas de las propiedades importantes de las que goza el sistema de control: rendimiento, eficiencia, atributos de calidad, capacidad de modificación, capacidad de evolución, facilidad de mantenimiento, integración con su entorno, reusabilidad, funcionalidad, dependibilidad, etc. En este artículo se trata de mostrar de qué forma la arquitectura global elegida afecta al sistema de control durante el tiempo que éste permanece en servicio.
Assistive Technologies (AT) are technological solutions that provide a disabled person interactio... more Assistive Technologies (AT) are technological solutions that provide a disabled person interaction and integration with the environment that surrounds them. The devices and solutions provided by AT are generally specific and personalized (ad-hoc) for each patient or group of patients and are seldom intended for massive distribution, making AT solutions expensive and of limited availability. In developing countries, AT are even more sparse and expensive either because of the low overall income and/or the lack of commercial interest of national producers. Therefore, the import of AT solutions is sometimes the only viable choice, insuring a high-cost low-availability scenario. However, technology transfer schemes (demand-pull and supply-push) with universities and technology park institutes can provide an alternative for the design and development of AT. These research centers count with highly qualified personnel and multilateral financial sources, thus being able to support and host AT centers. This is the case of the CETA-USB: Center of Assistive Technology of Simón Bolívar University, in Venezuela. For three years, CETA-USB has been researching, designing and developing AT, with the purpose of offering affordable alternatives to the Venezuelan handicapped community. Its mission is to perform research, development, education and service in order to increase knowledge, satisfy the needs and serve the handicapped community. Its vision is being an integral and multidisciplinary reference center of research, development and service provision of solutions for limited income handicapped people, adapted to the Venezuelan socio-cultural reality. This paper covers the research lines (at undergraduate and graduate level), accomplishments (the center's evolution, publications and projects) and products (communicational, robotic and therapeutic devices, interfaces, etc) obtained by the CETA-USB during the past 3 years. Such experience might be considered useful, as to be shared, promoted and discussed in order to benefit and help disabled and elder people in other places of the world.
The aim of this paper is to pin down the misuse of Heidegger's philosophal insights within t... more The aim of this paper is to pin down the misuse of Heidegger's philosophal insights within the discipline of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. In this paper we argue that a central thesis of phenomenology, in Husserl's words,“putting the world between brackets”, has led to a positioning in embodied AI that deeply neglects fundamental representational aspects that are totally necessary for the purpose of building a theory of cognition. The unification of representational and being-in-the-world aspects, are necesary for the explanation and ...
Abstract: Phenomenological states are generally considered sources of intrinsic motivation for au... more Abstract: Phenomenological states are generally considered sources of intrinsic motivation for autonomous biological agents. In this paper we will address the issue of exploiting these states for robust goal-directed systems. We will provide an analysis of consciousness in terms of a precise definition of how an agent” understands” the informational flows entering the agent. This model of consciousness and understanding is based in the analysis and evaluation of phenomenological states along potential trajectories in the phase space of ...
Introduction TcMEPs are widely used for monitoring of corticospinal motor pathways in a variety o... more Introduction TcMEPs are widely used for monitoring of corticospinal motor pathways in a variety of surgical procedures. However, there is no published standard recording technique indicating the optimal electrode placement for recording myogenic responses from the foot. The purpose of our survey was to asses the different foot recording montages used by neurodiagnostic technologists in the surgical setting and which is the preferred recording site. Methods Fifty neurodiagnostic technologists in the USA were sent diagrams of the foot asking them to indicate where they place the recording electrodes on the foot of their patients undergoing a variety of thoracic or lumbar spinal column surgeries. The diagrams sent to the technologists pictured the sole of the foot, the top of the foot, and the medial aspect of the foot. The technologists were instructed to place an X of where they place the recording electrodes for a foot motor evoked potential recording. Twenty technologists submitted their diagrams. The bulk of the data was broken down to show the top three muscles used by the technologists who returned their submissions. All technologists indicated that they used subdermal needle electrodes to record the TcMEPs from the foot. Results The survery showed that TcMEPs were obtained from four different muscles: the Abductor Hallicus Brevis (AHB); Flexor Hallicus Brevis (FHB); Flexor Digitorium Brevis (FDB); and the Abductor Digiti Minimi (ADM). The most commonly used recording montage was AHB-FHB at 65%; followed by AHB-FDB at 20%; and lastly AHB-ADM at 15%. Conclusion Our survey results indicate that the majority of technologists prefer using the AHB-FHB montage to record the TcMEP from the foot. Unfortunately, technologists did not provide reasons for why a particular recording montage was used and the survey did not specifically ask that reasons be provided. These results confirm our suspicion that multiple montages are used to record the foot TcMEP. We postulate that the reason for this is that there is no consensus or guideline indicating which muscle(s) should be used to record the TcMEP. We were also surprised that the majority of the recordings were obtained from two different muscles and not a single muscle. We recognize that the small number of respondents limits our study but we feel that these results provide useful insight and understanding on how technologists in the US record foot TcMEPs. This is an important step in trying to standardize how these recordings should be performed. Further studies are needed to determine the best muscles and montages to record the foot TcMEPs. We are doing a prospective study using the results from this survey to analyze TcMEPs and help determine the optimal recording montage.
Autonomous systems refer to systems capable of operating in a real world environment without any ... more Autonomous systems refer to systems capable of operating in a real world environment without any form of external control for extended periods of time. Autonomy is a desired goal for every system as it improves its performance, safely and profit. Ontologies are a way to conceptualize the knowledge of a specific domain. In this paper an ontology for the description of autonomous systems as well as for its development (engineering) is presented and applied to a process. This ontology is intended to be applied and used to generate final applications following a model driven methodology.
Adaptive agents use feedback as a key strategy to cope with uncertainty and change in their envir... more Adaptive agents use feedback as a key strategy to cope with uncertainty and change in their environments. The information fed back from the sensorimotor loop into the control subsystem can be used to change four different elements of the controller: parameters associated to the control model, the control model itself, the functional organization of the agent and the functional realization of the agent. There are many change alternatives and hence the complexity of the agent's space of potential configurations is daunting. The only viable alternative for space-and time-constrained agents-in practical, economical, evolutionary terms-is to achieve a reduction of the dimensionality of this configuration space. Emotions play a critical role in this reduction. The reduction is achieved by functionalization, interface minimization and by patterning, i.e. by selection among a predefined set of organizational configurations. This analysis lets us state how autonomy emerges from the integration of cognitive, emotional and autonomic systems in strict functional terms: autonomy is achieved by the closure of functional dependency. Emotion-based morphofunctional systems are able to exhibit complex adaptation patterns at a reduced cognitive cost. In this article we show a general model of how emotion supports functional adaptation and how the emotional biological systems operate following this theoretical model. We will also show how this model is also of applicability to the construction of a wide spectrum of artificial systems 1 .
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Papers by Ricardo Bravo