Bayle’s aesthetic radicalism is based on a conception of a living space in which there is not an opposition of an inner space to an outer space. This idea will be discussed by looking at the morphology creation, temporal evolution and sound spatiality on François Bayle’s works. Sound events as ‘images-of-sounds’ are characterised by a philosophy of dynamic production and energy transformation which creates a space in movement. However, the organisation of time structure in Bayle’s works can be divided into three categories (discrete time, time based on independent moments and circular time) corresponding to three periods of his creative life. We can conclude that this organisation led him to realise how important the active behaviour of the listener is for the construction of space. As a result, the spatial experience does not create a constructed space but rather a subjective one in which the listener is a resonant subject with the space surrounding him.

Space is a concept central to music. Particular spaces can be seen as the enablers and analogues of social configurations for music-making. Thus, for example, concert halls, clubs or cathedrals determine significant aspects of the social and auditory presence of heard music, in terms of concepts such as proximity, separation, resonance, silence, community. Recording technologies have forced us to reconsider musical space as a much more complex phenomenon, including the possible presence of imaginary spaces. Bearing in mind Henri Lefebvre’s assertion that space must be ‘produced’, and starting from Pierre Schaeffer’s notion of spatial development, this article considers the ‘materiality’ of space and the implications of such materiality for thinking about music and sound. Taking the recent reconstruction of the Denman exponential horn at the British Science Museum as an emblem, in relation to the recent resurgence of interest in historic sound recording practices, space is considered in relation to current discussions of material culture.

The one-man band is a highly performative musical practice which combines visual spectacle and musical production. As digital and electronic technologies play an increasingly important role in our lives and change the ways in which music is produced, performed and consumed, the traditional one-man band with a bass drum on his back and cymbals between his knees provides an interesting model through which to examine both our relationship with technology and the importance of embodiment and visual spectacle in developing and maintaining audience/performer relationships. Furthermore, for digital performance artists, the model of the traditional one-man band can provide interesting inspiration for new works.

At a time when tape music, which obviated the need for performers by eliminating interpretation after composition, was becoming the dominant paradigm for electronic music, John Cage, motivated by his inchoate aesthetic of indeterminacy, radically reimagined electronic music that ‘treats machines as things to perform with’. In the 1950s and 1960s, Cage employed electronic technologies in place of musical instruments in concert music, but also reframed the creation of tape music by following a score to be a performative act. Although Cage idealised a liberal approach to performance practice and maintained a modernist, utilitarian attitude towards technological progress, his actions and scores reflect allegiance to the ‘work concept’ (Goehr 1992). Twenty-first-century performers of Cage’s electronic music are challenged to address the seemingly paradoxical imperatives of technological progressivism and creative interpretation with fidelity to a work embodied in a score. This article discusses efforts to reconcile these forces in contemporary realisations using the interactive technologies of three of Cage’s classic electronic works. The development of interactive performance interfaces in response to musical requirements of a score is presented as an important but overlooked model for the development of new interfaces for musical expression.

We describe and evaluate a text-to-pictograph translation system that is used in an online platform for Augmentative and Alternative Communication, which is intended for people who are not able to read and write, but who still want to communicate with the outside world. The system is set up to translate from Dutch into Sclera and Beta, two publicly available pictograph sets consisting of several thousands of pictographs each. We have linked large amounts of these pictographs to synsets or combinations of synsets of Cornetto, a lexical-semantic database for Dutch similar to WordNet. In the translation system, the Dutch input text undergoes shallow linguistic analysis and the synsets of the content words are looked up. The system looks for the nearest pictographs in the lexical-semantic database and displays the message into pictographs. We evaluated the system and results showed a large improvement over the baseline system which consisted of straightforward string-matching between the input text and the filenames of the pictographs.

Our system provides a clear improvement in the communication possibilities of illiterate people. Nevertheless there is room for further improvement.

We introduce a new formulation of pure type systems (PTSs) with explicit substitution and de Bruijn indices and formally prove some of its meta-theory. Using techniques based on Normalisation by Evaluation, we prove that untyped conversion can be typed for predicative PTSs. Although this equivalence was settled by Siles and Herbelin for the conventional presentation of PTSs, we strongly conjecture that our proof method can also be applied to PTSs with η.

Because space manipulators must satisfy the law of conservation of momentum, any motion of a manipulator within a space-manipulator system disturbs the position and attitude of its free-floating base. In this study, the authors have designed a multi-swarm particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to address the motion planning problem and so minimize base disturbances for 6-DOF space manipulators. First, the equation of kinematics for space manipulators in the form of a generalized Jacobian matrix (GJM) is introduced. Second, sinusoidal and polynomial functions are used to parameterize joint motion, and a quaternion representation is used to represent the attitude of the base. Moreover, by transforming the planning problem into an optimization problem, the objective function is analyzed and the proposed algorithm explained in detail. Finally, numerical simulation results are used to verify the validity of the proposed algorithm.

Bibliometric calculations currently used to assess the quality of researchers, articles, and scientific journals have serious structural problems; many authors have noted the weakness of citation counts, because they are purely quantitative and do not differentiate between high- and low-citing papers. If a paper’s reputation is simply evaluated according to the number of its citations, then incomplete, incorrect, or controversial articles may be promoted, regardless of their relevancy. Therefore, perverse incentives are generated for researchers who may publish many incorrect or incomplete papers to achieve high impact indexes. It is essential to improve the objective criteria for automatic article-quality assessments. However, to obtain these new criteria, it is necessary to advance the programmed detection of context, polarity, and function of bibliographic references.

We present an overview of general concepts and review contributions to the solutions to problems related to these issues, with the purpose of identifying trends and suggesting possible future research directions.

Monadic second-order logic on finite words is a decidable yet expressive logic into which many decision problems can be encoded. Since MSO formulas correspond to regular languages, equivalence of MSO formulas can be reduced to the equivalence of some regular structures (e.g., automata). This paper presents a verified functional decision procedure for MSO formulas that is not based on automata but on regular expressions. Functional languages are ideally suited for this task: regular expressions are data types and functions on them are defined by pattern matching and recursion and are verified by structural induction. Decision procedures for regular expression equivalence have been formalized before, usually based on Brzozowski derivatives. Yet, for a straightforward embedding of MSO formulas into regular expressions, an extension of regular expressions with a projection operation is required. We prove total correctness and completeness of an equivalence checker for regular expressions extended in that way. We also define a language-preserving translation of formulas into regular expressions with respect to two different semantics of MSO. Our results have been formalized and verified in the theorem prover Isabelle. Using Isabelle's code generation facility, this yields purely functional, formally verified programs that decide equivalence of MSO formulas.

In spite of researchers’ and practitioners’ increasing attention to data-driven learning (DDL) and increasing numbers of DDL studies, a multi-item scale to measure learners’ attitude toward DDL has not been developed thus far. In the present study, we developed and validated a psychometric scale to measure learners’ perceived preferences and benefits of DDL for research and pedagogical purposes. First, we created an item pool by referring to open-ended responses from learners; second, the items were pilot tested with target-level learners of English as a foreign language; and third, with item analyses and exploratory factor analysis, the revised version of the questionnaire was prepared. Finally, the questionnaire was administered, and its psychometric properties were examined with confirmatory factor analysis and fit indices. The final phase also included a measure of task values to explore the convergent evidence of the construct validity of the proposed scale. The results suggest that the scale is a valid measure of learners’ attitudes toward DDL, with the hypothesized model providing a good fit with the data. We propose that the scale can be used in future studies that utilize the same type of questionnaire research to facilitate further investigation of DDL. Suggestions for further research are also provided.

In accordance with strict requirements of portability, cheapness, and modularity, an innovative assistive device for hand disabilities has been developed and validated. This robotic orthosis is designed to be a low-cost, portable hand exoskeleton to assist people with physical disabilities in their everyday lives. Referring to hand opening disabilities, the authors have developed a methodology which, by starting from the geometrical characteristics of the patient's hand, defines the novel kinematic mechanism that better fits to the finger trajectories. The authors have validated the proposed novel mechanism by carrying out a Hand Exoskeleton System (HES) prototype, based on a single-phalanx mechanism, cable driven. The testing phase of the real prototype with a patient is currently on going.

Lexis-based views of second or foreign language (L2) teaching place prime importance on the teaching of conventionalized multi-word lexical items, or unanalyzed chunks, as a useful mechanism for fostering learners’ creative production of forms and their subsequent development of L2 competence. This pretest/posttest quasi-experimental study probed the use of teacher-designed multi-purpose instructional lexis software, dubbed LexisBOARD, on L2 learners’ vocabulary achievement in an Iranian EFL (English as a foreign language) context. A cohort of 50 Iranian junior-high-school students participated in the main instructional phase of the study. Instruction on L2 lexical items (e.g., concordances, polywords, or formulaic sequences) was mainly given to the experimental group using LexisBOARD, which was designed to be user-friendly and attuned to learners’ communicative and curricular needs. LexisBOARD offered further practice or feedback affordances through engaging students in lexical exercises (with word partnerships and collocations) for each unit and several quizzes for self-assessment. The control group was only taught using their mainstream EFL textbooks focusing on grammatical rules, discrete vocabulary items with fixed meanings, and reading texts, without any use of corpus-based activities. The results of the groups’ vocabulary test scores indicate that the lexis group significantly outperformed the control group, pointing to the superiority of practicing and learning L2 vocabulary when lexical items are seen in larger, more holistic ways and, especially, when engaging and experimenting with lexis is scaffolded through computer affordances.

Complex systems are challenging to design, particularly when they contain multi-level organizations with non-obvious relationships among design components. Here, we investigate engineering students’ capacity to search for optimal nanoscale biosystem designs with stochastic component and system behaviors. The study aims to characterize information types that facilitate human learning and improve their complex system understanding and design proficiency. It is hypothesized that learning parametric system relationships and/or inter-level causal mechanisms improves design proficiency; these relationships and mechanisms are teachable through software interfaces. Two contrasting learning/design interfaces were developed that presented differing information types: an interface with performance charts that emphasized parametric relationship learning and an interface with agent-based animations that emphasized inter-level causality learning. Users improved on pre-/post-learning design tasks with both interfaces; users who demonstrated inter-level causal relationship understanding, which occurred primarily with the animation interface, had greater improvement. All users were then presented contrasting animations of systems with opposing emergent behaviors, resulting in many more participants demonstrating an understanding of inter-level causal behaviors. These findings reveal the difficulties in understanding and designing multi-level systems and that interactive software tools may convey crucial information that supports engineering design, particularly with respect to the development of reasoning skills for how system components relate across levels.

This paper proposes a new approach for slip prediction of walking biped robots. The slip prediction is a measurement-based and friction behavior-inspired approach. A measurement-based online algorithm is designed to estimate the Coulomb friction which is regarded as a slip threshold. To predict the slip, a safety margin is introduced in the negative vicinity of the estimated Coulomb friction. The estimation algorithm concludes that if the applied force is outside the safety margin, then the foot tends to slip. The proposed approach depends on the available type of measurements. Three options of measurements are discussed. Among them, the foot acceleration and ankle force measurements scenario is validated by experiments on the humanoid SURALP (Sabanci University Robotics Research Laboratory Platform). The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for slip prediction and detection.