Knowing which method parameters may be mutated during a method's execution is useful for many software engineering tasks. We present an approach to discovering parameter immutability, in which several lightweight, scalable ...

A preliminary set of experiments are described in which a biologically-inspired computer vision system (Serre, Wolf et al. 2005; Serre 2006; Serre, Oliva et al. 2006; Serre, Wolf et al. 2006) designed for visual object ...

A compiler-checked immutability guarantee provides useful documentation, facilitates reasoning, and enables optimizations. This paper presents Immutability Generic Java (IGJ), a novel language extension that expresses ...

Programmability is a major challenge in spatial computing, anaggregate control problem found in domains such as sensor networks,swarm robotics, and modular robotics. We address this challenge witha model of a spatial ...

We describe a quantitative theory to account for the computations performed by the feedforward path of the ventral stream of visual cortex and the local circuits implementing them. We show that a model instantiating the ...

Many applications of autonomous agents require groups to work in tight coordination. To be dependable, these groups must plan, carry out and adapt their activities in a way that is robust to failure and to uncertainty. ...

This thesis presents an effective alternative to the traditionalapproach to robotic manipulation. In our approach, manipulation ismainly guided by tactile feedback as opposed to vision. Themotivation comes from the fact ...

Opportunistic routing is a recent technique that achieves high throughput in the face of lossy wireless links. The current opportunistic routing protocol, ExOR, ties the MAC with routing, imposing a strict schedule on ...

This paper proposes a new approach to anonymous communication called information slicing. Typically, anonymizers use onion routing, where a message is encrypted in layers with the public keys of the nodes along the path. ...

Traditionally, interference is considered harmful.Wireless networks strive to avoid scheduling multiple transmissions at the same time in order to prevent interference. This paper adopts the opposite approach; it encourages ...

The Probabilistic I/O Automata framework of Lynch, Segala and Vaandrager provides tools for precisely specifying protocols and reasoning about their correctness using multiple levels of abstraction, based on implementation ...

This paper investigates the problem of automatically learning how torestructure the reward function of a Markov decision process so as tospeed up reinforcement learning. We begin by describing a method thatlearns a shaped ...

Bit errors occur over wireless channels when the signal isn't strongenough to overcome the effects of interference and noise. Currentwireless protocols may use forward error correction (FEC) to correct forsome (small) ...

There are currently two approaches to providing Byzantine-fault-tolerant state machine replication: a replica-based approach, e.g., BFT, that uses communication between replicas to agree on a proposed ordering of requests, ...

A preliminary set of experiments are described in which a biologically-inspired computer vision system (Serre, Wolf et al. 2005; Serre 2006; Serre, Oliva et al. 2006; Serre, Wolf et al. 2006) designed for visual object ...

This thesis presents the findings of exploratory research in low-cost compliant robotics. The most heavily leveraged trade-off is that of mechanical precision for computational power, with the hope that the price of future ...

We compare the practical performance of several recently proposed algorithms for active learning in the online setting. We consider two algorithms (and their combined variants) that are strongly online, in that they do ...

Human environments present special challenges for robot manipulation. They are often dynamic, difficult to predict, and beyond the control of a robot engineer. Fortunately, many characteristics of these settings can be ...

We are investigating vector-thread architectures which provide competitive performance and efficiency across a broad class of application domains. Vector-thread architectures unify data-level, thread-level, and instruction-level ...

Many problems in vision involve the prediction of a class label for each frame in an unsegmented sequence. In this paper we develop a discriminative framework for simultaneous sequence segmentation and labeling which can ...