Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Central Florida, 2008. / Adviser: Lisa A. Dieker. Includes bibliographical references (p. 174-188).

Memory is a part of cognition. It is essential for an individual to function normally in society. It encompasses an individual's lifetime experience, thus defining his identity. This thesis develops the concept of a machine-based personal memory manager which captures and manages an individual's day-to-day external memories. Rather than accumulating large amounts of data which has to be mined for useful memories, the machine-based memory manager automatically organizes memories as they are captured to enable their quick retrieval and use. The main functions of the machine-based memory manager envisioned in this thesis are the support and the augmentation of an individual's biological memory system. In the thesis, a model for a machine-based memory manager is developed. A visual programming environment, which can be used to build context aware applications as well as a proof-of-concept machine-based memory manager, is conceptualized and implemented. An experimental machine-based memory manager is implemented and evaluated. The model describes a machine-based memory manager which manages an individual's external memories by context. It addresses the management of external memories which accumulate over long periods of time by proposing a context aware file system which automatically organizes external memories by context. It describes how personal memory management can be facilitated by machine using six entities (life streams, memory producers, memory consumers, a memory manager, memory fragments and context descriptors) and the processes in which these entities participate (memory capture, memory encoding and decoding, memory decoding and retrieval). The visual programming environment represents a development tool which contains facilities that support context aware application programming. For example, it provides facilities which enable the definition and use of virtual sensors. It enables rapid programming with a focus on component re-use and dynamic composition of applications through a visual interface. The experimental machine-based memory manager serves as an example implementation of the machine-based memory manager which is described by the model developed in this thesis. The hardware used in its implementation consists of widely available components such as a camera, microphone and sub-notebook computer which are assembled in the form of a wearable computer. The software is constructed using the visual programming environment developed in this thesis. It contains multiple sensor drivers, context interpreters, a context aware file system as well as memory retrieval and presentation interfaces. The evaluation of the machine-based memory manager shows that it is possible to create a machine which monitors the states of an individual and his environment, and manages his external memories, thus supporting and augmenting his biological memory.

Title: Visual Programming Backend for a Mobile Robot Author: Bc. Ondřej Staněk Department: The Department of Software Engineering Supervisor: RNDr. David Obdržálek, Ph.D. Supervisor's e-mail address: David.Obdrzalek@mff.cuni.cz Abstract: In this work, the author designs and implements a solution for programming small mobile robots using a visual programming language. A suitable visual programming front-end is selected and back-end layers are created that allow execution of the program in a mobile robot. The author designs and implements a virtual machine that runs alongside the original robot firmware on an 8-bit microcontroller with limited resources. A code generator layer compiles the visual representation of the program into a sequence of bytecode instructions that is interpreted on board of the mobile robot. The solution supports typical features of procedural programming languages, in particular: variables, expressions, conditional statements, loops, static arrays, function calls and recursion. The emphasis is put on robustness of the implementation. To verify and maintain code quality, methods of automated software testing are used. Keywords: visual programming language, virtual machine, mobile robot, Blockly Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Visual programming is a programming paradigm commonly used for game scripting, it also has applications in other areas such as for example patcher languages for music and animation and even a few languages for general purpose programming. By using visual programming complex tasks can be made easier by abstracting the code and letting the user express a flow of commands instead. This also gives a better overview of the problem and how the different parts connect. By graphically connecting nodes the program flow will be made clear even for those new to programming. Unfortunately, visual programming is mostly limited to laptops and stationary computer systems. Touch enabled mobile devices which perhaps would be even better suited for a visual programming approach are left with textual programming environments, which doesn’t use the capabilities of the touch screen, and a few non-graph-like visual programming languages, which use interlocked blocks to represent code. To explore how well graph-like visual programming would work on mobile devices a study will be conducted in which a lo-fi design is created and iteratively evaluated and improved using a modified NEVO process. The design will be created and improved based on existing visual programming interfaces and research in the area of visual programming, interaction design and information design, combined with the input from the test subjects. In this work a mobile, visual, graph-like, general purpose programming language has been designed. A lo-fi prototype of the language has been created to display how the language would look on a mobile system if realized. The lo-fi prototype was then tested with a method given by Rettig to give an indication of the systems usability measured by its task completion time compared to the task completion time of a mobile textual system. There is also a qualitative analysis on the responses from the test users. The tests were conducted both on people new to programming as well as people who have been programming for a while.

In an ever faster changing environment, software developers not only need agile methods, but also agile programming paradigms and tools. A paradigm shift towards declarative programming has begun; a clear indication of this is Microsoft's substantial investment in functional programming. Moreover, several attempts have been made to enable visual programming. We believe that software development is ready for a new paradigm which goes beyond any existing declarative paradigm: visual compositional-relational programming. Compositional-relational programming (CRP) is a purely declarative paradigm -- making it suitable for a visual representation. All procedural aspects -- including the increasingly important issue of parallelization -- are removed from the programmer's consideration and handled in the underlying implementation. The foundation for CRP is a theory of higher-order combinatory logic programming developed by Hamfelt and Nilsson in the 1990's. This thesis proposes a model for visualizing compositional-relational programming. We show that the diagrams are isomorphic with the programs represented in textual form. Furthermore, we show that the model can be used to automatically generate code from diagrams, thus paving the way for a visual integrated development environment for CRP, where programming is performed by combining visual objects in a drag-and-drop fashion. At present, we implement CRP using Prolog. However, in future we foresee an implementation directly on one of the major object-oriented frameworks, e.g. the .NET platform, with the aim to finally launch relational programming into large-scale systems development.

<p>Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) and IoT (Internet of Things) devices have substantial potential to increase productivity in Small and Medium Enterprises (SME). However, factors such as high costs involved in setting up and maintaining AMR automation and deficit of programming expertise among factory workers render AMR automation uneconomical for SMEs. </p><p><br></p><p></p><p>Visual Programming can be used in the spatial context of the operating environment to enable closer mental models at the right level of abstraction for novice programmers. In this thesis, we develop a system for deploying a Spatially Situated Visual Language (SSVL) for programming robot-IoT workflows. To address the challenges of interoperability, scalability, and versatility of industrial machinery, we develop a novel communication protocol based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF). Our communication protocol forms the basis of a system architecture that integrates SSVL, IoT devices, and mobile robots that enables factory workers to program AMR workflows. We design, implement and validate the system and the architecture following the systems engineering approach. To evaluate the system developed in an industrial context, we deploy the system to author AMR workflows for material handling application for an SME painting factory.</p><p></p>

This diploma thesis deals with a theoretical analysis, a design and an implementation of a programming framework in a virtual environment. Robots use sensors to gain information about the environment and they subsequently modify this environment as a result of an instruction code. The instructions are entered in a graphic form using a visual programming language. The analysis and the outline of this language is discussed in detail in this work as well. The last part describes editing and rendering of the virtual world in which the robots are moving, considering sample tasks of following a line and movement inside a maze according to the rules of the Micromouse competition. The thesis includes solution proposals for both tasks regarding the possibilities of the programming environment. The result of the work is a concept of the aforementioned components and their implementation and linking to a functional unit.

<p>When humans delegate tasks---whether to human workers or robots---they do so either to trade money for time, or to leverage additional knowledge and capabilities. For complex tasks, however, describing the work to be done requires substantial effort, which reduces the benefit to the requester who delegates tasks. On one hand, human workers---e.g., crowd workers, friends or colleagues on social network, factory workers---have diverse knowledge and level of commitment, making it difficult to achieve joint efforts towards the requester's goal. In contrast, robots and machines have clearly defined capabilities and full commitment, but the requester lacks an efficient way to coordinate them for flexible workflows. </p><p> </p><p> This dissertation presents a series of workflows and systems to enable efficient work transfer to human workers or robots. First, I present BlueSky, a system that can automatically coordinate hundreds of crowd workers to enumerate ideas for a given topic. The latent structure of the idea enumeration task is decomposed into a three-step workflow to guide the crowd workers. Second, I present CoStory, a system that requests alternative designs from friends or colleagues by decomposing the design task into hierarchical chunks. Third, I present AdapTutAR, a system that delegates machine operation tasks to workers through adaptive Augmented Reality tutorials. Finally, I present Vipo, a system that allows requesters to customize tasks for robots and smart machines through spatial-visual programming. This dissertation demonstrates that decomposing latent task structure enables task delegation in an on-demand, scalable, and distributed way.</p>

Computational creativity is an active area of research within the artificial intelligence domain that investigates what aspects of computing can be considered as an analogue to the human creative process. Computers can be programmed to emulate the type of things that the human mind can. Artificial creativity is worthy of study for two reasons. Firstly, it can help in understanding human creativity and secondly it can help with the design of computer programs that appear to be creative. Although the implementation of creativity in computer algorithms is an active field, much of the research fails to specify which of the known theories of creativity it is aligning with. The combination of computational creativity with computer generated visualisations has the potential to produce visualisations that are context sensitive with respect to the data and could solve some of the current automation problems that computers experience. In addition theories of creativity could theoretically compute unusual data combinations, or introducing graphical elements that draw attention to the patterns in the data. More could be learned about the creativity involved as humans go about the task of generating a visualisation. The purpose of this dissertation was to develop a computer program that can automate the generation of a visualisation, for a suitably chosen visualisation type over a small domain of knowledge, using a subset of the computational creativity criteria, in order to try and explore the effects of the introduction of conceptual blending techniques. The problem is that existing computer programs that generate visualisations are lacking the creativity, intuition, background information, and visual perception that enable a human to decide what aspects of the visualisation will expose patterns that are useful to the consumer of the visualisation. The main research question that guided this dissertation was, “How can criteria derived from theories of creativity be used in the generation of visualisations?”. In order to answer this question an analysis was done to determine which creativity theories and artificial intelligence techniques could potentially be used to implement the theories in the context of those relevant to computer generated visualisations. Measurable attributes and criteria that were sufficient for an algorithm that claims to model creativity were explored. The parts of the visualisation pipeline were identified and the aspects of visualisation generation that humans are better at than computers was explored. Themes that emerged in both the computational creativity and the visualisation literature were highlighted. Finally a prototype was built that started to investigate the use of computational creativity methods in the ‘variable choice’, and ‘aesthetics’ stages of the data visualisation pipeline. / School of Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

This study aims to investigate CT in relation to students’ experience with visual programming - particularly visual programming language Scratch. The study looks at the level of CT among Swedish high school students. Two research questions are investigated; one related to students’ general programming experience, one related to their level of experience with programming language Scratch. The method used in the study is the Computational Thinking test (CTt). Data from 162 students is presented. The study finds that the students’ performance is relatively high, but not as high as expected given the fact that Swedish education has become heavily focused on teaching programming in recent years. The study also finds that the level of Scratch experience alone is not found to impact the performance, which implies that Scratch does not allow users to deepen their CT knowledge the more they use it. Visual programming is found to play an important role in the level of computational thinking, although the participants with the best results have additional experience of normal programming. The study concludes that visual programming needs to be combined with normal programming in order for students to achieve the best result within computational thinking