Merging Features

This book presents new work on how Merge and formal features, two basic factors in the Minimalist Program, should determine the syntactic computation of natural language. Merge combines simpler objects into more complex ones. Formal features establish dependencies within objects. In this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which these two factors interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. It is divided into two parts concerned with formal features and interpretable features - a subset of formal features. The authors combine grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of languages, both in the adult grammar and in first language acquisition. The mechanisms at work in linguistic computation are considered in relation to a variety of linguistic phenomena, including A-binding, A'-dependencies and reconstruction, agreement, word order, adjuncts, pronouns and complementizers.

This work examines the challenges of distributed map merging and localization in multi-robot systems, which enables robots to acquire the knowledge of their surroundings needed to carry out coordinated tasks. After identifying the main issues associated with this problem, each chapter introduces a different distributed strategy for solving them. In addition to presenting a review of distributed algorithms for perception in localization and map merging, the text also provides the reader with the necessary tools for proposing new solutions to problems of multi-robot perception, as well as other interesting topics related to multi-robot scenarios. The coverage is largely self-contained, supported by numerous explanations and demonstrations, although references for further study are also supplied. The reader will not require any prior background knowledge, other than a basic understanding of mathematics at a graduate-student level.

The Special Issue entitled “Remote Sensing in Vessel Detection and Navigation” comprises 15 articles on many topics related to remote sensing with navigational sensors. The sequence of articles included in this Special Issue is in line with the latest scientific trends. The latest developments in science, including artificial intelligence, were used. It can be said that navigation and vessel detection remain important and hot topics, and a lot of work will continue to be done worldwide. New techniques and methods for analyzing and extracting information from navigational sensors and data have been proposed and verified. Some of these will spark further research, and some are already mature and can be considered for industrial implementation and development.

Geographic data models are digital frameworks that describe the location and characteristics of things in the world around us. With a geographic information system, we can use these models as lenses to see, interpret, and analyze the infinite complexity of our natural and man-made environments. With the geodatabase, a new geographic data model introduced with ArcInfo 8, you can extend significantly the level of detail and range of accuracy with which you can model geographic reality in a database environment.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Flexible Query Answering Systems, FQAS 2009, held in Roskilde, Denmark, in October 2009. The 57 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. They are structured in topical sections on database management, information retrieval, extraction and mining, ontologies and semantic web, intelligent information extraction from texts, advances in fuzzy querying, personalization, preferences, context and recommendation, and Web as a stream.

This book demonstrates bene?ts of abstract and qualitative reasoning that have not received much attention in the context of autonomous robotics before. Bremen, Christian Freksa December 2007 Director of the SFB/TR 8 Spatial Cognition Preface This book addresses spatial representations and reasoning techniques for - bile robot mapping, providing an analysis of fundamental representations and processes involved. A spatial representation based on shape information is p- posed and shape analysis techniques are developed to tackle the correspondence problem in robot mapping. A general mathematical formulation is presented to provide the formal ground for an e?cient matching of con?gurations of objects. This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral thesis submitted to the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Bremen, Germany. Manycontributeto the developmentofa dissertation,butsomeofthemstand out. Christian Freksa, I thank you for supporting and encouraging my work, for introducing me to interdisciplinary work, for giving me the freedom to develop this dissertation, and for providing an enjoyable atmosphere to work in. Longin Jan Latecki, thank you for countless in-depth discussions helping me to develop andtopositionmywork,forthefruitfulcollaboration,andformakingaresearch stay possible that has been very valuable to me. I thank the research groups in Bremen and Philadelphia for helpful discussions and feedback, in particular Jan Oliver Wallgrun. ̈ I also thank Kai-Florian Richter, Sven Bertel, and Lutz Frommberger for feedback on this work. Robert Ross, thank you for helping to proof-read this dissertation.

Mergers are the mechanisms by which galaxy clusters are assembled through the hierarchical growth of smaller clusters and groups. Major cluster mergers are the most energetic events in the Universe since the Big Bang. Many of the observed properties of clusters depend on the physics of the merging process. These include substructure, shock, intra cluster plasma temperature and entropy structure, mixing of heavy elements within the intra cluster medium, acceleration of high-energy particles, formation of radio halos and the effects on the galaxy radio emission. This book reviews our current understanding of cluster merging from an observational and theoretical perspective, and is appropriate for both graduate students and researchers in the field.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the Second International Conference on Software Language Engineering, SLE 2009, held in Denver, CO, USA, in October 2009. The 15 revised full papers and 6 revised short paper presented together with 2 tool demonstration papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 initial submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on language and model evolution, variability and product lines, parsing, compilation, and demo, modularity in languages, and metamodeling and demo.