William S. Levine - US grants

Development of methods to integrate neurokinesiological, anatomical, and physiological data into a comprehensive model of the cat hindlimb during normal and perturbed locomotion.

This is a competitive renewal of a contract that is now in its third year at the University of Maryland. This award for an additional three years has as its objective the continued development and further refinement of an existing quantitative model of the structure and function of the cat hindlimb and its musculoskeletal components. Specifically, the existing model will be extended to include a description of motion in the toe segments, descriptions of the internal architecture of each of the 33 muscles, development of a mathematical relationship among excitation measurements (EMG) and the kinematic terms of velocity and length of the muscle sarcomeres, and "userfriendly" interfaces by which experimentalists can introduce and manipulate experimental data and receive graphical output of model projections.

The International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) is composed of 44 National Member Organizations (NMO), each one representing the technical societies concerned with automatic control in its own country. The U.S. NMO is the American Automatic Control Council (AACC) consisting of representatives from seven member societies of which the largest is the IEEE Control Systems Society. IFAC sponsors many conferences, but the most important is the triennial World Congress. The 11th such IFAC World Congress will be held August 13-17, 1990 in Tallinn, USSR. The 12th will be held in Sydney, Australia, in 1993, and the 13th in San Francisco, U.S.A. in 1996. The official theme of the 11th IFAC World Congress is "Automatic control in the service of mankind." One objective of the Congress is to strengthen the connections between theory and applications by including papers whose topics range from basic research to industrial and social applications. A second objective is to strengthen the cooperation between researchers from various parts of the world, including the U.S. In the past, this conference has been very successful in attracting researchers and other engineers and scientists from all over the world. The most recent IFAC World Congress, the 10th held in Munich, FRG, in 1987, had an attendance of over 1,500. Thus, the conference is expected to be a particularly good forum for the exchange of ideas among U.S. and non-U.S. experts in automatic control. The conference will be comprised of invited sessions and regular sessions. It will address control theory topics as well as applications to industrial controls, manufacturing systems, automation, and other related issues.

EIA-0088081
Walsh, Gregory C.
University of Maryland

CRCD: A Curriculum in Networked and Distributed Systems

This project develops an innovative senior/masters-level curriculum designed to: (a) bring the important new technologies in Wireless and Networked Distributed Systems into the classroom, (b) make use of novel teaching and evaluation methods to enhance faculty productivity in laboratory and project courses, and (c) improve the educational value of students' experiences in laboratory and project courses. The laboratory facilities, which are part of this work, also play a key role in enabling multi-disciplinary research in networks, communications, embedded systems, and controls. The project crosses several disciplinary boundaries and has clearly defined deliverables that expose students to bodies of knowledge in great demand in the workforce. Two leading companies in this emerging area, United Technologies and General Electric, mentor this project.

Recent advances in telecommunications, materials nanotechnology and biology have potential implications in the area of control. The purpose of this workshop is to define the generic methodological research needs pursuant to these advances as: (1) they will involve a more detailed description of nature, down to the cellular and molecular level, and (2) the next set of engineering systems will be of a larger size and their complexity will be far greater than in the past.

This grant is for support of a multidisciplinary workshop that will address the research needs in the areas of Modeling, Dynamics, Control and Monitoring of Complex Engineering Systems. It will take place in Anchorage Alaska on May 11 and 12 following the American Control Conference. By scheduling it to follow immediately after the ACC, the cost will be substantially lower since most of the participants will already be on site and the meeting rooms on Saturday will be free. The organization of the workshop aims to avoid the segregation of issues and challenges along the traditional Engineering disciplines. A systematic effort will be undertaken to consider issues that are common to all engineering fields and breakout sessions will have participants that cover all engineering disciplines.

Project Summary
The proposal seeks NSF support for twelve controls and signal processing researchers
and teachers from the U.S.A. to attend a joint Balkan/USA/EC/Japan workshop on
research and education in control and signal processing. Similar proposals have been
submitted to the EC and Japan to support attendance by members of those communities.
Approximately three-dozen attendees from the Balkans are expected.
The intellectual merit of having a delegation of twelve Americans participate in such a
workshop is in the opportunities to learn from the other participants and in the
opportunities to teach them. There will be many attendees who are outstanding in their
specialties. Because of the recent troubles in the Balkans, many of their excellent
researchers have been isolated from the rest of the research community. This will be an
opportunity for us to learn of their work and for them to catch up with what we have been
doing.
The broader impacts of such a joint workshop are large. First, the Balkan countries have
been a source of many outstanding researchers in the past. The workshop will help bring
younger researchers and students from the Balkans into the broader international research
community. Second, the meeting itself will help foster further collaboration between the
participants, their institutions, and their countries. Lastly, such meetings generally
contribute to broader understanding among people and nations.

Language comprehension is always contextualized. Psychological theories differ with respect to the role they give context in the moment-by-moment processing of language. With National Science Foundation support, William Levine will conduct three years of psycholinguistic research on the role of context in language comprehension. The project will focus on a common linguistic device that is heavily dependent on context for its interpretation: negation. Consider how the statement "I am not lazy" sounds in a context in which one has been accused of being lazy versus how odd it would sound if no such accusation exists. Using a highly-accurate eye-tracker to monitor people's eye-movements as they read sentences, the experiments are designed to assess the processes by which readers make use of contextual information when the contextual motivation for negation is or is not obvious. Readers' memory and comprehension of negation will be assessed under these conditions as well. The broader aim of the project is to work toward building a general theory of comprehension that specifies the role of context in the processing of language for all aspects of comprehension (e.g., syntactic, semantic). The significance of the project will be realized by individuals in enterprises such as computer communications. The more fully-specified a theory of human language processing is, the more effectively machines can communicate. Moreover, the further development of such theories holds the promise of improving educational programs of many kinds, including teaching and remediating reading skills in children, as well as improving literacy programs for adults.