Abstractj There has been a lot of research in recreational uses of robots. A robot drawing the portrait of a human face is one such famous task. This makes the robot behavior more human-like and entertaining. There have been several demonstrations of portrait drawing robots in past few years. But the existing techniques can draw only on pre-calibrated and flat surfaces. This paper demonstrates a robot equipped with force sensing capability that can draw portraits on a non-calibrated, arbitrarily shaped surface. The robot is able to draw on a noncalibrated surface by orienting its drawing pen normal to the drawing surface, the penj s-orientation being computed from the forces being sensed. In this way, the robot is also able to draw portraits on arbitrarily shaped surfaces without knowing the surface geometry. This avoids the need for calibration of robot with respect to the drawing surface. A number of portraits were drawn successfully on a flat surface without calibration. Also a map outline was drawn on a spherical globe to demonstrate the ability of robot to draw on an arbitrarily shaped surface.

Categories are the fundamental components of scientific knowledge and are used in every phase of the scientific process. However, they are often in a state of flux, with new observations, discoveries and changes in our conceptual understanding leading to the birth and death of categories, drift in their identities, as well as merging or splitting. Contemporary research tools rarely support such changes in operationalized categories, neglecting the problem of capturing and utilizing the knowledge lurking behind the process of change. This paper presents a tool -AdvoCate 1 -that represents the dynamic nature of categories. It allows category evolution to be modelled, while maintaining a category versioning system that captures all the different versions of a category, along with the process of its exploration and evolution through use. This helps us to better understand and communicate different versions of categories and the reasons and decisions behind any changes they undergo. We demonstrate the usefulness of AdvoCate using examples of category evolution from a land cover mapping exercise.

The aim of this paper if to show that the great part of the execution time is consumed in computations. So as the number of processors increase, the amount of work done by each processor will be decrease regardless the effect of the number of physical cores used. Still the time taken to solve the computations dominates over the communication time as by increasing number of processors; tasks are more divided so overall time decreases. The total overhead generated from process initializations and inter-process communication negatively affects the execution time. Using MPI, parallelization on five sorting techniques which are selection sort, bubble sort, quick sort, insertion sort and shell sort have been implemented.

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