clarke@utcsri.UUCP (Jim Clarke) (11/05/86)
(SF = Sandford Fleming Building, 10 King's College Road)
(GB = Galbraith Building, 35 St. George Street)
COLLOQUIUM, Tuesday, Nov. 11, 11 am, SF 1101
Professor D.S. Batory
University of Texas at Austin
"GENESIS; An Extensible Database Management System"
Nontraditional database applications, such as VLSI CAD, graphics, and
statistical data processing, demand new logical data model and data
language constructs and require novel physical storage structures and query
processing algorithms. Rather than developing monolithic DBMSs for each
specialized application, there is a growing interest in extensible or modu-
lar DBMSs which can be customized by plugging or unplugging modules that
provide desired DBMS capabilities. Customization can be achieved in a
matter of hours or days, rather than the man-months or man-years of effort
that are required to modify existing (nonextensible) DBMSs. GENESIS is an
extensible DBMS that is now under construction. In this talk, we highlight
the design approaches we are taking to achieve logical and physical data-
base extensibility.
A.I. SEMINAR, Tues, Nov. 11, 3 pm, GB 119
Professor Rodney Brooks
MIT A.I. Lab
"A Mobile Robot that Learns Maps with a Distributed Controller"
The MIT AI Lab mobile robot project decomposes the control system into
competing layers of task achieving behaviors. Each layer is made up of
simple asynchronous processors communicating over low bandwidth channels.
There is no central locus of control. Initially we controlled a mobile
robot with an offboard processor simulating this architecture. In recent
months we have built two onboard hardware implementations of such control
schemes, for different mobile robots. We demonstrate how this control
scheme can effectively learn global data structures in a distributed
manner. In particular it builds a map of its environment.
--
Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
(416) 978-4058
{allegra,cornell,decvax,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!clarke