Real-time virtual reference service based on applicable artificial intelligence technologies:The début of the robot Xiaotu at Tsinghua University Library

The adoption of applicable artificial intelligence technologies to library real-time virtual reference services is an innovative experimentation in one of the key areas of library services. Based on the open source software Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity(A.L.I.C.E.) and a combined application of several other relevant supporting technologies for facilitating the use of the current existing library resources, Tsinghua University Library has recently developed a real-time smart talking robot, named Xiaotu,for the enhancement of its various service functions, such as reference services, book searching, Baidu Baike searching, self-directed learning, etc. The operation of Xiaotu is programmed into Renren website(a social networking website), which adds significantly an innovative feature to the modus operandi of the real-time virtual reference service at Tsinghua University Library.

Constructing a Virtual Large Reference Plate with High-precision for Calibrating Cameras with Large FOV

It is well known that the accuracy of camera calibration is constrained by the size of the reference plate,it is difficult to fabricate large reference plates with high precision.Therefore,it is non-trivial to calibrate a camera with large field of view(FOV).In this paper,a method is proposed to construct a virtual large reference plate with high precision.Firstly,a high precision datum plane is constructed with a laser interferometer and one-dimensional air guideway,and then the reference plate is positioned at different locations and orientations in the FOV of the camera.The feature points of reference plate are projected to the datum plane to obtain a virtual large reference plate with high-precision.The camera is moved to several positions to get different virtual reference plates,and the camera is calibrated with the virtual reference plates.The experimental results show that the mean re-projection error of the camera calibrated with the proposed method is 0.062 pixels.The length of a scale bar with standard length of 959.778mm was measured with a vision system composed of two calibrated cameras,and the length measurement error is 0.389mm.

Demodulation method combining virtual reference interferometry and minimum mean square error for fiber-optic Fabry–Perot sensors

We propose a cavity length demodulation method that combines virtual reference interferometry（VRI） and minimum mean square error（MMSE） algorithm for fiber-optic Fabry–Perot（F-P） sensors. In contrast to the conventional demodulating method that uses fast Fourier transform（FFT） for cavity length estimation,our method employs the VRI technique to obtain a raw cavity length, which is further refined by the MMSE algorithm. As an experimental demonstration, a fiber-optic F-P sensor based on a sapphire wafer is fabricated for temperature sensing. The VRI-MMSE method is employed to interrogate cavity lengths of the sensor under different temperatures ranging from 28°C to 1000°C. It eliminates the ＂mode jumping＂ problem in the FFT-MMSE method and obtains a precision of 4.8 nm, corresponding to a temperature resolution of 2.0°C over a range of 1000°C. The experimental results reveal that the proposed method provides a promising, high precision alternative for demodulating fiber-optic F-P sensors.