An autonomous mobile manipulator for collecting sample containers

In this work we present an autonomous mobile ma- nipulator that is used to collect sample containers in an unknown environment. The manipulator is part of a team of heterogeneous mobile robots that are to search and identify sample containers in an unknown environment. A map of the environment along with possible positions of sample containers are shared between the robots in the team by using a cloud-based communication interface. To grasp a container with its manipulator arm the robot has to place itself in a position suitable for the manipulation task. This optimal base placement pose is selected by querying a precomputed inverse reachability database.

Effective emergency messaging during natural disasters: An application of message compliance theories

Study/Objective This research examines the types of emergency messages used in Australia during the response and early recovery phases of a natural disaster. The aim of the research is to develop theory-driven emergency messages that increase individual behavioural compliance during a disaster. Background There is growing evidence of non-compliant behaviour in Australia, such as refusing to evacuate and travelling through hazardous areas. This can result in personal injury, loss of life, and damage to (or loss of) property. Moreover, non-compliance can place emergency services personnel in life-threatening situations when trying to save non-compliant individuals. Drawing on message compliance research in psychology and sociology, a taxonomy of message types was developed to ascertain how emergency messaging can be improved to produce compliant behaviour. Method A review of message compliance literature was conducted to develop the taxonomy of message types previously found to achieve compliance. Seven categories were identified: direct-rational, manipulation, negative phrasing, positive phrasing, exchange appeals, normative appeals, and appeals to self. A content analysis was then conducted to assess the emergency messages evident in the Australian emergency management context. The existing messages were aligned with the literature to identify opportunities to improve emergency messaging. Results & Conclusion The results suggest there is an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of emergency messaging to increase compliance during the response and early recovery phases of a natural disaster. While some message types cannot legally or ethically be used in emergency communication (e.g. manipulative messaging), there is an opportunity to create more persuasive messages (e.g. appeals to self) that personalise the individual’s perception of risk, triggering them to comply with the message.

Sensors and control for mining robotics

This paper discusses some of the sensing technologies and control approaches available for guiding robot manipulators for a class of underground mining tasks including drilling jumbos, bolting arms, shotcreters or explosive chargers. Data acquired with such sensors, in the laboratory and underground, is presented.

Investigation of lignin biosynthesis in sugarcane for improved lignocellulosic ethanol production

As oil use increases at a rate unsustainable for the environment and unmatchable by current levels of oil production, a major shift towards renewable energy is necessary. By expanding the current knowledge of lignin biosynthesis and its manipulation in sugarcane, this PhD contributes to the production of economically viable second generation bioethanol, a fuel produced from plant biomass. The findings of this thesis contribute to the limited knowledge of lignin biosynthesis and deposition in sugarcane, and the application of biotechnology to produce sugarcane, and the resulting bagasse, with a modified cell wall. Reducing or modifying the lignin content in the cell wall of bagasse can reduce production costs and increase yields of bioethanol. This makes bioethanol more economically competitive with oil as an alternative energy source. A move to using bioethanol over fossil based transport fuels will have global economic and environmental benefits.

Frequent (flier) frustration and the dark side of word‐of‐web: exploring online dysfunctional behavior in online feedback forums

Purpose Following the perspective of frustration theory customer frustration incidents lead to frustration behavior such as protest (negative word‐of‐mouth). On the internet customers can express their emotions verbally and non‐verbally in numerous web‐based review platforms. The purpose of this study is to investigate online dysfunctional customer behavior, in particular negative “word‐of‐web” (WOW) in online feedback forums, among customers who participate in frequent‐flier programs in the airline industry. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a variation of the critical incident technique (CIT) referred to as the critical internet feedback technique (CIFT). Qualitative data of customer reviews of 13 different frequent‐flier programs posted on the internet were collected and analyzed with regard to frustration incidents, verbal and non‐verbal emotional effects and types of dysfunctional word‐of‐web customer behavior. The sample includes 141 negative customer reviews based on non‐recommendations and low program ratings. Findings Problems with loyalty programs evoke negative emotions that are expressed in a spectrum of verbal and non‐verbal negative electronic word‐of‐mouth. Online dysfunctional behavior can vary widely from low ratings and non‐recommendations to voicing switching intentions to even stronger forms such as manipulation of others and revenge intentions. Research limitations/implications Results have to be viewed carefully due to methodological challenges with regard to the measurement of emotions, in particular the accuracy of self‐report techniques and the quality of online data. Generalization of the results is limited because the study utilizes data from only one industry. Further research is needed with regard to the exact differentiation of frustration from related constructs. In addition, large‐scale quantitative studies are necessary to specify and test the relationships between frustration incidents and subsequent dysfunctional customer behavior expressed in negative word‐of‐web. Practical implications The study yields important implications for the monitoring of the perceived quality of loyalty programs. Management can obtain valuable information about program‐related and/or relationship‐related frustration incidents that lead to online dysfunctional customer behavior. A proactive response strategy should be developed to deal with severe cases, such as sabotage plans. Originality/value This study contributes to knowledge regarding the limited research of online dysfunctional customer behavior as well as frustration incidents of loyalty programs. Also, the article presents a theoretical “customer frustration‐defection” framework that describes different levels of online dysfunctional behavior in relation to the level of frustration sensation that customers have experienced. The framework extends the existing perspective of the “customer satisfaction‐loyalty” framework developed by Heskett et al.

Group 14 element-based non-centrosymmetric quantum spin hall insulators with large bulk gap

To date, a number of two-dimensional (2D) topological insulators (TIs) have been realized in Group 14 elemental honeycomb lattices, but all are inversionsymmetric. Here, based on first-principles calculations, we predict a new family of 2D inversion-asymmetric TIs with sizeable bulk gaps from 105 meV to 284 meV, in X2–GeSn (X = H, F, Cl, Br, I) monolayers, making them in principle suitable for room-temperature applications. The nontrivial topological characteristics of inverted band orders are identified in pristine X2–GeSn with X = (F, Cl, Br, I), whereas H2–GeSn undergoes a nontrivial band inversion at 8% lattice expansion. Topologically protected edge states are identified in X2–GeSn with X = (F, Cl, Br, I), as well as in strained H2–GeSn. More importantly, the edges of these systems, which exhibit single-Dirac-cone characteristics located exactly in the middle of their bulk band gaps, are ideal for dissipationless transport. Thus, Group 14 elemental honeycomb lattices provide a fascinating playground for the manipulation of quantum states.

The iconic and the critical

Theodor Adorno was opposed to the cinema because he felt it was too close to reality, and ipso facto an extension of ideological Capital, as he wrote in 1944 in Dialectic of Enlightenment. What troubled Adorno was the iconic nature of cinema – the semiotic category invented by C. S. Peirce where the signifier (sign) does not merely signify, in the arbitrary capacity attested by Saussure, but mimics the formal-visual qualities of its referent. Iconicity finds its perfect example in the film’s ingenuous surface illusion of an unmediated reality – its genealogy (the iconic), since classical antiquity, lay in the Greek term eikōn which meant “image,” to refer to the ancient portrait statues of victorious athletes which were thought to bear a direct similitude with their parent divinities. For the postwar, Hollywood-film spectator, Adorno said, “the world outside is an extension of the film he has just left,” because realism is a precise instrument for the manipulation of the mass spectator by the culture industry, for which the filmic image is an advertisement for the world unedited. Mimesis, or the reproduction of reality, is a “mere reproduction of the economic base.” It is precisely film’s iconicity, then, its “realist aesthetic . . . [that] makes it inseparable from its commodity character.”...

Multimodal polymer nanoparticles with combined 19F magnetic resonance and optical detection for tunable, targeted, multimodal imagingin vivo

Understanding the complex nature of diseased tissue in vivo requires development of more advanced nanomedicines, where synthesis of multifunctional polymers combines imaging multimodality with a biocompatible, tunable, and functional nanomaterial carrier. Here we describe the development of polymeric nanoparticles for multimodal imaging of disease states in vivo. The nanoparticle design utilizes the abundant functionality and tunable physicochemical properties of synthetically robust polymeric systems to facilitate targeted imaging of tumors in mice. For the first time, high-resolution 19F/1H magnetic resonance imaging is combined with sensitive and versatile fluorescence imaging in a polymeric material for in vivo detection of tumors. We highlight how control over the chemistry during synthesis allows manipulation of nanoparticle size and function and can lead to very high targeting efficiency to B16 melanoma cells, both in vitro and in vivo. Importantly, the combination of imaging modalities within a polymeric nanoparticle provides information on the tumor mass across various size scales in vivo, from millimeters down to tens of micrometers.

Inducing nonlocal reactions with a local probe

The scanning tunneling microscope (STM) has evolved continually since its invention, as scientists have expanded its use to encompass atomic-scale manipulation, momentum-resolved electronic characterization, localized chemical reactions (bond breaking and bond making) in adsorbed molecules, and even chain reactions at surfaces. This burgeoning field has recently expanded to include the use of the STM to inject hot electrons into substrate surface states; the injected electrons can travel laterally and induce changes in chemical structure in molecules located up to 100 nm from the STM tip. We describe several key demonstrations of this phenomenon, including one appearing in this issue of ACS Nano by Chen et al. Possible applications for this technique are also discussed, including characterizing the dispersion of molecule−substrate interface states and the controlled patterning of molecular overlayers.

LibVM: An architecture for shared library sandboxing

Many software applications extend their functionality by dynamically loading libraries into their allocated address space. However, shared libraries are also often of unknown provenance and quality and may contain accidental bugs or, in some cases, deliberately malicious code. Most sandboxing techniques which address these issues require recompilation of the libraries using custom tool chains, require significant modifications to the libraries, do not retain the benefits of single address-space programming, do not completely isolate guest code, or incur substantial performance overheads. In this paper we present LibVM, a sandboxing architecture for isolating libraries within a host application without requiring any modifications to the shared libraries themselves, while still retaining the benefits of a single address space and also introducing a system call inter-positioning layer that allows complete arbitration over a shared library’s functionality. We show how to utilize contemporary hardware virtualization support towards this end with reasonable performance overheads and, in the absence of such hardware support, our model can also be implemented using a software-based mechanism. We ensure that our implementation conforms as closely as possible to existing shared library manipulation functions, minimizing the amount of effort needed to apply such isolation to existing programs. Our experimental results show that it is easy to gain immediate benefits in scenarios where the goal is to guard the host application against unintentional programming errors when using shared libraries, as well as in more complex scenarios, where a shared library is suspected of being actively hostile. In both cases, no changes are required to the shared libraries themselves.

From vision to actions: Towards adaptive and autonomous humanoid robots

Although robotics research has seen advances over the last decades robots are still not in widespread use outside industrial applications. Yet a range of proposed scenarios have robots working together, helping and coexisting with humans in daily life. In all these a clear need to deal with a more unstructured, changing environment arises. I herein present a system that aims to overcome the limitations of highly complex robotic systems, in terms of autonomy and adaptation. The main focus of research is to investigate the use of visual feedback for improving reaching and grasping capabilities of complex robots. To facilitate this a combined integration of computer vision and machine learning techniques is employed. From a robot vision point of view the combination of domain knowledge from both imaging processing and machine learning techniques, can expand the capabilities of robots. I present a novel framework called Cartesian Genetic Programming for Image Processing (CGP-IP). CGP-IP can be trained to detect objects in the incoming camera streams and successfully demonstrated on many different problem domains. The approach requires only a few training images (it was tested with 5 to 10 images per experiment) is fast, scalable and robust yet requires very small training sets. Additionally, it can generate human readable programs that can be further customized and tuned. While CGP-IP is a supervised-learning technique, I show an integration on the iCub, that allows for the autonomous learning of object detection and identification. Finally this dissertation includes two proof-of-concepts that integrate the motion and action sides. First, reactive reaching and grasping is shown. It allows the robot to avoid obstacles detected in the visual stream, while reaching for the intended target object. Furthermore the integration enables us to use the robot in non-static environments, i.e. the reaching is adapted on-the- fly from the visual feedback received, e.g. when an obstacle is moved into the trajectory. The second integration highlights the capabilities of these frameworks, by improving the visual detection by performing object manipulation actions.

Roles of forced nicotine exposure and Comt gene disruption in the development of addiction-related behavioural and neurochemical changes in mice

Activation of midbrain dopamine systems is thought to be critically involved in the addictive properties of abused substances. Drugs of abuse increase dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens and dorsal striatum, which are the target areas of mesolimbic and nigrostriatal dopamine pathways, respectively. Dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens is thought to mediate the attribution of incentive salience to rewards, and dorsal striatal dopamine release is involved in habit formation. In addition, changes in the function of prefrontal cortex (PFC), the target area of mesocortical dopamine pathway, may skew information processing and memory formation such that the addict pays an abnormal amount of attention to drug-related cues. In this study, we wanted to explore how long-term forced oral nicotine exposure or the lack of catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), one of the dopamine metabolizing enzymes, would affect the functioning of these pathways. We also wanted to find out how the forced nicotine exposure or the lack of COMT would affect the consumption of nicotine, alcohol, or cocaine. First, we studied the effect of forced chronic nicotine exposure on the sensitivity of dopamine D2-like autoreceptors in microdialysis and locomotor activity experiments. We found that the sensitivity of these receptors was unchanged after forced oral nicotine exposure, although an increase in the sensitivity was observed in mice treated with intermittent nicotine injections twice daily for 10 days. Thus, the effect of nicotine treatment on dopamine autoreceptor sensitivity depends on the route, frequency, and time course of drug administration. Second, we investigated whether the forced oral nicotine exposure would affect the reinforcing properties of nicotine injections. The chronic nicotine exposure did not significantly affect the development of conditioned place preference to nicotine. In the intravenous self-administration paradigm, however, the nicotine-exposed animals self-administered nicotine at a lower unit dose than the control animals, indicating that their sensitivity to the reinforcing effects of nicotine was enhanced. Next, we wanted to study whether the Comt gene knock-out animals would be a suitable model to study alcohol and cocaine consumption or addiction. Although previous work had shown male Comt knock-out mice to be less sensitive to the locomotor-activating effects of cocaine, the present study found that the lack of COMT did not affect the consumption of cocaine solutions or the development of cocaine-induced place preference. However, the present work did find that male Comt knock-out mice, but not female knock-out mice, consumed ethanol more avidly than their wild-type littermates. This finding suggests that COMT may be one of the factors, albeit not a primary one, contributing to the risk of alcoholism. Last, we explored the effect of COMT deficiency on dorsal striatal, accumbal, and prefrontal cortical dopamine metabolism under no-net-flux conditions and under levodopa load in freely-moving mice. The lack of COMT did not affect the extracellular dopamine concentrations under baseline conditions in any of the brain areas studied. In the prefrontal cortex, the dopamine levels remained high for a prolonged time after levodopa treatment in male, but not female, Comt knock-out mice. COMT deficiency induced accumulation of 3,4-dihydroxyphenylacetic acid, which increased further under levodopa load. Homovanillic acid was not detectable in Comt knock-out animals either under baseline conditions or after levodopa treatment. Taken together, the present results show that although forced chronic oral nicotine exposure affects the reinforcing properties of self-administered nicotine, it is not an addiction model itself. COMT seems to play a minor role in dopamine metabolism and in the development of addiction under baseline conditions, indicating that dopamine function in the brain is well-protected from perturbation. However, the role of COMT becomes more important when the dopaminergic system is challenged, such as by pharmacological manipulation.

Generalized Query-By-Rule: a heterogeneous database query language

This paper describes the design and implementation of a high-level query language called Generalized Query-By-Rule (GQBR) which supports retrieval, insertion, deletion and update operations. This language, based on the formalism of database logic, enables the users to access each database in a distributed heterogeneous environment, without having to learn all the different data manipulation languages. The compiler has been implemented on a DEC 1090 system in Pascal.

ADAMIS: a database for medical information systems

This paper describes the design and implementation of ADAMIS (‘A database for medical information systems’). ADAMIS is a relational database management system for a general hospital environment. Apart from the usual database (DB) facilities of data definition and data manipulation, ADAMIS supports a query language called the ‘simplified medical query language’ (SMQL) which is completely end-user oriented and highly non-procedural. Other features of ADAMIS include provision of facilities for statistics collection and report generation. ADAMIS also provides adequate security and integrity features and has been designed mainly for use on interactive terminals.

Access path query language for relational database systems

Database management systems offer a very reliable and attractive data organization for fast and economical information storage and processing for diverse applications. It is much more important that the information should be easily accessible to users with varied backgrounds, professional as well as casual, through a suitable data sublanguage. The language adopted here (APPLE) is one such language for relational database systems and is completely nonprocedural and well suited to users with minimum or no programming background. This is supported by an access path model which permits the user to formulate completely nonprocedural queries expressed solely in terms of attribute names. The data description language (DDL) and data manipulation language (DML) features of APPLE are also discussed. The underlying relational database has been implemented with the help of the DATATRIEVE-11 utility for record and domain definition which is available on the PDP-11/35. The package is coded in Pascal and MACRO-11. Further, most of the limitations of the DATATRIEVE-11 utility have been eliminated in the interface package.