Augmenting and assisting model elicitation tasks with 3D virtual world context metadata

Accurate process model elicitation continues to be a time consuming task, requiring skill on the part of the interviewer to extract explicit and tacit process information from the interviewee. Many errors occur in this elicitation stage that would be avoided by better activity recall, more consistent specification methods and greater engagement in the elicitation process by interviewees. Theories of situated cognition indicate that interactive 3D representations of real work environments engage and prime the cognitive state of the viewer. In this paper, our major contribution is to augment a previous process elicitation methodology with virtual world context metadata, drawn from a 3D simulation of the workplace. We present a conceptual and formal approach for representing this contextual metadata, integrated into a process similarity measure that provides hints for the business analyst to use in later modelling steps. Finally, we conclude with examples from two use cases to illustrate the potential abilities of this approach.

Mission path planning of aerial survey tasks using hybrid game evolutionary algorithm

The work presented in this report is aimed to implement a cost-effective offline mission path planner for aerial inspection tasks of large linear infrastructures. Like most real-world optimisation problems, mission path planning involves a number of objectives which ideally should be minimised simultaneously. Understandably, the objectives of a practical optimisation problem are conflicting each other and the minimisation of one of them necessarily implies the impossibility to minimise the other ones. This leads to the need to find a set of optimal solutions for the problem; once such a set of available options is produced, the mission planning problem is reduced to a decision making problem for the mission specialists, who will choose the solution which best fit the requirements of the mission. The goal of this work is then to develop a Multi-Objective optimisation tool able to provide the mission specialists a set of optimal solutions for the inspection task amongst which the final trajectory will be chosen, given the environment data, the mission requirements and the definition of the objectives to minimise. All the possible optimal solutions of a Multi-Objective optimisation problem are said to form the Pareto-optimal front of the problem. For any of the Pareto-optimal solutions, it is impossible to improve one objective without worsening at least another one. Amongst a set of Pareto-optimal solutions, no solution is absolutely better than another and the final choice must be a trade-off of the objectives of the problem. Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) are recognised to be a convenient method for exploring the Pareto-optimal front of Multi-Objective optimization problems. Their efficiency is due to their parallelism architecture which allows to find several optimal solutions at each time

Differences in trunk accelerometry between frail and non-frail elderly persons in functional tasks

Background Physical conditions through gait and other functional task are parameters to consider for frailty detection. The aim of the present study is to measure and describe the variability of acceleration, angular velocity and trunk displacement in the ten meter Extended Timed Get-Up-and-Go test in two groups of frail and non-frail elderly people through instrumentation with the iPhone4® smartphone. Secondly, to analyze the differences and performance of the variance between the study groups (frail and non-frail). This is a cross-sectional study of 30 subjects aged over 65 years, 14 frail subjects and 16 non-frail subjects. Results The highest difference between groups in the Sit-to-Stand and Stand-to-Sit subphases was in the y axis (vertical vector). The minimum acceleration in the Stand-to-Sit phase was -2.69 (-4.17 / -0.96) m/s2 frail elderly versus -8.49 (-12.1 / -5.23) m/s2 non-frail elderly, p < 0.001. In the Gait Go and Gait Come subphases the biggest differences found between the groups were in the vertical axis: -2.45 (-2.77 /-1.89) m/s2 frail elderly versus -5.93 (-6.87 / -4.51) m/s2 non-frail elderly, p < 0.001. Finally, with regards to the turning subphase, the statistically significant differences found between the groups were greater in the data obtained from the gyroscope than from the accelerometer (the gyroscope data for the mean maximum peak value for Yaw movement angular velocity in the frail elderly was specifically 25.60°/s, compared to 112.8°/s for the non-frail elderly, p < 0.05). Conclusions The inertial sensor fitted in the iPhone4® is capable of studying and analyzing the kinematics of the different subphases of the Extended Timed Up and Go test in frail and non-frail elderly people. For the Extended Timed Up and Go test, this device allows more sensitive differentiation between population groups than the traditionally used variable, namely time.

Deficits on self ordered tasks associated with hyperostosis frontalis interna

A 74 year old patient, EW, with dorsolateral frontal cortical compression due to hyperostosis frontalis interna, in the absence of the Morgagni or Stewart-Morel syndromes, is described. In addition to conventional neuropsychological measures EW was administered one nonspatial and two spatial self ordered working memory tasks, as well as a standard measure of fluid intelligence or g. She showed impaired performance on all three self ordered working memory tasks compared with a normal control group of 10 subjects matched for age, education, sex, and IQ. By contrast, her performance on the fluid intelligence test was comparable with that of the controls. It is concluded that the compression of dorsolateral frontal cortex accompanying hyperostosis frontalis interna may produce selective cognitive impairment.

Design and Simulation of a Solar Powered UAV for Remote Sensing Tasks Technical Report

This research deals with the development of a Solar-Powered UAV designed for remote sensing, in particular to the development of the autopilot sub-system and path planning. The design of the Solar-Powered UAS followed a systems engineering methodology, by first defining system architecture, and selecting each subsystem. Validation tests and integration of autopilot is performed, in order to evaluate the performances of each subsystem and to obtain a global operational system for data collection missions. The flight tests planning and simulation results are also explored in order to verify the mission capabilities using an autopilot on a UAS. The important aspect of this research is to develop a Solar-Powered UAS for the purpose of data collection and video monitoring, especially data and images from the ground; transmit to the GS (Ground Station), segment the collected data, and afterwards analyze it with a Matlab code.

The social tasks of learning to become a physical education teacher: Considering the HPE subject department as a community of practice

Initial teacher education (ITE) students participate in various workplaces within schools and in doing so, form understandings about the numerous, and at times competing, expectations of teachers’ work. Through these experiences they form understandings about themselves as health and physical education (HPE) teachers. This paper examines the ways communities of practice within HPE subject department offices function as sites of workplace learning for student teachers. In particular this research focused on how ITE students negotiate tacit and contradictory expectations as well as social tasks during the practicum and the ways in which their understandings are mediated through participation in the workspace. Qualitative methods of survey and semi-structured interview were used to collect data on a cohort of student teachers during and following their major (10 week) practicum experience. Analysis was informed by theories of communities of practice (Wenger, 1998), workplace learning (Billett, 2001), and social task systems (Doyle, 1977). It was evident that considerable effort, attention, and energy was expended on various interrelated social tasks aimed at building positive relationships with their supervisor and other HPE teachers at the school. The social dynamics were highly nuanced and required a game-like approach. In our view the complexity that student teachers must negotiate in striving for an excellent evaluation warrants specific attention in physical education teacher education (PETE) programs. This study raises questions regarding our responsibilities in sending student teachers into contexts that might even be described as toxic. We offer some suggestions for how PETE might better support students going into practicum contexts that might be regarded as problematic workplaces.

Supporting knowledge-intensive construction management tasks in BIM

The delivery of products and services for construction-based businesses is increasingly becoming knowledge-driven and information-intensive. The proliferation of building information modelling (BIM) has increased business opportunities as well as introduced new challenges for the architectural, engineering and construction and facilities management (AEC/FM) industry. As such, the effective use, sharing and exchange of building life cycle information and knowledge management in building design, construction, maintenance and operation assumes a position of paramount importance. This paper identifies a subset of construction management (CM) relevant knowledge for different design conditions of building components through a critical, comprehensive review of synthesized literature and other information gathering and knowledge acquisition techniques. It then explores how such domain knowledge can be formalized as ontologies and, subsequently, a query vocabulary in order to equip BIM users with the capacity to query digital models of a building for the retrieval of useful and relevant domain-specific information. The formalized construction knowledge is validated through interviews with domain experts in relation to four case study projects. Additionally, retrospective analyses of several design conditions are used to demonstrate the soundness (realism), completeness, and appeal of the knowledge base and query-based reasoning approach in relation to the state-of-the-art tools, Solibri Model Checker and Navisworks. The knowledge engineering process and the methods applied in this research for information representation and retrieval could provide useful mechanisms to leverage BIM in support of a number of knowledge intensive CM/FM tasks and functions.

Green Falcon IV: An Unmanned Aerial System and an integrated Wireless Sensor Network for remote sensing tasks

This report summarises the development of an Unmanned Aerial System and an integrated Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), suitable for the real world application in remote sensing tasks. Several aspects are discussed and analysed to provide improvements in flight duration, performance and mobility of the UAV, while ensuring the accuracy and range of data from the wireless sensor system.

Task-dependent activations of human auditory cortex during pitch discrimination and pitch memory tasks

"The functional organization of auditory cortex (AC) is still poorly understood. Previous studies suggest segregation of auditory processing streams for spatial and nonspatial information located in the posterior and anterior AC, respectively (Rauschecker and Tian, 2000; Arnott et al., 2004; Lomber and Malhotra, 2008). Furthermore, previous studies have shown that active listening tasks strongly modulate AC activations (Petkov et al., 2004; Fritz et al., 2005; Polley et al., 2006). However, the task dependence of AC activations has not been systematically investigated. In the present study, we applied high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging of the AC and adjacent areas to compare activations during pitch discrimination and n-back pitch memory tasks that were varied parametrically in difficulty. We found that anterior AC activations were increased during discrimination but not during memory tasks, while activations in the inferior parietal lobule posterior to the AC were enhanced during memory tasks but not during discrimination. We also found that wide areas of the anterior AC and anterior insula were strongly deactivated during the pitch memory tasks. While these results are consistent with the proposition that the anterior and posterior AC belong to functionally separate auditory processing streams, our results show that this division is present also between tasks using spatially invariant sounds. Together, our results indicate that activations of human AC are strongly dependent on the characteristics of the behavioral task."

Towards Explaining the Tasks and Roles of the Boards of Directors

While previous research has helped to improve our understanding of corporate governance and boards of directors, less is known about the factors that affect boards’ tasks and roles and directors’ motivation and engagement. This requires knowledge of how board decisions are being made and the internal and external factors that affect the decision-making process. Large inferential leaps have been made from board demographics to firm performance with equivocal results. This thesis concentrates on how the institutional, behavioral and social identification factors impact the enactment of board roles and tasks. Data used in this thesis were collected in 2009 through a mailed survey to Finnish large and middle-sized corporations. The findings suggest that firstly, the national context of an organization is reflected in board roles and shapes how and for what reasons the board roles are carried out; secondly, the directors’ human and external social capital invariably impacts their engagement in board tasks and that conflicts among directors moderate those relationships; finally, directors’ identification with the organization, its shareholders and its customers affect the directors’ involvement in board tasks. By addressing the impact of organisational context, board-internal behaviour and social identification of board members on board roles and tasks, this thesis firstly complements the shareholder supremacy view as the only reason for the board’s involvement with specific tasks; secondly questions the existence of the board as separate from its institutional context; and thirdly questions the view that a board is a ‘black box’, subject to a selection of input demographic variables and producing quantifiable results. The thesis demonstrates that boards are complex organisational bodies, which involve much interaction among board members. Director behaviour and its influence on board decision making is an important determinant of board tasks and boards are likely subjected to inter-group tensions and are susceptible to the influence of internal and external social forces.

Do wordnets also improve human performance on NLP tasks?

FinnWordNet is a wordnet for Finnish that complies with the format of the Princeton WordNet (PWN) (Fellbaum, 1998). It was built by translating the PrincetonWordNet 3.0 synsets into Finnish by human translators. It is open source and contains 117000 synsets. The Finnish translations were inserted into the PWN structure resulting in a bilingual lexical database. In natural language processing (NLP), wordnets have been used for infusing computers with semantic knowledge assuming that humans already have a sufficient amount of this knowledge. In this paper we present a case study of using wordnets as an electronic dictionary. We tested whether native Finnish speakers benefit from using a wordnet while completing English sentence completion tasks. We found that using either an English wordnet or a bilingual English Finnish wordnet significantly improves performance in the task. This should be taken into account when setting standards and comparing human and computer performance on these tasks.

Cross-Guided Clustering: Transfer of Relevant Supervision across Tasks

Lack of supervision in clustering algorithms often leads to clusters that are not useful or interesting to human reviewers. We investigate if supervision can be automatically transferred for clustering a target task, by providing a relevant supervised partitioning of a dataset from a different source task. The target clustering is made more meaningful for the human user by trading-off intrinsic clustering goodness on the target task for alignment with relevant supervised partitions in the source task, wherever possible. We propose a cross-guided clustering algorithm that builds on traditional k-means by aligning the target clusters with source partitions. The alignment process makes use of a cross-task similarity measure that discovers hidden relationships across tasks. When the source and target tasks correspond to different domains with potentially different vocabularies, we propose a projection approach using pivot vocabularies for the cross-domain similarity measure. Using multiple real-world and synthetic datasets, we show that our approach improves clustering accuracy significantly over traditional k-means and state-of-the-art semi-supervised clustering baselines, over a wide range of data characteristics and parameter settings.