Managing workload in human–robot interaction: A review of empirical studies

Working with artificial agents is a challenging endeavor, often imposing high levels of workload on human operators who work within these socio-technical systems. We seek to understand these workload demands through examining the literature in major content areas of human–robot interaction. As research on HRI continues to explore a host of issues with operator workload, there is a need to synthesize the extant literature to determine its current state and to guide future research. Within HRI socio-technical systems, we reviewed the empirical literature on operator information processing and action execution. Using multiple resource theory (MRT; Wickens, 2002) as a guiding framework, we organized this review by the operator perceptual and responding demands which are routinely manipulated in HRI studies. We also reviewed the utility of different interventions for reducing the strain on the perceptual system (e.g., multimodal displays) and responses (e.g., automation). Our synthesis of the literature demonstrates that much is known about how to decrease operator workload, but there are specific gaps in knowledge due to study operations and methodology. This work furthers our understanding of workload in complex environments such as those found when working with robots. Principles and propositions are provided for those interested in decreasing operator workload in applied settings and also for future research.     

Transfer of learning in virtual environments: a new challenge?

The aim of all education is to apply what we learn in different contexts and to recognise and extend this learning to new situations. Virtual learning environments can be used to build skills. Recent research in cognitive psychology and education has shown that acquisitions are linked to the initial context. This provides a challenge for virtual reality in education or training. A brief overview of transfer issues highlights five main ideas: (1) the type of transfer enables the virtual environment (VE) to be classified according to what is learned; (2) the transfer process can create conditions within the VE to facilitate transfer of learning; (3) specific features of VR must match and comply with transfer of learning; (4) transfer can be used to assess a VE’s effectiveness; and (5) future research on transfer of learning must examine the singular context of learning. This paper discusses how new perspectives in cognitive psychology influence and promote transfer of learning through the use of VEs.     

A demand-driven virtual disk prefetch mechanism for seamless mobility of personal computing environments

In this paper, we propose a demand-driven virtual disk (VD) prefetch mechanism—DPM—to improve the performance of virtual machine (VM) at destination site for mobile personal computing environments. DPM uses an extended CoW (Copy-on-Write) virtual block device to split the traditional monolithic large-sized VD image into multiple small-sized SVD (Software Virtual Disk) images at a basic granularity of a single kind of software. Based on the fine-grained VD splitting, DPM uses an access frequency and dynamic priority-based prefetch target identifying-APTI algorithm to identify the SVDs of the software being used by the user at destination site, and prefetches those SVDs by utilizing P2P transportation mechanism at background. We have built a prototype to realize DPM on Xen virtual machine monitor (VMM). Experiments on the prototype show that DPM can effectively improve the VM performance at an unexpected destination site without any cached VD state, being helpful in achieving seamless mobility of personal computing environments in distributed virtual machine environments.     

Particle swarm optimisation in designing parameters of manufacturing processes: A review (2008–2018)

The evolutionary optimisation algorithms appeared as an effective alternative to conventional statistical methods that have certain limitations in optimising complex manufacturing processes. Considering works published in the last decade, this paper presents an analysis of the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) implementation in designing parameters of heterogeneous manufacturing processes, both conventional and emerging, new processes. The literature review and analysis was structured according to the complexity of the optimisation problem (single response and multiresponse problems), and the development of an objective function for PSO. The tuning of the PSO algorithm-specific parameters was analysed in detail. The PSO algorithm performance was benchmarked with the results of other methods, including evolutionary algorithms, in designing process parameters. The concerns in applying PSO for multiresponse manufacturing problems were highlighted, and recommendations for future research were drawn. Such a comprehensive review on the PSO application in optimising manufacturing processes, including the detailed discussion on the algorithm characteristics and benchmark with other optimisation procedures, has not been pursued so far. Therefore, this review analysis provides hands on information for researchers and engineers at one place, and it is believed that the findings could serve as a basis for the future research and implementation directions.     

Expert system applications in business: A review and analysis of the literature (1977–1993)

A survey of expert system (ES) business application papers published between 1977 and 1993 indicates that an increasing amount of ES research is being conducted for a diverse range of business activities. The classification of literature by (1) year of publication, (2) application area, (3) generic problem area addressed, (4) problem domain, (5) level of management, (6) level of task interdependence, (7) means of development, (8) corporate/academic interaction in development, and (9) technology integration provides some insights in the trend. Implications to ES developers are discussed.     

Energizing business transactions in virtual worlds: an empirical study of consumers’ purchasing behaviors

Virtual marketplaces for products and services have become major profit sources in virtual worlds (VWs). The large quantity and growth of virtual product transactions and their platform providers’ profits have made it critical to understand consumer purchasing behavior in VWs. However, as open-ended VWs such as Second Life have environments that differ from those of other online communities, the underlying mechanisms of consumers’ e-commerce behavior may not explain their VW behavior. Therefore, this study examines consumers’ VW behavior by considering three categories of factors influencing their purchasing behavior: the platform context (i.e., technical characteristics such as interactivity and vividness and social characteristics such as involvement), product context (i.e., product value), and virtual experience (i.e., flow and satisfaction). This study examines how these factors affect consumers when they purchase virtual products. Its results highlight the importance of flow experience in consumers’ VW behavior. Interactivity, vividness, and involvement are found to affect consumers’ virtual experience—flow, and involvement exhibits a significantly stronger influence on flow. Flow and involvement are found to affect product value, and flow exerts a stronger influence than involvement on product value. Flow and product value directly impact consumers’ willingness to purchase, whereas satisfaction with the virtual world experience, which is significantly affected by flow, is not associated with willingness to purchase. The results further indicate that product value is more influential on willingness to purchase than is flow. After describing the study’s contributions to both research and practice, I conclude the paper by presenting avenues for future research.     

A combination of proper orthogonal decomposition–discrete empirical interpolation method (POD–DEIM) and meshless local RBF-DQ approach for prevention of groundwater contamination

The main presented idea is to reduce the used CPU time for employing the local radial basis functions-differential quadrature (LRBF-DQ) method. To this end, the proper orthogonal decomposition–discrete empirical interpolation method (POD–DEIM) has been combined with the LRBF-DQ technique. For checking the ability of the new procedure, the groundwater equation is solved. This equation has been classified in category of system of advection–diffusion equations. The solutions of advection equations have some shock, thus, special numerical methods should be applied for example discontinuous Galerkin and finite volume methods. Moreover, several test problems are given that show the acceptable accuracy and efficiency of the proposed schemes.     

Evaluation of commercial brain–computer interfaces in real and virtual world environment: A pilot study

This paper identifies the user’s adaptation on brain-controlled systems and the ability to control brain-generated events in a closed neuro-feedback loop. The user experience is quantified for the further understanding of brain–computer interfacing. A working system has been developed based on off-the-shelf components for controlling a robot in both the real and virtual world. Using commercial brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) the overall cost, set up time and complexity can be reduced. The system is divided in two prototypes based on the headset type used. The first prototype is based on the Neurosky headset and it has been tested with 54 participants in a field study. The second prototype is based on the Emotiv headset including more sensors and accuracy, tested with 31 participants in a lab environment. Evaluation results indicate that robot navigation through commercial BCIs can be effective and natural both in the real and the virtual environment.     

Web-based Personalised System of Instruction: An effective approach for diverse cohorts with virtual learning environments?

The Personalised System of Instruction is a form of mastery learning which, though it has been proven to be educationally effective, has never seriously challenged the dominant lecture-tutorial teaching method in higher education and has largely fallen into disuse. An information and communications technology assisted version of the Personalised System of Instruction using a virtual learning environment is promoted here based on the authors’ longitudinal design research into this pedagogy. The particular elements of the virtual learning environment which are promoted are short video clips, online formative tests and an assessment management system. The authors present their experiences of developing and deploying this pedagogy for the teaching of introductory discrete mathematics to large classes of Computer Science students at two UK higher education institutions both with whole cohorts and ‘at risk’ groups of students. In particular, this method is promoted as particularly helpful to students who do not adopt a deep approach to learning as many students fail to do. Moreover ‘at risk’ students using this method (n = 71) demonstrated an average Glass effect size of 0.83 compared with other ‘at risk’ students who did not (n = 35). Based on these experiences, this pedagogy is promoted as an effective approach to teaching in higher education, especially the teaching of cognitive skills to diverse cohorts of students on foundation level modules.     

Petr Petrovich Troyanskii (1894–1950): A Forgotten Pioneer of Mechanical Translation

This article presents translations of works by Troyanskii describing his 1933 proposals for a mechanical translation device, some later elaborations of the linguistic and technical features, and also translated extracts from commentaries made in 1959 by the Russian editors of his papers. The paper includes extensive assessments of Troyanskii's proposals, and places his work in the context of his time and in the light of subsequent research in machine translation.     

Classification and trend analysis of UML books (1997–2009)

Technical books of each subject area denote the level of maturity and knowledge demand in that area. According to the Google Books database, about 208 Unified Modeling Language (UML) books have been published from its inception in 1997 until 2009. While various book reviews are frequently published in various sources (e.g., IEEE Software Bookshelf), there are no studies to classify UML books into meaningful categories. Such a classification can help researchers in the area to identify trends and also reveal the level of activity in each sub-area of UML. The statistical survey reported in this article intends to be a first step in classification and trend analysis of the UML books published from 1997 to 2009. The study also sheds light on the quantity of books published in different focus areas (e.g., UML’s core concepts, patterns, tool support, Object Constraint Language and Model-Driven Architecture) and also on different application domains (e.g., database modeling, web applications, and real-time systems). The trends of book publications in each sub-area of UML are also used to track the level of maturity, to identify possible Hype cycles and also to measure knowledge demand in each area.     

The evolution of sentiment analysis—A review of research topics,venues, and top cited papers

Sentiment analysis is one of the fastest growing research areas in computer science, making it challenging to keep track of all the activities in the area. We present a computer-assisted literature review, where we utilize both text mining and qualitative coding, and analyze 6996 papers from Scopus. We find that the roots of sentiment analysis are in the studies on public opinion analysis at the beginning of 20th century and in the text subjectivity analysis performed by the computational linguistics community in 1990’s. However, the outbreak of computer-based sentiment analysis only occurred with the availability of subjective texts on the Web. Consequently, 99% of the papers have been published after 2004. Sentiment analysis papers are scattered to multiple publication venues, and the combined number of papers in the top-15 venues only represent ca. 30% of the papers in total. We present the top-20 cited papers from Google Scholar and Scopus and a taxonomy of research topics. In recent years, sentiment analysis has shifted from analyzing online product reviews to social media texts from Twitter and Facebook. Many topics beyond product reviews like stock markets, elections, disasters, medicine, software engineering and cyberbullying extend the utilization of sentiment analysis.     

A Formalization of the Knuth–Bendix(–Huet) Critical Pair Theorem

A mechanical proof of the Knuth–Bendix Critical Pair Theorem in the higher-order language of the theorem prover PVS is described. This well-known theorem states that a Term Rewriting System is locally confluent if and only if all its critical pairs are joinable. The formalization of this theorem follows Huet’s well-known structure of proof in which the restriction on strong normalization or Noetherian was dropped and the result presented as a lemma. In order to formalize the Knuth–Bendix Critical Pair Theorem we rely on previously developed PVS theories for abstract reduction systems, named ars, and term rewriting systems, named trs, which were built upon the PVS libraries for finite sequences and sets. On the one hand, the theory trs is composed of subtheories for dealing with the structure of terms, for replacements of subterms and substitutions and jointly with the theory ars it allows for adequate specifications of elaborate notions of term rewriting systems such as the one of critical pairs. On the other hand, ars specifies basic definitions and notions of abstract reduction systems such as reduction, termination, normal forms, and confluence as well as non basic concepts such as strong normalization.     

A virtual pegging approach to the max–min optimization of the bi-criteria knapsack problem

We are concerned with a variation of the knapsack problem, the bi-objective max–min knapsack problem (BKP), where the values of items differ under two possible scenarios. We have given a heuristic algorithm and an exact algorithm to solve this problem. In particular, we introduce a surrogate relaxation to derive upper and lower bounds very quickly, and apply the pegging test to reduce the size of BKP. We also exploit this relaxation to obtain an upper bound in the branch-and-bound algorithm to solve the reduced problem. To further reduce the problem size, we propose a ‘virtual pegging’ algorithm and solve BKP to optimality. As a result, for problems with up to 16,000 items, we obtain a very accurate approximate solution in less than a few seconds. Except for some instances, exact solutions can also be obtained in less than a few minutes on ordinary computers. However, the proposed algorithm is less effective for strongly correlated instances.     

Internet-based virtual computing environment(iVCE):Concepts and architecture

Resources over Internet have such intrinsic characteristics as growth, autonomy and diversity, which have brought many challenges to the efficient sharing and comprehensive utilization of these resources. This paper presents a novel approach for the construction of the Internet-based Virtual Computing Environment (iVCE), whose sig- nificant mechanisms are on-demand aggregation and autonomic collaboration. The iVCE is built on the open infrastructure of the Internet and provides harmonious, transparent and integrated services for end-users and applications. The concept of iVCE is presented and its architectural framework is described by introducing three core concepts, i.e., autonomic element, virtual commonwealth and virtual executor. Then the connotations, functions and related key technologies of each components of the architecture are deeply analyzed with a case study, iVCE for Memory.     

Contemporary intellectual structure of CSCL research (2006–2013): a co-citation network analysis with an education focus

This present study endeavors to discover the scholarly communication structure in the CSCL knowledge domain. To explore the intellectual structure of contemporary literature of CSCL research from 2006 to 2013, over a thousand research papers indexed in the leading journal publications and conference proceedings were retrieved from WOS. Accordingly, this paper adopted a series of methods to analyze these research articles from macro to micro level, including document co-citation analysis (DCA), exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and social network analysis (SNA). As a result, a total of 7,552 and 2,180 co-citation ties were obtained from 403 to 66 source papers, respectively. In addition, six intellectual subfields within the CSCL literature were extracted, namely: (1) representation, discourse & pattern, (2) factors influencing CSCL, (3) intervention and comparison, (4) critical reasoning, (5) process of social construction, and (6) design and modeling of CSCL. Central documents and publications within contemporary CSCL research were identified and presented in the undirected co-citation networks from both macro and micro perspectives. Furthermore, the dissemination of underlying subfields and pivotal documents serving as a boundary-spanning role were discussed. This is the very first attempt to integrate the bibliographical method, statistical analysis, and visualization techniques in relation to contemporary CSCL research. Further discussion and research directions for future CSCL study are provided.     

IDS: Thermodynamic–kinetic–empirical tool for modelling of solidification,microstructure and material properties

IDS (InterDendritic Solidification) is a thermodynamic–kinetic–empirical tool for simulation of solidification phenomena of steels including phase transformations from melt down to room temperature. In addition, important thermophysical material properties (enthalpy, thermal conductivity, density, etc.) are calculated. The model has been developed in the Laboratory of Metallurgy, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, since 1984. IDS includes two main modules, the IDS module and the ADC (Austenite DeComposition) module. IDS module simulates the solidification phenomena from liquid down to 1000 °C and ADC the austenite decomposition down to room temperature. Both modules have their own recommended composition ranges. The IDS module is based on the so-called sharp interface concept. The ADC is mainly statistical based on empirical CCT (Continuous Cooling Transformation) diagrams. IDS tool is also coupled with the thermodynamic programmer's library, called ChemApp, developed by a German company, GTT-Technologies. This coupled package is used to simulate among other things multiphase inclusions during solidification. The present paper summarises the features of the IDS tool including the coupling with the ChemApp library.     

A semi‐empirical backscattering model for estimation of leaf area index (LAI) of rice in southern China

Most paddy rice in southern China grows in warm, humid and rainy areas where it is hard to acquire optical remote sensing data. In this study, a semi‐empirical backscattering model was proposed to estimate leaf area index (LAI) of rice in the area using ENVISAT Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR) alternating polarization data. Ground measurements of LAI, water content and height of rice in the test site were collected and the model fitted at the same time as the acquisition of ASAR data. LAI estimated from the model was compared with ground measurements to evaluate the accuracy of the model. The results showed that the model provides a promising alternative to optical remote sensing data for predicting LAI of rice in southern China.