Designing for attention with sound: challenges and extensions to ecological interface design

OBJECTIVE: We explore whether ecological interface design (EID) principles can be applied to the design of an auditory display for anesthesia monitoring. BACKGROUND: EID examples focus almost exclusively on visual displays. In the anesthesia work environment, however, auditory displays may provide better individual and team awareness of patient state. METHOD: Using a work domain analysis of physiological monitoring in anesthesia, we identify information to display. Using the skills, rules, and knowledge distinction we identify cognitive control needed. Using semantic mapping we map physiological variables and constraints to auditory dimensions. RESULTS: EID principles do not address when information should be displayed and to whom. An attentional mapping stage helps to specify answers to these questions so that a workable auditory display for anesthesia monitoring is achieved. CONCLUSION: EID principles of representing work domain functional structure and minimizing resource-demanding cognitive control are necessary but insufficient to specify requirements for an effective auditory display. Also needed are analyses of control tasks, strategies, and the social organization of work. Such analyses are an integral part of the broader cognitive work analysis framework from which EID emerged. APPLICATION: Actual or potential uses of this research include the design of displays that support continuous peripheral awareness in collaborative multimodal work environments.     

Modeling expert problem solving in a game of chance: a Yahtzee© case study

Although developments on software agents have led to useful applications in automation of routine tasks such as electronic mail filtering, there is a scarcity of research that empirically evaluates the performance of a software agent versus that of a human reasoner, whose problem-solving capabilities the agent embodies. In the context of a game of a chance, namely Yahtzee©, we identified strategies deployed by expert human reasoners and developed a decision tree for agent development. This paper describes the computer implementation of the Yahtzee game as well as the software agent. It also presents a comparison of the performance of humans versus an automated agent. Results indicate that, in this context, the software agent embodies human expertise at a high level of fidelity.     

Real time video frames allocation in mobile networks using cooperative pre-fetching

In this paper, we study the bandwidth allocation problem for serving video requests in a mobile real-time video player system. One of the main issues to maintain the quality of services (QoS) in mobile video playback is to ensure sufficient number of video frames available at the client side while a video is being played. However, due to the limited bandwidth of a mobile network and variable workload streaming video, this is not easy to achieve in practice. In addition, the communication link between mobile clients and a video server is subject to frequent errors and temporary disconnection. In this paper, we propose to use the notion of buffered bandwidth in addition to the network bandwidth to support real-time playback of videos at mobile clients. Based on this, we designed a bandwidth allocation scheme called Cooperative Pre-Fetching (CP) in which the amount of bandwidth to be allocated to serve a video request depends on the current buffer level of the video at the client relative to the target buffer level of the client. In determining the target buffer level, we consider the errors in communication to the client as well as the other clients who are concurrently served by the system. The buffered video frames at the clients are then used to minimize the impact of error in communications on the overall QoS of video playbacks in the whole system.

Organizational climate in air traffic control Innovative preparedness for implementation of new technology and organizational development in a rule governed organization

A positive and innovative organizational climate is of great importance in order to manage and adapt to change. Such a climate seldom evolves in organizations closely governed by rules and regulations. Because of ongoing organizational and technical changes within the Swedish Air Navigation Services Provider, a study concerning the organizational climate for changes and innovations was conducted to investigate the organization's capacity to cope with changes. Study locations were the two Swedish main air traffic control centers and parts of the civil aviation administration headquarters. In the study 390 subjects took part and the CCQ questionnaire was used to measure the organizational climate. The results show that the organizational climate is quite positive despite the rule-governed work. The results also show that administrative personnel assess the organizational climate as more positive than operative personnel. Comparisons between management positions did not result in any differences.     

Development of an Autonomous Robot for Gas Storage Spheres Inspection

Inspection for corrosion of gas storage spheres at the welding seam lines must be done periodically. Until now this inspection is being done manually and has a high cost associated to it and a high risk of inspection personel injuries. The Brazilian Petroleum Company, Petrobras, is seeking cost reduction and personel safety by the use of autonomous robot technology. This paper presents the development of a robot capable of autonomously follow a welding line and transporting corrosion measurement sensors. The robot uses a pair of sensors each composed of a laser source and a video camera that allows the estimation of the center of the welding line. The mechanical robot uses four magnetic wheels to adhere to the sphere’s surface and was constructed in a way that always three wheels are in contact with the sphere’s metallic surface which guarantees enough magnetic atraction to hold the robot in the sphere’s surface all the time. Additionally, an independently actuated table for attaching the corrosion inspection sensors was included for small position corrections. Tests were conducted at the laboratory and in a real sphere showing the validity of the proposed approach and implementation.     

Fault-based test suite prioritization for specification-based testing

Context

Existing test suite prioritization techniques usually rely on code coverage information or historical execution data that serve as indicators for estimating the fault-detecting ability of test cases. Such indicators are primarily empirical in nature and not theoretically driven; hence, they do not necessarily provide sound estimates. Also, these techniques are not applicable when the source code is not available or when the software is tested for the first time.

Objective

We propose and develop the novel notion of fault-based prioritization of test cases which directly utilizes the theoretical knowledge of their fault-detecting ability and the relationships among the test cases and the faults in the prescribed fault model, based on which the test cases are generated.

Method

We demonstrate our approach of fault-based prioritization by applying it to the testing of the implementation of logical expressions against their specifications. We then validate our proposal by an empirical study that evaluates the effectiveness of prioritization techniques using two different metrics.

Results

A theoretically guided fault-based prioritization technique generally outperforms other techniques under study, as assessed by two different metrics. Our empirical results also show that the technique helps to reveal all target faults by executing only about 72% of the prioritized test suite, thereby reducing the effort required in testing.

Conclusions

The fault-based prioritization approach is not only applicable to the instance empirically validated in this paper, but should also be adaptable to other fault-based testing strategies. We also envisage new research directions to be opened up by our work.     

Preference-based multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for power-aware application mapping on NoC platforms

Network-on-chip (NoC) are considered the next generation of communication infrastructure in embedded systems. In the platform-based design methodology, an application is implemented by a set of collaborative intellectual property (IP) blocks. The selection of the most suited set of IPs as well as their physical mapping onto the NoC infrastructure to implement efficiently the application at hand are two hard combinatorial problems that occur during the synthesis process of Noc-based embedded system implementation. In this paper, we propose an innovative preference-based multi-objective evolutionary methodology to perform the assignment and mapping stages. We use one of the well-known and efficient multi-objective evolutionary algorithms NSGA-II and microGA as a kernel. The optimization processes of assignment and mapping are both driven by the minimization of the required silicon area and imposed execution time of the application, considering that the decision maker’s preference is a pre-specified value of the overall power consumption of the implementation.     

Computer simulation of the precordial QRS complex: effects of simulated changes in ventricular wall thickness and volume

Over a 4-year period 40,923 operations and 44,716 surgical admissions were monitored for both community and hospital onset infections. One thousand eight hundred sixty-five patients had 1966 surgical wound infections and 2056 remote infections including 1652 hospital onset and 404 community onset infections. One thousand one hudnred forty-four patients with multiple infections averaged 40 days in the hospital contrasted with 24 days for 721 patients with a single wound infection. The total excess cost of hospitalization for these patients was $951,150. A statistically significant reduction occurred for urinary tract infections, lower respiratory infections and clean and contaminated surgical wound infections. It is suggested that these are all inter-related and a significant reduction in surgical wound infections can be achieved through control of infections at remote sites, particularly those associated with medical devices. The coagulase positive staphylococcus is still the most important single bacterial species in the primary etiology of surgical wound infections. When the gastrointestinal tract is entered or "supra" infecting organisms appear, gram negative bacteria and mixed gram negative and gram positive infections are dominant. Reduction in remote site infections occurring in surgical patients is necessary to reduce the incidence of surgical wound infections, suggest preventive and control measures, and document the effectiveness of such measures.     

Interplay Between Wetting and Phase Behavior in Binary Polymer Films and Wedges: Monte Carlo Simulations and Mean Field Calculations

Confining a binary mixture, one can profoundly alter its miscibility behavior. The qualitative features of miscibility in confined geometry are ratheruniversal and shared by polymer mixtures as well as small molecules, but the unmixing transition in the bulk and the wetting transition are typically well separated in polymer blends. The interplay between wetting and miscibility of a symmetric polymer mixture via large-scale Monte Carlo simulations in the framework of the bond fluctuation model and via numerical self–consistent field calculations is studied. The film surfaces interact with the monomers via short ranged potentials, and the wetting transition of the semi–infinite system is of first order. It can be accurately located in the simulations by measuring the surface and interface tensions and using Young’s equation. If both surfaces in a film attract the same component, capillary condensation occurs and the critical point is close to the critical point of the bulk. If surfaces attract different components, an interface localization/delocalization occurs which gives rise to phase diagrams with two critical points in the vicinity of the pre-wetting critical point of the semi–infinite system. The crossover between these two types of phase diagrams as a function of the surface field asymmetry is studied. The dependence of the phase diagram on the film thickness Δ for antisymmetric surface fields is investigated. Upon decreasing the film thickness, the two critical points approach the symmetry axis of the phase diagram, and below a certain thickness Δ_tri, there remains only a single critical point at the symmetric composition. This corresponds to a second-order interface localization/delocalization transition even though the wetting transition is of first order. At a specific film thickness, Δ_tri, tricritical behavior is found. The behavior of antisymmetric films is compared with the phase behavior in an antisymmetric double wedge. While the former is the analog of the wetting transition of a planar surface, the latter is related to the filling behavior of a single wedge. Evidence for a second-order interface localization/delocalization transition in an antisymmetric double wedge is presented, and its unconventional critical behavior is related to the predictions of Parry et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 83:5535 (1999)) for wedge filling. The critical behavior differs from the Ising universality class and is characterized by strong anisotropic fluctuations.Invited paper presented at the Fifteenth Symposium on Thermophysical Properties, June 022–27, 2003, Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A.