An invitation to fiberwise topology: The general framework for multicolored images in pattern recognition and some of its artificial intelligence aspects

We present a short and rather informal account concerning a problem we posed in earlier work, recall our conjecture at the time, and report on our answer today. Specifically, our purpose is to draw attention to fiberwise topology as a possible mathematical tool for formalizing multi-colored images and other complex signals met in pattern recognition (P.R.), to provide some information concerning the mathematical background of the fiber topological machinery, and indicate how to use it. For a detailed technical study as well as a tentative hierarchical classification of topological images in growing order of complexity and the corresponding topological processing methods, the readers may consult Pavel [5]. The paper ends by mentioning some artificial intelligence (A.I.) aspects of the fiberwise imagery.     

Estimation of soil and crop parameters for wheat from airborne radar backscattering data in C and X bands

The study of radar backscattering signatures of wheat fields was investigated, using data collected on the Orgeval agricultural watershed (France) by the airborne scatterometer ERASME in C and X bands, HH and VV polarizations, at incidence angles from 15° to 45°, during two years for different soil moisture conditions with simultaneous ground-based measurements. A simple parameterization as water-cloud model with two driving parameters (the surface soil moisture and the plant water content) gives satisfactory results to estimate radar cross sections of wheat for a wide range of frequencies (C and X bands) and incidence angles (20° and 40°) within 1 dB in CHH and XHH and 2 dB in CVV and XVV. At the lower frequency (C band) the attenuated soil backscattering by the vegetation is dominant. It is shown that simple linear relations in C band between radar cross section and soil moisture are insufficient. A correction term for the vegetation attenuation is needed and is determined. Low contrast between the backscattering of dry and wet soil (around 6 dB) for a given vegetation density leads to a relatively high error in the estimation of soil moisture by radar (0.06 cm³ / cm³). At the higher frequency (X band), the radar backscattering is negatively correlated to the vegetation water content with a saturation of the radar cross section as the plant grows (about 6 dB of dynamic range between low and fully grown canopy) with no dependence on the soil signal. The achievable accuracy in the estimation of crop water content is the same at 20° and 40° and higher in XHH (about 0.5 kg/m²) than in XVV.     

Semantic priming between spoken words in adults and children.

Used an auditory lexical decision paradigm to determine occurrence of semantic priming between spoken words and to investigate the organization of the mental lexicon in preliterate children. 30 undergraduates and 24 1st-grade children (aged 6 yrs 2 mo to 7 yrs) were tested on a lexical decision task in which Ss had to decide whether pairs of spoken items were words. In both groups, significant facilitation was found for semantically related words compared with unrelated ones. Results indicate that semantic priming occurred in the auditory modality. The fact that children benefited at least as much from and often more than adults from an appropriate semantic context suggests that the lexicon of the child is organized in the same way as the adult's as early as 6 to 7 yrs of age. (French abstract) (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Integral-based filtering of continuous glucose sensor measurements for glycaemic control in critical care

Hyperglycaemia is prevalent in critical illness and increases the risk of further complications and mortality, while tight control can reduce mortality up to 43%. Adaptive control methods are capable of highly accurate, targeted blood glucose regulation using limited numbers of manual measurements due to patient discomfort and labour intensity. Therefore, the option to obtain greater data density using emerging continuous glucose sensing devices is attractive. However, the few such systems currently available can have errors in excess of 20-30%. In contrast, typical bedside testing kits have errors of approximately 7-10%. Despite greater measurement frequency larger errors significantly impact the resulting glucose and patient specific parameter estimates, and thus the control actions determined creating an important safety and performance issue. This paper models the impact of the continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS, Medtronic, Northridge, CA) on model-based parameter identification and glucose prediction. An integral-based fitting and filtering method is developed to reduce the effect of these errors. A noise model is developed based on CGMS data reported in the literature, and is slightly conservative with a mean Clarke Error Grid (CEG) correlation of R=0.81 (range: 0.68-0.88) as compared to a reported value of R=0.82 in a critical care study. Using 17 virtual patient profiles developed from retrospective clinical data, this noise model was used to test the methods developed. Monte-Carlo simulation for each patient resulted in an average absolute 1-h glucose prediction error of 6.20% (range: 4.97-8.06%) with an average standard deviation per patient of 5.22% (range: 3.26-8.55%). Note that all the methods and results are generalizable to similar applications outside of critical care, such as less acute wards and eventually ambulatory individuals. Clinically, the results show one possible computational method for managing the larger errors encountered in emerging continuous blood glucose sensors, thus enabling their more effective use in clinical glucose regulation studies.     

Perception of difficulties for the back related to asssembly work: general findings and impact of back health

The study objective was to describe the perceptions of airplane assemblers on job demand for the back and how back pain modulated these perceptions. One hundred and seventy-six workers answered two questionnaires concerning back pain and the perception of work related difficulties (work activities, work contexts, tools, work positions, efforts). Results show that positions and work contexts are perceived as greater sources of difficulty than efforts or dynamic activities. The duration of a given position is more important than its frequency. Back pain has a significant but complex impact on the perception of difficulty. Assemblers appear to integrate several factors when evaluating their difficulties as opposed to individual aspects, as it is often measured in ergonomic studies. The results have important implications for the measurement of ergonomic factors in the genesis of back pain and illustrates the potential for misclassification and biases in current epidemiologic studies.     

Does a rolling floor reduce the physical work demands and workload, and increase the productivity of truck drivers handling packed goods?

A PCM rolling floor (RF) was developed to reduce the risk of musculoskeletal complaints among truck drivers. The RF can be used to move packed goods automatically in and out of the cargo space. The efficacy of this intervention on physical work demands, energetic and perceived workload and productivity was evaluated by comparing nine truck drivers working with a RF and a traditional, non-moving floor during a working day. Since the RF was not used during the loading process, no effects were found. The RF reduced the unloading process by 8 min, decreased the frequency of lifting and setting down goods by 24%, decreased the frequency of handling goods below knee level by 79%, and decreased the frequency of entering the cargo space by 45%. No effect was found on the energetic and perceived workload. The RF resulted in a small increase in productivity.     

Management and enterprise architecture click: The FAD(E)E framework

Enterprises are living things. They constantly need to be (re-)architected in order to achieve the necessary agility, alignment and integration. This paper gives a high-level overview of how companies can go about doing ‘enterprise architecture’ in the context of both the classic (isolated) enterprise and the Extended Enterprise. By discussing the goals that are pursued in an enterprise architecture effort we reveal some basic requirements that can be put on the process of architecting the enterprise. The relationship between managing and architecting the enterprise is discussed and clarified in the FAD(E)E, the Framework for the Architectural Development of the (Extended) Enterprise. Frank G. Goethals completed his Master studies in economics (option informatics), at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 2000. He is presently researching for a Ph.D. under the theme of `Managing data in the Extended Enterprise'. This research is conducted at the K.U.Leuven under the guidance of professor J. Vandenbulcke, and is financed by SAP Belgium. Frank has a strong interest in coordination and dependency theory and Enterprise Architecture. Monique Snoeck obtained her Ph.D. in May 1995 from The Department of Computer Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven with a thesis that lays the formal foundations of the object-oriented business modelling method MERODE. Since then she has done further research in the area of formal methods for object-oriented conceptual modelling. She now is Full Professor with the Management Information Systems Group of the Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. She has been involved in several industrial conceptual modelling projects. Her research interests are object oriented conceptual modelling, software architecture and software quality. Wilfried Lemahieu holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Economic Sciences of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (1999). At present, he is associate professor at the Management Informatics research group of the Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics. His teaching includes Database Management, Data Storage Architectures and Management Informatics. His research interests comprise distributed object architectures and web services, object-relational and object-oriented database systems and hypermedia systems. Jacques A. Vandenbulcke is professor at the Faculty of Economics and Applied Economics of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. His main research interests are in Database management, Data modelling, and Business Information Systems. He is co-ordinator of the Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems (LIRIS) and holder of the SAP-chair on ‘Extended enterprise infrastructures’. He is president of ‘Studiecentrum voor Automatische Informatieverwerking (SAI)’, the largest society for computer professionals in Belgium, and co-founder of the ‘Production and Inventory Control Society (PICS)’ in Belgium.     

Hybridizing discrete- and continuous-time models for batch sizing and scheduling problems

This paper proposes a new hybrid technique called “partial parameter uniformization” (hereafter PPU). The technique simplifies problems by ignoring the different values that certain problem parameters can take, which may facilitate the solution of some hard combinatorial optimization problems. PPU is applied to complex batch sizing and scheduling problems. Some information can be obtained from a discrete-time model in which job durations have been made uniform. This information is then exploited by a more detailed continuous-time model to generate feasible solutions and further improve these solutions. Good, or optimal solutions to the Westenberger and Kallrath Benchmark problems have been obtained in this way, at relatively low computational cost, as have solutions to the newer problems of Blömer and Günther.     

MPaaS: Mobility prediction as a service in telecom cloud

Mobile applications and services relying on mobility prediction have recently spurred lots of interest. In this paper, we propose mobility prediction based on cellular traces as an infrastructural level service of telecom cloud. Mobility Prediction as a Service (MPaaS) embeds mobility mining and forecasting algorithms into a cloud-based user location tracking framework. By empowering MPaaS, the hosted 3rd-party and value-added services can benefit from online mobility prediction. Particularly we took Mobility-aware Personalization and Predictive Resource Allocation as key features to elaborate how MPaaS drives new fashion of mobile cloud applications. Due to the randomness of human mobility patterns, mobility predicting remains a very challenging task in MPaaS research. Our preliminary study observed collective behavioral patterns (CBP) in mobility of crowds, and proposed a CBP-based mobility predictor. MPaaS system equips a hybrid predictor fusing both CBP-based scheme and Markov-based predictor to provide telecom cloud with large-scale mobility prediction capacity.     

The work load of warehouse workers in three different working systems

An investigation was conducted in five companies in the distribution branch. These companies were divided into three different working systems, i.e., highly mechanized (HM), moderately mechanized (MM), and slightly mechanized (SM). The three systems differed in logistics and kind of appliances used. The purpose of this study was to compare the three working systems with different degrees of mechanization concerning the time spent on tasks, activities during the working day, postures that occurred, physiological work load, perceived exertion and recovery from work. To investigate the different tasks, activities and working postures, 50 warehouse workers, originating from the three working systems, were observed by means of a direct observation method, called: ‘TRAC’. To investigate the physiological work load the heart rate was recorded continuously during the working day and related to the individually determined relation between heart rate and oxygen uptake. This relation was constructed with the results of a cycle ergometer test done in the laboratory. During lunch and at the end of the working day the warehouse workers filled in a questionnaire concerning their perceived exertion and recovery from work.

In the slightly mechanized system more time was spent with the trunk flexed more than 75° as compared with the other two systems. This posture was very common during lifting of objects, and lifting was done more often in this system than in the other systems. In the MM system the warehouse workers had the highest estimated oxygen uptake and reported the highest perceived exertion at the end of the working day. The workers in the HM system had a shorter working day and had less problems with recovery from work than the workers of the other two systems. Poor working postures like rotation and lateroflexion were commonly found in the HM working system. An important explanation was the difference in time spent driving an electric car. This activity was done mostly in the HM system. In conclusion, the HM system was considered most favourable when it concerned work load and recovery from work. The appliances used in the HM system, and especially the electric car, need to be designed according to ergonomic guidelines to avoid poor working postures.