Hierarchical Correlation Clustering in Multiple 2D Scalar Fields

Sets of multiple scalar fields can be used to model many types of variation in data, such as uncertainty in measurements and simulations or time‐dependent behavior of scalar quantities. Many structural properties of such fields can be explained by dependencies between different points in the scalar field. Although these dependencies can be of arbitrary complexity, correlation, i.e., the linear dependency, already provides significant structural information. Existing methods for correlation analysis are usually limited to positive correlation, handle only local dependencies, or use combinatorial approximations to this continuous problem. We present a new approach for computing and visualizing correlated regions in sets of 2‐dimensional scalar fields. This paper describes the following three main contributions: (i) An algorithm for hierarchical correlation clustering resulting in a dendrogram, (ii) a generalization of topological landscapes for dendrogram visualization, and (iii) a new method for incorporating negative correlation values in the clustering and visualization. All steps are designed to preserve the special properties of correlation coefficients. The results are visualized in two linked views, one showing the cluster hierarchy as 2D landscape and the other providing a spatial context in the scalar field's domain. Different coloring and texturing schemes coupled with interactive selection support an exploratory data analysis.     

Identifying organizational barriers—A case study of usability work when developing software in the automation industry

This study investigates connections between usability efforts and organizational factors. This is an important field of research which so far appears to be insufficiently studied and discussed. It illustrates problems when working with software engineering tasks and usability requirements. It deals with a large company that manufactures industrial robots with an advanced user interface, which wanted to introduce usability KPIs, to improve product quality. The situation in the company makes this difficult, due to a combination of organizational and behavioural factors that led to a “wicked problem” that caused conflicts, breakdowns and barriers. Addressing these problems requires a holistic view that places context in the foreground and technological solutions in the background. Developing the right product requires communication and collaboration between multiple stakeholders. The inclusion of end users, who fully understand their own work context, is vital. Achieving this is dependent on organizational change, and management commitment. One step to beginning this change process may be through studying ways to introduce user-centred design processes.     

Automation-driver cooperative driving in presence of undetected obstacles

The work presented in this paper describes and discusses the principles of a haptic shared control between a human driver and an Electronic copilot (E-copilot) for a vehicle. The aim of the sharing control is to allow the driver to momentarily take control over the E-copilot without deactivating it nor being constrained, in order to deal with a specific situation such as avoiding an obstacle that has not been detected by the E-copilot. As the E-copilot acts simultaneously on the steering system with the driver, both have to be aware of one another's actions, which means bi-directional communication is essential. In this work, to achieve this goal, we consider the haptical interactions through the steering wheel. The torque applied by the driver on the steering system is used by the E-copilot to take into account the driver's actions while the E-copilot assistance torque is felt by the driver and used by him to understand the system's behavior. This low communication level strongly improves the cooperation between the driver and the E-copilot.The system takes into account the drivers actions thanks to a driver lane keeping model that is added to the road vehicle one in the controller synthesis step. This allows to introduce driver's interaction control variables in such a way that the E-copilot can consider conflicting objectives between the driver and the lane keeping task, and thus handle them.In order to highlight the assets of the approach, a comparison of the behaviors of a simple lane keeping E-copilot to that of a cooperative proposed here is given at the end of this paper. This comparison is achieved through computer simulations and experimental tests with a human driver carried out in the SHERPA-LAMIH interactive dynamic driving simulator. The results of these tests confirm the improvement of the level of cooperation between the human driver and the E-copilot and show that the cooperative E-copilot gives more authority to the human driver especially in hazardous situations.     

社会主义市场经济条件下人与能源和谐发展研究

本文从人与能源的关系问题出发,采用矛盾分析法和规范与实证经济分析相结合的方法,论述当前社会主义市场经济条件下中国能源发展中存在的内在矛盾及其运动规律,提出解决问题的可能途径,坚持宏观调控与市场主体相结合,坚持理论自觉和理论自信,达到实现以人为本、人与能源的发展互相适应、持续发展、和谐发展的目的.     

Design and validation of a motion-tracking system for ROM measurements in home rehabilitation

This work deals with the design, implementation and experimental validation of a home rehabilitation system capable of bringing a real-time 3D reconstruction of human posture to the therapist’s desk. The system has been validated against two commercial systems, capable of providing joint angle measurements and commonly used in rehabilitation gyms, which are used profitably to assist clinics in limb motor dysfunction treatment. Early experimental results promise to provide measurements accurate enough to complement the subjective therapist’s perception with objective observations, leading to quantitative evaluation.     

Design of a decentralized modular architecture for flexible and extensible production systems

In the European manufacturing industry, production batches are decreasing, resulting in an increase in required changeovers. Companies are pushed to respond quickly and cost-efficient to changing markets. One way for Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SMEs) to become more agile, is to incorporate industrial robots in their production processes; larger enterprises already use this versatile piece of equipment for large batch sizes. To do so, a new perspective and approach is required, tailored to dynamic manufacturing systems in which production systems and components can be easily reconfigured, altered, swapped or replaced. A modular system architecture was developed within project SInBot upon which challenges in dynamic cooperation between robots and humans were projected. The developed system uses decentralized control and distributed intelligence, linked through an extensible, flexible, and fault-tolerant communication architecture. The rapidly growing complexity of traditional systems is compared to its decentralized counterpart to illustrate some of the many advantages of this new system architecture. A manufacturing scenario analogue is discussed and the approach to verify the performance of inner-system components, as well as the benefits of this approach. Key challenges that are encountered in implementing the cooperation into the current industrial environments are identified and projected upon the verification system.     

Assigning responsibility for a structural failure

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is typically used during the engineering design process to plan for the avoidance of in-service failure. This paper presents a variation of FTA; this has been adapted to assist non-engineers with the identification of the causes of structural failures and to indicate the relationship between these causes and the party or parties who should accept responsibility for them. Examples are provided to illustrate the methodology and its application.     

Audio steganalysis based on reversed psychoacoustic model of human hearing

During the last decade, audio information hiding has attracted lots of attention due to its ability to provide a covert communication channel. On the other hand, various audio steganalysis schemes have been developed to detect the presence of any secret messages. Basically, audio steganography methods attempt to hide their messages in areas of time or frequency domains where human auditory system (HAS) does not perceive. Considering this fact, we propose a reliable audio steganalysis system based on the reversed Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (R-MFCC) which aims to provide a model with maximum deviation from HAS model. Genetic algorithm is deployed to optimize dimension of the R-MFCC-based features. This will both speed up feature extraction and reduce the complexity of classification. The final decision is made by a trained support vector machine (SVM) to detect suspicious audio files. The proposed method achieves detection rates of 97.8% and 94.4% in the targeted (Steghide@1.563%) and universal scenarios. These results are respectively 17.3% and 20.8% higher than previous D2-MFCC based method.