Investigation of oil palm harvesting tools design and technique on work-related musculoskeletal disorders of the upper body

The oil palm industry is one of the important sectors in Malaysia. The growth and development of this industry shows that Malaysia is the world second-largest oil palm producers. However, in the fresh fruit bunch (FFB) harvesting process, the harvesters are exposed to many types of work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). The FFB harvesters tend to develop WMSDs especially the shoulders and trunk. Hence, it is important to identify the exposure levels, awkward postures and the reaction forces of muscle activity based on the posture and movement of the harvesters when using pole, chisel and loading spike during the harvesting process. The objective of this study was to investigate the effect of the design of oil palm FFB harvesting tools on WMSDs of the upper body. Rapid Upper Limb Analysis (RULA) was used to investigate and assess the exposure level on the harvester body during the harvesting process. The assessment showed that the shoulders and trunk have high exposure level and undergo awkward posture. Human Musculoskeletal Model Analysis (HMMA) was used to identify the reaction force exerted on the muscle during the FFB harvesting process. In this study, 4 muscles were analysed including Triceps, Biceps, Erector Spinae and Psoas Major. The highest reaction force of 16.36 N was found on the left triceps when handling a loading spike. In conclusion, it is important to address the risks by reviewing all possible aspects that contribute to the WMSDs and interventions on the tool design, task and working shifts may be required.     

Improving human robot collaboration through Force/Torque based learning for object manipulation

Human–Robot Collaboration (HRC) is a term used to describe tasks in which robots and humans work together to achieve a goal. Unlike traditional industrial robots, collaborative robots need to be adaptive; able to alter their approach to better suit the situation and the needs of the human partner. As traditional programming techniques can struggle with the complexity required, an emerging approach is to learn a skill by observing human demonstration and imitating the motions; commonly known as Learning from Demonstration (LfD). In this work, we present a LfD methodology that combines an ensemble machine learning algorithm (i.e. Random Forest (RF)) with stochastic regression, using haptic information captured from human demonstration. The capabilities of the proposed method are evaluated using two collaborative tasks; co-manipulation of an object (where the human provides the guidance but the robot handles the objects weight) and collaborative assembly of simple interlocking parts. The proposed method is shown to be capable of imitation learning; interpreting human actions and producing equivalent robot motion across a diverse range of initial and final conditions. After verifying that ensemble machine learning can be utilised for real robotics problems, we propose a further extension utilising Weighted Random Forest (WRF) that attaches weights to each tree based on its performance. It is then shown that the WRF approach outperforms RF in HRC tasks.     

Human error identification in human reliability assessment. Part 2: Detailed comparison of techniques

This is the second part of a two-part review of human error identification (HEI) approaches in human reliability assessment (HRA). Part 1 reviewed the probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) context in which HRA occurs, and then detailed 12 HEI techniques which have evolved in the field of HRA. Part 2 attempts to compare the way these techniques perform against a range of criteria relevant to HEI theoretical and empirical validity, and practical usefulness in applied HRA. It is hoped that these comparisons will help assessors in the selection of techniques for practical applications. The comparisons also point to research and development needs in the area of applied HEI.     

标准正面人脸图像的识别

本论文选用人脸上27个特殊点作为人脸基本特征。以人脸几何结构为基础,结合有脸识别的心理特性,提出新颖、简便、高精度的“寻找存在”法,使提取特征点的速度、精度得到大大的提高,在详细分析这27个特列点的统计特性后,选择了其中信息量丰富的15个点间距及间距比构成一组向量代替人脸描述,用加权欧氏距离作为特征向量间相似性测试,在两类实验中,识别率高达100％和98％。     

人胎盘泌乳素的提纯及裂解片断免疫学特性的研究

采用人胎盘泌乳素（hPL）-亲和层析和抗人血清抗体-亲和层析技术，从胎盘匀浆中提取hPL纯品，经圆盘电泳、免疫电泳及交叉试验证实为单一成分。溴化氰水解后的产物，以高效液相色谱分析。分离出7个肽链片断峰，分别用hPL和人生长激素（hGH）放免法检测其活性，其中第6肽链片断无hGH免疫活性，若用此片断制备特异抗体，可避免与hGH出现交叉反应。     

Alcohol consumption detection through behavioural analysis using intelligent systems

We describe in this paper a new methodology for blood alcohol content (BAC) estimation of a subject. Rather than using external devices to determine the BAC value of a subject, we perform a behaviour analysis of this subject using intelligent systems. We monitor the user’s actions in an ordinary task and label those data to various measured BAC values. The obtained data-set is then used to train learning systems to detect alcoholic consumption and perform BAC estimation. We obtain good results on a mono-user base, and lower results with multiple users. We improve the results by combining multiple classifiers and regression algorithms.     

人血浆蛋白C的纯化与鉴定

目的　建立人血浆蛋白C的纯化与鉴定方法。方法　利用DEAE SephadexA 5 0代替氯化钡 ,对血浆进行预处理 ,再经DEAE SepharoseFF离子交换和肝素 SepharoseCL 6B亲和层析进行分离纯化 ,用活化的部分凝血活酶时间 (APTT)测定组分活性 ,非还原型SDS PAGE测定其相对分子质量 ,Westernblot鉴定其特异性。结果获得相对分子质量为 6 2 0 0 0的蛋白条带 ,此条带可与人蛋白C单克隆抗体发生特异性反应。结论　已成功地从血浆中分离到蛋白C ,为其规模化生产奠定了基础。     

按平均收缩率计算注塑模成型尺寸的公式修正

讨论了现用计算公式的缺陷及原因,提出4个修正公式,并举例说明了修正后公式对确定合理的模具公差和保证注塑件顺利生产的重要经济意义。     

Beauty is more than screen deep: Improving the web survey respondent experience through socially-present and aesthetically-pleasing user interfaces

Web surveys are rapidly becoming standard issue in many researchers’ toolkits; however, measurement error has been shown to affect web surveys to a greater extent than paper-and-pencil surveys (Couper, 2000, Manfreda and Vehovar, 2002). Principles of aesthetic design and social presence have been applied to web surveys to reduce the prevalence of such error with promising results, which were further investigated in this research. A sample of 181 first-year psychology undergraduate students participated in this study. Participants were randomly allocated to view one of eight web survey interfaces, which varied by aesthetic quality and social presence. Exploratory structural equation modeling using the partial least squares method revealed that classical aesthetic quality and social presence were both positively related to perceived ease of use of the web survey interface and positive state affect; social presence and perceived ease of use were positively related to trust in the web survey researcher; classical aesthetic quality was negatively related to negative state affect; and, expressive aesthetic quality was negatively related to perceived ease of use and positively related to positive state affect. Interestingly, expressive aesthetic quality was also positively related to negative state affect. These relationships between aesthetic quality and social presence should inform best practice web survey design recommendations, and future empirical work should extend and test the generalizability of these findings.     

Level of interest sensing in spoken dialog using decision-level fusion of acoustic and lexical evidence

Automatic detection of a user's interest in spoken dialog plays an important role in many applications, such as tutoring systems and customer service systems. In this study, we propose a decision-level fusion approach using acoustic and lexical information to accurately sense a user's interest at the utterance level. Our system consists of three parts: acoustic/prosodic model, lexical model, and a model that combines their decisions for the final output. We use two different regression algorithms to complement each other for the acoustic model. For lexical information, in addition to the bag-of-words model, we propose new features including a level-of-interest value for each word, length information using the number of words, estimated speaking rate, silence in the utterance, and similarity with other utterances. We also investigate the effectiveness of using more automatic speech recognition (ASR) hypotheses (n-best lists) to extract lexical features. The outputs from the acoustic and lexical models are combined at the decision level. Our experiments show that combining acoustic evidence with lexical information improves level-of-interest detection performance, even when lexical features are extracted from ASR output with high word error rate.