Formalizing process-based risk with Value-Focused Process Engineering

Following calls to advance the integration of risk and business process modeling paradigms, this paper formalizes the process of incorporating risk into business process models through the principles of Value-Focused Process Engineering (VFPE). In doing so, the paper aims to extend the existing VFPE modeling notation to reflect a set of necessary constructs required to adequately represent risk in goal-oriented business-process models. The extended set of constructs is proposed to support a formal systems view of process-based risk. Process-based risk is formalized on the one hand, as a product of complex interactions between activity-based elements, and on the other hand, as a natural component of the value creation mechanism of an elementary function or a complex process. The proposed risk-aware VFPE formalism also formulates rules for decomposing risk in process models according to the organizational values, thereby enabling better risk visibility, reducing process complexity, and ensuring continuity of business processes.     

Automatic Design of Application Specific Instruction Set Extensions Through Dataflow Graph Exploration

General-purpose processors are often incapable of achieving the challenging cost, performance, and power demands of high-performance applications. To meet these demands, most systems employ a number of hardware accelerators to off-load the computationally demanding portions of the application. As an alternative to this strategy, we examine customizing the computation capabilities of a processor for a particular application. The processor is extended with hardware in the form of a set of custom function units and instruction set extensions. To effectively identify opportunities for creating custom hardware, a dataflow graph design space exploration engine heuristically identifies candidate computation subgraphs without artificially constraining their size or shape. The engine combines estimates of performance gain, cost, and inherent limitations of the processor to grow candidate graphs in profitable directions while pruning unprofitable paths. This paper describes the dataflow graph exploration engine and evaluates its effectiveness across a set of embedded applications.     

Ergonomics and sustainability: towards an embrace of complexity and emergence

Technology offers a promising route to a sustainable future, and ergonomics can serve a vital role. The argument of this article is that the lasting success of sustainability initiatives in ergonomics hinges on an examination of ergonomics’ own epistemology and ethics. The epistemology of ergonomics is fundamentally empiricist and positivist. This places practical constraints on its ability to address important issues such as sustainability, emergence and complexity. The implicit ethical position of ergonomics is one of neutrality, and its positivist epistemology generally puts value-laden questions outside the parameters of what it sees as scientific practice. We argue, by contrast, that a discipline that deals with both technology and human beings cannot avoid engaging with questions of complexity and emergence and seeking innovative ways of addressing these issues.

Practitioner Summary: Ergonomics has largely modelled its research on a reductive science, studying parts and problems to fix. In sustainability efforts, this can lead to mere local adaptations with a negative effect on global sustainability. Ergonomics must consider quality of life globally, appreciating complexity and emergent effects of local relationships.     

Reverse engineering expert visual observations: From fixations to the learning of spatial filters with a neural-gas algorithm

Human beings can become experts in performing specific vision tasks, for example, doctors analysing medical images, or botanists studying leaves. With sufficient knowledge and experience, people can become very efficient at such tasks. When attempting to perform these tasks with a machine vision system, it would be highly beneficial to be able to replicate the process which the expert undergoes. Advances in eye-tracking technology can provide data to allow us to discover the manner in which an expert studies an image. This paper presents a first step towards utilizing these data for computer vision purposes. A growing-neural-gas algorithm is used to learn a set of Gabor filters which give high responses to image regions which a human expert fixated on. These filters can then be used to identify regions in other images which are likely to be useful for a given vision task. The algorithm is evaluated by learning filters for locating specific areas of plant leaves.     

Vascular perfusion chilling of red meat carcasses – A feasibility study

Meat carcasses must be chilled to below 7 °C before leaving the slaughterhouse. Typically this is done by passing cold air over the surfaces of eviscerated and de-hided carcasses. This surface cooling can take many hours to reduce centre temperatures to below 7 °C. In vascular perfusion chilling (VPC), a cold fluid is circulated through the intact vascular system, offering significant reductions in cooling time.This paper describes a small feasibility study to evaluate vascular perfusion techniques for rapid chilling of lamb carcasses using a proprietary Flo-ice^™ system. This produces pumpable ice slurries containing very fine ice particles, suitable for circulating through vascular systems.VPC was found to be capable of rapid initial reduction of carcass temperatures in comparison with air chilling (mean times to 20 °C in deep legs were reduced from 2.6 to 1.3 h, which was significantly different at P < 0.05). In all cases however, uptake of perfusate into the carcasses occurred. This limited the duration of the perfusion treatment and as a result restricted the period of enhanced cooling. Samples from carcasses treated with VPC were lighter (P < 0.05, with mean measured L value increasing from 43.4 to 46.8) and more yellow (P < 0.05, with mean measured b value increasing from 6.7 to 7.9) than samples from conventionally chilled carcasses, and had lower shear force values when cooked (P < 0.05, with mean force reducing from 10.0 to 6.8 kg). This was most probably due to the added water in the meat. Microbial quality of the meat was not significantly affected by the perfusion treatments.     

The ideology of ergonomics

This paper examines the positivist and empiricist philosophical ideas that underpin mainstream ergonomics and argues that they undermine the discipline's ability to properly theorise the nature of the social world. Instead and as a consequence of these largely implicit philosophical beliefs ergonomics is an ideological discipline whose social use is largely shaped to reflect the interests of dominant social institutions, whether public or private, that tend to control the workplace. Arguing from the perspective of critical social science the paper says that questions of design are central to debates about the good society (how people should live) as indeed some ergonomic researchers have recently begun to argue. The task of the paper is to help encourage such debate within the discipline by clarifying what it sees as the ideological role that ergonomics plays in society and how this ideology is, in turn, reflected in its philosophical assumptions. The importance of the paper for ergonomic theory is that it highlights the need for the discipline to engage in a critical manner with its philosophical assumptions. It does this by exposing the problematic nature of its positivist philosophy, arguing that as a consequence of the latter ergonomics in practice is an ideological discipline.     

Use of hydrochloric acid for determinining solid-phase arsenic partitioning in sulfidic sediments

We examined the use of room-temperature hydrochloric acid (1-6 M) and salt solutions of magnesium chloride, sodium carbonate, and sodium sulfide for the removal of arsenic from synthetic iron monosulfides and contaminated sediments containing acid-volatile sulfides (AVS). Results indicate that acid-soluble arsenic reacts with H2S released from AVS phases and precipitates at low pH as disordered orpiment or alacranite. Arsenic sulfide precipitation is consistent with geochemical modeling in that conditions during acid extraction are predicted to be oversaturated with respect to orpiment, realgar, or both. Binding of arsenic with sulfide at low pH is sufficiently strong that 6 M HCl will not keep spiked arsenic in the dissolved fraction. Over a wide range of AVS concentrations and molar [As]/[AVS] ratios, acid extraction of arsenic from sulfide-bearing sediments will give biased results that overestimate the stability or underestimate the bioavailability of sediment-bound arsenic. Alkaline solutions of sodium sulfide and sodium carbonate are efficient in removing arsenic from arsenic sulfides and mixed iron-arsenic sulfides because of the high solubility of arsenic at alkaline pH, the formation of stable arsenic complexes with sulfide or carbonate, or both.     

Tool support for executable documentation of Java class hierarchies

While object‐oriented programming offers great solutions for today's software developers, this success has created difficult problems in class documentation and testing. In Java, two tools provide assistance: Javadoc allows class interface documentation to be embedded as code comments and JUnit supports unit testing by providing assert constructs and a test framework. This paper describes JUnitDoc, an integration of Javadoc and JUnit, which provides better support for class documentation and testing. With JUnitDoc, test cases are embedded in Javadoc comments and used as both examples for documentation and test cases for quality assurance. JUnitDoc extracts the test cases for use in HTML files serving as class documentation and in JUnit drivers for class testing. To address the difficult problem of testing inheritance hierarchies, JUnitDoc provides a novel solution in the form of a parallel test hierarchy. A small controlled experiment compares the readability of JUnitDoc documentation to formal documentation written in Object‐Z. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.