pinecone/core-2020-05-10-deduplication huggingface dataset:
Inducing behavioural change in society through communication and education in sustainable manufacturing

The United Nations considers the mobilization of the broad public to be the essential requirement for achieving a shift towards a more sustainable development. Science can play a vital role in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) by contributing to ESD-related research and development on the one hand, and by becoming active awareness raisers themselves in education and multiplier networks. Specifically, the use of special Learnstruments, and investment inOpen Educationformats among other educational tools, may pave the way for accelerated apprehension and appreciation of sustainable manufacturing topics among the greater populace
Sustainability dynamics

Value creation ensures societal prosperity. At the same time, Sustainable Development determines the future of global human wellbeing. Both aspects are based on profound environmental, social and economic mechanisms—and both aspects are closely linked. The Sustainability Dynamics Model describes the direct and indirect effects of value creation together with the three dimensions of Sustainable Development. This contribution introduces and defines the Sustainability Dynamics Model. The effects and dynamics are exemplarily shown. Eventually, the link to circular economy is drawn. In the future, the Sustainability Dynamics Model can be used as a control model in order to predict consequences of value creation towards environmental, social and economic sustainability
Enabling low-carbon development in poor countries

The challenges associated with achieving sustainable development goals and stabilizing the world’s climate cannot be solved without significant efforts by developing and newly-emerging countries. With respect to climate change mitigation, the main challenge for developing countries lies in avoiding future emissions and lock-ins into emission-intensive technologies, rather than reducing today’s emissions. While first best policy instruments like carbon prices could prevent increasing carbonization, those policies are often rejected by developing countries out of a concern for negative repercussions on development and long-term growth. In addition, policy environments in developing countries impose particular challenges for regulatory policy aiming to incentivize climate change mitigation and sustainable development. This chapter first discusses how climate policy could potentially interact with sustainable development and economic growth. It focuses, in particular, on the role of industrial sector development. The chapter then continues by discussing how effective policy could be designed, specifically taking developing country circumstances into account
Sustainable technologies for thick metal plate welding

Welding is the most important joining technology. In the steel construction industry, e.g. production of windmill sections, welding accounts for a main part of the manufacturing costs and resource consumption. Moreover, social issues attached to welding involve working in dangerous environments. This aspect has unfortunately been neglected so far, in light of a predominant focus on economics combined with a lack of suitable assessment methods. In this chapter, exemplary welding processes are presented that reduce the environmental and social impacts of thick metal plate welding. Social and environmental Life Cycle Assessments for a thick metal plate joint are conducted for the purpose of expressing and analysing the social and environmental impacts of welding. Furthermore, it is shown that state-of-the-art technologies like Gas Metal Arc Welding with modified spray arcs and Laser Arc-Hybrid Welding serve to increase social and environmental performance in contrast to common technologies, and therefore offer great potential for sustainable manufacturing
Human-centred automation to simplify the path to social and economic sustainability

Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSDs) pose a serious threat to sustainability in manufacturing. In particular, this phenomenon impacts the sustainability indicators of worker health and safety and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Effective MSD prevention measures would therefore constitute a remarkable contribution to social and economic sustainability. This chapter provides first an outline of existing methods to prevent MSD at the workplace. Analysis of the approaches yields that effective solutions require earmarked finances as well as qualified personnel, both of which are not affordable for many companies. In pursuit of solutions, Human-centred Automation (HCA), a recent paradigm in manufacturing, proposes the design of manufacturing systems using intelligent technology to support the worker instead of replacing him/her. HCA has the unique potential of reducing the effort needed to implement MSD prevention strategies by simplifying the path to social and economic sustainability. This chapter demonstrates this process with the example of the “Working Posture Controller” (WPC), which illustrates how the HCA concept can be applied. Finally, the lessons learned from the case are outlined, providing a vision of how future workplaces can benefit from HCA
Target-driven sustainable product development

Figuring in sustainability in product development requires a profound understanding of the cause and effect of engineering decisions along the full spectrum of the product lifecycle and the triple bottomline of sustainability. Sustainability design targets can contribute to mitigating the complexity involved, by means of a formalised problem description. This article discusses how sustainability design targets can be defined and presents methods for systematically implementing these targets into the design process. To that end, different means of decision support mechanisms are presented. They comprise (a) use cases of target breakdowns in subsystems, (b) systematic reduction of solution space and (c) assistance in design activities to ensure achievement of sustainability design targets. This paper explains how interfaces to engineering tools such as Computer Aided Design/Engineering (CAD/CAE) or Product Data/Lifecycle Management (PDM/PLM) can be put in place to make the process of retrieving information and providing decision support more seamless
Single-Player and Two-Player Buttons & Scissors Games

We study the computational complexity of the Buttons & Scissors game and obtain sharp thresholds with respect to several parameters. Specifically we show that the game is NP-complete for C=2 colors but polytime solvable for C=1. Similarly the game is NP-complete if every color is used by at most   F=4 buttons but polytime solvable for F≤3. We also consider restrictions on the board size, cut directions, and cut sizes. Finally, we introduce several natural two-player versions of the game and show that they are PSPACE-complete
Decreasing time consumption of microscopy image segmentation through parallel processing on the GPU

The computational performance of graphical processing units (GPUs) has improved significantly. Achieving speedup factors of more than 50x compared to single-threaded CPU execution are not uncommon due to parallel processing. This makes their use for high throughput microscopy image analysis very appealing. Unfortunately, GPU programming is not straightforward and requires a lot of programming skills and effort. Additionally, the attainable speedup factor is hard to predict, since it depends on the type of algorithm, input data and the way in which the algorithm is implemented. In this paper, we identify the characteristic algorithm and data-dependent properties that significantly relate to the achievable GPU speedup. We find that the overall GPU speedup depends on three major factors: (1) the coarse-grained parallelism of the algorithm, (2) the size of the data and (3) the computation/memory transfer ratio. This is illustrated on two types of well-known segmentation methods that are extensively used in microscopy image analysis: SLIC superpixels and high-level geometric active contours. In particular, we find that our used geometric active contour segmentation algorithm is very suitable for parallel processing, resulting in acceleration factors of 50x for 0.1 megapixel images and 100x for 10 megapixel images
Optimized Connected Components Labeling with Pixel Prediction

In this paper we propose a new paradigm for connected components labeling, which employs a general approach to minimize the number of memory accesses, by exploiting the information provided by already seen pixels, removing the need to check them again. The scan phase of our proposed algorithm is ruled by a forest of decision trees connected into a single graph. Every tree derives from a reduction of the complete optimal decision tree. Experimental results demonstrated that on low density images our method is slightly faster than the fastest conventional labeling algorithms
Human Action Recognition Based on Temporal Pyramid of Key Poses Using RGB-D Sensors

Human action recognition is a hot research topic in computer vision, mainly due to the high number of related applications, such as surveillance, human computer interaction, or assisted living. Low cost RGB-D sensors have been extensively used in this field. They can provide skeleton joints, which represent a compact and effective representation of the human posture. This work proposes an algorithm for human action recognition where the features are computed from skeleton joints. A sequence of skeleton features is represented as a set of key poses, from which histograms are extracted. The temporal structure of the sequence is kept using a temporal pyramid of key poses. Finally, a multi-class SVM performs the classification task. The algorithm optimization through evolutionary computation allows to reach results comparable to the state-of-the-art on the MSR Action3D dataset.This work was supported by a STSM Grant from COST Action IC1303 AAPELE - Architectures, Algorithms and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments
A novel decentralised system architecture for multi-camera target tracking

Target tracking in a multi-camera system is an active and challenging research that in many systems requires video synchronisation and knowledge of the camera set-up and layout. In this paper a highly flexible, modular and decentralised system architecture is presented for multi-camera target tracking with relaxed synchronisation constraints among camera views. Moreover, the system does not rely on positional information to handle camera hand-off events. As a practical application, the system itself can, at any time, automatically select the best target view available, to implicitly solve occlusion. Further, to validate the proposed architecture, an extension to a multi-camera environment of the colour-based IMS-SWAD tracker is used. The experimental results show that the tracker can successfully track a chosen target in multiple views, in both indoor and outdoor environments, with non-overlapping and overlapping camera views
Learning-based SPARQL query performance prediction

According to the predictive results of query performance, queries can be rewritten to reduce time cost or rescheduled to the time when the resource is not in contention. As more large RDF datasets appear on the Web recently, predicting performance of SPARQL query processing is one major challenge in managing a large RDF dataset efficiently. In this paper, we focus on representing SPARQL queries with feature vectors and using these feature vectors to train predictive models that are used to predict the performance of SPARQL queries. The evaluations performed on real world SPARQL queries demonstrate that the proposed approach can effectively predict SPARQL query performance and outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.Wei Emma Zhang, B, Quan Z. Sheng, Kerry Taylor, Yongrui Qin, and Lina Ya
Bridging Enterprise and Software Engineering Through an User-Centered Design Perspective

The development of Web-based Information Systems is crucial in the quest to maintain and develop the enterprise competiveness. However, capturing requirements from Business Processes (BP) is still an issue, as existing methods mostly focus, or on human aspects and the user interface, or on business concerns as rules and workflow coordination, and therefore do not specify all the Software Architectural components which are relevant for software development. We present the Goals Approach, which analyzes BPs and User Tasks and details them in the process of methodically designing and structuring the User Interface, the Business Logic and the Database of the Information System given a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architectural pattern. In this paper we focus on how to obtain the Goals business model of requirements based on the DEMO method. The approach can be used for in-house software development, and the method is straightforward fitting Small and Medium Enterprises agility needs
Examining the usability of touch screen gestures for elderly people

UCAMI 2016  This paper reports an evaluation of 101 elderly people aged from 61 to 92 years to determine their ability to perform a number of gestures on multi-touch surfaces. We recruited participants at two daycare centres for elderly people in Madrid region. They used the Gesture Games tool to perform the sev-en most common activities on multi-touch surfaces (Tap, Double tap, Long press, Drag, Scale up, Scale down and Rotation). This application automatically generates a log of participant interaction. This log can be used to conduct a transparent quantitative analysis of the information. The main finding of this study is that older adults are perfectly capable of performing all seven tasks. The older adults were found to have different skills levels with respect to the tasks. For example, they found it easy to execute the Scale-down and Scale-up gestures, whereas they found it hard to perform the Double-tap gesture. Finally, the general conclusions of the study are outlined
Evaluation of a usability testing guide for mobile applications focused on people with Down syndrome (USATESTDOWN)

Usability testing of mobile applications involving people with Down syndrome is an issue that has not been comprehensively investigated. There is no single proposal that takes on board all the issues that could potentially be taken into account to deal with the specific needs of people with Down syndrome. We propose a guide for a usability testing process involving participants with Down syndrome. This guide is called USATESTDOWN. It is based on a literature review and experience gained at a number of workshops where people with Down syndrome used mobile devices. This paper briefly describes USATESTDOWN and its application at a special employment centre called PRODIS with 10 participants
On the (parameterized) complexity of recognizing well-covered (r,l)-graphs.

An (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-partition of a graph G is a partition of its vertex set into r independent sets and ℓℓ cliques. A graph is (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ) if it admits an (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-partition. A graph is well-covered if every maximal independent set is also maximum. A graph is (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-well-covered if it is both (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ) and well-covered. In this paper we consider two different decision problems. In the (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-Well-Covered Graph problem ((r,ℓ)(r,ℓ) wcg for short), we are given a graph G, and the question is whether G is an (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-well-covered graph. In the Well-Covered (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-Graph problem (wc (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ) g for short), we are given an (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-graph G together with an (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-partition of V(G) into r independent sets and ℓℓ cliques, and the question is whether G is well-covered. We classify most of these problems into P, coNP-complete, NP-complete, NP-hard, or coNP-hard. Only the cases wc(r, 0)g for r≥3r≥3 remain open. In addition, we consider the parameterized complexity of these problems for several choices of parameters, such as the size αα of a maximum independent set of the input graph, its neighborhood diversity, or the number ℓℓ of cliques in an (r,ℓ)(r,ℓ)-partition. In particular, we show that the parameterized problem of deciding whether a general graph is well-covered parameterized by αα can be reduced to the wc (0,ℓ)(0,ℓ) g problem parameterized by ℓℓ, and we prove that this latter problem is in XP but does not admit polynomial kernels unless coNP⊆NP/polycoNP⊆NP/poly
Congestion Games with Mixed Objectives

We study a new class of games which generalizes congestion games and its
bottleneck variant. We introduce congestion games with mixed objectives to
model network scenarios in which players seek to optimize for latency and
bandwidths alike. We characterize the existence of pure Nash equilibria (PNE)
and the convergence of improvement dynamics. For games that do not possess PNE
we give bounds on the approximation ratio of approximate pure Nash equilibria.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via
  http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48749-6_4
Decidability and Expressivity of Ockhamist Propositional Dynamic Logics

Ockhamist Propositional Dynamic Logic (OPDL) is a logic unifying the family of dynamic logics and the family of branching-time temporal logics, two families of logic widely used in AI to model reactive systems and multi-agent systems (MAS). In this paper, we present two variants of this logic. These two logics share the same language and differ only in one semantic condition. The first logic embeds Bundled CTLé while the second embeds CTLé. We provide a 2EXPTIME decision procedure for the satisfiability problem of each variant. The decision procedure for the first variant of OPDL is based on the elimination of Hintikka sets while the decision procedure for the second variant relies on automata
Prompt interval temporal logic

Interval temporal logics are expressive formalisms for temporal representation and reasoning, which use time intervals as primitive temporal entities. They have been extensively studied for the past two decades and successfully applied in AI and computer science. Unfortunately, they lack the ability of expressing promptness conditions, as it happens with the commonly-used temporal logics, e.g., LTL: whenever we deal with a liveness request, such as “something good eventually happens”, there is no way to impose a bound on the delay with which it is fulfilled. In the last years, such an issue has been addressed in automata theory, game theory, and temporal logic. In this paper, we approach it in the interval temporal logic setting. First, we introduce PROMPT-PNL, a prompt extension of the well-studied interval temporal logic PNL, and we prove the undecidability of its satisfiability problem; then, we show how to recover decidability (NEXPTIME-completeness) by imposing a natural syntactic restriction on it
On hierarchical task networks

In planning based on hierarchical task networks (HTN), plans are generated by refining high-level actions (‘compound tasks’) into lower-level actions, until primitive actions are obtained that can be sent to execution. While a primitive action is defined by its precondition and effects, a high-level action is defined by zero, one or several methods: sets of (high-level or primitive) actions decomposing it together with a constraint. We give a semantics of HTNs in terms of dynamic logic with program inclusion. We propose postulates guaranteeing soundness and completeness of action refinement. We also show that hybrid planning can be analysed in the same dynamic logic framework
On logics of group belief in structured coalitions

In the study of group belief formation, groups of agents are often assumed to possess a topological structure. Here we investigate some ways in which this topological structure may provide the semantical basis for logics of group belief. We impose a partial order on a set of agents first to be able to express preferences of agents by their doxastic abilities, secondly to express the idea of a coalition (well formed group) and thirdly to give a natural semantics for the group belief operator. We define the group belief of a set of agents in two different ways and study their corresponding logics. We also study a logic where doxastic preference is expressed by a binary operator. We prove completeness and discuss correspondences between the logics
3D Printed ABS and Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymer Specimens for Engineering Education

Three 3D printed plastic materials, ABS, ABS plus, and CFRP, have been studied for their potential applications in engineering education. Using tensile test, the stress strain curves of the materials have been measured. The Young’s modulus, ultimate strength, and fracture toughness of the materials are calculated from the stress strain curve. The results show that CFRP has the highest stiffness or Young’s modulus. ABS plus has strongest mechanical properties, with highest ultimate strength and fracture toughness. With the measured properties, the 3D printed samples are a viable solution for engineering students to learn mechanical properties of materials
Non-intrusive monitoring of attentional behavior in teams

Attention is a very important cognitive and behavioral process,
by means of which an individual is able to focus on a single aspect
of information, while ignoring others. In a time in which we drawn in notifications,
beeps, vibrations and blinking messages, the ability to focus
becomes increasingly important. This is true in many diferent domains,
from the workplace to the classroom. In this paper we present a nonintrusive
distributed system for monitoring attention in teams of people.
It is especially suited for teams working at the computer. The presented
system is able to provide real-time information about each individual as
well as information about the team. It can be very useful for team managers
to identify potentially distracting events or individuals, as well as
to detect the onset of mental fatigue or boredom, which significantly influence
attention. In the overall, this tool may prove very useful for team
managers to implement better human resources management strategies.This work has been supported by COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043
and FCT   Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the Project Scope:
UID/CEC/00319/2013. The work of Davide Carneiro is supported by a PostDoctoral
Grant by FCT (SFRH/BPD/109070/2015).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
A speculative computation approach for conflict styles assessment with incomplete information

Thispaperanalysesawaytocopewithincompleteinformation,namely information regarding the conﬂict style used by parties. This analysis is important because it enables us to develop a more accurate and informed conﬂict style classiﬁcation method to promote better strategies. To develop this proposal, an experiment using a combination of Bayesian Networks with Speculative Computation is depicted. Thus, in this work, was ﬁrstly identiﬁed and applied a set of methods for classifying conﬂict styles with incomplete information; secondly, the approach was validating opposing data collected from a web-based negotiationgame.Fromtheexperimentoutcomes,wecanconcludedthatitispossibleto copewithincompleteinformationbyproducingvalidconﬂictstyledefaultvalues and, particularly, to anticipate competing postures through the dynamic generation of recommendations for a conﬂict manager. The ﬁndings suggest that this approach is suitable for handling incomplete information in this context and can be applied in a viable and feasible way.This work has been supported by COMPETE:POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007043 and FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology) within the Project Scope UID/CEC/00319/2013.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio