Narrow Results

Design of intelligent research systems is considered as one of the most prominent developments in multi-modal information domains in our day-to-day life. While significant growth in computer-aided English teaching methods (CAETMs) has made a progression over the past few years using techniques such as computational intelligence, biological computing aspects within the artificial intelligence domain. All the research in English teaching structures has been automated through online cloud-based applications and progressing at a rapid rate. But there are still a number of subjects that need to be explored in terms of its design, implementation, deployment of intelligent methods, and multi-agent systems in a real-world environment. However establishing teaching research subjects with novel techniques and methodologies utilized in computer vision in support of deep learning, semantic models in healthcare, organizations, and education sector are in need of further research with innovative and creative ideas. This paper will provide the emerging CAETM that solved the global needs of people in the educational domain. We will also discuss the improvements that need to be done in English teaching methods with digital computing solutions.

Much as object-oriented programming allows for the creation of more reusable components, it is the reuse of the design of an application that is most promising for attaining the goals of reusability. Object-oriented frameworks further design-level reuse, in that they allow for reusing the abstract design of an entire application, modelling each major component with an abstract class. Yet, application design based on frameworks remains a difficult endeavor, and a comprehensive approach to represent and document designs based on frameworks is still missing. In our work, we have developed a multi-layered model for framework reuse which comprises reuse objects at different levels of abstraction, most notably, micro-architectures. We have adopted, refined, and integrated novel techniques for the representation and documentation of micro-architectures and frameworks, namely, design patterns, contracts, and motifs. We believe that our approach is a valuable step towards better exploiting the reuse potential of frameworks.

This paper describes the Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology. MaSE is a general purpose, methodology for developing heterogeneous multiagent systems. MaSE uses a number of graphically based models to describe system goals, behaviors, agent types, and agent communication interfaces. MaSE also provides a way to specify architecture-independent detailed definition of the internal agent design. An example of applying the MaSE methodology is also presented.

Pond ash is a suitable embankment material for the construction of road. However, this material is not in practice for the construction of railway embankment in India. Very limited basic study is available in the literature. Due to this, study the behavior of pond ash railway embankment under dynamic condition, a pilot project on 'Design of pond ash railway embankment' is carried out by Central Road Research Institute, New Delhi, India. Pond ash was collected from National Thermal Power, Kahalgaon, Bihar, India. In this paper, geotechnical properties of pond ash and local soil are presented. Design and stability analysis of embankment with different height (with or without berm) is carried out considering the uniformly distributed load due to train loading under the water logged and sudden drawdown conditions with earthquake factor. It was observed that critical factor of safety was found for lower height of embankment in comparison to the higher embankment.

Addressing the urban heat island effect is critical in mitigating the threat of heat from the perspective of land use planning and design. This paper, therefore, presents a structured review of urban heat island mitigation policy that is contained in the local-level planning policy documents and regulation of 20 large municipalities throughout the United States and Canada. It explores how the issue of the urban heat island effect is framed and approached and, therewith, facilitates an understanding of how aware municipalities are of the issue and its impacts. The review identifies a total of 307 instances of mitigation policy measures among 19 of the 20 municipalities, with the most commonly applied: approaches to mitigation being the promotion of latent heat flux, albedo modification, and provision of shade cover; and, framing contexts being public health, air quality, energy, comfort, and climate change. Although the review indicates that there is widespread awareness of the issue, it notes that only 79, or 25.7 percent, of the 307 mitigation policy measures were framed in any context. Thus, the majority of policy measures do not communicate an understanding of the significance and potential impacts of the urban heat island effect or provide a lens through which it should be perceived and, therewith, addressed. Indeed, they call for blind action. This suggests a need to promote awareness of the potential impacts of the urban heat island effect and communicate same in local planning policy documents and regulations.

Following recent rapid development of researches in utilizing Magnetorheological (MR) fluid, a smart material that can be magnetically controlled to change its apparent viscosity instantaneously, a lot of applications have been established to exploit the benefits and advantages of using the MR fluid. One of the most important applications for MR fluid in devices is the MR valve, where it uses the popular flow or valve mode among the available working modes for MR fluid. As such, MR valve is widely applied in a lot of hydraulic actuation and vibration reduction devices, among them are dampers, actuators and shock absorbers. This paper presents a review on MR valve, discusses on several design configurations and the mathematical modeling for the MR valve. Therefore, this review paper classifies the MR valve based on the coil configuration and geometrical arrangement of the valve, and focusing on four different mathematical models for MR valve: Bingham plastic, Herschel–Bulkley, bi-viscous and Herschel–Bulkley with pre-yield viscosity (HBPV) models for calculating yield stress and pressure drop in the MR valve. Design challenges and opportunities for application of MR fluid and MR valve are also highlighted in this review. Hopefully, this review paper can provide basic knowledge on design and modeling of MR valve, complementing other reviews on MR fluid, its applications and technologies.

The paper describes a finite element investigation into the buckling, under uniform external pressure, of four submarine pressure hulls. Two of these hulls were traditional ring-stiffened types, but two of these hulls were in the form of corrugated circular cylinders. The latter design was based on an invention by the present author. The investigation found that the new design was structurally efficient and in the case of the smaller vessel, it was found to be structurally more efficient than the conventional design.

Another investigation, based on axisymmetric plastic buckling, was conducted on the two corrugated vessels, to determine if they were prone to collapse through the bellows' mode of failure. This investigation was carried out because former critics of this work stated that the corrugated circular cylinders would fail by the bellows' mode of failure. Neither of the two corrugated pressure hulls was found to fail through the bellows' mode of failure, thereby completely vindicating the present author. The author, however, concludes that the bellows' mode of failure can occur if the cone angles were too large.

Two of the finite element theories were based on the author's work, but the giant computer package ANSYS was also used to study non-symmetric bifurcation buckling. This work was carried out to vindicate the author's in-house computer programs, which were simpler to use than ANSYS.

The paper pertains to a study in which the waterfront retaining wall has been analyzed for its stability when it is exposed to the forces jointly coming from an earthquake and tsunami. Closed form solutions following the simple limit equilibrium principles have been proposed. For the calculation of the seismic passive earth pressure and the wall inertia force, pseudo-dynamic approach has been considered, while the hydrodynamic and the tsunami wave pressures have been calculated using different approximating solutions available in literature. The results presented in the sliding and overturning modes of failure of the wall show that the stability of the wall gets seriously challenged when it gets jointly exposed to the effects of the tsunami and earthquake. About 92% decrease is observed in the value of the factor of safety in sliding mode of failure of the wall as the ratio of tsunami wave height to the upstream still water height increases from 0 to 1.5. Also, the critical mode of failure of the wall has been found to be that of the overturning. Effect of different parameters involved in the analysis has also been studied and it has been observed that quite a few of them like k_h, k_v, ϕ, δ, r_u have a significant effect on the stability of the wall. Comparison with a previously existing methodology using pseudo-static approach suggests that the present pseudo-dynamic approach is more realistic and comparatively less conservative and hence can be used as a handy simple economic method for the design of the waterfront retaining walls exposed to the combined effects of earthquake and tsunami.

The high luminosity operation of the LHC will require an upgrade of the CMS Silicon Strip Tracker, possibly implementing trigger capabilities. In order to evaluate the possible options and geometries, a standalone software package has been developed (tkLayout) to generate detector layouts, evaluate the effect of inactive material and provide an a priori estimate of the tracking performance. The package can be used to compare the performance of different options, and then to optimise the chosen detector concept; tkLayout is not specific to CMS, thus it can be adapted to design studies for other tracking detectors. The technology of tkLayout is presented, along with some results obtained in the context of the CMS Tracker design studies.

The beam power of the CEPC Collider is about 60 MW, so an efficiency of an RF power source is very important for cost of project implementation. The most popular source for an accelerator is a klystron, which has the advantage that it can be operated at high power with a reasonable high efficiency. IHEP is developing 650 MHz klystron with 800 kW CW output power and 80% efficiency. To reach this goal, a couple of klystron prototypes will be manufactured in the near future. The first prototype is completely manufactured by Institute of Electronics (IE) and GLVAC Company and the first step of high-power conditioning and commissioning is also completed in IHEP. The design schemes of high-efficiency klystron are also in progress.

Like any other large and complex software systems, Service-Based Systems (SBSs) must evolve to fit new user requirements and execution contexts. The changes resulting from the evolution of SBSs may degrade their design and quality of service (QoS) and may often cause the appearance of common poor solutions in their architecture, called antipatterns, in opposition to design patterns, which are good solutions to recurring problems. Antipatterns resulting from these changes may hinder the future maintenance and evolution of SBSs. The detection of antipatterns is thus crucial to assess the design and QoS of SBSs and facilitate their maintenance and evolution. However, methods and techniques for the detection of antipatterns in SBSs are still in their infancy despite their importance. In this paper, we introduce a novel and innovative approach supported by a framework for specifying and detecting antipatterns in SBSs. Using our approach, we specify 10 well-known and common antipatterns, including Multi Service and Tiny Service, and automatically generate their detection algorithms. We apply and validate the detection algorithms in terms of precision and recall two systems developed independently, (1) Home-Automation, an SBS with 13 services, and (2) FraSCAti, an open-source implementation of the Service Component Architecture (SCA) standard with more than 100 services. This validation demonstrates that our approach enables the specification and detection of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) antipatterns with an average precision of 90% and recall of 97.5%.

Part I of this article provides a status update on the ongoing projects for both high-beta and low-beta applications. Some of these projects are already under production, others are perfecting prototypes and future plans. We first cover the funded projects and continue with the planned projects. The update naturally captures the state-of-the-art for superconducting RF (SRF) performance for applications in progress. Part II goes on to present a vision for future prospects for performance progress in the field, along with some advice about the likely fruitful R&D paths to follow. In general, the R&D paths chosen for discussion will benefit most SRF-based accelerators.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are online tools that match the policy preferences of voters with the policy positions of political parties or candidates. Designed to enhance the political competence of citizens, VAAs have become increasingly popular and institutionally embedded in a growing number of European countries. While the traditional VAA relied on the stated position or academically coded position of parties/candidates, a recent innovation has been to introduce a social vote recommendation borrowing the basic principles of collaborative filtering. The latter takes advantage of the community of VAA users to provide a vote recommendation. This paper provides an overview of the social vote recommendation scheme and tackles three problems related to its optimal implementation in a real–world setting: (1) the number of samples required to train party models; (2) whether this number is affected by differences in characteristics between early users versus late users; and (3) whether generalizations can be derived across VAA applications in different countries. For our experiments we use three real VAA datasets based on elections in Greece 2012, Cyprus 2013 and Germany 2013. The corresponding datasets are made freely available to other researchers working in the areas of VAA and web based recommender systems.

Design is increasingly gaining recognition as a fruitful means to improve business performance. Technology-based firms are an important source of innovation, and therefore it is important to develop a means to study the relationship between technology-based firms' emphasis on design as an element of innovation and their performance. This article develops a model for evaluating technology-based firms' design emphasis. The model is based on a synthesis approach to studying innovation in both services and manufacturing and a three-dimensional definition of design.

The application of the model is demonstrated using a set of new technology-based firms. The empirical study confirms the appropriateness of using the synthesis approach for studying design as an element of innovation in technology-based firms. The application of the model provides a classification which can be used as a basis for studying the relationship between design emphasis and performance.

The aim of this paper is to base organisational change on the firm's business model, an approach that research has only recently start to address. This study adopts a process-based perspective on business models and insights from a variety of theories as the basis for the development of ideas on the design of business model change. This paper offers a new, process-based strategic analytical artefact for the design of business model change, consisting of three main phases. Designing business model change as suggested in this paper allows ex ante analysis of alternative scenarios of change in a structured and comprehensive way. Such a tool is useful for obtaining an overall view of the working logic of the firm and to facilitate innovation through change. The main contribution of this paper is to transform management theories into an instrument that can be helpful for companies to develop their capacity to change in a more focused and structured way.

Wireless sensor networks have specifically unique characteristics with regards to energy, memory, computational and complexity limitations. This paper shares the experiences gained in designing and implementing a wireless sensor network when we take these considerations into account. We also highlight some challenges faced in the implementation of the network. The hardware that is developed provides a realistic and flexible platform for future implementation and testing of relevant higher layer schemes.

The paper presents a study of the capacities of steel rack frames based on linear analysis (LA), geometric nonlinear analysis (GNA), and geometric and material nonlinear analysis (GMNIA). In the case of linear and geometric nonlinear analyses, the design is carried out to the Australian cold-formed steel structures AS/NZS4600. The study includes braced, unbraced, and semi-braced frames, and compact and noncompact cross sections. The paper shows axial force and bending moment paths for geometric and geometric and material nonlinear analyses, and explains the differences observed in the design capacities obtained using the different types of analysis based on these paths. The paper provides evidence to support the use of advanced GMNIA for the direct design of steel rack frames without the need for checking section or member capacities to a structural design standard.

This paper reports on the mechanical design of the huggable robot Probo. Its intentions include human–robot interaction (HRI), both physical and cognitive, with a special focus on children. Since most of the communication passes through nonverbal cues and since people rely on face-to-face communication, the focus of Probo's communicative skills lies initially on facial expressions. The robot has 20 high-precision motors in its head and body. They are used to actuate the ears, eyebrows, eyelids, eyes, trunk, mouth, and neck. To build safety aspects intrinsically in the robot's hardware, all the motors are linked with flexible components. In case of a collision, the robot will be elastic and safety will be ensured. The mechanics of Probo are covered by protecting plastic shells, foam, and soft fur. This gives Probo's animal-like look and makes the robot huggable.

The impressive manipulation capabilities of the human hand are undoubtedly related to the thumb opposition. Such a versatility is highly desirable in the context of humanoid robots, in particular when performing object manipulation. In the present case, a robotic hand with size, forces, velocity, and shape comparable to the human one, is envisioned. Unlike most robotic designs — where the fingers are modular and the thumb is simply a finger placed in opposition — the thumb benefits from an intensive functional analysis. This paper details the design method of the thumb of the Awiwi hand, the hand of the Integrated Hand Arm System project of DLR. First, several guidelines are presented that are fused and, with the help of a novel optimization method, lead to the final design. Finally, the design is evaluated by the means of biomedical tests on the realized hardware.

Designing a remarkable product innovation is a difficult challenge, which businesses today are continuously striving to tackle. This challenge is particularly present in the fuzzy front end of innovation, where the main product concept, the DNA of the innovation, is determined. A main challenge in the fuzzy front end is the reasoning process: innovation teams are faced with open-ended, ill-defined problems, where they need to make decisions about an unknown future but have only incomplete, ambiguous and contradicting insights available. We study the reasoning of experts, how they frame to make sense of all the insights and create a basis for decision-making in relation to a new project. Based on case studies of five innovative products from various industries, we propose a Product DNA model for understanding the reasoning in the fuzzy front end of innovation. The Product DNA Model explains how experts reason and what direct their reasoning.