Narrow Results

Several evaluation criteria exist in the literature for both specification and specification techniques. These evaluation criteria identify a list of desired properties in specifications and specification techniques for judging their goodness. This paper presents a detailed analysis of several specification and specification technique evaluation criteria. Detailed analysis of these criteria identified that there is a lack of consistency in the property definition among criteria. The implication of this lack of differentiation between the two concepts is that the criteria for both specification and specification techniques are intermingled. Since the concept of specification is different from specification technique, the criteria used for one might not be applicable for the other. For example, "completeness" and "consistency" are specification criteria. A specification can be complete and consistent regardless of the medium used to represent the specification, the process used in its construction, the degree/extent of tools and automation used, or whether it is formal or informal. However, there is meaning to denote that a technique can be used to produce "consistent" or "complete" specifications. Hence, for proper applicability of these criteria, this paper separates specification criteria from that of the specification technique criteria. This paper also presents a unified criteria terminology and uses a table to list each criterion property from various researchers mapped to the unified terminology. The paper also identifies and presents a mapping from technique criteria to the specification criteria that shows which technique criteria satisfies specification criteria. The applicability of the mapping is then demonstrated by applying the mapping to a specification language and its support environment.

There are indicators useful to measure the grasp quality of prostheses, two of them are the force that can be reached, and the precision needed to grasp an object. It is important to evaluate force and precision in hand prostheses because these characteristics are directly related to its performance and to the activities that can be done with it. Nowadays, there are no available criteria to evaluate these two characteristics. Existing criteria can be applied only in particular situations and can be applied only to a few prosthetic devices to obtain a general evaluation. This paper presents a proposal for criteria able to evaluate precision and force in-hand prosthetic devices. These criteria have three main original characteristics: Each system in the prosthesis is evaluated individually; quantitative information about its performance is obtained; the criteria can be used for evaluating most of the existing prosthetic devices. In order to show the application and use of the criteria the evaluation of two devices is presented: CDMIT^© and SmartHand^©. Prosthesis evaluation results show that both prosthesis have some particular aspects that can be improved, and thus reach a higher force and better precision. Criteria presented in this paper serve for stablishing a framework useful for compare several prosthesis in various aspects.

New product development (NPD) is one of the most important processes for firms to increase their profit and competitiveness. This study presents the result of a comparison study between Taiwan and Indonesia industry in the employment of evaluation criteria for NPD process. This study is guided by a stage-gate process to derive a structured NPD performance evaluation framework. In this study, we use 20 evaluation criteria that are grouped into five dimensions, market-, financial-, product-, process-, and intuition-based measures. Based on a sample of 148 industrial firms, the findings of the study present guidelines for R&D managers as measuring product development and employing appropriate evaluation dimensions for effectiveness and efficiency in NPD related decision making.

This paper outlines a Decision-Maker's Tool (DM Tool), designed to guide practitioners and their inter-disciplinary teams through a typical strategic environmental assessment (SEA) process. While SEA properly includes post-decision follow-up, the DM Tool covers the SEA process up to the creation of a Briefing Note for the decision maker. Together, use of the DM Tool and the Briefing Note should facilitate positive contributions to sustainability through well considered and aligned policies, plans and programmes (PPPs), by enhancing the comprehensiveness, consistency, clarity, accessibility and credibility of decision making information.

The discussion presumes that the SEA is central to the PPP development process, rather than being a separate exercise. The DM Tool and Briefing Note are designed to recommend PPP action based on clearly stated needs and purposes, addressing the key issues, and application of explicit sustainability criteria in the comparative evaluation of feasible alternatives. Particular attention is paid to recognising trade-offs and residual risks, and presenting all this information concisely for the decision maker.

With the widespread availability of media technologies, such as real-time streaming, new Internet-of-Thing devices and smart phones, multimedia data are extensively increased and the big multimedia data rapidly spread over various social networks. This has created complexity and information overload for users to choose the suitable multimedia objects. Thus, different multimedia recommender systems have been emerging to help users find the useful multimedia objects that are possibly preferred by the user. However, the evaluation of these multimedia recommender systems is still in an ad-hoc stage. Given the distinct features of multimedia objects, the evaluation criteria adopted from the general recommender systems might not be effectively used to evaluate multimedia recommendations. In this paper, we therefore review and analyze the evaluation criteria that have been used in the previous multimedia recommender system papers. Based on the review, we propose a generalized evaluation framework to guide the researchers and practitioners to perform evaluations, especially user-centric evaluations, for multimedia recommender systems.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has become an important public health problem in the world. According to reports, COPD ranks fourth in the global cause of death, causing a serious economic burden on society. The pathogenesis of COPD is complex, making it difficult to simulate the pathological changes and clinical features of COPD. Moreover, the COPD animal model has an irreplaceable role in the study of etiology, pathology and treatment. It is worth noting that the risk factors for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease persist, and the economic burden of global chronic obstructive pulmonary disease is expected to continue to increase in the coming decades. Establishing a standardized, a clinically realistic COPD animal model has always been a research direction that scholars are keen on. Therefore, it is essential to establish an economical animal model. The establishment of a suitable animal model can accurately simulate the pathological features of human chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and help to develop effective interventions and treatments in a short period of time. This review integrates the experimental animal species selected in the animal models used in COPD studies. Subsequently, different methods and mechanisms for establishing animal models were summarized according to different modeling factors. Finally, the criteria for evaluating existing animal models are discussed. It is hoped that the summary of this paper will guide the establishment of relevant animal models for future COPD research.

A strong understanding of the basic knowledge will help the readers not only in easily comprehending the subsequent chapters but also in grasping the analysis strategies of the latest research. In this chapter, we first introduce the elementary knowledge of electrochemical water splitting and the reaction mechanisms of hydrogen and oxygen evolution reactions, and then summarize the basic components of the test devices and crucial parameters for performance evaluation. Hopefully, this chapter can be a stepping stone for readers to comprehend the following chapters.

With the introduction of digital media and the associated increasingly rapid spread of the digitization process, the need for automatic methods for the evaluation of learning performance is also growing. Innovative approaches for automatic evaluations are particularly important in the engineering courses of university teaching, where students have to learn and practice programming techniques. In this work, we have proposed and analyzed a few general evaluation criteria which are important for the automatic evaluation of programming tasks in university teaching. We have considered both the hard and the soft criteria, with each targeted at the beginners and advanced learners respectively. Based on these criteria, we have proposed an approach for the automatic evaluation of programming performance and demonstrated how it can be integrated into an online learning management system.

Efficient gait patterns are an important issue for walking robots, such as quadrupeds. In this paper, of the many patterns available, three significant static gait patterns will be compared with each other using a quadruped walking robot on the basis of static stability, energy efficiency and duty factor. The characteristics of the gait patterns and the chosen criteria will be detailed. The comparative results will be illustrated using a simulation model and will be validated with the help of experiments carried out on the quadruped walking robot ADONIS (ALDURO Demonstrator with Onboard Navigation and Intelligent Step Generation). The results of this study will provide the basis to develop a statically stable and flexible gait algorithm which can adapt to different terrain conditions.