2014
Authors
Furniss, D; Masci, P; Curzon, P; Mayer, A; Blandford, A;
Publication
Applied Ergonomics
Abstract
There is relatively little guidance on the situated ergonomic assessment of medical devices, and few case studies that detail this type of evaluation. This paper reports results of a detailed case study that focuses on the design and use of a modern blood glucose meter on an oncology ward. We spent approximately 150 h in-situ, over 11 days and 4 nights, performing observations and interviews with users. This was complemented by interviews with two staff with oversight and management responsibility related to the device. We identified 19 issues with the design and use of this device. These issues were grouped into 7 themes which can help guide the situated study of medical devices: usability, knowledge gaps and mental models, workarounds, wider tasks and equipment, the patient, connection between services, and policy. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd and The Ergonomics Society.
2014
Authors
Hu, Z; Pacheco, H; Fischer, S;
Publication
Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Abstract
A bidirectional transformation consists of pairs of transformations-a forward transformation get produces a target view from a source, while a putback transformation put puts back modifications on the view to the source-satisfying sensible roundtrip properties. Existing bidirectional approaches are get-based in that one writes (an artifact resembling) a forward transformation and a corresponding backward transformation can be automatically derived. However, the unavoidable ambiguity that stems from the underspecification of put often leads to unpredictable bidirectional behavior, making it hard to solve nontrivial practical synchronization problems with existing bidirectional transformation approaches. Theoretically, this ambiguity problem could be solved by writing put directly and deriving get, but differently from programming with get it is easy to write invalid put functions. An open challenge is how to check whether the definition of a putback transformation is valid, while guaranteeing that the corresponding unique get exists. In this paper, we propose, as far as we are aware, the first safe language for supporting putback-based bidirectional programming. The key to our approach is a simple but powerful language for describing primitive putback transformations. We show that validity of putback transformations in this language is decidable and can be automatically checked. A particularly elegant and strong aspect of our design is that we can simply reuse and apply standard results for treeless functions and tree transducers in the specification of our checking algorithms. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.
2014
Authors
Leitao, P; Barbosa, J; Pereira, A;
Publication
IECON 2014 - 40TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF THE IEEE INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS SOCIETY
Abstract
Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a middleware infrastructure that provides a way to integrate loosely-coupled heterogeneous software applications based on the services principles. The life-cycle management of services in such environments is a critical issue for the component's reuse, maintenance and operation. This paper introduces a service life-cycle management module that extends the traditional functionalities with advanced monitoring and data analytics to contribute for the robustness, reliability and self-organization of networks of clusters based on ESB platforms. The realization of this module was embedded in the JBoss ESB, considering a sniffer mechanism to collect the service messages crossing the bus and a Liferay portal to display relevant information related to the services' health.
2014
Authors
Au Yong Oliveira, M; Coelho, JV;
Publication
ICERI2014: 7TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF EDUCATION, RESEARCH AND INNOVATION
Abstract
Academia has been criticized for being in an "ivory tower", somewhat distant from what is going on in the practical world. How should we measure the return of investment in education worldwide? One such measure could be the satisfaction and preparedness felt by students when making the transition from classroom to the practical world of entrepreneurial and corporate business. Herein we analyse how three companies have been approaching internationalization, in order to increase the comprehension of what is going on in the real world, and to then tie it to curricula in higher education institutions on the subject. There is seen to be a necessity to perhaps also include lower-level material in internationalization curricula, as graduate students will tend to be involved in lower-level front-and back-office activities in organizations seeking to internationalize; but perhaps more important is specific sales training, for commercial contacts [1], but also to prepare for partnerships with universities and to promote mobility within the network. Effective collaboration with a number of entities, up-and down-stream, is a growing requirement in organizations. Finally, our research confirms other findings with regards to firms in Portugal following a gradual internationalization process.
2014
Authors
Pinto, AM; Moreira, AP; Correia, MV; Costa, PG;
Publication
JOURNAL OF INTELLIGENT & ROBOTIC SYSTEMS
Abstract
Visual motion perception from a moving observer is the most often encountered case in real life situations. It is a complex and challenging problem, although, it can promote the arising of new applications. This article presents an innovative and autonomous robotic system designed for active surveillance and a dense optical flow technique. Several optical flow techniques have been proposed for motion perception however, most of them are too computationally demanding for autonomous mobile systems. The proposed HybridTree method is able to identify the intrinsic nature of the motion by performing two consecutive operations: expectation and sensing. Descriptive properties of the image are retrieved using a tree-based scheme and during the expectation phase. In the sensing operation, the properties of image regions are used by a hybrid and hierarchical optical flow structure to estimate the flow field. The experiments prove that the proposed method extracts reliable visual motion information in a short period of time and is more suitable for applications that do not have specialized computer devices. Therefore, the HybridTree differs from other techniques since it introduces a new perspective for the motion perception computation: high level information about the image sequence is integrated into the estimation of the optical flow. In addition, it meets most of the robotic or surveillance demands and the resulting flow field is less computationally demanding comparatively to other state-of-the-art methods.
2014
Authors
Oliveira, BB; Carravilla, MA; Oliveira, JF; Toledo, FMB;
Publication
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF OPERATIONAL RESEARCH
Abstract
Empty repositions are a major problem for car rental companies that deal with special types of vehicles whose number of units is small. In order to meet reservation requirements concerning time and location, companies are forced to transfer cars between rental stations, bearing significant costs and increasing the environmental impact of their activity due to the fuel consumption and CO2 emission. In this paper, this problem is tackled under a vehicle-reservation assignment framework as a network-flow model in which the profit is maximized. The reservations are allocated considering the initial and future availability of each car, interdependencies between rental groups, and different reservation priorities. To solve this model, a relax-and-fix heuristic procedure is proposed, including a constraint based on local branching that enables and controls modifications between iterations. Using real instances, the value of this approach is established and an improvement of 33% was achieved when compared to the company's current practices.
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