An online tool to identify white-collar worker profiles in relation to their ICT skills and mental strain

The introduction of Internet and Information and communication Technologies (ICT) in offices is a global phenomenon that transformed white-collar worker job demands. Although there are several studies of e-skills and mental workload for central countries, there is a lack of similar studies for the Latin American context. An online snowball sampled (n = 352) survey was developed and validated by the authors (internal consistency = 0.7). We characterized ICT worker profiles from e-skills and these dimensions: attitudes toward, resources usage and technology dependency. Mental Strain was assessed with raw task load index (RTLX) and correlated with the proposed profiles by means of paired T-tests and Mann–Whitney Tests. The sample was characterized by 7.2% of non visual display terminal users and 92.8% of visual display terminal, ICT skilled users. Of the latter, 30.7% were ICT practitioners, 30.4% were ICT Users and 27.2% were E-Business Users. Non VDT users’ mental strain was statistically meaningful smaller than VDT–ICT skilled users’ mental workload. No statistical differences were found in RTLX results when comparing ICT skilled user profiles. Non VDT users can be identified from ICT skilled Users by their lower ITC Dependency and minor use of ICT resources. There were no differences in those dimensions among ICT skilled Profiles. Attitude toward these technologies was a distinct factor for ICT Users in relation to ICT Practitioners and ITC Business Users. The application of this tool in peripheral and central countries would allow a complete ergonomical characterization of white-collar workers within the Information Society.     

An experiment for improving students performance in secondary and tertiary education by means of m-learning auto-assessment

Mobile learning is considered an evolution of e-learning that embraces the ubiquitous nature of current computational systems in order to improve teaching and learning. Within this context it is possible to develop mobile applications oriented to learning, but it is also important to assess to what extent such applications actually work. In this paper we present a new tool designed to reinforce students’ knowledge by means of self-assessment. Improvement in student achievement was evaluated and an attitudinal survey was also carried out to measure student attitudes towards this new tool. Three different experimental groups were selected for this research, with students aged from 14 to 21 years old, including high-school and university students. Results show that this kind of tool improves student achievement, especially amongst younger learners, with a relatively low impact on current teaching activities and methodology.     

Simultaneous learning of perception and action in mobile robots

One of the main problems of robots is the lack of adaptability and the need for adjustment every time the robot changes its working place. To solve this, we propose a learning approach for mobile robots using a reinforcement-based strategy and a dynamic sensor-state mapping. This strategy, practically parameterless, minimises the adjustments needed when the robot operates in a different environment or performs a different task.Our system will simultaneously learn the state space and the action to execute on each state. The learning algorithm will attempt to maximise the time before a robot failure in order to obtain a control policy suited to the desired behaviour, thus providing a more interpretable learning process. The state representation will be created dynamically, starting with an empty state space and adding new states as the robot finds new situations that has not seen before. A dynamic creation of the state representation will avoid the classic, error-prone and cyclic process of designing and testing an ad hoc representation. We performed an exhaustive study of our approach, comparing it with other classic strategies. Unexpectedly, learning both perception and action does not increase the learning time.     

Sensitivity analysis of the rice model WARM in Europe: Exploring the effects of different locations,climates and methods of analysis on model sensitivity to crop parameters

Sensitivity analysis studies how the variation in model outputs can be due to different sources of variation. This issue is addressed, in this study, as an application of sensitivity analysis techniques to a crop model in the Mediterranean region. In particular, an application of Morris and Sobol' sensitivity analysis methods to the rice model WARM is presented. The output considered is aboveground biomass at maturity, simulated at five rice districts of different countries (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain) for years characterized by low, intermediate, and high continentality. The total effect index of Sobol' (that accounts for the total contribution to the output variation due a given parameter) and two Morris indices (mean μ and standard deviation σ of the ratios output changes/parameter variations) were used as sensitivity metrics. Radiation use efficiency (RUE), optimum temperature (T_opt), and leaf area index at emergence (LAI_ini) ranked in most of the combinations site × year as first, second and third most relevant parameters. Exceptions were observed, depending on the sensitivity method (e.g. LAI_ini resulted not relevant by the Morris method), or site-continentality pattern (e.g. with intermediate continentality in Spain, LAI_ini and T_opt were second and third ranked; with low continentality in Portugal, RUE was outranked by T_opt). Low σ values associated with the most relevant parameters indicated limited parameter interactions. The importance of sensitivity analyses by exploring site × climate combinations is discussed as pre-requisite to evaluate either novel crop-modelling approaches or the application of known modelling solutions to conditions not explored previously. The need of developing tools for sensitivity analysis within the modelling environment is also emphasized.     

Bond graph based control of a three-phase inverter with LC filter – Connection to passive and active loads

This paper proposes a model of a three phase electrical inverter with a LC output filter in delta connection used in a renewable energy supply system. The concept of inverse bond graph via bicausality is used for the control law design. The control law robustness is tested by connecting passive and active (induction machine) loads.     

A hybrid particle swarm optimization approach for the sequential ordering problem

The sequential ordering problem is a version of the asymmetric travelling salesman problem where precedence constraints on vertices are imposed. A tour is feasible if these constraints are fulfilled, and the objective is to find a feasible solution with minimum cost.     

Incremental Linear Discriminant Analysis Using Sufficient Spanning Sets and Its Applications

This paper presents an incremental learning solution for Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and its applications to object recognition problems. We apply the sufficient spanning set approximation in three steps i.e. update for the total scatter matrix, between-class scatter matrix and the projected data matrix, which leads an online solution which closely agrees with the batch solution in accuracy while significantly reducing the computational complexity. The algorithm yields an efficient solution to incremental LDA even when the number of classes as well as the set size is large. The incremental LDA method has been also shown useful for semi-supervised online learning. Label propagation is done by integrating the incremental LDA into an EM framework. The method has been demonstrated in the task of merging large datasets which were collected during MPEG standardization for face image retrieval, face authentication using the BANCA dataset, and object categorisation using the Caltech101 dataset.     

Behavioural study of median associative memory under true-colour image patterns

Median associative memories (MED-AMs) are a special type of associative memory that substitutes the maximum and minimum operators of a morphological associative memory with the median operator. This associative model has been applied to restore grey scale images and provided a better performance than morphological associative memories when the patterns are altered with mixed noise. Despite their power, MED-AMs have not been adopted in problems related with true-colour patterns. In this paper, we describe how MED-AMs can be applied to problems involving true-colour patterns. Furthermore, a complete study of the behaviour of this associative model in the restoration of true-colour images is performed using a benchmark of 16,000 images altered by different noise types.     

3D face computational photography using PCA spaces

In this paper, we present a 3D face photography system based on a facial expression training dataset, composed of both facial range images (3D geometry) and facial texture (2D photography). The proposed system allows one to obtain a 3D geometry representation of a given face provided as a 2D photography, which undergoes a series of transformations through the texture and geometry spaces estimated. In the training phase of the system, the facial landmarks are obtained by an active shape model (ASM) extracted from the 2D gray-level photography. Principal components analysis (PCA) is then used to represent the face dataset, thus defining an orthonormal basis of texture and another of geometry. In the reconstruction phase, an input is given by a face image to which the ASM is matched. The extracted facial landmarks and the face image are fed to the PCA basis transform, and a 3D version of the 2D input image is built. Experimental tests using a new dataset of 70 facial expressions belonging to ten subjects as training set show rapid reconstructed 3D faces which maintain spatial coherence similar to the human perception, thus corroborating the efficiency and the applicability of the proposed system.     

New simple and efficient heuristics for the uncapacitated single allocation hub location problem

Hub-and-spoke networks are widely studied in the area of location theory. They arise in several contexts, including passenger airlines, postal and parcel delivery, and computer and telecommunication networks. Hub location problems usually involve three simultaneous decisions to be made: the optimal number of hub nodes, their locations and the allocation of the non-hub nodes to the hubs. In the uncapacitated single allocation hub location problem (USAHLP) hub nodes have no capacity constraints and non-hub nodes must be assigned to only one hub. In this paper, we propose three variants of a simple and efficient multi-start tabu search heuristic as well as a two-stage integrated tabu search heuristic to solve this problem. With multi-start heuristics, several different initial solutions are constructed and then improved by tabu search, while in the two-stage integrated heuristic tabu search is applied to improve both the locational and allocational part of the problem. Computational experiments using typical benchmark problems (Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) and Australian Post (AP) data sets) as well as new and modified instances show that our approaches consistently return the optimal or best-known results in very short CPU times, thus allowing the possibility of efficiently solving larger instances of the USAHLP than those found in the literature. We also report the integer optimal solutions for all 80 CAB data set instances and the 12 AP instances up to 100 nodes, as well as for the corresponding new generated AP instances with reduced fixed costs.