Expert systems and the emergence of teledesign

This paper considers the extent to which the amateur use of expert systems for home design challenges traditional views of the design process. The issues are examined in the context of competing definitions of design. The emergence of a design process characterised as ‘teledesign’ is then considered, wherein retailers provide a CAD/CAM service to consumers, allowing the latter to use expert systems to modify template designs and get products fabricated to their own specifications. Such a system may be seen to empower consumers as designers, rather than just selectors of products, and would differ considerably from established paradigms of design, manufacture and consumption, such as that given by Baudrillard

QUANTIFYING REGULATORY BARRIERS TO ASIAN-U.S. FOOD TRADE

Data on U.S. Food and Drug Administration import detentions and alerts are used to quantify regulatory barriers experienced by Asian food products entering the United States. These data offer the only comprehensive means of assessing regulatory barriers without relying on expert opinion, although they fall short of placing a dollar value on the volume of trade affected. The data show that meeting food regulations is a significant barrier to Asian food products entering the United States, especially for products originating in developing and newly industrialized countries.Asia, food products, regulatory standards, trade, International Relations/Trade,

The Collision Between New Discovery Amendments and Expert Testimony Rules

The young litigator\u27s nightmare was always the same. He was in medieval Europe, ready to engage in a sword fight with the expert swordsman representing his arch rival. After countless hours of preparation, he felt confident that he would be able to hold his own against the swordsman. But when the swordsman drew his lengthy rapier from its sheath, the young attorney pulled only a short dagger from his scabbard. Realizing that he was doomed to defeat, he tossed his dagger into the air and ran from the scene with the laughter of the onlookers ringing in his ears. The young litigator needed no dream analyst to tell him the nightmare\u27s symbolism. He knew that the sword fight represented cross-examination and that his swordsman opponent was simply an expert witness. As hard as he practiced and studied and researched, he never felt comfortable crossexamining his opponent\u27s expert about the expert\u27s field of expertise. He might as well admit his failure now and become a tax attorney, he thought. Fear of expert witnesses can indeed be disabling. With the increase in litigation about complex business transactions, products liability, and professional malpractice, expert testimony continues to become more important. The modern litigator must learn to deal effectively with opposing experts or be faced with the embarrassment of his worst nightmares. Handling the opponent\u27s expert has become more difficult because the rules of evidence have been liberalized over the years, while the rules of discovery recently have been restricted

What drives the relevance and quality of experts' adjustment to model-based forecasts?

Experts frequently adjust statistical model-based forecasts. Sometimes this leads to higher forecast accuracy, but expert forecasts can also be dramatically worse. We explore the potential drivers of the relevance and quality of experts' added knowledge. For that purpose, we examine a very large database covering monthly forecasts for pharmaceutical products in seven categories concerning thirty-five countries. The extensive results lead to two main outcomes which are (1) that more balance between model and expert leads to more relevance of the added value of the expert and(2) that smaller-sized adjustments lead to higher quality, although sometimes very large adjustments can be beneficial too. In general, too much input of the expert leads to a deterioration of the quality of the final forecast.expert forecasts;judgemental adjustment

3D avatar seller's effect on online consumer's purchasing behavior: a trust transference perspective

The emerging 3D virtual worlds attract more and more people to participate in the virtual environment, creating a new market for business to sell their products. In 3D virtual worlds, members mainly interact with each other through avatars. The selling process is fulfilled through the shop avatars. How businesses sell their products successfully to the potential customers and eventually persuade the customer to purchase the product is an essential question. Trust played a key role in the selling process. In the general selling process, trust was established through the sales person. In the virtual world environment, could the trust be established between the sales avatars and customer avatars This paper aims at answering this question by examining the trust transference process in the 3D virtual world environment. An experiment was conducted to categorize the avatars into attractive and expert ones. The research result first suggest that trust formed in a 3D avatar seller could be transferred to a selling company and a product but for an expert 3D avatar seller, trust transferred to the company and product results in intent to purchase. Trust in a 3D avatar seller is transferred to trust in a product and a company and furthermore, an expert avatar can affect a consumer's intent to purchase. In the case of an attractive 3D avatar, although trust is transferred, it is only to the point of intent to purchase

A knowledge based expert system for moulded part design

In today's competitive market many consumer products are designed with complex curved shapes to meet customers' demands for styling and ergonomics. These styled products are commonly manufactured using moulding processes because they can produce a wide range of freeform shapes at relatively low cost. However, although injection moulding and metal casting allow a great deal of design freedom they also make significant demands on the designer to ensure that parts are designed with due regard for manufacturability. This paper describes a knowledge based moulding advisor that has been developed to provide design for moulding advice to designers during the design process. The main contributions of the research are the development of a hierarchical knowledge representation to allow moulding advice to be generated at different levels of detail and the integration of the expert system with a geometric part description extracted from a Computer Aided Design (CAD) solid model. A demonstrator for the manufacturing advisor has been implemented using the expert system shell CLIPS and integrated with CAD using feature recognition. The moulding advisor is able to generate tailored design for moulding advice for a range of manufacturing processes and materials and evaluate the manufacturability of a designed part at the feature level. The paper provides a case study for a simple moulded test part

Expert systems for superalloy studies

There are many areas in science and engineering which require knowledge of an extremely complex foundation of experimental results in order to design methodologies for developing new materials or products. Superalloys are an area which fit well into this discussion in the sense that they are complex combinations of elements which exhibit certain characteristics. Obviously the use of superalloys in high performance, high temperature systems such as the Space Shuttle Main Engine is of interest to NASA. The superalloy manufacturing process is complex and the implementation of an expert system within the design process requires some thought as to how and where it should be implemented. A major motivation is to develop a methodology to assist metallurgists in the design of superalloy materials using current expert systems technology. Hydrogen embrittlement is disasterous to rocket engines and the heuristics can be very complex. Attacking this problem as one module in the overall design process represents a significant step forward. In order to describe the objectives of the first phase implementation, the expert system was designated Hydrogen Environment Embrittlement Expert System (HEEES)

Report of species diagnosis of a tuna at Queens Products B.V. on 23 December 2009

According to a company in the same marketsegment as Queen Products B.V. part of the tuna filet sold by Queens Products B.V. does not consist of the species that is mentioned on the label. According to DNA analysis filets were not from the species on the label, Albacore (Thunnus alalunga), but from Yellowfin tuna (T. albacares). The present intention of Queens Products is to check by means of DNA analysis of different lots of filets the originating species. A Spanish expert on DNA analysis who has travelled to the Netherlands to collect samples, has requested species identification by an independent scientist on the basis of morphological features as back up of the findings by means of DNA analysi

All Your Cards Are Belong To Us: Understanding Online Carding Forums

Underground online forums are platforms that enable trades of illicit services and stolen goods. Carding forums, in particular, are known for being focused on trading financial information. However, little evidence exists about the sellers that are present on carding forums, the precise types of products they advertise, and the prices buyers pay. Existing literature mainly focuses on the organisation and structure of the forums. Furthermore, studies on carding forums are usually based on literature review, expert interviews, or data from forums that have already been shut down. This paper provides first-of-its-kind empirical evidence on active forums where stolen financial data is traded. We monitored 5 out of 25 discovered forums, collected posts from the forums over a three-month period, and analysed them quantitatively and qualitatively. We focused our analyses on products, prices, seller prolificacy, seller specialisation, and seller reputation