754 research outputs found

    NASA space station automation: AI-based technology review

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    Research and Development projects in automation for the Space Station are discussed. Artificial Intelligence (AI) based automation technologies are planned to enhance crew safety through reduced need for EVA, increase crew productivity through the reduction of routine operations, increase space station autonomy, and augment space station capability through the use of teleoperation and robotics. AI technology will also be developed for the servicing of satellites at the Space Station, system monitoring and diagnosis, space manufacturing, and the assembly of large space structures

    Graphicacy within the secondary school curriculum, an exploration of continuity and progression of graphicacy in children aged 11 to 15

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    Graphicacy is the fundamental human capability of communicating through still images. Graphicacy has been described as the fourth ace within education, alongside literacy, numeracy and articulacy. However, it has been neglected, both within education and the research field. This thesis investigates graphicacy and students learning, structured around 3 objectives: establishing what graphicacy is and how it is used in the school curriculum; demonstrating the wider significance of design and technology teaching and learning by collecting evidence of the importance of graphicacy across the curriculum; and establishing how the abilities to understand and create images affect students learning. A literature review was conducted focused on three areas. Firstly, identifying the meaning of graphicacy, elements contained within it and relevant prior studies including its use in different subject areas and image use within teaching. This formed the foundations for a new taxonomy of graphicacy. Secondly, the levels of drawing and developmental stages children go through were investigated and the need for further research on children s abilities aged 11 to 14 was identified. The well balanced arguments concerning the nature versus nurture debates are described. Thirdly, the methodology used to measure graphicacy, and map the results to reflect levels of different competencies were reviewed. A naturalistic and often opportunistic approach was followed in this research. The research methodology was based on the analysis of textbooks and later, on research within practice. The research included the development, validation and use of the taxonomy of graphicacy; case studies in Cyprus, the USA and England on identifying graphicacy use across the curriculum; and the creation of continuity and progression descriptors through the analysis of students work. This work covered: rendering, perspective drawing, logo designing, portrait drawing and star profile charts. Research methodologies developed and implemented for conducting co-research and the Delphi studies are also described. Through interviews with experts, the taxonomy was validated as an appropriate research tool to enable the identification of graphicacy use across the curriculum. These research studies identified links between design and technology and all other subject-areas studied. Similar patterns of graphicacy use were identified across 3 schools, one in Cyprus, USA and the UK. Photographs were the most commonly used graphicacy element across all subject areas studied. Design and technology within England was found to use the widest variety of graphicacy elements, providing evidence towards research objective 3; establishing how the ability to understand and create images affects students learning. Continuity and progression (CaP) descriptors were created for each area covered by this research. The success of the CaP descriptors relied on the technical complexity involved in the creation of each image. Some evidence was found concerning the limits of natural development and how nurture can further develop graphicacy skills. In addition, co-research as a methodology, its limitations and potentials are identified

    Toolpath verification using set-theoretic solid modelling

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    Mechanisms of Isometric Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia in Young and Older Adults

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    Pain reduction following exercise (exercise-induced hypoalgesia; EIH) is well-established in young adults. Specific to isometric exercise, the greatest EIH follows low intensity contractions held for long duration. The EIH response of older adults is not known; and the mechanisms for EIH are unclear at any age. This dissertation aimed to address these unknowns through a series of three studies. In study one, repeatability of pressure pain reports (pain threshold and pain ratings) was assessed in healthy older adults, including the impact of psychological factors. Pain reports, measured before and after quiet rest, did not change following quiet rest. Higher state anxiety was associated with greater pain. Study two examined the impact of isometric contractions that varied in intensity and duration on pain relief in healthy older adults. Pressure pain was assessed before and after isometric contractions of the left elbow flexor muscles. Unlike young adults, older adults experienced EIH similarly across different isometric exercise tasks and women experienced greater pain reduction than men. Anxiety did not influence EIH. Conditioned pain modulation (CPM; a reduction in pain to a test stimulus in the presence of a noxious conditioning stimulus) has been hypothesized to augment EIH when exercise is painful. In study three, CPM and EIH were assessed in healthy young and older adults. CPM was measured as the difference in pressure pain with the foot immersed in neutral-temperature water versus noxious ice water. While young adults experienced CPM, older adults experienced a range of responses from hypoalgesia to hyperalgesia with foot immersion in the ice water bath. CPM predicted EIH and was associated with state anxiety; however state anxiety was unrelated to EIH. Results for age and sex-related differences in pain perception varied across studies or sessions. The results of this dissertation suggest anxiety influences pain sensitivity, but not magnitude of EIH. Older adults, particularly women, experience reductions in pain following isometric exercise and are less dependent upon task than young adults. CPM may predict EIH response following isometric exercise in both young and older adults and may be a useful tool in clinical decision making for adults experiencing pai

    Suitably underspecified: systematic notations and the relations between paper and music

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    Through building a taxonomy of drawing, and a set of four drawing research studies aimed at generating innovative cross-disciplinary practices, an argument will be developed that systematised drawings such as the music notation are hybrid representational environments, sufficiently different from other inscriptive practices as to merit a separate classification. The taxonomical model will decentralise specific modes of drawing, in favour of a multi-disciplinary view appropriate to the persistence of its subject as a deeply rooted strategic and executive practice, and the four studies will engage the time-factoring of notation systems as transductive environments, setting the conditions for innovative practices both in and outside of the frame of the inscription

    A Unified Framework for Parallel Anisotropic Mesh Adaptation

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    Finite-element methods are a critical component of the design and analysis procedures of many (bio-)engineering applications. Mesh adaptation is one of the most crucial components since it discretizes the physics of the application at a relatively low cost to the solver. Highly scalable parallel mesh adaptation methods for High-Performance Computing (HPC) are essential to meet the ever-growing demand for higher fidelity simulations. Moreover, the continuous growth of the complexity of the HPC systems requires a systematic approach to exploit their full potential. Anisotropic mesh adaptation captures features of the solution at multiple scales while, minimizing the required number of elements. However, it also introduces new challenges on top of mesh generation. Also, the increased complexity of the targeted cases requires departing from traditional surface-constrained approaches to utilizing CAD (Computer-Aided Design) kernels. Alongside the functionality requirements, is the need of taking advantage of the ubiquitous multi-core machines. More importantly, the parallel implementation needs to handle the ever-increasing complexity of the mesh adaptation code. In this work, we develop a parallel mesh adaptation method that utilizes a metric-based approach for generating anisotropic meshes. Moreover, we enhance our method by interfacing with a CAD kernel, thus enabling its use on complex geometries. We evaluate our method both with fixed-resolution benchmarks and within a simulation pipeline, where the resolution of the discretization increases incrementally. With the Telescopic Approach for scalable mesh generation as a guide, we propose a parallel method at the node (multi-core) for mesh adaptation that is expected to scale up efficiently to the upcoming exascale machines. To facilitate an effective implementation, we introduce an abstract layer between the application and the runtime system that enables the use of task-based parallelism for concurrent mesh operations. Our evaluation indicates results comparable to state-of-the-art methods for fixed-resolution meshes both in terms of performance and quality. The integration with an adaptive pipeline offers promising results for the capability of the proposed method to function as part of an adaptive simulation. Moreover, our abstract tasking layer allows the separation of different aspects of the implementation without any impact on the functionality of the method

    LIPIcs, Volume 248, ISAAC 2022, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 248, ISAAC 2022, Complete Volum

    Configurable nD-visualization for complex Building Information Models

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    With the ongoing development of building information modelling (BIM) towards a comprehensive coverage of all construction project information in a semantically explicit way, visual representations became decoupled from the building information models. While traditional construction drawings implicitly contained the visual representation besides the information, nowadays they are generated on the fly, hard-coded in software applications dedicated to other tasks such as analysis, simulation, structural design or communication. Due to the abstract nature of information models and the increasing amount of digital information captured during construction projects, visual representations are essential for humans in order to access the information, to understand it, and to engage with it. At the same time digital media open up the new field of interactive visualizations. The full potential of BIM can only be unlocked with customized task-specific visualizations, with engineers and architects actively involved in the design and development process of these visualizations. The visualizations must be reusable and reliably reproducible during communication processes. Further, to support creative problem solving, it must be possible to modify and refine them. This thesis aims at reconnecting building information models and their visual representations: on a theoretic level, on the level of methods and in terms of tool support. First, the research seeks to improve the knowledge about visualization generation in conjunction with current BIM developments such as the multimodel. The approach is based on the reference model of the visualization pipeline and addresses structural as well as quantitative aspects of the visualization generation. Second, based on the theoretic foundation, a method is derived to construct visual representations from given visualization specifications. To this end, the idea of a domain-specific language (DSL) is employed. Finally, a software prototype proofs the concept. Using the visualization framework, visual representations can be generated from a specific building information model and a specific visualization description.Mit der fortschreitenden Entwicklung des Building Information Modelling (BIM) hin zu einer umfassenden Erfassung aller Bauprojektinformationen in einer semantisch expliziten Weise werden Visualisierungen von den Gebäudeinformationen entkoppelt. Während traditionelle Architektur- und Bauzeichnungen die visuellen Reprä̈sentationen implizit als Träger der Informationen enthalten, werden sie heute on-the-fly generiert. Die Details ihrer Generierung sind festgeschrieben in Softwareanwendungen, welche eigentlich für andere Aufgaben wie Analyse, Simulation, Entwurf oder Kommunikation ausgelegt sind. Angesichts der abstrakten Natur von Informationsmodellen und der steigenden Menge digitaler Informationen, die im Verlauf von Bauprojekten erfasst werden, sind visuelle Repräsentationen essentiell, um sich die Information erschließen, sie verstehen, durchdringen und mit ihnen arbeiten zu können. Gleichzeitig entwickelt sich durch die digitalen Medien eine neues Feld der interaktiven Visualisierungen. Das volle Potential von BIM kann nur mit angepassten aufgabenspezifischen Visualisierungen erschlossen werden, bei denen Ingenieur*innen und Architekt*innen aktiv in den Entwurf und die Entwicklung dieser Visualisierungen einbezogen werden. Die Visualisierungen müssen wiederverwendbar sein und in Kommunikationsprozessen zuverlässig reproduziert werden können. Außerdem muss es möglich sein, Visualisierungen zu modifizieren und neu zu definieren, um das kreative Problemlösen zu unterstützen. Die vorliegende Arbeit zielt darauf ab, Gebäudemodelle und ihre visuellen Repräsentationen wieder zu verbinden: auf der theoretischen Ebene, auf der Ebene der Methoden und hinsichtlich der unterstützenden Werkzeuge. Auf der theoretischen Ebene trägt die Arbeit zunächst dazu bei, das Wissen um die Erstellung von Visualisierungen im Kontext von Bauprojekten zu erweitern. Der verfolgte Ansatz basiert auf dem Referenzmodell der Visualisierungspipeline und geht dabei sowohl auf strukturelle als auch auf quantitative Aspekte des Visualisierungsprozesses ein. Zweitens wird eine Methode entwickelt, die visuelle Repräsentationen auf Basis gegebener Visualisierungsspezifikationen generieren kann. Schließlich belegt ein Softwareprototyp die Realisierbarkeit des Konzepts. Mit dem entwickelten Framework können visuelle Repräsentationen aus jeweils einem spezifischen Gebäudemodell und einer spezifischen Visualisierungsbeschreibung generiert werden
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