NASA Tech Briefs, November 2002

Topics include: a technology focus on engineering materials, electronic components and systems, software, mechanics, machinery/automation, manufacturing, bio-medical, physical sciences, information sciences book and reports, and a special section of Photonics Tech Briefs

NASA Tech Briefs, May 2002

Topics include: a technology focus on engineering materials, electronic components and circuits, software, mechanics, machinery/automation, manufacturing, physical sciences, information sciences, book and reports, and a special section of Photonics Tech Briefs

Intelligent Coordination and Automation for Smart Home Accessories

Smarthome accessories are rapidly becoming more popular. Although many companies are making devices to take advantage of this market, most of the created smart devices are actually unintelligent. Currently, these smart home devices require meticulous, tedious configuration to get any sort of enhanced usability over their analog counterparts. We propose building a general model using machine learning and data science to automatically learn a user\u27s smart accessory usage to predict their configuration. We have identified the requirements, collected data, recognized the risks, implemented the system, and have met the goals we set out to accomplish

Evolving web-based test automation into agile business specifications

Usually, test automation scripts for a web application directly mirror the actions that the tester carries out in the browser, but they tend to be verbose and repetitive, making them expensive to maintain and ineffective in an agile setting. Our research has focussed on providing tool-support for business-level, example-based specifications that are mapped to the browser level for automatic verification. We provide refactoring support for the evolution of existing browser-level tests into business-level specifications. As resulting business rule tables may be incomplete, redundant or contradictory, our tool provides feedback on coverage

A Method to Improve the Early Stages of the Robotic Process Automation Lifecycle

The robotic automation of processes is of much interest to organizations. A common use case is to automate the repetitive manual tasks (or processes) that are currently done by back-office staff through some information system (IS). The lifecycle of any Robotic Process Automation (RPA) project starts with the analysis of the process to automate. This is a very time-consuming phase, which in practical settings often relies on the study of process documentation. Such documentation is typically incomplete or inaccurate, e.g., some documented cases never occur, occurring cases are not documented, or documented cases differ from reality. To deploy robots in a production environment that are designed on such a shaky basis entails a high risk. This paper describes and evaluates a new proposal for the early stages of an RPA project: the analysis of a process and its subsequent design. The idea is to leverage the knowledge of back-office staff, which starts by monitoring them in a non-invasive manner. This is done through a screen-mousekey- logger, i.e., a sequence of images, mouse actions, and key actions are stored along with their timestamps. The log which is obtained in this way is transformed into a UI log through image-analysis techniques (e.g., fingerprinting or OCR) and then transformed into a process model by the use of process discovery algorithms. We evaluated this method for two real-life, industrial cases. The evaluation shows clear and substantial benefits in terms of accuracy and speed. This paper presents the method, along with a number of limitations that need to be addressed such that it can be applied in wider contexts.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-

The ergonomics of command and control

Since its inception, just after the Second World War, ergonomics research has paid special attention to the issues surrounding human control of systems. Command and Control environments continue to represent a challenging domain for Ergonomics research. We take a broad view of Command and Control research, to include C2 (Command and Control), C3 (Command, Control and Communication), and C4 (Command, Control, Communication and Computers) as well as human supervisory control paradigms. This special issue of ERGONOMICS aims to present state-of-the-art research into models of team performance, evaluation of novel interaction technologies, case studies, methodologies and theoretical review papers. We are pleased to present papers that detail research on these topics in domains as diverse as the emergency services (e.g., police, fire, and ambulance), civilian applications (e.g., air traffic control, rail networks, and nuclear power) and military applications (e.g., land, sea and air) of command and control. While the domains of application are very diverse, many of the challenges they face share interesting similarities