Frequently Asked Questions on Food Regulations for Small Market Food Producers

Interest and demand for local food in Iowa and across the nation have increased dramatically in the past few years. Iowa small market producers are finding markets for their food products at farmers markets, community supported agriculture enterprises, farm stands, and institutions such as restaurants, hospitals, schools, and conference centers. As farmers have entered these markets across the state, questions about food regulations have increased. This document answers the most common questions most often asked by producers. Responses were crafted by state agency and university specialists with expertise in food safety and food regulations

Automatic Assessment and Learning of Robot Social Abilities

One of the key challenges of current state-of-the-art robotic deployments in public spaces, where the robot is supposed to interact with humans, is the generation of behaviors that are engaging for the users. Eliciting engagement during an interaction, and maintaining it after the initial phase of the interaction, is still an issue to be overcome. There is evidence that engagement in learning activities is higher in the presence of a robot, particularly if novel [1], but after the initial engagement state, long and non-interactive behaviors are detrimental to the continued engagement of the users [5, 16]. Overcoming this limitation requires to design robots with enhanced social abilities that go past monolithic behaviours and introduces in-situ learning and adaptation to the specific users and situations. To do so, the robot must have the ability to perceive the state of the humans participating in the interaction and use this feedback for the selection of its own actions over time [27]

Are You Still With Me? Continuous Engagement Assessment From a Robot's Point of View

Continuously measuring the engagement of users with a robot in a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) setting paves the way toward in-situ reinforcement learning, improve metrics of interaction quality, and can guide interaction design and behavior optimization. However, engagement is often considered very multi-faceted and difficult to capture in a workable and generic computational model that can serve as an overall measure of engagement. Building upon the intuitive ways humans successfully can assess situation for a degree of engagement when they see it, we propose a novel regression model (utilizing CNN and LSTM networks) enabling robots to compute a single scalar engagement during interactions with humans from standard video streams, obtained from the point of view of an interacting robot. The model is based on a long-term dataset from an autonomous tour guide robot deployed in a public museum, with continuous annotation of a numeric engagement assessment by three independent coders. We show that this model not only can predict engagement very well in our own application domain but show its successful transfer to an entirely different dataset (with different tasks, environment, camera, robot and people). The trained model and the software is available to the HRI community, at https://github.com/LCAS/engagement_detector, as a tool to measure engagement in a variety of settings

Validity and reliability of a modified english version of the physical activity questionnaire for adolescents

BACKGROUND: Adaptation of physical activity self-report questionnaires is sometimes required to reflect the activity behaviours of diverse populations. The processes used to modify self-report questionnaires though are typically underreported. This two-phased study used a formative approach to investigate the validity and reliability of the Physical Activity Questionnaire for Adolescents (PAQ-A) in English youth. Phase one examined test content and response process validity and subsequently informed a modified version of the PAQ-A. Phase two assessed the validity and reliability of the modified PAQ-A. METHODS: In phase one, focus groups (n = 5) were conducted with adolescents (n = 20) to investigate test content and response processes of the original PAQ-A. Based on evidence gathered in phase one, a modified version of the questionnaire was administered to participants (n = 169, 14.5 ± 1.7 years) in phase two. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were assessed using Cronbach’s alpha and intra-class correlations, respectively. Spearman correlations were used to assess associations between modified PAQ-A scores and accelerometer-derived physical activity, self-reported fitness and physical activity self-efficacy. RESULTS: Phase one revealed that the original PAQ-A was unrepresentative for English youth and that item comprehension varied. Contextual and population/cultural-specific modifications were made to the PAQ-A for use in the subsequent phase. In phase two, modified PAQ-A scores had acceptable internal consistency (α = 0.72) and test-retest reliability (ICC = 0.78). Modified PAQ-A scores were significantly associated with objectively assessed moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (r = 0.39), total physical activity (r = 0.42), self-reported fitness (r = 0.35), and physical activity self-efficacy (r = 0.32) (p ≤ 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The modified PAQ-A had acceptable internal consistency and test-retest reliability. Modified PAQ-A scores displayed weak-to-moderate correlations with objectively measured physical activity, self-reported fitness, and self-efficacy providing evidence of satisfactory criterion and construct validity, respectively. Further testing with more diverse English samples is recommended to provide a more complete assessment of the tool. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13690-016-0115-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Plant circadian clock control of Medicago truncatula nodulation via regulation of Nodule Cysteine-Rich peptides

Legumes house nitrogen-fixing endosymbiotic rhizobia in specialized polyploid cells within root nodules, which undergo tightly regulated metabolic activity. By carrying out expression analysis of transcripts over time in Medicago truncatula nodules we found that the circadian clock enables coordinated control of metabolic and regulatory processes linked to nitrogen fixation. This involves the circadian clock-associated transcriptional factor LATE ELONGATED HYPOCOTYL (LHY), with lhy mutants being affected in nodulation. Rhythmic transcripts in root nodules include a subset of Nodule-specific Cysteine Rich peptides (NCRs) that have the LHY-bound conserved Evening Element in their promoters. Until now, studies have suggested that NCRs act to regulate bacteroid differentiation and keep the rhizobial population in check. However, these conclusions came from the study of a few members of this very large gene family that has complex diversified spatio-temporal expression. We suggest that rhythmic expression of NCRs may be important for temporal coordination of bacterial activity with the rhythms of the plant host, in order to ensure optimal symbiosis

Artificial Cognition for Social Human-Robot Interaction: An Implementation

© 2017 The Authors Human–Robot Interaction challenges Artificial Intelligence in many regards: dynamic, partially unknown environments that were not originally designed for robots; a broad variety of situations with rich semantics to understand and interpret; physical interactions with humans that requires fine, low-latency yet socially acceptable control strategies; natural and multi-modal communication which mandates common-sense knowledge and the representation of possibly divergent mental models. This article is an attempt to characterise these challenges and to exhibit a set of key decisional issues that need to be addressed for a cognitive robot to successfully share space and tasks with a human. We identify first the needed individual and collaborative cognitive skills: geometric reasoning and situation assessment based on perspective-taking and affordance analysis; acquisition and representation of knowledge models for multiple agents (humans and robots, with their specificities); situated, natural and multi-modal dialogue; human-aware task planning; human–robot joint task achievement. The article discusses each of these abilities, presents working implementations, and shows how they combine in a coherent and original deliberative architecture for human–robot interaction. Supported by experimental results, we eventually show how explicit knowledge management, both symbolic and geometric, proves to be instrumental to richer and more natural human–robot interactions by pushing for pervasive, human-level semantics within the robot's deliberative system

Development of a nurse home visitation intervention for intimate partner violence

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Despite an increase in knowledge about the epidemiology of intimate partner violence (IPV), much less is known about interventions to reduce IPV and its associated impairment. One program that holds promise in preventing IPV and improving outcomes for women exposed to violence is the Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP), an evidence-based nurse home visitation program for socially disadvantaged first-time mothers. The present study developed an intervention model and modification process to address IPV within the context of the NFP. This included determining the extent to which the NFP curriculum addressed the needs of women at risk for IPV or its recurrence, along with client, nurse and broader stakeholder perspectives on how best to help NFP clients cope with abusive relationships.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Following a preliminary needs assessment, an exploratory multiple case study was conducted to identify the core components of the proposed IPV intervention. This included qualitative interviews with purposeful samples of NFP clients and community stakeholders, and focus groups with nurse home visitors recruited from four NFP sites. Conventional content analysis and constant comparison guided data coding and synthesis. A process for developing complex interventions was then implemented.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Based on data from 69 respondents, an IPV intervention was developed that focused on identifying and responding to IPV; assessing a client's level of safety risk associated with IPV; understanding the process of leaving and resolving an abusive relationship and system navigation. A need was identified for the intervention to include both universal elements of healthy relationships and those tailored to a woman's specific level of readiness to promote change within her life. A clinical pathway guides nurses through the intervention, with a set of facilitators and corresponding instructions for each component.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>NFP clients, nurses and stakeholders identified the need for modifications to the existing NFP program; this led to the development of an intervention that includes universal and targeted components to assist NFP nurses in addressing IPV with their clients. Plans for feasibility testing and evaluation of the effectiveness of the IPV intervention embedded within the NFP, and compared to NFP-only, are discussed.</p