A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions

Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands. We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments. Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at ACL 201

A Tale of Two DRAGGNs: A Hybrid Approach for Interpreting Action-Oriented and Goal-Oriented Instructions

Robots operating alongside humans in diverse, stochastic environments must be able to accurately interpret natural language commands. These instructions often fall into one of two categories: those that specify a goal condition or target state, and those that specify explicit actions, or how to perform a given task. Recent approaches have used reward functions as a semantic representation of goal-based commands, which allows for the use of a state-of-the-art planner to find a policy for the given task. However, these reward functions cannot be directly used to represent action-oriented commands. We introduce a new hybrid approach, the Deep Recurrent Action-Goal Grounding Network (DRAGGN), for task grounding and execution that handles natural language from either category as input, and generalizes to unseen environments. Our robot-simulation results demonstrate that a system successfully interpreting both goal-oriented and action-oriented task specifications brings us closer to robust natural language understanding for human-robot interaction.Comment: Accepted at the 1st Workshop on Language Grounding for Robotics at ACL 201

Effect of Lean Processes on Surgical Wait Times and Efficiency in a Tertiary Care Veterans Affairs Medical Center

Importance There are an increasing number of veterans in the United States, and the current delay and wait times prevent Veterans Affairs institutions from fully meeting the needs of current and former service members. Concrete strategies to improve throughput at these facilities have been sparse. Objective To identify whether lean processes can be used to improve wait times for surgical procedures in Veterans Affairs hospitals. Design, Setting, and Participants Databases in the Veterans Integrated Service Network 11 Data Warehouse, Veterans Health Administration Support Service Center, and Veterans Information Systems and Technology Architecture/Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol were queried to assess changes in wait times for elective general surgical procedures and clinical volume before, during, and after implementation of lean processes over 3 fiscal years (FYs) at a tertiary care Veterans Affairs medical center. All patients evaluated by the general surgery department through outpatient clinics, clinical video teleconferencing, and e-consultations from October 2011 through September 2014 were included. Patients evaluated through the emergency department or as inpatient consults were excluded. Exposures The surgery service and systems redesign service held a value stream analysis in FY 2013, culminating in multiple rapid process improvement workshops. Multidisciplinary teams identified systemic inefficiencies and strategies to improve interdepartmental and patient communication to reduce canceled consultations and cases, diagnostic rework, and no-shows. High-priority triage with enhanced operating room flexibility was instituted to reduce scheduling wait times. General surgery department pilot projects were then implemented mid-FY 2013. Main Outcomes and Measures Planned outcome measures included wait time, clinic and telehealth volume, number of no-shows, and operative volume. Paired t tests were used to identify differences in outcome measures after the institution of reforms. Results Following rapid process improvement workshop project rollouts, mean (SD) patient wait times for elective general surgical procedures decreased from 33.4 (8.3) days in FY 2012 to 26.0 (9.5) days in FY 2013 (P = .02). In FY 2014, mean (SD) wait times were half the value of the previous FY at 12.0 (2.1) days (P = .07). This was a 3-fold decrease from wait times in FY 2012 (P = .02). Operative volume increased from 931 patients in FY 2012 to 1090 in FY 2013 and 1072 in FY 2014. Combined clinic, telehealth, and e-consultation encounters increased from 3131 in FY 2012 to 3460 in FY 2013 and 3517 in FY 2014, while the number of no-shows decreased from 366 in FY 2012 to 227 in FY 2014 (P = .02). Conclusions and Relevance Improvement in the overall surgical patient experience can stem from multidisciplinary collaboration among systems redesign personnel, clinicians, and surgical staff to reduce systemic inefficiencies. Monitoring and follow-up of system efficiency measures and the employment of lean practices and process improvements can have positive short- and long-term effects on wait times, clinical throughput, and patient care and satisfaction

Single-electron quantum dot in Si/SiGe with integrated charge-sensing

Single-electron occupation is an essential component to measurement and manipulation of spin in quantum dots, capabilities that are important for quantum information processing. Si/SiGe is of interest for semiconductor spin qubits, but single-electron quantum dots have not yet been achieved in this system. We report the fabrication and measurement of a top-gated quantum dot occupied by a single electron in a Si/SiGe heterostructure. Transport through the quantum dot is directly correlated with charge-sensing from an integrated quantum point contact, and this charge-sensing is used to confirm single-electron occupancy in the quantum dot.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, accepted version, to appear in Applied Physics Letter

Made-to-measure malaria vector control strategies: rational design based on insecticide properties and coverage of blood resources for mosquitoes.

Eliminating malaria from highly endemic settings will require unprecedented levels of vector control. To suppress mosquito populations, vector control products targeting their blood hosts must attain high biological coverage of all available sources, rather than merely high demographic coverage of a targeted resource subset, such as humans while asleep indoors. Beyond defining biological coverage in a measurable way, the proportion of blood meals obtained from humans and the proportion of bites upon unprotected humans occurring indoors also suggest optimal target product profiles for delivering insecticides to humans or livestock. For vectors that feed only occasionally upon humans, preferred animal hosts may be optimal targets for mosquito-toxic insecticides, and vapour-phase insecticides optimized to maximize repellency, rather than toxicity, may be ideal for directly protecting people against indoor and outdoor exposure. However, for vectors that primarily feed upon people, repellent vapour-phase insecticides may be inferior to toxic ones and may undermine the impact of contact insecticides applied to human sleeping spaces, houses or clothing if combined in the same time and place. These concepts are also applicable to other mosquito-borne anthroponoses so that diverse target species could be simultaneously controlled with integrated vector management programmes. Measurements of these two crucial mosquito behavioural parameters should now be integrated into programmatically funded, longitudinal, national-scale entomological monitoring systems to inform selection of available technologies and investment in developing new ones

Influence of industrial by-products on the behavior of geopolymer concrete forsustainable development

Carbon dioxide emission in cement industries is a great concern for environment, which is increasing day by day.Therefore, it is very essential to find a possible material that can be used as a replacement of cement. Geopolymer concreteis a kind of inorganic concrete elucidating the formal usage of industrial and natural waste in either single or combinedform. Geopolymers are amorphous covalently bonded by a 3D network of inorganic molecules of aluminosilicate material.The formation of geopolymer concrete is greatly influenced by several factors such as binder chemical reaction, curingtemperature/period, molarity of the solution, and rate of polymerization. The curing temperature helps in deciding theproperties of geopolymer. Performance variables for geopolymer concrete such as selection of alkaline binder withpozzolana (Fly ash, slag, silica fume etc.) and interrelationship of GPC, reinforcing agent in geopolymer concrete withcomponents responsible for durability are summarized in detail. The durability of concrete is reviewed with structure withshrinkage-resistant, resistant to sulfate attack, and consequences of carbonation. The various consequences of corrosion arealso summarized in last of present review paper. Different research findings in this paper proves successfully thatgeopolymer is better construction material as compare to cement-based concrete