Test-Driven Development as a tool to optimize the JEE programming

The article is about the benefits of using the Test-Driven Development methodology. Tests were carried out on the author's application based on Java Enterprise Edition platform. The investigated methodology was compared with the standard approach to writing tests

Temporal Analysis of Looting Activity in Tūwāneh (Southern Jordan)

Looting is a worldwide issue that occurs not only in conflict zones or areas with weak governmental control. Although national and international agencies are addressing the problem, we are far from solving it, due to its complexity and the insufficient allocation of resources. In this article, we examine the temporal and spatial patterns of looting at the single site level (Tūwāneh, southern Jordan) over the past decade. Our analysis utilized orthomosaics created in 2018 and 2019, a systematic surface survey conducted in November 2022, and publicly available satellite imagery (via Google Earth Pro) dating back to August 2013. We identified a total of 723 looting pits, of which 259 were excavated before August 2013 and 140 between August 2013 and November 2022; 324 were inconclusive due to methodological limitations. The findings suggest that looting is a persistent issue in the area, highlighting the importance of implementing effective measures to prevent the loss of archaeological heritage

Dacia capta: geographical targeting in Trajan's monetary propaganda

Poniższa praca skupia się na zagadnieniu targetowania geograficznego w kontekście propagandy namonetarnej cesarza Trajana. Jej celem jest sprawdzenie, czy monety które ikonograficznie nawiązują do zwycięstwa nad Dakami, są odnajdywane w statystycznie większych ilościach na terenach późniejszej prowincji Dacji. Takie ich natężenie na tych terenach miałoby poświadczać o celowym działaniu emitenta, który określone przekazy miał kierować do zawężonego kręgu odbiorców. Pierwotnym źródłem inspiracji była publikacja Corey Ellithorpe’a Striking a Dissonant Chord: The Geographical Targeting of Trajan’s Debellator Coinage in Dacia, w której autor wykazał istnienie zależności pomiędzy monetami ikonograficznie nawiązującymi do zwycięstwa nad Dacją, a miejscem ich odkrycia na terenach tej prowincji. W celu sprawdzenia tej hipotezy konieczne stało się utworzenie własnej bazy danych, w której znalazły się informacje dotyczące znalezisk skarbów monetarnych i ich dystrybucji w tym okresie oraz przyjrzenie się dokładnie działaniu mechanizmów propagandowych. Dane zostały poddane analizie z uwzględnieniem współrzędnych geograficznych, przypisanego im numeru katalogowego RIC oraz daty zamknięcia depozytu. Wzięte pod uwagę zostały wszystkie czynniki, które mogły wpływać na dystrybucję przekazów, takie jak rozmieszczenie wojsk oraz działania wojenne z tego okresu. Dzięki zaprezentowaniu danych w formie graficznej oraz dokładnej analizie powyższych elementów, możliwe stało się wysunięcie odpowiednich wniosków zaprzeczających pierwotnie postawionemu pytaniu badawczemu.The following thesis focuses on the issue of geographical targeting in the context of Emperor Trajan's monetary propaganda. Its aim is to verify whether coins which iconographically refer to the victory over the Dacians are found in statistically larger quantities in the areas of the later province of Dacia. Such an abundance in those areas would testify to the deliberate action of the issuer, whose aim was to use the coinage as a vehicle for political propaganda. The initial source of inspiration was the publication of Corey Ellithorpe's Striking a Dissonant Chord: The Geographical Targeting of Trajan's Debellator Coinage in Dacia, in which the author demonstrated the existence of a correlation between coins iconographically referring to the victory over Dacia and the place of their discovery in that province. In order to test this hypothesis, it became necessary to create a database, which included information from coin treasure finds and how they were distributed during this period as well as to look closely at the propaganda mechanisms. The data was analyzed by geographic coordinates, the assigned RIC catalog number, and the close date of the deposit. All factors that may have influenced the distribution of the messages, such as military deployment and warfare of the period, were taken into account. By presenting the data in graphical form and carefully analyzing the above elements, it became possible to draw appropriate conclusions contradicting the research question originally posed

Comprehensive analysis of ceramic material from the Tuwaneh site, Jordan.

Jednym z efektów badań prowadzonych w 2018 roku przez zespół składający się z przedstawicieli Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego oraz Akademii Górniczo-Hutniczej na terenie stanowiska At-Tuwaneh, było pozyskanie z zadokumentowanych wkopów rabunkowych materiału ceramicznego. Jego opracowanie stanowi główny cel poniższej pracy. Stanowisko At-Tuwaneh położone jest w południowej Jordanii, we współczesnym dystrykcie Tafila-Hesa i mimo historycznych tekstów źródłowych wspominających jego lokalizację, rozpoznania przez współczesnych podróżników oraz prowadzonych serii badań powierzchniowych, nie wzbudziło wystarczającego zainteresowania wśród badaczy. Szczególnie zaniedbanym aspektem była kwestia materiału ceramicznego, który pozyskiwany był w ramach tychże badań powierzchniowych, lecz nigdy nie doczekał się właściwego opracowania. Na jego podstawie formułowane były jednak propozycje dotyczące chronologii stanowiska oraz poszczególnych etapów jego zasiedlenia i faz rozwoju. Niestety w związku z brakiem prowadzonych na terenie stanowiska badań archeologicznych na większą skalę, wciąż nie została rozpoznana faktyczna stratygrafia stanowiska, która umożliwiłaby formułowanie wniosków dotyczących chronologii. Fakt ten bardzo negatywnie wpływa na próbę datowania materiału ceramicznego, pozyskanego z pozbawionych kontekstu archeologicznego wkopów rabunkowych, a co za tym idzie cechującego się bardzo dużym stopniem przemieszania. Konieczne było więc przeprowadzenie kompleksowej analizy materiału ceramicznego, której celem była nie tylko próba uzupełnienia wcześniejszych propozycji dotyczących chronologii stanowiska, ale także przygotowanie bazy gromadzącej w sobie dokładne opisy poszczególnych fragmentów diagnostycznych. W analizie materiału zastosowany został specyficzny sposób jego podziału na mniejsze grupy uwzględniający przede wszystkim podobieństwa wizualne lub technologiczne. Analizy te odrzucały stosowane w przypadku badań na innych stanowiskach metody, wykorzystujące wypracowaną w ramach badań wykopaliskowych stratygrafię archeologiczną. Następnym krokiem była próba zweryfikowania jakości utworzonych grup na podstawie analogii pochodzących z dobrze opracowanych stanowisk. Umożliwiło to wstępne umieszczenie stanowiska At-Tuwaneh w szerszym kontekście kulturowym regionu, przygotowując jednocześnie podwaliny pod prowadzone w przyszłości badania.One of the results of the research carried out in 2018 by a team comprising representatives of the Jagiellonian University and the AGH University of Science and Technology at the At-Tuwaneh site was the retrieval of ceramic material from the documented robbery pits, study of which is the main objective of the following work. The At-Tuwaneh site is located in southern Jordan, in the modern Tafila-Hesa district, and despite historical sources mentioning its location, recognition by modern travelers and a series of surface investigations conducted, it has not attracted sufficient interest among researchers. A particularly neglected aspect was the question of ceramic material, which was acquired as part of these surface surveys, but never lived to see proper study. On its basis, however, proposals were made regarding the chronology of the site and the different stages of its settlement and development phases. Unfortunately, in the absence of larger-scale archaeological investigations carried out at the site, the actual stratigraphy of the site has still not been recognized to enable conclusions to be drawn about the chronology. This fact has a very negative impact on the attempt to date the pottery material, obtained from robbery pits devoid of archaeological context, and therefore characterized by a very high degree of mixing. It was therefore necessary to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the ceramic material, the aim of which was not only to attempt to supplement earlier proposals concerning the chronology of the site, but also to prepare a database that would bring together accurate descriptions of individual diagnostic fragments. In the analysis of the material, a specific method was used to divide it into smaller groups taking into account mainly visual or technological similarities. These analyses rejected the methods applied in the case of research on other sites, using the archaeological stratigraphy developed in the excavations. The next step was to try to verify the quality of the groups formed on the basis of analogies from well-developed sites. This enabled the At-Tuwaneh site to be pre-positioned in the wider cultural context of the region, while preparing the groundwork for future research

On two different concepts of set

The article contains no abstrac

Compliant Sensorized Testing Device to Provide a Model-Based Estimation of the Cooking Time of Vegetables

Many cooking tasks rely on physically interacting with and sensing soft objects. One assessment widely performed is identifying when a vegetable or soft structure is cooked. Commonly, we may interact with the food item and use tactile feedback to estimate if the food is cooked or not. This is also a task performed at scale in food supply chains. To address this, we have developed a general purpose model for modelling the kinetics and thermal properties of the vegetable cooking. We show that by identifying the size, and stiffness of the vegetable at two points in the cooking process the time for the vegetable to cook can be identified. With this in mind, we have developed a compliant tactile testing device which includes a tactile force sensor which can be used for measuring stiffness, and proprioceptive sensing method which can be used to measure the size. The mechanism is robust and high torque, in addition to being simple and low cost in terms of fabrication. Using this model and device we demonstrate the accuracy in predicting the cooking time for potatoes of various sizes, and benchmark this in comparison to when used a fixed cooking time. We demonstrate that the model based approach significantly improves the estimation and outcome of the cooking process. Whilst we demonstrate this approach on potatoes, the hardware and model to other vegetable cooking processes.Beko pl

Mastication-Enhanced Taste-Based Classification of Multi-Ingredient Dishes for Robotic Cooking

Chefs frequently rely on their taste to assess the content and flavor of dishes during cooking. While tasting the food, the mastication process also provides continuous feedback by exposing the taste receptors to food at various stages of chewing. Since different ingredients of the dish undergo specific changes during chewing, the mastication helps to understand the food content. The current methods of electronic tasting, on the contrary, always use a single taste snapshot of a homogenized sample. We propose a robotic setup that uses the mixing to imitate mastication and tastes the dish at two different mastication phases. Each tasting is done using a conductance probe measuring conductance at multiple, spatially distributed points. This data is used to classify 9 varieties of scrambled eggs with tomatoes. We test four different tasting methods and analyze the resulting classification performance, showing a significant improvement over tasting homogenized samples. The experimental results show that tasting at two states of mechanical processing of the food increased classification F1 score to 0.93 in comparison to the traditional tasting of a homogenized sample resulting in F1 score of 0.55. We attribute this performance increase to the fact that different dishes are affected differently by the mixing process, and have different spatial distributions of the salinity. It helps the robot to distinguish between dishes of the same average salinity, but different content of ingredients. This work demonstrates that mastication plays an important role in robotic tasting and implementing it can improve the tasting ability of robotic chefs

Closed-Loop Robotic Cooking of Scrambled Eggs with a Salinity-based ‘Taste’ Sensor

The sense of taste is fundamental to a human chef's ability to cook tasty food. To develop robots that can demonstrate human-like cooking, robots need to be equipped with a sense of taste, and enabled to use this perception capabilities to improve or understand the food which they are cooking. We propose a first study of using a salinity sensor to provide a robot with a sense of saltiness. We then demonstrate how this artificial taste receptor can be used to create an autonomous closed-loop cooking system that uses a measurement of saltiness to improve the cooking process of preparing scrambled eggs. Specifically, we show that the sensor measurements can be mapped to different taste metrics such as the overall saltiness and state of mixing the eggs, and how the cooking process can be adapted to match user-defined specifications.EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Agri-Food Robotics: AgriFoRwArdS BEKO pl

Towards practical robotic chef: Review of relevant work and future challenges

Publication status: PublishedFunder: Beko plcFunder: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)AbstractRobotic chefs are a promising technology that can improve the availability of quality food by reducing the time required for cooking, therefore decreasing food's overall cost. This paper clarifies and structures design and benchmarking rules in this new area of research, and provides a comprehensive review of technologies suitable for the construction of cooking robots. The diner is an ultimate judge of the cooking outcome, therefore we put focus on explaining human food preferences and perception of taste and ways to use them for control. Mechanical design of robotic chefs at a practically low cost remains the challenge, but some recently published gripper designs as well as whole robotic systems show the use of cheap materials or off‐the‐shelf components. Moreover, technologies like taste sensing, machine learning, and computer vision are making their way into robotic cooking enabling smart sensing and therefore improving controllability and autonomy. Furthermore, objective assessment of taste and food palatability is a challenge even for trained humans, therefore the paper provides a list of procedures for benchmarking the robot's tasting and cooking abilities. The paper is written from the point of view of a researcher or engineer building a practical robotic system, therefore there is a strong priority for solutions and technologies that are proven, robust and self‐contained enough to be a part of a larger system.</jats:p

Theoretical Framework for Human-Like Robotic Taste with Reference to Nutritional Needs

Abstract This paper contains a theoretical framework for an intelligent robot that can feed itself with organic matter and learns to like and want certain foods. Furthermore, being tied to the onboard generation of power, the robot’s learning is grounded to physical requirements that need to be met for continued robot operation. We posit a system wherein the electrical power is generated by a microbial fuel cell(MFC), and the food value can be assessed by measuring the current generated. Interestingly, the MFC requires feed similar in many parameters to food preferred by most people with respect to parameters like salinity or pH. This property is theorized to be a good start for teaching a robotic chef human preferences. We also propose a circuit that injects additional current, simulating social cues for some foods, and effectively resulting in learning an acquired taste.</jats:p