Sailing with a ghost ship: Design guidelines for developing supervisory control interfaces for the semi-autonomous cargo vessel system

Rolls-Royce Marine is currently developing a semi-autonomous cargo vessel. The semi-autonomous cargo ship operation is a supervisory control task, in which the human operator is receiving information from a remote semi-autonomous vessel and instructing it through supervisory control interfaces. Thus, it is necessary to have supervisory control interfaces to carry the operation. But, the design guidelines for the interfaces are unclear, because of the lack of semi-autonomous cargo ships. The thesis presents design guidelines for developing supervisory control interfaces for the semi-autonomous cargo vessel. The research question answered in this thesis is: “How to design a supervisory control interface for remote semi-autonomous cargo vessel system to enable intuitive and precise instruction of the course plan?” The author answers the question through a research and design process that consists of the problem and solution spaces. The problem space suggests design requirements through a literature review and experts interviews. The literature review gives contextual and theoretical knowledge to design supervisory control interfaces. The expert interviews with video gamers and autonomous ship experts present potential user needs and design considerations. The findings from the problem space combine and formulate design requirements. The solution space ideates and prototypes a supervisory control interface prototype by applying the design requirements. The prototype has been evaluated in usability tests with sailors and autonomous ship expert. The findings from the usability tests are linked to the design requirements to evaluate how the designed solution fulfils design requirements. The thesis contributes to the design of semi-autonomous cargo vessel supervisory control interfaces by answering to the research question. In the conclusion part, the author answer to the research question by suggesting three design themes, which are synthetics of the design requirements and analysis. The design themes are: providing situation awareness, intuitive manipulation, and collaborative control. With these design themes designers will be able to develop supervisory control interfaces, which present intuitive and precise course planning capability to the operators. At the same time, the findings of the thesis will provide several directions for further research, such as researching an unmanned surface vehicle supervisory control interface

Have restaurant firms been using right recession turnaround strategies?: Evaluating with propensity score measure

Among the diverse strategies that restaurants use in recessions, some studies have shown that strategies that increase advertising, profit margins, or asset turnover have yielded promising results in terms of firm performance. However, the success of these turnaround strategies might be due to the health or size of a firm rather than the implementation of these strategies. Therefore, this study empirically tested this question utilizing the propensity score measure (PSM) due to concerns with selection bias across restaurant segments. The results showed significant improvements in revenue for limited-service and franchise restaurants when aggressive advertising was used but no improvements in profitability. The profit margin strategy had no impact on revenue but affected profitability and stock returns positively for all segments. Finally, the asset turnover strategy had adverse effects on revenue the year after a recession for all segments. These mixed results suggest that managers need to be cautious when implementing recession turnaround strategies.Accepted manuscrip

Option 2: Why lower priced restaurant segments are better to predict in smaller sub spaces comparing to higher priced restaurants?: A geographical approach using machine learning?

While most causal studies try to find the relationship between market size and the number of restaurants, this study focuses on the difference in predicting the number of restaurants by segments, using machine learning classifiers, which are decision tree, support vector regression, and neural network. The study attempts to provide practical implications in predicting the optimal number of restaurants under the assumption that a market bound exist for restaurants. Results show predictability of the number of restaurants to improve greater for lower priced restaurants than higher priced restaurants when franchise and food retail information was included in the model, which imply uneven market power among lower priced to be greater than higher priced restaurants.Accepted manuscrip

Mouse neuroblastoma cell-based model and the effect of epileptic events on calcium oscillations and neural spikes

Recently, mouse neuroblastoma cells have been considered as an attractive model for the study of human neurological and prion diseases, and they have been intensively used as a model system in different areas. For example, the differentiation of neuro2a (N2A) cells, receptor-mediated ion current, and glutamate-induced physiological responses have been actively investigated with these cells. These mouse neuroblastoma N2A cells are of interest because they grow faster than other cells of neural origin and have a number of other advantages. The calcium oscillations and neural spikes of mouse neuroblastoma N2A cells in epileptic conditions are evaluated. Based on our observations of neural spikes in these cells with our proposed imaging modality, we reported that they can be an important model in epileptic activity studies. We concluded that mouse neuroblastoma N2A cells produce epileptic spikes in vitro in the same way as those produced by neurons or astrocytes. This evidence suggests that increased levels of neurotransmitter release due to the enhancement of free calcium from 4-aminopyridine causes the mouse neuroblastoma N2A cells to produce epileptic spikes and calcium oscillations.open0

Failure Tolerant Training with Persistent Memory Disaggregation over CXL

This paper proposes TRAININGCXL that can efficiently process large-scale recommendation datasets in the pool of disaggregated memory while making training fault tolerant with low overhead. To this end, i) we integrate persistent memory (PMEM) and GPU into a cache-coherent domain as Type-2. Enabling CXL allows PMEM to be directly placed in GPU's memory hierarchy, such that GPU can access PMEM without software intervention. TRAININGCXL introduces computing and checkpointing logic near the CXL controller, thereby training data and managing persistency in an active manner. Considering PMEM's vulnerability, ii) we utilize the unique characteristics of recommendation models and take the checkpointing overhead off the critical path of their training. Lastly, iii) TRAININGCXL employs an advanced checkpointing technique that relaxes the updating sequence of model parameters and embeddings across training batches. The evaluation shows that TRAININGCXL achieves 5.2x training performance improvement and 76% energy savings, compared to the modern PMEM-based recommendation systems

A two model approach to understanding the effects of psychological work environment and personal-work conflict on turnover intention: a generational analysis

The purpose of this study is to further understand the effects of personal-work conflict and work environment on turnover intention with a focus on generational differences. Data was collected from a total of 922 respondents from U.S. casual-dining restaurant employees. The results supported the proposed relationship with work environment mediating the relationship between personal-work conflict and turnover intention. It was determined in this model that the newer generations were more effected by these relationships. This study demonstrates an important understanding in the directional analysis of personal-work conflict and the work environment on turnover intent.Accepted manuscrip

Judging food by its description: a text mining approach examining the most influential words on restaurant menus

Accepted manuscrip

Do words matter? Consumers’ perceptions of words used to describe restaurant menu items

INTRODUCTION: The menu is an integral component of a restaurant’s core strategy (McCall & Lynn, 2008). Menus are used to describe dishes to help consumers understand potential ingredients, textures, and tastes (Kincaid & Corsun, 2003). Analogous to speeches by professional speakers, a menu requires carefully chosen words to make it exciting and memorable (Bowen & Morris, 1995). Menu descriptions build a mental image of the food prior to consumption, which can influence consumers’ decision-making process (Drysdale & Galipue, 2008). Subsequently, the congruency of this mental image with customer expectation drives selection behavior (Lockyer, 2006). Given that menus are critical tools for marketing a restaurant meal, word selection and patterns must be carefully crafted in order to facilitate this communication. The menu serves several functions for both the restaurateur and the customer (McCall & Lynn, 2008). Practitioners and academic researchers alike agree that the menu is an important communicative tool, though how menu items should be described is still debatable. Mills and Thomas (2008) proposed the Customer Information Expectation of Restaurant Menu (CIERM) model, suggesting that menu effectiveness is affected by nutrition information, product information and availability of food preparation. Building upon the CIERM model, this study aims to examine consumers’ preferences over menu word choice based on current industry practice. This study could contribute to enriches the literature on menu word item descriptions by first examining current practices and then testing the effect of menu word choice on consumers’ choice.Accepted manuscrip

Psychedelic VR Experience : An Exploratory Study on Cosmic Flow

Virtual environments are emerging as a tool for providing psychede-lic experiences due to the increasing interest in altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and the spread of VR headsets. However, the user experience of commercial psychedelic VR applications has not yet been adequately explored in HCI. To fill this gap, we conducted a user experience study of Cosmic Flow, one of the psychedelic VR available on Steam. In this exploratory study, six participants experienced Cosmic Flow and got interviewed. Analysis of user interviews revealed three main themes that articulate different aspects of the experience: moderate interaction, reflections on personal experience, and VR ergonomics. In the discussion, we derive seven design considerations to guide the development of psychedelic VR: non-active engagement, positive indolence and idleness, non-invasive multi-sensory modalities, creative and introspective activities, effects of priming, virtual nature, and comfortableness. The study contributes to design researchers and practitioners working on related experiences.publishedVersionPeer reviewe