Engineering Design for Mechatronics – A pedagogical perspective

Here we examine how innovative and challenging Mechatronics programmes structured to meet future needs must still incorporate the basic principles of Engineering Design. However, Mechatronics remains a fundamentally innovative field and simple instruction in the basic mechanics of putting the components together is missing an educational opportunity to push students to develop their creative engineering thinking. Mechatronics, being such a diverse field, allows students and teachers to explore genuinely innovative questions and solutions. As such, it is well suited to allowing teachers to set tasks and projects for students that break new ground and explicitly support the creation of the new concepts and solutions required to take mechatronics forward

Subdivision surface fitting to a dense mesh using ridges and umbilics

Fitting a sparse surface to approximate vast dense data is of interest for many applications: reverse engineering, recognition and compression, etc. The present work provides an approach to fit a Loop subdivision surface to a dense triangular mesh of arbitrary topology, whilst preserving and aligning the original features. The natural ridge-joined connectivity of umbilics and ridge-crossings is used as the connectivity of the control mesh for subdivision, so that the edges follow salient features on the surface. Furthermore, the chosen features and connectivity characterise the overall shape of the original mesh, since ridges capture extreme principal curvatures and ridges start and end at umbilics. A metric of Hausdorff distance including curvature vectors is proposed and implemented in a distance transform algorithm to construct the connectivity. Ridge-colour matching is introduced as a criterion for edge flipping to improve feature alignment. Several examples are provided to demonstrate the feature-preserving capability of the proposed approach

eHealth and the Internet of Things

To respond to an ageing population, eHealth strategies offer significant opportunities in achieving a balanced and sustainable healthcare infrastructure. Advances in technology both at the sensor and device levels and in respect of information technology have opened up other possibilities and options. Of significance among these is what is increasingly referred to as the Internet of Things, the interconnection of physical devices to an information infrastructure. The paper therefore sets out to position the Internet of Things at the core of future developments in eHealt

Measuring acceptable input: What is "good enough"?

Many new assistive input systems developed to meet the needs of users with functional impairments fail to make it out of the research laboratory and into regular use by the intended end users. This paper examines some of the reasons for this failure and focuses particularly on whether the developers of such systems are using the correct metrics and approaches for evaluating the functional and social attributes of the input systems they are designing. This paper further focuses on the importance of benchmarking new assistive input systems against baseline measures of useful interaction rates that take allowance of factors such as input success/recognition rate, error rate, correction effort and input time. By addressing each of these measures, a more complete understanding of whether an input system is practically and functionally acceptable can be obtained and design guidance for developers is provided

A pedagogical example of teaching Universal Access

Designing for Universal Access requires designers to have a good understanding of the full range of users and their capabilities, appropriate datasets, and the most suitable tools and techniques. Education clearly plays an important role in helping designers acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to find the relevant information about the users and then apply it to produce a genuinely inclusive design. This paper presents a reflective analysis of a variant of the ?Usability and Accessibility? course for MSc students, developed and delivered by the author over five successive semesters at the IT University of Copenhagen. The aim is to examine whether this course provided an effective and useful method for raising the issues around Universal Access with the designers of the future. This paper examines the results and conclusions from the students over five semesters of this course and provides an overview of the success of the different design and evaluation methods. The paper concludes with a discussion of the effectiveness of each of the specific methods, techniques and tools used in the course, both from design and education perspectives

When Universal Access is not quite universal enough: Case studies and lessons to be learned

While the theory of designing for Universal Access is increasingly understood, there remain persistent issues over realising products and systems that meet the goal of being accessible and usable by the broadest possible set of users. Clearly products or services that are designed without even considering the needs of the wider user base are implicitly going to struggle to be universally accessible. However, even products that have been designed knowing that they are to be used by broad user bases frequently still struggle to achieve the ambition of being universally accessible. This paper examines a number of such products that did not achieve, at least initially, the desired level of universal accessibility. Principal recommendations from each case study are presented to provide a guide to common issues to be avoided

Native architecture for artificial intelligence

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Machine learning for voice recognition

Verbal communication is very important to us humans, but using thisperforming verbal communication to communicateion with machines still faces particular challenges. Therefore, researchers are trying to find ways to make communication with a machine more similar to communicating with other people, for which two systems have been identified: speech and voice recognition. While speech recognition has aimed to become speaker independent, voice recognition focuses on identifying the speaker, by looking at the tone of the voice, which is affected by the physical characteristics of that person. This requires one to identify these unique tonal features, to then train a system with this data. Being able to perform this identification well, would also bring benefit to speech recognition by allowing the system to adjust to the characteristics of that speaker and how he/she produces their sounds

Reviewing the current state of machine learning for artificial intelligence with regards to the use of contextual information

This paper will consider the current state of Machine Learning for Artificial Intelligence, more specifically for applications, such as: Speech Recognition, Game Playing and Image Processing. The artificial world tends to make limited use of context in comparison to what currently happens in human life, while it would benefit from improvements in this area. Additionally, the process of transferring knowledge between application domains is another important area where artificial system can improve. Using context and transferability would have several potential benefits, such as: better ability to function in multiple problem domains, improved understanding of human interaction and stronger grasping of current and potential future situations. While these items are all quite usual to us humans, it is particularly challenging to integrate them into artificial systems, as will be shown within this review. The limitations of our current systems with regards to these topics and the achievable improvements, if these items would be addressed, will also be covered. It is expected that by utilising transferability and/or context, many algorithms in the artificial intelligence field will be able to expand their functionality considerably and should provide for more general purpose learning algorithms

Gestures and multimodal input

For users with motion impairments, the standard keyboard and mouse arrangement for computer access often presents problems. Other approaches have to be adopted to overcome this. In this paper, we will describe the development of a prototype multimodal input system based on two gestural input channels. Results from extensive user trials of this system are presented. These trials showed that the physical and cognitive loads on the user can quickly become excessive and detrimental to the interaction. Designers of multimodal input systems need to be aware of this and perform regular user trials to minimize the problem