| 1. |
- Boxall, A. B. A., et al.
(författare)
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Pharmaceuticals and Personal Care Products in the Environment: What Are the Big Questions?
- 2012
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Ingår i: Environmental Health Perspectives. - : Environmental Health Perspectives. - 0091-6765 .- 1552-9924. ; 120:9, s. 1221-1229
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- BACKGROUND: Over the past 10-15 years, a substantial amount of work has been done by the scientific, regulatory, and business communities to elucidate the effects and risks of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs) in the environment. OBJECTIVE: This review was undertaken to identify key outstanding issues regarding the effects of PPCPs on human and ecological health in order to ensure that future resources will be focused on the most important areas. DATA SOURCES: To better understand and manage the risks of PPCPs in the environment, we used the "key question" approach to identify the principle issues that need to be addressed. Initially, questions were solicited from academic, government, and business communities around the world. A list of 101 questions was then discussed at an international expert workshop, and a top-20 list was developed. Following the workshop, workshop attendees ranked the 20 questions by importance. DATA SYNTHESIS: The top 20 priority questions fell into seven categories: a) prioritization of substances for assessment, b) pathways of exposure, c) bioavailability and uptake, a effects characterization, e) risk and relative risk, f) antibiotic resistance, and g) risk management. CONCLUSIONS: A large body of information is now available on PPCPs in the environment. This exercise prioritized the most critical questions to aid in development of future research programs on the topic.
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| 2. |
- Calinon, S., et al.
(författare)
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Multi-optima exploration with adaptive Gaussian mixture model
- 2012
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Ingår i: Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL), 2012 IEEE International Conference on. - : IEEE. - 9781467349635 ; , s. 6400808-
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In learning by exploration problems such as reinforcement learning (RL), direct policy search, stochastic optimization or evolutionary computation, the goal of an agent is to maximize some form of reward function (or minimize a cost function). Often, these algorithms are designed to find a single policy solution. We address the problem of representing the space of control policy solutions by considering exploration as a density estimation problem. Such representation provides additional information such as shape and curvature of local peaks that can be exploited to analyze the discovered solutions and guide the exploration. We show that the search process can easily be generalized to multi-peaked distributions by employing a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with an adaptive number of components. The GMM has a dual role: representing the space of possible control policies, and guiding the exploration of new policies. A variation of expectation-maximization (EM) applied to reward-weighted policy parameters is presented to model the space of possible solutions, as if this space was a probability distribution. The approach is tested in a dart game experiment formulated as a black-box optimization problem, where the agent's throwing capability increases while it chases for the best strategy to play the game. This experiment is used to study how the proposed approach can exploit new promising solution alternatives in the search process, when the optimality criterion slowly drifts over time. The results show that the proposed multi-optima search approach can anticipate such changes by exploiting promising candidates to smoothly adapt to the change of global optimum.
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| 3. |
- Imboden, S., et al.
(författare)
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A Haptic Enabled Multimodal Pre-Operative Planner for Hip Arthroplasty
- 2005
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Ingår i: World Haptics Conference: First Joint Eurohaptics Conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virutual Environment and Teleoperator Systems, Proceedings. - 0769523102 ; , s. 503-504
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper introduces the multisense idea, with a special reference to the use of haptics in the medical field and, in particular, in the planning of total hip replacement surgery. We emphasise the integration of different modalities and the capability of the multimodal system to gather and register data coming from different sources.
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| 4. |
- Petterson, Anders, et al.
(författare)
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A Bernoulli principle gripper for handling of planar and 3D (food) products
- 2010
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Ingår i: Industrial robot. - : Emerald. - 0143-991X .- 1758-5791. ; 37:6, s. 518-526
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Tidskriftsartikel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Purpose - The purpose of this paper is the increase the flexibility of robots used for handling of 3D (food) objects handling by the development and evaluation of a novel 3D Bernoulli gripper. Design/methodology/approach - A new gripper technology have been designed and evaluated. A deformable surface have been used to enable individual product handling. The lift force generated and the force exerted on the product during gripping is measured using a material tester instrument. Various products are tested with the gripper. A experimental/theoretical approach is used to explain the results. Findings - A deformable surface can be used to generate a lift force using the Bernoulli principle on 3D objects. Using a small forming a significant increase in the lift force generated is recorded. Increasing the forming further was shown to have little or even negative effects. The forces exerted on the product during forming was measured to be sufficiently low to avoid product damage. Research limitations/implications - To be able to improve the grippers lift strength a better model and understanding of the flow is needed. Originality/value - A novel Bernoulli gripper for 3D Bernoulli gripping have been designed and evaluated. The gripper enables flexible and delicate handling of various product shapes, 3D as well as 2D. Increased utilization of robots in the food industry can be gained. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited [ISSN 0143-991X].
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| 5. |
- Testi, D., et al.
(författare)
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A multimodal and multisensorial pre-operative planning environment for total hip replacement
- 2005
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Ingår i: Proceedings - Third International Conference on Medical Information Visualisation - BioMedical Visualisation, MediVis 2005. - 0769523935 - 9780769523934 ; , s. 25-29
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper describes a new environment for the pre-operative planning of total hip replacement. The system is based on a multimodal/multisensorial interface, which includes advanced software visualisation and evaluation modules for the planning and state-of-the-art technologies for immersive interface (stereoscopic display, different six degrees of freedom tracking technologies, speech recognition, and haptic feedbacks). This paper is focused on the final clinical application description. More specific visualisation-related modules are described in other related papers.
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