by Ang Siu-lun. / Bibliography: leaves 137-140 / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1986

This study examined the often contrived advertising claims of the manufacturers of variable resistance isotonic machinery. Specifically, the study sought to ascertain whether certain equipment was compatible with musculo-skeletal and perceptual needs and limitations of the human user: that is, to determine whether presently installed eccentric cams, which provide the variable resistance, matched the users force curves. The format of this research was in the ergonomic tradition in which empirical research is not necessarily the primary avenue. Consequently the inter-disciplinary nature of ergonomics required small-scale laboratory- simulation experiments to be conducted in a diverse range of disciplines such as physiology, psychology and biomechanics. It was found that on all five pieces of variable resistance machinery analysed, a mismatch between the force curves and the eccentric cams exist. The cams were redesigned accordingly. The metabolic cost of performing fixed-rate isoinertial lifts was moderate. The psychophysical analysis revealed that perceptual responses indicated that the work was classified as 'light' and only at 30% stress levels do local cues begin to dominate. Based on these findings it was concluded that manufacturers advertising claims in the instances analysed were not well-founded and that variable resistance isotonic machinery should only be used to develop muscular strength and endurance, and do not effectively serve as weight-loss devices.

Pushing and pulling research has yet to fully elucidate the demands placed on manual workers despite established epidemiological links to musculoskeletal disorders. The current study therefore aimed to quantify biomechanical and perceptual responses of male operators to dynamic pushing and pulling tasks. Three common push/pull techniques (pushing, one handed and two handed pulling) were performed at loads of 250kg and 500kg using an industrial pallet jack in a laboratory environment. Thirty six healthy male subjects (age: 21 ±2 years, stature: 1791 ±43 mm and body mass: 77 ±10 kg) were required to perform six loaded experimental and two unloaded control conditions. Hand force exertion, muscle activity and gait pattern responses were collected during 10m push/pull trials on a coefficient controlled walkway; body discomfort was assessed on completion of the condition. Horizontal hand force responses were significantly (p<0.05) affected by load, with a linear relationship existing between the two. This relationship is determined by specific environmental and trolley factors and is context specific, depending on factors such as trolley maintenance and type of flooring. Hand force exertion responses were tenuously affected by technique at higher loads in the initial and sustained phases, with pushing inducing the greatest hand forces. Comparison of the motion phases revealed significant differences between all three phases, with the initial phase evidencing the greatest hand forces. Muscle activity responses demonstrated that unloaded backward walking evoked significantly higher muscle activation than did unloaded forward walking whilst increased muscular activity during load movement compared to unloaded walking was observed. However increasing load from 250kg to 500kg did not significantly impact the majority of muscle activity responses. When considering technique effects on muscle activity, of the significant differences found, all indicated that pushing imposed the least demand on the musculoskeletal system. Gait pattern responses were not significantly affected by load/technique combinations and were similar to those elicited during normal, unloaded walking. Perceptually, increased load led to increased perception of discomfort while pushing resulted in the least discomfort at both loads. From these psychophysical responses, the calves, shoulders and biceps were identified as areas of potential musculoskeletal injury, particularly during one and two handed pulling. Pushing elicited the highest hand forces and the lowest muscle activity responses in the majority of the conditions whilst psychophysical responses identified this technique as most satisfactory. Current results advocate the use of pushing when moving a load using a wheeled device. Suitability of one and two handed pulling remains contradictory, however results suggest that one handed pulling be employed at lower loads and two handed pulling at higher loads.

Orientador: Ricardo da Silva Torres / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-20T03:10:49Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Toffoli_TicianaOniki_M.pdf: 3006898 bytes, checksum: 09832cb2965a248613f643435f1f9be6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012 / Resumo: Bibliotecas digitais são avançados e complexos sistemas de informação que armazenam, agregam e gerenciam informações correlatas para que comunidades específicas possam ter acesso a objetos digitais de interesse. Grandes volumes de dados de diferentes tipos e formatos vêm sendo gerados. Muitos desses dados são organizados em objetos digitais que podem ser objetos complexos, ou seja, objetos compostos de outros objetos digitais. Como a especificação e a implementação de uma biblioteca digital são tarefas cruciais para um gerenciamento eficaz de documentos, ferramentas vêm sendo criadas para auxiliar na especificação e na implementação de bibliotecas digitais. Entretanto, poucas ferramentas existentes permitem a especificação de objetos complexos em bibliotecas digitais. Além disso, dificuldades são encontradas na especificação, na modelagem e no reuso desse tipo complexo de dado. O objetivo desta dissertação foi propor um metamodelo de bibliotecas digitais de objetos complexos para especificar instâncias de bibliotecas digitais que gerenciem objetos complexos. O novo metamodelo foi incluído na ferramenta 5SGraph, ferramenta gráfica baseada no formalismo 5S (Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios e Societies) que permite a especificação formal de bibliotecas digitais. A validação do novo metamodelo foi realizada por estudos de caso, por uma avaliação com usuários potenciais da ferramenta 5SGraph e pela implementação de um protótipo de uma biblioteca digital de documentos legais. Com os resultados obtidos, comprovou-se que a ferramenta 5SGraph estendida pode ser usada para especificar bibliotecas digitais de objetos complexos. As principais contribuições deste trabalho são: a caracterização de documentos legais como objetos complexos; a especificação de um metamodelo para especificação de bibliotecas digitais de objetos complexos; a implementação de um metamodelo para uso na ferramenta 5SGraph com o objetivo de especificar e instanciar bibliotecas digitais contendo objetos complexos; uma apresentação de estudos de casos para especificar objetos complexos de bibliotecas digitais na ferramenta 5SGraph; a validação do uso do novo metamodelo na ferramenta 5SGraph por usuários potenciais; e a especificação e a implementação de um protótipo de biblioteca digital de objetos complexos do tipo documento legal / Abstract: Digital libraries are advanced and complex information systems that store, aggregate, and manage correlated information. These systems are used by specific communities to access digital objects of interest. Due to the creation of huge collections of heterogeneous data (in terms of type and format), some of these data are organized in digital complex objects, in the sense that they are composed by other digital objects. Since specification and implementation of digital libraries are decisive tasks to achieve an effective management of documents, specific software tools have been created to help and facilitate the specification and implementation of digital libraries. However, few existing tools used to model digital libraries allow the specification of complex objects. Besides, this kind of complex data make more difficult the tasks of specification, modeling, and reusing of complex objects. The objective of this dissertation was to propose a digital library metamodel in order to specify instances of digital libraries that manage complex objects. The new metamodel was included in the 5SGraph tool. 5SGraph is a software tool based on the 5S theory (Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies) and provides a visual environment for the formal specification of digital libraries. The new metamodel was validated through: case studies, an evaluation with potential users, and the implementation of a digital library prototype containing legal documents. According to the results, the extended 5SGraph tool can be used to specify digital libraries of complex objects. The main contributions of this work are: the characterization of legal documents as complex objects; the specification of a metamodel to be used in the specification of digital libraries of complex objects; the implementation of a metamodel in the 5SGraph tool, making the tool capable of specifying digital libraries of complex objects; the presentation of some case studies using the 5SGraph tool to specify complex objects of digital libraries; validation of the new metamodel in the 5SGraph with potential users; and the specification and implementation of a digital library prototype containing complex objects related to legal documents / Mestrado / Ciência da Computação / Mestre em Ciência da Computação

My dissertation is about how engineering educators can use natural language processing (NLP) in implementing open-ended assessments in undergraduate engineering degree programs. Engineering students need to develop an ability to exercise judgment about better and worse outcomes of their decisions. One important consideration for improving engineering students' judgment involves creating sound educational assessments. Currently, engineering educators face a trad-off in selecting between open- and closed-ended assessments. Closed-ended assessments are easy to administer and score but are limited in what they measure given students are required, in many instances, to choose from a priori list. Conversely, open-ended assessments allow students to write their answers in any way they choose in their own words. However, open-ended assessments are likely to take more personal hours and lack consistency for both inter-grader and intra-grader grading. The solution to this challenge is the use of NLP. The working principles of the existing NLP models is the tallying of words, keyword matching, or syntactic similarity of words, which have often proved too brittle in capturing the language diversity that students could write. Therefore, the problem that motivated the present study is how to assess student responses based on underlying concepts and meanings instead of morphological characteristics or grammatical structure in sentences. Some of this problem can be addressed by developing NLP-assisted grading tools based on transformer-based large language models (TLLMs) such as BERT, MPNet, GPT-4. This is because TLLMs are trained on billions of words and have billions of parameters, thereby providing capacity to capture richer semantic representations of input text. Given the availability of TLLMs in the last five years, there is a significant lack of research related to integrating TLLMs in the assessment of open-ended engineering case studies. My dissertation study aims to fill this research gap. I developed and evaluated four NLP approaches based on TLLMs for thematic analysis of student responses to eight question prompts of engineering ethics and systems thinking case scenarios. The study's research design comprised the following steps. First, I developed an example bank for each question prompt with two procedures: (a) human-in-the-loop natural language processing (HILNLP) and (b) traditional qualitative coding. Second, I assigned labels using the example banks to unlabeled student responses with the two NLP techniques: (i) k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN), and (ii) Zero-Shot Classification (ZSC). Further, I utilized the following configurations of these NLP techniques: (i) kNN (when k=1), (ii) kNN (when k=3), (iii) ZSC (multi-labels=false), and (iv) ZSC (multi-labels=true). The kNN approach took input of both sentences and their labels from the example banks. On the other hand, the ZSC approach only took input of labels from the example bank. Third, I read each sentence or phrase along with the model's suggested label(s) to evaluate whether the assigned label represented the idea described in the sentence and assigned the following numerical ratings: accurate (1), neutral (0), and inaccurate (-1). Lastly, I used those numerical evaluation ratings to calculate accuracy of the NLP approaches. The results of my study showed moderate accuracy in thematically analyzing students' open-ended responses to two different engineering case scenarios. This is because no single method among the four NLP methods performed consistently better than the other methods across all question prompts. The highest accuracy rate varied between 53% and 92%, depending upon the question prompts and NLP methods. Despite these mixed results, this study accomplishes multiple goals. My dissertation demonstrates to community members that TLLMs have potential for positive impacts on improving classroom practices in engineering education. In doing so, my dissertation study takes up one aspect of instructional design: assessment of students' learning outcomes in engineering ethics and systems thinking skills. Further, my study derived important implications for practice in engineering education. First, I gave important lessons and guidelines for educators interested in incorporating NLP into their educational assessment. Second, the open-source code is uploaded to a GitHub repository, thereby making it more accessible to a larger group of users. Third, I gave suggestions for qualitative researchers on conducting NLP-assisted qualitative analysis of textual data. Overall, my study introduced state-of-the-art TLLM-based NLP approaches to a research field where it holds potential yet remains underutilized. This study can encourage engineering education researchers to utilize these NLP methods that may be helpful in analyzing the vast textual data generated in engineering education, thereby reducing the number of missed opportunities to glean information for actors and agents in engineering education. / Doctor of Philosophy / My dissertation is about how engineering educators can use natural language processing (NLP) in implementing open-ended assessments in undergraduate engineering degree programs. Engineering students need to develop an ability to exercise judgment about better and worse outcomes of their decisions. One important consideration for improving engineering students' judgment involves creating sound educational assessments. Currently, engineering educators face a trade-off in selecting between open- and closed-ended assessments. Closed-ended assessments are easy to administer and score but are limited in what they measure given students are required, in many instances, to choose from a priori list. Conversely, open-ended assessments allow students to write their answers in any way they choose in their own words. However, open-ended assessments are likely to take more personal hours and lack consistency for both inter-grader and intra-grader grading. The solution to this challenge is the use of NLP. The working principles of the existing NLP models are the tallying of words, keyword matching, or syntactic similarity of words, which have often proved too brittle in capturing the language diversity that students could write. Therefore, the problem that motivated the present study is how to assess student responses based on underlying concepts and meanings instead of morphological characteristics or grammatical structure in sentences. Some of this problem can be addressed by developing NLP-assisted grading tools based on transformer-based large language models (TLLMs). This is because TLLMs are trained on billions of words and have billions of parameters, thereby providing capacity to capture richer semantic representations of input text. Given the availability of TLLMs in the last five years, there is a significant lack of research related to integrating TLLMs in the assessment of open-ended engineering case studies. My dissertation study aims to fill this research gap. The results of my study showed moderate accuracy in thematically analyzing students' open-ended responses to two different engineering case scenarios. My dissertation demonstrates to community members that TLLMs have potential for positive impacts on improving classroom practices in engineering education. This study can encourage engineering education researchers to utilize these NLP methods that may be helpful in analyzing the vast textual data generated in engineering education, thereby reducing the number of missed opportunities to glean information for actors and agents in engineering education.

So Ting Pong. / Summary in Chinese. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Bibliography: leaves 150-151.

Orientador: Hans Kurt Edmund Liesenberg / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-19T21:42:32Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Maranesi_LuisAlfredoHarriss_M.pdf: 1573468 bytes, checksum: a5643eac32cc4886a7cfc43507758fd6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: Soluções de Software de Gestão Empresarial (ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning) no Brasil são normalmente de código proprietário, caras de adquirir e implantar. No mercado brasileiro micro e pequenas empresas poderiam se beneficiar muito com a existência de soluções de ERP mais acessíveis. Uma possível solução seria o uso de programas de código livre para atender a essa demanda, tal como o projeto Apache Open For Business, um conjunto de aplicativos e um framework voltado para soluções de gestão empresarial. Neste estudo espera-se investigar a localização (processo de adaptação de um sistema para uma determinada cultura). Não apenas no que diz respeito a mera tradução dele, mas a aspectos legais, fiscais e contábeis, buscando aumentar sua usabilidade e viabilidade para empresários brasileiros / Abstract: In Brazil, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software are usually proprietary, expensive to acquire and deploy. Micro and small businesses could benefit greatly from the existence of more affordable ERP solutions. One possible solution would be to use open source software to meet this demand. Of relevance in this scenario there is the project Apache Open For Business, a suite of applications and a framework aimed at business management solutions. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the localization (i.e. adapting computer software to different cultural contexts) of this software, not only regarding to mere translation, but also the legal, tax and accounting aspects, seeking to increase its usability and feasibility for Brazilian businessmen. / Mestrado / Ciência da Computação / Mestre em Ciência da Computação