Consulting Software Services

This paper presents a real-life example of using industrial robots to automate the testing procedures of aerospace products. Three different scenarios are proposed as potential solutions to allow a Mobile Manipulator to help automate the environmental testing process. An overview of different simulation and Off Line Programming (OLP) software packages are presented and discussed as methods to test and validate the scenarios. A framework is presented consisting of a product data model to be used for the identification of the different products and a unified modelling system is introduced to allow information exchange at the operational level. The focus of this paper and future work is towards integrating all the elements of the proposed framework into a human machine interface to create a collaborative process involving human, robots, machines and products.

Engineered microorganisms in biotechnology present biosafety and environmental management challenges. As the synthetic biology market develops and deploys new technologies, these engineered organisms may escape into unintended environments. Improved predictive computational tools are necessary to assess the potential establishment risk and environmental location of these escaped engineered microorganisms, assisting their design and management. Here, we present EnCen, a risk assessment Python software package that predicts the environmental range of engineered microorganisms through annotated functional one-hot-encoded similarity between the engineered microorganism and resident microorganisms of a given environment. EnCen utilizes publicly available composite metagenomes as representatives of microbial environments that occur along an agriculture-water cycle and can be customized for any additional target environment. This tool was deployed against case studies reported in the literature and to reassess commercially available bacterial biopesticides, highlighting both the successful recapture of previously reported dynamics and the identification of select commercial products that pose a wider establishment risk in multiple environments. When further utilizing EnCen to investigate the receiving environments comprising the central database, key enzyme classes are mapped as characteristics to select environments, prioritizing certain modifications likely leading to a greater risk (or effectiveness) of establishment. The results demonstrate that EnCen meaningfully summarizes publicly available metagenomic data, prioritizes environments to monitor for adverse effects, and analyzes potential impacts on microbial community composition and functioning. Overall, this study demonstrates a computational approach to managing engineered microorganisms, aiding in the safe deployment and benefit of industrial synthetic biology.

Analyses of lawsuits against gastroenterologists suggest that the disorders of colon cancer and inflammatory bowel disease are among the more common disorders resulting in malpractice claims, with colon cancer suits receiving some of the highest monetary judgments. Unfortunately, that composite data does not specify the exact alleged wrongdoing, but uses global categories such as "errors of diagnosis." This review will focus on potential legal pitfalls regarding those disorders. The focus is on the legal theories, not the exact medical approach recommended, and is intended as general education, and not legal advice for any specific patient.

Sports memorabilia collecting is a $3bn per year industry in the United States. One popular and easily obtained memento is the sports celebrity photograph. Protected by the Copyright Act 1976, owners of sports celebrity photographs are entitled to several exclusive rights that restrict other’s use of their photographs. This article discusses the key exceptions of United States law that enable sports memorabilia collectors to market, trade, buy, and sell photographs, as well as outlining the potential legal pitfalls collectors should avoid, such as the duplication of photographs and the display of photographs over the internet.

The civil jury has been under attack in recent years for being unreliable and incompetent. Considering the myriad causes for poor civil juror decision-making, the current investigation explores both procedural and evidentiary issues that impact juror's decisions. Specifically, the first phase of this dissertation examines how jurors (mis)use evidence pertaining to the litigants when determining liability and awarding damages. After investigating how jurors utilize evidence, the focus shifts to exploring the utility of procedural reforms designed to improve decision-making (specifically revising the instructions on the laws in the case and bifurcating the damage phases of the trial). Using the results from the first two phases of the research, the final study involves manipulating pieces of evidence related to the litigants while exploring the effects that revising the judicial instructions have on the utilization of evidence in particular and on decision-making in general. This dissertation was run on-line, allowing participants to access the study materials at their convenience. After giving consent, participants read the scenario of a fictitious product liability case with the litigant manipulations incorporated into the summary. Participants answered several attitudinal, case-specific, and comprehension questions, and were instructed to find in favor of one side and award any damages they felt warranted. Exploratory factor analyses, Probit and linear regressions, and path analyses were used to analyze the data (M-plus and SPSS were the software packages used to conduct the analyses). Results indicated that misuse of evidence was fairly frequent, though the mock jurors also utilized evidence appropriately. Although the results did not support bifurcation as a viable procedural reform, revising the judicial instructions did significantly increase comprehension rates. Trends in the data suggested that better decision-making occurred when the revised instructions were used, thus providing empirical support for this procedural reform as a means of improving civil jury decision-making. Implications for actual trials and attorneys are discussed.

Software today provides the foundation for research in essentially all disciplines of the sciences and engineering, and in many cases the software packages are developed by lose collaborations of people who release their contributions under open source licenses. Here, we are collecting necessary ingredients for successful scientific software projects to answer the questions: 1. What makes some projects successful (user base, longevity, funding) and others not? 2. How can we learn from successful projects? What are some best practices? This poster is a summary of the paper [BH13] and a lot of the lessons come from us being two of the main developers of the open source finite element library deal.II [BHH15] and the developers of the open source mantle convection community code ASPECT [BH15, KHB12]. Overarching goals Promote community growth Save developer time Engineer for maintainability 1. Quality Provide promised functionality Provide reasonably bug free code Easy setup/installation Goal: acquire/retain users Best practices: 1. Aim for “it just works” 2. Promised functionality more important than features 3. Avoid bugs using infrastructure (see 4.)

The diagnostic values of the aVR lead or "Vereckei algorithm," and the lead II R-wave peak time (RWPT) criterion, recently devised for the differential diagnosis of wide QRS complex tachycardias (WCTs), were compared. A total of 212 WCTs (142 ventricular tachycardias [VTs], 62 supraventricular tachycardias [SVT], and eight preexcitation SVTs) from 145 patients with proven electrophysiologic diagnoses were retrospectively analyzed by seven examiners blinded to the electrophysiologic diagnoses. The overall test accuracy of the Vereckei algorithm was superior to that of the RWPT criterion (84.3% vs. 79.6%; p = 0.0003). The sensitivity of the Vereckei algorithm for VT diagnosis was greater than that of RWPT criterion (92.4% vs. 79.1%; p < 0.0001). The negative predictive value (NPV) for the Vereckei algorithm was also greater (77.8%; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 73.6% to 82.1%) than that of the RWPT criterion (61.6%; 95% CI = 57.6% to 65.6%). The specificity of the Vereckei algorithm was lower than that of the RWPT criterion (64.7% vs. 80.9%; p < 0.0001). The positive predictive value (PPV) was also lower for the Vereckei algorithm (86.4%; 95% CI = 84.4% to 88.4%) than for the RWPT criterion (90.9%; 95% CI = 89.1% to 92.8%). Incorrect diagnoses made by the Vereckei algorithm were mainly due to misdiagnosis of SVT as VT (65.7% of cases), and those made by the RWPT criterion were due to the more dangerous misdiagnosis of VT as SVT (72.5% of cases). The Vereckei algorithm was superior in overall test accuracy, sensitivity, and NPV for VT diagnosis and inferior in specificity and PPV to the RWPT criterion. All of these parameters were lower in "real life" than those reported by the original authors for each of the particular electrocardiographic methods.

During the last 30 years, there was a surge for coupling thermodynamics and phase diagrams in the field of material science. Many large programmers as well as the exploring of versatile solution models, the description of the magnetism energy of elements and solutions, etc. were developed. Thermo-Calc, as one of the most successful commercial software package for calculation of phase equilibrium from a broad database, offered appropriate guidance for the materials study and reduced the amount of experiments. For example, the slag database in this commercial software package could be used for predicting the composition of oxide and sulphide inclusion formed during the deoxidation and solidification process with a specific multiphase equilibrium calculation.

The LSST project will provide public access to a database catalog that, in its final year, is estimated to include 26 billion stars and galaxies in dozens of trillion detections in multiple petabytes. Because we are not aware of an existing open-source database implementation that has been demonstrated to efficiently satisfy astronomers' spatial self-joining and cross-matching queries at this scale, we have implemented Qserv, a distributed shared-nothing SQL database query system. To speed development, Qserv relies on two successful open-source software packages: the MySQL RDBMS and the Xrootd distributed file system. We describe Qserv's design, architecture, and ability to scale to LSST's data requirements. We illustrate its potential with test results on a 150-node cluster using 55 billion rows and 30 terabytes of simulated data. These results demonstrate the soundness of Qserv's approach and the scale it achieves on today's hardware.

Conventional power system optimal power flow (OPF) solutions utilize standard optimization techniques. These techniques limit the practical value and scope of OPF applications. Realistic OPF solutions require special attention to the constraint enforcement and control action curtailment. From a practical point of view, an OPF does not need to find a rigid minimum solution. Certain trade-offs among: (1) minimizing the objective function; (2) satisfying constraints; and (3) moving control variables would be desirable. In this paper, a fuzzy set method is applied to the OPF problem to model these considerations. The method has been implemented in a successive linear programming OPF software package. Test results based on the PG&E network are promising.

National user facilities such as the NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) require a significant base of software to treat the data produced by their specialized measurement instruments. There is no universally accepted and used data treatment package for the reduction, visualization, and analysis of inelastic neutron scattering data. However, we believe that the software development approach adopted at the NCNR has some key characteristics that have resulted in a successful software package called DAVE (the Data Analysis and Visualization Environment). It is developed using a high level scientific programming language, and it has been widely adopted in the United States and abroad. In this paper we describe the development approach, elements of the DAVE software suite, its usage and impact, and future directions and opportunities for development.