Digital Commons Network^™

The Effects Of Robot Voices And Appearances On Users' Emotion Recognition And Subjective Perception, Sangjin Ko, Jaclyn A. Barnes, Jiayuan Dong, Chung Hyuk Park, Ayanna Howard, Myounghoon Jeon

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

As the influence of social robots in people's daily lives grows, research on understanding people's perception of robots including sociability, trust, acceptance, and preference becomes more pervasive. Research has considered visual, vocal, or tactile cues to express robots' emotions, whereas little research has provided a holistic view in examining the interactions among different factors influencing emotion perception. We investigated multiple facets of user perception on robots during a conversational task by varying the robots' voice types, appearances, and emotions. In our experiment, 20 participants interacted with two robots having four different voice types. While participants were reading fairy tales to …

Fibroblast-Generated Extracellular Matrix Guides Anastomosis During Wound Healing In An Engineered Lymphatic Skin Flap, Alvis Chiu, Wenkai Jia, Yumeng Sun, Jeremy Goldman, Feng Zhao

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

A healthy lymphatic system is required to return excess interstitial fluid back to the venous circulation. However, up to 49% of breast cancer survivors eventually develop breast cancer-related lymphedema due to lymphatic injuries from lymph node dissections or biopsies performed to treat cancer. While early-stage lymphedema can be ameliorated by manual lymph drainage, no cure exists for late-stage lymphedema when lymph vessels become completely dysfunctional. A viable late-stage treatment is the autotransplantation of functional lymphatic vessels. Here we report on a novel engineered lymphatic flap that may eventually replace the skin flaps used in vascularized lymph vessel transfers. The engineered …

Utilization Of Mechanically Recycled Carbon Fibers In Vinyl Ester Composites, Khaled Alharmoodi, Amir Hussain Idrisi, Abdel Hamid Ismail Mourad, Basim Abu-Jdayil

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

As we enter the twenty-first century, the aviation sector is expected to thrive as flying becomes the primary mode of transportation between states or nations. With such a demand, there is a corresponding need to manufacture aircraft components. The study focused on recycling carbon fiber composites received from the STRATA company, which were cut-off/waste material generated during the manufacture of airplane components. The cut-offs were then reduced to powder form using a standard face milling machine in three sizes (90, 150, and 250 µm). After, the powder was utilized to fabricate vinyl ester composites with four weight percentages (10%, 20%, …

An Assessment Of Blood Vessel Remodeling Of Nanofibrous Poly(Ε-Caprolactone) Vascular Grafts In A Rat Animal Model, Jana Horakova, Tereza Blassova, Zbynek Tonar, Connor Mccarthy, Katerina Strnadova, David Lukas, Petr Mikes, Patrick Bowen, Roger J. Guillory Ii, Megan C. Frost, Jeremy Goldman

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

The development of an ideal vascular prosthesis represents an important challenge in terms of the treatment of cardiovascular diseases with respect to which new materials are being considered that have produced promising results following testing in animal models. This study focuses on nanofibrous polycaprolactone-based grafts assessed by means of histological techniques 10 days and 6 months following suturing as a replacement for the rat aorta. A novel stereological approach for the assessment of cellular distribution within the graft thickness was developed. The cellularization of the thickness of the graft was found to be homogeneous after 10 days and to have …

Proposal For And Validation Of Novel Risk-Based Process To Reduce The Risk Of Construction Site Fatalities (Major Accident Prevention (Map) Program), Roberta Selleck, Marcus Cattani, Maureen Hassall

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Despite developments in the prevention of fatalities in the construction industry, fatalities resulting from well-known hazards continue at an unacceptable rate. Construction fatality prevention literature describes risk management techniques to provide ‘early warning’ of potential events. In dynamic construction project environments, these ‘early warnings’ are missed resulting in serious and fatal events. Critical Control Risk Management (CCRM) provides an alternative strategy to prevent fatal events in the construction industry. However, no research exists that explores the application of CCRM to actual construction projects. This study aims to design, develop, and validate a construction fatality prevention program using CCRM principles through …

Editorial: Green Chemistry Biocatalysis, Barry J. Ryan, Gary T. Henehan, Bekir E. Eser, Ning Li, Zheng Guo, Gemma K. Kinsella

Articles

Editorial on the Research Topic: Green chemistry biocatalysis

Digital Twin Applications In 3d Concrete Printing, Yuxin Wang, Farhad Aslani, Arcady Dyskin, Elena Pasternak

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

The benefits of 3D concrete printing (3DCP) include reducing construction time and costs, providing design freedom, and being environmentally friendly. This technology is expected to be effective in addressing the global house shortage. This review highlights the main 3DCP applications and four critical challenges. It is proposed to combine 3D concrete printing with Digital Twin (DT) technology to meet the challenges the 3DCP faces and improve quality and sustainability. This paper provides a critical review of research into the application of DT technology in 3DCP, categorize the applications and directions proposed according to different lifecycles, and explore the possibility of …

Motor Cortical Excitability And Pre-Supplementary Motor Area Neurochemistry In Healthy Adults With Substantia Nigra Hyperechogenicity, Gabrielle Todd, Caroline D. Rae, Janet L. Taylor, Nigel C. Rogasch, Jane E. Butler, Michael Hayes, Robert A. Wilcox, Simon C. Gandevia, Karl Aoun, Adrian Esterman, Simon J. G. Lewis, Julie M. Hall, Elie Matar, Jana Godau, Daniela Berg, Christian Plewnia, Anna-Katharina Von Thaler, Clarence Chiang, Kay L. Double

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Substantia nigra (SN) hyperechogenicity, viewed with transcranial ultrasound, is a risk marker for Parkinson's disease. We hypothesized that SN hyperechogenicity in healthy adults aged 50 – 70 years is associated with reduced short-interval intracortical inhibition in primary motor cortex, and that the reduced intracortical inhibition is associated with neurochemical markers of activity in the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA). Short-interval intracortical inhibition and intracortical facilitation in primary motor cortex was assessed with paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation in 23 healthy adults with normal (n = 14; 61 ± 7 yrs) or abnormally enlarged (hyperechogenic; n = 9; 60 ± 6 yrs) area …

Laboratory-Scale Investigation On Shear Behavior Of Non-Persistent Joints And Joint Infill Using Lattice-Spring-Based Synthetic Rock Mass Model, Mariam Al-E'Bayat, Taghi Sherizadeh, Dogukan Guner

Mining Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Discontinuities Mainly Control the Mechanical Behavior of Rock Mass and Cause a Significant Reduction in the Rock Mass Strength. Joint Persistency and Joint Infill Conditions Are Considered the Most Significant Joint Parameters that Control the Mechanical Response of Rock Mass. in This Study, Numerical and Statistical Analyses Were Performed on Pre-Cracked Specimens with Two Flaws to Investigate the Effect of Joint Persistence Parameters on Shear Strength. in Addition, an Extensive Study Was Conducted to Explore the Effect of Infilled Mineral Strength, Infill Thickness, and Infill Wall Roughness on Shear Strength. the Lattice-Spring-Based Synthetic Rock Mass (LS-SRM) Approach Was Utilized to …

Interview No. 1749, Jesse Muñoz Rev.

Combined Interviews

Jesse Munoz was an El Paso priest from Our Lady of the Light Church. He was born in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, in 1940 during the depression years. When he turned eleven him and his family moved to El Paso, Texas in hopes of a better life and education. At the age of fourteen he took a bus to New York and worked there for over a year. He then had enough money to go to Spain and pay for an education and many years later he came back to El Paso, Texas.

At the time Rev. Munoz came back to …

Interview No. 1750, Tarango

Combined Interviews

The audio is unintelligible

Interview No. 1754, Ortega

Combined Interviews

Her last name is Ortega, she was part of the Farah Strike at El Paso, Texas. She says that the Union was getting stronger because more people were getting involved. When she was working, she will notice cases of harassment and she says that many of the supervisors were trying to get advantage of other workers. She was part of the strike that many other people participated because they were fighting for their rights and for a better wage. When she was working at the company, she says that many workers will get fired for no reason or reasons that …

Interview No. 1755, Gandara

Combined Interviews

He says that he stared working with his father after returning from the ARMY. He says that when he was working, they had a union that sometimes will fire people for nothing and they will have to legally open a case against that and he says that in order to get a response you needed to wait a long time. He says that one of his duties in the job was cutting ropes into different sizes. There is another woman interview that is his wife and she says that women were a minority in their job and they had to …

Interview No. 1756, Eva Valdez

Combined Interviews

Eva was offered to join the strike during her time working at Farah Manufacturing Company, she first felt kind of scared because she didn’t want to be part of a strike. Eva didn’t understand what the union strike was about but she would later find out.

Eva’s first days at the Farah Manufacturing Company were filled with patches and jeans. She mentioned that she had to put patches in clothing items all day for long periods of time. For her work she would get pay less than $1.60 an hour. Some of her women coworkers had been working there for …

Interview No. 1761, Rios

Combined Interviews

Everyone at Farah hated their job, that’s how Rios described it when she first started working there. She didn’t understand the problems happening at Farah at Paisano that made every worker hate going to work every day. A couple of days pass, she received her first check and realized that she got payed very little, when the manager told her that she would be getting payed more. She realized that she started her work there as a lie and that the contract that she sign was also a total lie that the managers didn’t respect.

At first, she thought that …

Interview No. 1765, Garcia

Combined Interviews

Garcia has lived and worked in El Paso, Texas. She mentioned that poverty in Mexico is worse than the poverty in the United States. Garcia left Mexico 5 years ago to get a better life in the USA. She left her children with her mother and got on the train to get to El Paso, Texas. She first arrived to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico and stayed with a family during a couple of weeks, while she gathered her papers to get a passport. After she got her passport she went to El Paso and started working and sending money back to …

Interview No. 1768, Arieta

Combined Interviews

When Arieta initially started working there, she said that everyone at Farah detested their jobs. She didn't get the issues at Farah in Paisano that made every employee dread reporting to work each day. After a few days had passed, she received her first check and found she had been paid very little before the manager informed her that her pay would be increasing. She came to the realization that the contract she signed when she first started working there was also a complete fabrication that the bosses didn't regard.

She initially believed that Farah employed anyone who was willing …

Interview No. 1770, Del Hierro

Combined Interviews

Nearly all of Farah's employees were exhausted and tired of work. That was when Del Hierro started working there. She didn’t understand the problem in Farah of Paisano that was causing all workers to be reluctant to go to work every day. A few days went by and she received her first check and when the manager told her she would be paid more, she realized she had barely been paid, and realized that the contract she signed was also a complete lie and not respected by her manager.

At first, she thought the hiring process would be so easy …

Interview No. 1775, Jaramillo De Palacio

Combined Interviews

She mentions that the companies were demanding the same quality of work and they were not realizing the amount of work they were giving to the workers, and it was an excessive amount of it. She says that the strikes separated people because it was a movement that had different opinions, but in the end they were fighting for the same thing. The union was created to support employees but the workers realized that that wasn’t true at all. When the strike first started she couldn’t ever imagine that the strike was going to be as big as it was, …

Interview No. 1776, Paraa

Combined Interviews

She says that everything is back in busisnes at Farah and that the new president of Farah is not fighting with the union any more. She says that many people are getting left off and many people just like her she was let off and came back 3 times in a row and she says that she is thinking that is better for her to start studying. She says that Willy Farah, the owner, was very hated and loved at the same tiem and she says that many people will give them gifts such as bringing him mariachi and workers …

Interview No. 1778, Herrera

Combined Interviews

She said her husband worked for Farah, but they treated him very poorly, and were told to keep working with the bad consditionds. All they could do was keep working, but eventually tired of the abuse. She says that his His job at Farah included cutting metals that left a lot of metal debrie, which were labor intensive and heavy jobs. She claims that before the union there was no one to turn to for help and his husband was part of the union. They believed a union would improve their situation, but it didn't work. When you were hired, …

Interview No. 1783, Avalos

Combined Interviews

Avalos grandmother is from Mexico. Her father was always on duty and her mother passed away when Avalos was four years old. After her mother passing, her grandmother adopted them and she became their mother. Avalos considers her grandmother her real mother, because she did everything for them. Avalos thanks her grandmother for everything she did for them even when she was an older woman struggling with her health. During her childhood before living with her grandmother she was at an orphanage for a couple of months. Once Avalos and her siblings went to stay with her grandmother their lives …

A Fair Incentive Scheme For Community Health Workers, Avinandan Bose, Tracey Li, Arunesh Sinha, Tien Mai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Community health workers (CHWs) play a crucial role in the last mile delivery of essential health services to under-served populations in low-income countries. Many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) provide training and support to enable CHWs to deliver health services to their communities, with no charge to the recipients of the services. This includes monetary compensation for the work that CHWs perform, which is broken down into a series of well-defined tasks. In this work, we partner with a NGO D-Tree International to design a fair monetary compensation scheme for tasks performed by CHWs in the semi-autonomous region of Zanzibar in Tanzania, …

Lightweight And Non-Invasive User Authentication On Earables, Changshuo Hu, Xiao Ma, Dong Ma, Ting Dang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The widespread adoption of wireless earbuds has advanced the developments in earable-based sensing in various domains like entertainment, human-computer interaction, and health monitoring. Recently, researchers have shown an increased interest in user authentication using earables. Despite the successes witnessed in acoustic probing and speech based authentication systems, this paper proposed a lightweight and non-invasive ambient sound based user authentication scheme. It employs the difference between the in-ear and out-ear sounds to estimate the individual-specific occluded ear canal transfer function (OECTF). Specifically, the {out-ear, in-ear} scaling factors at different frequency bands are captured via linear regression and treated as the OECTF …

Mitigating Popularity Bias For Users And Items With Fairness-Centric Adaptive Recommendation, Zhongzhou Liu, Yuan Fang, Min Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommendation systems are popular in many domains. Researchers usually focus on the effectiveness of recommendation (e.g., precision) but neglect the popularity bias that may affect the fairness of the recommendation, which is also an important consideration that could influence the benefits of users and item providers. A few studies have been proposed to deal with the popularity bias, but they often face two limitations. Firstly, most studies only consider fairness for one side - either users or items, without achieving fairness jointly for both. Secondly, existing methods are not sufficiently tailored to each individual user or item to cope with …

Learning To Count Isomorphisms With Graph Neural Networks, Xingtong Yu, Zemin Liu, Yuan Fang, Xinming Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Subgraph isomorphism counting is an important problem on graphs, as many graph-based tasks exploit recurring subgraph patterns. Classical methods usually boil down to a backtracking framework that needs to navigate a huge search space with prohibitive computational costs. Some recent studies resort to graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn a low-dimensional representation for both the query and input graphs, in order to predict the number of subgraph isomorphisms on the input graph. However, typical GNNs employ a node-centric message passing scheme that receives and aggregates messages on nodes, which is inadequate in complex structure matching for isomorphism counting. Moreover, on …

On Generalized Degree Fairness In Graph Neural Networks, Zemin Liu, Trung Kien Nguyen, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Conventional graph neural networks (GNNs) are often confronted with fairness issues that may stem from their input, including node attributes and neighbors surrounding a node. While several recent approaches have been proposed to eliminate the bias rooted in sensitive attributes, they ignore the other key input of GNNs, namely the neighbors of a node, which can introduce bias since GNNs hinge on neighborhood structures to generate node representations. In particular, the varying neighborhood structures across nodes, manifesting themselves in drastically different node degrees, give rise to the diverse behaviors of nodes and biased outcomes. In this paper, we first define …

Flexible Job-Shop Scheduling Via Graph Neural Network And Deep Reinforcement Learning, Wen Song, Xinyang Chen, Qiqiang Li, Zhiguang Cao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recently, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been applied to learn priority dispatching rules (PDRs) for solving complex scheduling problems. However, the existing works face challenges in dealing with flexibility, which allows an operation to be scheduled on one out of multiple machines and is often required in practice. Such one-to-many relationship brings additional complexity in both decision making and state representation. This article considers the well-known flexible job-shop scheduling problem and addresses these issues by proposing a novel DRL method to learn high-quality PDRs end to end. The operation selection and the machine assignment are combined as a composite decision. …

Contrastive Learning Approach To Word-In-Context Task For Low-Resource Languages, Pei-Chi Lo, Yang-Yin Lee, Hsien-Hao Chen, Agus Trisnajaya Kwee, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Word in context (WiC) task aims to determine whether a target word’s occurrences in two sentences share the same sense. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Learning WiC (CLWiC) framework to improve the learning of sentence/word representations and classification of target word senses in the sentence pair when performing WiC on lowresource languages. In representation learning, CLWiC trains a pre-trained language model’s ability to cope with lowresource languages using both unsupervised and supervised contrastive learning. The WiC classifier learning further finetunes the language model with WiC classification loss under two classifier architecture options, SGBERT and WiSBERT, which use single-encoder …

Encapsulation Of Orange Peel Oil In Biopolymeric Nanocomposites To Control Its Release Under Different Conditions, Sanaz Ghasemi, Elham Assadpour, Mohammad Saeed Kharazmi, Shima Jafarzadeh, Masoumeh Zargar, Seid Mahdi Jafari

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Orange peel oil (OPO) is one of the most common flavorings used in the food industry, but it is volatile under environmental conditions (the presence of light, oxygen, humidity, and high temperatures). Encapsulation by biopolymer nanocomposites is a suitable and novel strategy to improve the bioavailability and stability of OPO and its controlled release. In this study, we investigated the release profile of OPO from freeze-dried optimized nanocomposite powders as a function of pH (3, 7, 11) and temperature (30, 60, and 90 °C), and within a simulated salivary system. Finally, its release kinetics modelling was performed using experimental models. …