Andrew Lynn

HOLISTIC ENGINEERING DESIGN: A COMBINED SYNCHRONOUS AND ASYNCHRONOUS APPROACH

To aid the creation and through-life support of large, complex engineering products, organizations are placing a greater emphasis on constructing complete and accurate records of design activities. Current documentary approaches are not sufficient to capture activities and decisions in their entirety and can lead to organizations revisiting and in some cases reworking design decisions in order to understand previous design episodes. Design activities are undertaken in a variety of modes; many of which are dichotomous, and thus each require separate documentary mechanisms to capture information in an efficient manner. It is possible to identify the modes of learning and transaction to describe whether an activity is aimed at increasing a level of understanding or whether it involves manipulating information to achieve a tangible task. The dichotomy of interest in this paper is that of synchronous and asynchronous working, where engineers may work alternately as part of a group or as individuals and where different forms of record are necessary to adequately capture the processes and rationale employed in each mode. This paper introduces complimentary approaches to achieving richer representations of design activities performed synchronously and asynchronously, and through the undertaking of a design based case study, highlights the benefit of each approach. The resulting records serve to provide a more complete depiction of activities undertaken, and provide positive direction for future co-development of the approaches.

Towards crowdsourcing translation tasks in library cataloguing, a pilot study

Although automated translation systems are increasingly impressive they are still far from perfect, and even casual use demonstrates that they can?t produce robust, error free, transcriptions of arbitrary text. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that Crowdsourcing of translation tasks is not only viable but, in many cases, provides results equal to more expensive and slower alternatives. This paper provides a brief survey of academic and commercial systems that harness collective intelligence in the translation of text, and presents the results of a pilot conducted using MTurk for the translation of non-Roman scripts of unknown providence. It concludes by proposing a workflow for integration of Crowdsourcing in to the cataloguing of foreign texts.

Crowdsourcing solutions to 2D irregular strip packing problems from Internet workers

Many industrial processes require the nesting of 2D profiles prior to the cutting, or stamping, of components from raw sheet material. Despite decades of sustained academic effort, algorithmic solutions are still sub-optimal and produce results that can frequently be improved by manual inspection. However, the Internet offers the prospect of novel ‘human-in-the-loop’ approaches to nesting problems that uses online workers to produce packing efficiencies beyond the reach of current CAM packages. To investigate the feasibility of such an approach, this paper reports on the speed and efficiency of online workers engaged in the interactive nesting of six standard benchmark data-sets. To ensure the results accurately characterise the diverse educational and social backgrounds of the many different labour forces available online, the study has been conducted with subjects based in both Indian IT service (i.e. Rural BPOs) centres and a network of homeworkers in Northern Scotland. The results (i.e. time and packing efficiency) of the human workers are contrasted with both the baseline performance of a commercial CAM package and recent research results. The paper concludes that online workers could consistently achieve packing efficiencies roughly 4% higher than the commercial based-line established by the project. Beyond characterising the abilities of online workers to nest components, the results also make a contribution to the development of algorithmic solutions by reporting new solutions to the benchmark problems and demonstrating methods for assessing the packing strategy employed by the best workers.

A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Impact of Digital Libraries on Engineering Design Learning

Engineering design is an information intensive activity. Right from need finding to final prototyping, designers are constantly acquiring, assimilating, transforming and giving out information. In fact in a design process, designers act as autonomous learners actively seeking and processing information. However, the mechanism by which information influences design learning is not well understood. This paper presents a conceptual framework for studying the impact of information resources on design learning based on a survey conducted on engineering students participating in a two-week long global collaborative design exercise to build bicycles out of paper materials.Copyright

Computing the Incomputable with Human Processing Units

Initially commercial crowdsourcing services (such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk) were focused largely on providing micro-labor services for tasks such as image labeling and text processing. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that these services can also be regarded as providing parallel, on-demand, networks of (so-called) ‘Human Processing Units’ (HPUs). Such services are able to provide specialist computational facilities in a manner analogous to the way Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) support the specialist process of high speed rendering. This paper describes how this new technology could extend the functionality of mechanical CAD/CAM or PLM systems. Crucial to the commercial feasibility of such systems is the ability to access networks of HPUs where engineering data can be processed securely (unlike open crowdsourcing sites such as mTurk). The paper reports the initial results of work done to establish the feasibility of a proposed architecture for integrating HPUs into desktop CAD that uses established BPO centers in rural India to provide a secure source of geometric intelligence.

A novel hybrid intelligence approach for 2D packing through internet crowdsourcing

Packing problems on its current state are being utilized for wide area of industrial applications. The aim of present research is to create and implement an intelligent system that tackles the problem of 2D packing of objects inside a 2D container, such that objects do not overlap and the container area is to be maximized. The packing problem becomes easier, when regular/rectangular objects and container are used. In most of the practical situations, the usage of irregular objects comes to existence. To solve the packing problem of irregular objects inside a rectangular container, a hybrid intelligence approach is introduced in our proposed work. The combination of machine intelligence and human intelligence is referred as the hybrid intelligence or semi-automated approach in the proposed methodology. The incorporation of human intelligence in the outcome of machine intelligence is possible to obtain using the internet crowdsourcing as we wish to handle the packing problem through internet crowdsourcing involving rural people. The proposed methodology is tested on different standard data sets and it is observed that it has clear advantage over both manual as well as fully automated heuristic based methods in terms of time and space efficiency.

Social implications of crowd sourcing in rural Scotland

Various surveys mentioned that the benefits of ubiquitous crowdsourcing are reaped by people located in metro and smaller cities. The reach of crowdsourcing to rural population is questionable. The aim of this research is to bridge widening urban and rural divide by providing knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing tasks to rural work force which could provide long term benefits to them as well as improve supporting infrastructure. This paper reports an initial study of the demographic of small samples of twenty two rural homeworkers in Scotland, their motivation to do crowdsourcing work, present main occupation, computer skills, views on rural infrastructure and finally their skills on solving three spatial visualization tests. The survey shows that flexible hours of working, extra income, and work life balance are the three important factors emphasized as motivational constructs to do crowdsourcing work. Their skills on solving a spatial visualization test is equivalent to the literature reported results, and also high correlations are identified between these tests. These results demonstrate that with minimum training the homeworkers could able to solve knowledge-intensive industrial spatial reasoning problems to increase their earning potentials.

Specification of an information capture system to support distributed engineering design teams

The global distribution of design teams and the support of design activities within the digital domain has seen an increase in the need for computational systems for information capture, storage and use. Although significant work has taken place in managing detailed design information, such as CAD data and BOMS, there is currently little support for teams in the capture and communication of the informal and tacit information exchanged, often intensively, in design meetings and other non-computational based activity. The challenge facing organisations is to easily capture this information and knowledge for re-use within the life cycle of the project or for future projects without inhibiting either the designer or the design process. This paper introduces an information capture system architecture and highlights how the system can be of significant benefit when providing design teams with information and knowledge support within distributed design environments. The overall aim is to provide design teams with pertinent information, past examples and possible solutions to the design problem irrespective of their location, providing greater efficiency and more sustainable approaches to engineering by improving the through-life support. Current and future work in this regard is outlined.