BACKGROUND The circulating neutrophil count was commonly believed to be influenced by altitude. At present, neutrophil reference ranges (RRs) for very low birth weight (VLBW) neonates are only available from the sea level and from high altitude. This study aimed to construct RRs for neutrophils in VLBW infants in an intermediate-altitude area and assess its usefulness in evaluation for sepsis. ...

BACKGROUND Rapid review (RR) products are inherently appealing as they are intended to be less time-consuming and resource-intensive than traditional systematic reviews (SRs); however, there is concern about the rigor of methods and reliability of results. In 2013 to 2014, a workgroup comprising representatives from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's Evidence-based Practice Center...

– One of the important applications of robots is in material handling and transport of various shaped objects. In cases where an object cannot be directly grasped by the robot gripper, and must be carried by a hook, it may be subject to undesirable swings during transport. This paper presents an analytical method for minimizing the oscillation of a suspended object during transport. This method...

This paper presents a model of sensorimotor learning grounded in the sensory streams of a real humanoid robot (the iCub robot). The robot participates in a replication of two developmental psychology experiments, in which it is shown how spatial cues are sufficient for associating linguistic labels with objects. The robot, using auto-associated self-organizing maps connecting is perceptual inpu...

When executing commands, a robot has a certain level of contextual knowledge about the environment in which it operates. Taking this knowledge into account can be beneficial to disambiguate commands with multiple interpretations. We present an approach that uses combinatory categorial grammars for improving the semantic parsing of robot commands that takes into account the spatial context of th...

Describing the semantics of natural language spatial expressions such as (1) ‘moving forward slowly’ and (2) ‘you’re in front of the desk’ is not a straightforward task. In this paper we describe a setting with a mobile robot where the meanings of such expressions are learned from a set of robot data and natural language descriptions made by a human commentator. We start with simple robot-cente...

We propose a combined spatial and non-spatial probabilistic modeling methodology motivated by an inspection task performed by a group of miniature robots. Our models explicitly consider spatiality and yield accurate predictions on system performance. An agent’s spatial distribution over time is modeled by the Fokker–Planck diffusion model and complements current non-spatial microscopic and macr...

In conversation, people often use spatial relationships to describe their environment, e.g., “There is a desk in front of me and a doorway behind it”, and to issue directives, e.g., “Go around the desk and through the doorway.” In our research, we have been investigating the use of spatial relationships to establish a natural communication mechanism between people and robots, in particular, for...