Bridging the gap: A geroscience primer for neuroscientists with potential collaborative applications

While neurodegenerative diseases can strike at any age, the majority of afflicted individuals are diagnosed at older ages. Due to the important impact of age in disease diagnosis, the field of neuroscience could greatly benefit from the many of the theories and ideas from the biology of aging – now commonly referred as geroscience. As discussed in our complementary perspective on the topic, there is often a “silo-ing” between geroscientists who work on understanding the mechanisms underlying aging and neuroscientists who are studying neurodegenerative diseases. While there have been some strong collaborations between the biology of aging and neuroscientists, there is still great potential for enhanced collaborative effort between the two fields. To this end, here, we review the state of the geroscience field, discuss how neuroscience could benefit from thinking from a geroscience perspective, and close with a brief discussion on some of the “missing links” between geroscience and neuroscience and how to remedy them. Notably, we have a corresponding, concurrent review from the neuroscience perspective. Our overall goal is to “bridge the gap” between geroscience and neuroscience such that more efficient, reproducible research with translational potential can be conducted.

A Feasibility Study of a Robotic Approach for the Gluing Process in the Footwear Industry

Manufacturing processes in the shoe industry are still characterized to a large extent by human labour, especially in small and medium craft enterprises. Even when machinery is adopted to support manufacturing operations, in most cases an operator has to supervise or carry out the task. On the other hand, craft footwear industries are called to respond to continuous challenges to face the globalization effects, so that a rapid adaptability to customer needs is required. The industry 4.0 paradigms, which are taking place in the industrial environments, represent an excellent opportunity to improve the efficiency and quality of production, and a way to face international competitors. This paper analyses and proposes a robotic cell to automatize the process of glue deposition on shoe upper, which exploits a new means of depositing the glue compared to State-of-Art applications. While the latter mainly adopt glue gun spraying systems or pneumatic syringes, the proposed robotic cell is based on an extrusion system for the deposition of molten material originally in the form of a filament, similar to all extent to those adopted for Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM). Two cell solutions are designed and tested. In the former the extruder is the robot end effector and the shoe upper is grounded to the cell frame. In the second, being the reciprocal, the shoe last is clamped to the robot wrist and the extruder is fixed to the cell frame. The peculiarities of the two solutions are pointed out and compared in terms of cell layout, hardware, programming software and possibility to develop collaborative applications. A self developed slicing software allows designing the trajectories for glue deposition based on the CAD model of the shoe upper, also allowing driving the inclination of the extruder nozzle with respect to the vectors normal to the upper surface. Both the proposed cell layouts permit to achieve good quality and production times. The solution with the mobile extruder is able to deposit glue at highest end-effector speed (up to 200 mm/s). On the other hand, the solution with the mobile shoe upper and fixed extruder seems to be more appropriate to enhance collaborative applications.

A Generic Pattern-based Design for Distributed Collaborative Editors

With the advent of information sharing technologies, users can share and collaborate in performing common tasks through the use of distributed collaborative applications. Specifically, Distributed Collaborative Editors (DCE) are more and more used in many fields including healthcare, education, software engineering, military, etc. However, all proposed DCE frameworks focused on coordination algorithms, i.e. how to ensure data convergence, while very little attention was given to addressing the design of DCE which shall be the fundamental step for DCE frameworks construction. In this article, we analyze and design DCE as the structure of five layers comprising classifiers, relations among them, and their main properties. We contribute in two areas. First, we define a generic DCE architecture that captures organization, business and software aspects of DCE. Secondly, we propose a pattern-based design that emphasizes good design principles for the business core of DCE. This design will allow DCE researchers and developers to converge towards the same generic framework while improving the quality and performance of proposed DCE applications and tools.

Identifying Awareness Requirements in Face-to-Face Collaborative Applications for Users with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), mainly those with high severity, have difficulties to identify and understand the others’ actions and emotions and, therefore, to understand the basic concepts of a collaborative work, even in face-to-face situations. We developed and evaluated a multitouch collaborative game with youths with high severity in ASD. Despite the positive results to encourage the social interaction, we observed that they had difficulties to understand tasks, to identify their partners, and the workspace. Based on these difficulties, we identify a set of awareness requirements to contribute to the design of awareness mechanisms adequate to face-to-face collaborative applications for individuals with ASD.