30th International Conference on Intelligent Computing in Engineering (EG-ICE), 2023
Regulations and test criteria for building products are captured in hundreds of interrelated docu... more Regulations and test criteria for building products are captured in hundreds of interrelated documents. It can be daunting to figure out which of these documents contain information that is relevant to your building project or product. In this paper, we describe work on an Information Retrieval (IR) system that aims to search through the contents of building regulations. Based on practitioner interviews we develop a small dataset of user-queries for which we would like to return relevant passages of documents. We explore several approaches to Query Expansion (QE) and Document Expansion (DE), taking into account the scarcity of openly available knowledge sources in our small technical domain. We show that IR performance can be greatly improved using QE and DE, and retrieve a top-3 relevant result for up to 85% of out queries. We share our IR dataset and the code to replicate our approach.
11th Linked Data in Architecture and Construction Workshop, 2023
Compliance Checking (CC) would be a lot easier if we could automatically map between (1) terms th... more Compliance Checking (CC) would be a lot easier if we could automatically map between (1) terms that occur in building regulations and (2) elements of buildings and building products. However, the terminology used in the regulations is vastly different from the terminology found in Building Information Models (BIM). We are therefore forced to somehow shoehorn the vocabulary of regulatory terms into a set of classes that may well be several orders of magnitude smaller. This paper aims to reduce the gap between terms found verbatim in the regulations, and the classes that exist in Linked Data Vocabularies in Architecture and Construction. We explore the automated extraction of domain terminology from building regulations, and interlink the resulting terms with existing controlled vocabularies like Uniclass. The resulting Knowledge Graph (KG) can be used to suggest relevant and related domain terminology, which improves collecting the inventory of Linked Data terms required for CC.
This paper describes the research on the possibility of a new designtool. The purpose of this too... more This paper describes the research on the possibility of a new designtool. The purpose of this tool is to combine analog and digital designskills to create a hybrid form of design. The part that accounts for the analog designskills consists of an object (in example malleable material, wire etc.) which can be manipulated. These manipulations will be measured and digitally represented by using 3D tracking techniques. The assignment is part of Rawshaping Technology (RST) at the University of Twente. Firstly, the goal of RST will be clarified: improving the speed and freedom of design during the first designstage. Secondly, 3D tracking and modelling techniques will be elucidated as well as the techniques which have been used. The research is conducted by making the tool, of which the design is based on a list of demands and wishes. The demands and whishes on this list are derived from the goals of Rawshaping Technology. To get the tool to function, a lot of contact with the supplier of the equipment was required. While waiting for response some analog models have been made. At the time the equipment was connected, several attempts to digitally represent the analog input have been executed. With the results of these attempts, the knowledge gained on both the hardware and software connection, and the preliminary investigation, a conclusion was drawn concerning the achievment of the goals of Rawshaping Technology. It becomes clear that a large part of the requirements are met, or at least could be met with the prototype. This conclusion leads to several reccomendations for future research.
Biomimetics, the application of mechanisms observed in nature to inform technical solutions, is i... more Biomimetics, the application of mechanisms observed in nature to inform technical solutions, is inherently cross-disciplinary. For the most part, however, practitioners are only expert in one domain, e.g., engineering. Being a layman in the other domain, biology, can make it hard and time-consuming to find and understand relevant information. Computer-Aided Biomimetics (CAB) involves the development of computational tools to overcome this domain-expertise mismatch. Finding a bridge between engineering and biology has been challenging. Although a plethora of methodological approaches have been proposed to bridge the engineering and biology domains, Biomimetics remains adventitious and research intensive. We give an overview of previous research efforts in CAB and motivate our approach that revolves around the resolution of biological trade-offs. This is a unique approach, as previous work has always aimed to extract engineering functions from biological texts. We describe our novel C...
Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are increasingly adept at a variety of tasks, and this te... more Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are increasingly adept at a variety of tasks, and this technology can be used to assist blind and partially sighted people. To do this, the system’s responses must not only be accurate, but usable. It is also vital for assistive technologies to be designed with a focus on: (1) privacy, as the camera may capture a user’s mail, medication bottles, or other sensitive information; (2) transparency, so that the system’s behaviour can be explained and trusted by users; and (3) controllability, to tailor the system for a particular domain or user group. We have therefore extended a conversational VQA framework, called Aye-saac, with these objectives in mind. Specifically, we gave Aye-saac the ability to answer visual questions in the kitchen, a particularly challenging area for visually impaired people. Our system can now answer questions about quantity, positioning, and system confidence in regards to 299 kitchen objects. Questions about the spatial...
Nature has inspired various ground-breaking technological developments in applications ranging fr... more Nature has inspired various ground-breaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific biology texts is a time-consuming and hard task that requires domain-specific knowledge. Improving access for outsiders can help interdisciplinary research like Nature Inspired Engineering. This paper describes a dataset of 1,500 manually-annotated sentences that express domain-independent relations between central concepts in a scientific biology text, such as trade-offs and correlations. The arguments of these relations can be Multi Word Expressions and have been annotated with modifying phrases to form non-projective graphs. The dataset allows for training and evaluating Relation Extraction algorithms that aim for coarse-grained typing of scientific biological documents, enabling a high-level filter for engineers.
Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems aim to semantically parse building regulations to a s... more Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems aim to semantically parse building regulations to a set of rules. However, semantic parsing is known to be hard and requires large amounts of training data. The complexity of creating such training data has led to research that focuses on small sub-tasks, such as shallow parsing or the extraction of a limited subset of rules. This study introduces a shallow parsing task for which training data is relatively cheap to create, with the aim of learning a lexicon for ACC. We annotate a small domain-specific dataset of 200 sentences, SPAR.txt1, and train a sequence tagger that achieves 79,93 F1-score on the test set. We then show through manual evaluation that the model identifies most (89,84%) defined terms in a set of building regulation documents, and that both contiguous and discontiguous Multi-Word Expressions (MWE) are discovered with reasonable accuracy (70,3%).
Keep IT real, create, build, and develop design tools that support designers during the early pha... more Keep IT real, create, build, and develop design tools that support designers during the early phases of design processing. This paper investigates how, and whether, current technology can afford real-time interaction and affective computing in a HDT(E) design tool that integrates and blends realities through physical and virtual interaction. Interaction design (IxD) is crucial to the usability (UX) and engagement (UE), concepts and terminology are introduced, after which an interaction framework is set up that takes into account the multi-modal Human Computer Interaction (HCI) with a HDT(E).
This paper investigates how and whether existing or current design tools, assist and support desi... more This paper investigates how and whether existing or current design tools, assist and support designers and engineers in the early-phases of ideation and conceptualization stages of design and engineering processes. The research explores how fluidly and/or congruously technology affords cognitive, emotive, gesture-based shape-and-form transformation and stimulates externalization within a hybrid design tool environment (HDTE). Meta-cognitive, emotive, gestural, sensorial, multi-dimensional interaction through exploration, translation and manifestation within a contextual blended environment is studied to enhance representation, stimulate choice-architecture and foster decision-making. Current and novel hybrid design tool developments and experiments illustrate the promise of hybridization for natural computing and unobtrusive design-tools (HDT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS). Put into perspective; a proposed framework of robust interaction design (IxD), gamification and affective c...
When solving engineering problems through biomimetic design, a lack of knowledge of biology often... more When solving engineering problems through biomimetic design, a lack of knowledge of biology often impedes the translation of biological ideas into engineering principles. Specific challenges are the identification, selection and abstraction of relevant biological information. The use of engineering terminology to search for relevant biological information is hypothesised to contribute to the adventitious character of biomimetics. Alternatively, a holistic approach is proposed where a division is made between the analysis of biological research papers and the decomposition of the engineering problem. The aim of a holisitic approach is to take into account the importance of context during analogical problem solving and provide a theoretical framework for the development of Computer-Aided Biomimetics (CAB) tools. Future work will focus on the development of tools that support engineers during the analysis of biological research papers and modelling of biological systems by providing re...
Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 2020
Nature has inspired various groundbreaking technological developments in applications ranging fro... more Nature has inspired various groundbreaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific biology texts is a time-consuming and hard task that requires domain-specific knowledge. Improving access for outsiders can help interdisciplinary research like Nature Inspired Engineering. This paper describes a dataset of 1,500 manually-annotated sentences that express domain-independent relations between central concepts in a scientific biology text, such as trade-offs and correlations. The arguments of these relations can be Multi Word Expressions and have been annotated with modifying phrases to form non-projective graphs. The dataset allows for training and evaluating Relation Extraction algorithms that aim for coarse-grained typing of scientific biological documents, enabling a high-level filter for engineers.
30th International Conference on Intelligent Computing in Engineering (EG-ICE), 2023
Regulations and test criteria for building products are captured in hundreds of interrelated docu... more Regulations and test criteria for building products are captured in hundreds of interrelated documents. It can be daunting to figure out which of these documents contain information that is relevant to your building project or product. In this paper, we describe work on an Information Retrieval (IR) system that aims to search through the contents of building regulations. Based on practitioner interviews we develop a small dataset of user-queries for which we would like to return relevant passages of documents. We explore several approaches to Query Expansion (QE) and Document Expansion (DE), taking into account the scarcity of openly available knowledge sources in our small technical domain. We show that IR performance can be greatly improved using QE and DE, and retrieve a top-3 relevant result for up to 85% of out queries. We share our IR dataset and the code to replicate our approach.
11th Linked Data in Architecture and Construction Workshop, 2023
Compliance Checking (CC) would be a lot easier if we could automatically map between (1) terms th... more Compliance Checking (CC) would be a lot easier if we could automatically map between (1) terms that occur in building regulations and (2) elements of buildings and building products. However, the terminology used in the regulations is vastly different from the terminology found in Building Information Models (BIM). We are therefore forced to somehow shoehorn the vocabulary of regulatory terms into a set of classes that may well be several orders of magnitude smaller. This paper aims to reduce the gap between terms found verbatim in the regulations, and the classes that exist in Linked Data Vocabularies in Architecture and Construction. We explore the automated extraction of domain terminology from building regulations, and interlink the resulting terms with existing controlled vocabularies like Uniclass. The resulting Knowledge Graph (KG) can be used to suggest relevant and related domain terminology, which improves collecting the inventory of Linked Data terms required for CC.
This paper describes the research on the possibility of a new designtool. The purpose of this too... more This paper describes the research on the possibility of a new designtool. The purpose of this tool is to combine analog and digital designskills to create a hybrid form of design. The part that accounts for the analog designskills consists of an object (in example malleable material, wire etc.) which can be manipulated. These manipulations will be measured and digitally represented by using 3D tracking techniques. The assignment is part of Rawshaping Technology (RST) at the University of Twente. Firstly, the goal of RST will be clarified: improving the speed and freedom of design during the first designstage. Secondly, 3D tracking and modelling techniques will be elucidated as well as the techniques which have been used. The research is conducted by making the tool, of which the design is based on a list of demands and wishes. The demands and whishes on this list are derived from the goals of Rawshaping Technology. To get the tool to function, a lot of contact with the supplier of the equipment was required. While waiting for response some analog models have been made. At the time the equipment was connected, several attempts to digitally represent the analog input have been executed. With the results of these attempts, the knowledge gained on both the hardware and software connection, and the preliminary investigation, a conclusion was drawn concerning the achievment of the goals of Rawshaping Technology. It becomes clear that a large part of the requirements are met, or at least could be met with the prototype. This conclusion leads to several reccomendations for future research.
Biomimetics, the application of mechanisms observed in nature to inform technical solutions, is i... more Biomimetics, the application of mechanisms observed in nature to inform technical solutions, is inherently cross-disciplinary. For the most part, however, practitioners are only expert in one domain, e.g., engineering. Being a layman in the other domain, biology, can make it hard and time-consuming to find and understand relevant information. Computer-Aided Biomimetics (CAB) involves the development of computational tools to overcome this domain-expertise mismatch. Finding a bridge between engineering and biology has been challenging. Although a plethora of methodological approaches have been proposed to bridge the engineering and biology domains, Biomimetics remains adventitious and research intensive. We give an overview of previous research efforts in CAB and motivate our approach that revolves around the resolution of biological trade-offs. This is a unique approach, as previous work has always aimed to extract engineering functions from biological texts. We describe our novel C...
Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are increasingly adept at a variety of tasks, and this te... more Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems are increasingly adept at a variety of tasks, and this technology can be used to assist blind and partially sighted people. To do this, the system’s responses must not only be accurate, but usable. It is also vital for assistive technologies to be designed with a focus on: (1) privacy, as the camera may capture a user’s mail, medication bottles, or other sensitive information; (2) transparency, so that the system’s behaviour can be explained and trusted by users; and (3) controllability, to tailor the system for a particular domain or user group. We have therefore extended a conversational VQA framework, called Aye-saac, with these objectives in mind. Specifically, we gave Aye-saac the ability to answer visual questions in the kitchen, a particularly challenging area for visually impaired people. Our system can now answer questions about quantity, positioning, and system confidence in regards to 299 kitchen objects. Questions about the spatial...
Nature has inspired various ground-breaking technological developments in applications ranging fr... more Nature has inspired various ground-breaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific biology texts is a time-consuming and hard task that requires domain-specific knowledge. Improving access for outsiders can help interdisciplinary research like Nature Inspired Engineering. This paper describes a dataset of 1,500 manually-annotated sentences that express domain-independent relations between central concepts in a scientific biology text, such as trade-offs and correlations. The arguments of these relations can be Multi Word Expressions and have been annotated with modifying phrases to form non-projective graphs. The dataset allows for training and evaluating Relation Extraction algorithms that aim for coarse-grained typing of scientific biological documents, enabling a high-level filter for engineers.
Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems aim to semantically parse building regulations to a s... more Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems aim to semantically parse building regulations to a set of rules. However, semantic parsing is known to be hard and requires large amounts of training data. The complexity of creating such training data has led to research that focuses on small sub-tasks, such as shallow parsing or the extraction of a limited subset of rules. This study introduces a shallow parsing task for which training data is relatively cheap to create, with the aim of learning a lexicon for ACC. We annotate a small domain-specific dataset of 200 sentences, SPAR.txt1, and train a sequence tagger that achieves 79,93 F1-score on the test set. We then show through manual evaluation that the model identifies most (89,84%) defined terms in a set of building regulation documents, and that both contiguous and discontiguous Multi-Word Expressions (MWE) are discovered with reasonable accuracy (70,3%).
Keep IT real, create, build, and develop design tools that support designers during the early pha... more Keep IT real, create, build, and develop design tools that support designers during the early phases of design processing. This paper investigates how, and whether, current technology can afford real-time interaction and affective computing in a HDT(E) design tool that integrates and blends realities through physical and virtual interaction. Interaction design (IxD) is crucial to the usability (UX) and engagement (UE), concepts and terminology are introduced, after which an interaction framework is set up that takes into account the multi-modal Human Computer Interaction (HCI) with a HDT(E).
This paper investigates how and whether existing or current design tools, assist and support desi... more This paper investigates how and whether existing or current design tools, assist and support designers and engineers in the early-phases of ideation and conceptualization stages of design and engineering processes. The research explores how fluidly and/or congruously technology affords cognitive, emotive, gesture-based shape-and-form transformation and stimulates externalization within a hybrid design tool environment (HDTE). Meta-cognitive, emotive, gestural, sensorial, multi-dimensional interaction through exploration, translation and manifestation within a contextual blended environment is studied to enhance representation, stimulate choice-architecture and foster decision-making. Current and novel hybrid design tool developments and experiments illustrate the promise of hybridization for natural computing and unobtrusive design-tools (HDT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS). Put into perspective; a proposed framework of robust interaction design (IxD), gamification and affective c...
When solving engineering problems through biomimetic design, a lack of knowledge of biology often... more When solving engineering problems through biomimetic design, a lack of knowledge of biology often impedes the translation of biological ideas into engineering principles. Specific challenges are the identification, selection and abstraction of relevant biological information. The use of engineering terminology to search for relevant biological information is hypothesised to contribute to the adventitious character of biomimetics. Alternatively, a holistic approach is proposed where a division is made between the analysis of biological research papers and the decomposition of the engineering problem. The aim of a holisitic approach is to take into account the importance of context during analogical problem solving and provide a theoretical framework for the development of Computer-Aided Biomimetics (CAB) tools. Future work will focus on the development of tools that support engineers during the analysis of biological research papers and modelling of biological systems by providing re...
Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 2020
Nature has inspired various groundbreaking technological developments in applications ranging fro... more Nature has inspired various groundbreaking technological developments in applications ranging from robotics to aerospace engineering and the manufacturing of medical devices. However, accessing the information captured in scientific biology texts is a time-consuming and hard task that requires domain-specific knowledge. Improving access for outsiders can help interdisciplinary research like Nature Inspired Engineering. This paper describes a dataset of 1,500 manually-annotated sentences that express domain-independent relations between central concepts in a scientific biology text, such as trade-offs and correlations. The arguments of these relations can be Multi Word Expressions and have been annotated with modifying phrases to form non-projective graphs. The dataset allows for training and evaluating Relation Extraction algorithms that aim for coarse-grained typing of scientific biological documents, enabling a high-level filter for engineers.
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