In this study, a novel procedure is proposed to determine the shape parameter of multiquadric (MQ) radial basis function (RBF) utilizing multivariate adaptive regression splines (Mars) in a free convection problem. Input data (truth data) of Mars is prepared by applying MQ-RBF pseudospectral (PS) method to a free convection problem in a cavity with differentially heated vertical walls. Shape parameter determination in this step is also proposed. The input data obtained by the numerical method and by the proposed way to determine shape parameter is used in package earth of R project, and a model function is built to estimate the shape parameter. Then, instead of using the proposed search inside numerical method, the model function determines the shape parameter at any truth data. Results are also compared with a benchmark study, and good agreement is observed in the same free convection problem. Model function built is also tested against the results of the original method.

The natural language descriptions of the capabilities of manufacturing companies can be found in multiple locations including company websites, legacy system databases, and ad hoc documents and spreadsheets. To unlock the value of unstructured capability data and learn from it, there is a need for developing advanced quantitative methods supported by machine learning and natural language processing techniques. This research proposes a hybrid unsupervised learning methodology using K-means clustering and topic modeling techniques in order to build clusters of suppliers based on their capabilities, automatically infer topics from the created clusters, and discover nontrivial patterns in manufacturing capability corpora. The capability data is extracted either directly from the website of manufacturing firms or from their profiles in e-sourcing portals and directories. Feature extraction and dimensionality reduction process in this work are supported by N-gram extraction and latent semantic analysis (LSA) methods. The proposed clustering method is validated experimentally based on a dataset composed of 150 capability descriptions collected from web-based sourcing directories such as the Thomas Net directory for manufacturing companies. The results of the experiment show that the proposed method creates supplier cluster with high accuracy. Two example applications of the proposed framework, related to supplier similarity measurement and automated thesaurus creation, are introduced in this paper.

The paper describes the design of a wearable and wireless system that allows the real-time identification of some gestures performed by basketball players. This system is specifically designed as a support for coaches to track the activity of two or more players simultaneously. Each wearable device is composed of two separate units, positioned on the wrists of the user, connected to a personal computer (PC) via Bluetooth. Each unit comprises a triaxial accelerometer and gyroscope, a microcontroller, installed on a TinyDuino platform, and a battery. The concept of activity recognition chain is investigated and used as a reference for the gesture recognition process. A sliding window allows the system to extract relevant features from the incoming data streams: mean values, standard deviations, maximum values, minimum values, energy, and correlations between homologous axes are calculated to identify and differentiate the performed actions. Machine learning algorithms are implemented to handle the recognition phase.

Recently, social media has emerged as an alternative, viable source to extract large-scale, heterogeneous product features in a time and cost-efficient manner. One of the challenges of utilizing social media data to inform product design decisions is the existence of implicit data such as sarcasm, which accounts for 22.75% of social media data, and can potentially create bias in the predictive models that learn from such data sources. For example, if a customer says “I just love waiting all day while this song downloads,” an automated product feature extraction model may incorrectly associate a positive sentiment of “love” to the cell phone's ability to download. While traditional text mining techniques are designed to handle well-formed text where product features are explicitly inferred from the combination of words, these tools would fail to process these social messages that include implicit product feature information. In this paper, we propose a method that enables designers to utilize implicit social media data by translating each implicit message into its equivalent explicit form, using the word concurrence network. A case study of Twitter messages that discuss smartphone features is used to validate the proposed method. The results from the experiment not only show that the proposed method improves the interpretability of implicit messages, but also sheds light on potential applications in the design domains where this work could be extended.

Usage context is considered a critical driving factor for customers' product choices. In addition, physical use of a product (i.e., user-product interaction) dictates a number of customer perceptions (e.g., level of comfort). In the emerging internet of things (IoT), this work hypothesizes that it is possible to understand product usage and level of comfort while it is “in-use” by capturing the user-product interaction data. Mining this data to understand both the usage context and the comfort of the user adds new capabilities to product design. There has been tremendous progress in the field of data analytics, but the application in product design is still nascent. In this work, application of feature-learning methods for the identification of product usage context and level of comfort is demonstrated, where usage context is limited to the activity of the user. A novel generic architecture using foundations in convolutional neural network (CNN) is developed and applied to a walking activity classification using smartphone accelerometer data. Results are compared with feature-based machine learning algorithms (neural network and support vector machines (SVM)) and demonstrate the benefits of using the feature-learning methods over the feature-based machine-learning algorithms. To demonstrate the generic nature of the architecture, an application toward comfort level prediction is presented using force sensor data from a sensor-integrated shoe.

An important part of the engineering design process is prototyping, where designers build and test their designs. This process is typically iterative, time consuming, and manual in nature. For a given task, there are multiple objects that can be used, each with different time units associated with accomplishing the task. Current methods for reducing time spent during the prototyping process have focused primarily on optimizing designer to designer interactions, as opposed to designer to tool interactions. Advancements in commercially available sensing systems (e.g., the Kinect) and machine learning algorithms have opened the pathway toward real-time observation of designer's behavior in engineering workspaces during prototype construction. Toward this end, this work hypothesizes that an object O being used for task i is distinguishable from object O being used for task j, where i is the correct task and j is the incorrect task. The contributions of this work are: (i) the ability to recognize these objects in a free roaming engineering workshop environment and (ii) the ability to distinguish between the correct and incorrect use of objects used during a prototyping task. By distinguishing the difference between correct and incorrect uses, incorrect behavior (which often results in wasted time and materials) can be detected and quickly corrected. The method presented in this work learns as designers use objects, and infers the proper way to use them during prototyping. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, a case study is presented in which participants in an engineering design workshop are asked to perform correct and incorrect tasks with a tool. The participants' movements are analyzed by an unsupervised clustering algorithm to determine if there is a statistical difference between tasks being performed correctly and incorrectly. Clusters which are a plurality incorrect are found to be significantly distinct for each node considered by the method, each with p ≪ 0.001.