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Based on qualitative research on and automation technology apprentices in Switzerland, this paper examines apprentices' experiences of participating in their company's production activities and becoming members of their community of practice, and the influence of these experiences on the development of their occupational identity. Participation in activity and training is organised in various ways in different training companies, and expansive-restrictive participation models help in understanding the importance of workplace learning for apprentices' training experience and the development of their occupational identity. The results show that in learning situations characterised by expansive participation, apprentices have substantial responsibility and autonomy throughout their apprenticeship, together with guidance adapted to their needs. Apprentices are highly self-confident and adopt agentic actions aimed at increasing the variety and complexity of tasks and their own autonomy. In restrictive participation, in contrast, apprentices are often poorly integrated into the community of practice and feel devalued as aspiring professionals. These apprentices primarily develop agentic actions to improve their participation in company activities and their apprenticeship, but they are largely unable to develop their skills or become independent in performing complex tasks, and they are limited in their ability to construct a vocational identity.

Paperwork has always been a central part of bureaucratic work. Over the last few years, bureaucratic procedures have become increasingly standardised and digitalised. Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork within welfare offices in Switzerland and Belgium, we reflect on the way evidence is constructed within social policy and cases built for or against noncitizen welfare recipients in order to show how paper truths are established and challenged. The focus on digital practices within public policy implementation highlights how it contributes to enhanced control mechanisms on the implementation level and how migration law continues to guide welfare governance for noncitizens. This allows targeting of the most marginalised groups, whose rights to access state support are institutionally impeded. Through database information flows, official forms, paper reports and face-to-face meetings, we further show how a hybrid form of bureaucratic work emerges, where direct contact with the client is still key, yet highly influenced by standardisation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer-graders have been in regular use in the context of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). The automatic grading of programs presents an opportunity to assess and provide tailored feedback to large classes, while featuring at the same time a number of benefits like: immediate feedback, unlimited submissions, as well as low cost of feedback. The present paper compares Algo+, an automatic assessment tool for computer programs, to an automatic grader used in a MOOC course at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland). This empirical study explores the practicability and behavior of Algo+ and analyzes whether it can be used to evaluate a large scale of programs. Algo+ is a prototype based on a static analysis approach for automated assessment of algorithms where programs are not executed but analyzed by looking at their instructions. The second tool, EPFL grader, is used to grade programs submitted by students in MOOCs of Introductory programming with C++ at EPFL and is based on a compiler approach (Dynamic Analysis approach). In this technique submissions are assessed via a battery of unit tests where the student programs are run with standard input and assessed on whether they produced the correct output. In this study results showed the advantages and limits of each approach and pointed out how the two tools can be used to get a benefit assessment of students' learning in MOOCs of computer programming. This study led to the proposition of a model for the relationship between the number of submissions and the appearance of the most frequent submitted programs. This technique is used by Algo+ for giving feedback and it is based only on the "n" most redundant submissions that have been annotated by the instructor.

Based on qualitative research on bricklaying and automation technology apprentices in Switzerland, this paper examines apprentices' experiences of participating in their company's production activities and becoming members of their community of practice, and the influence of these experiences on the development of their occupational identity. Participation in activity and training is organised in various ways in different training companies, and expansive–restrictive participation models help in understanding the importance of workplace learning for apprentices' training experience and the development of their occupational identity. The results show that in learning situations characterised by expansive participation, apprentices have substantial responsibility and autonomy throughout their apprenticeship, together with guidance adapted to their needs. Apprentices are highly self-confident and adopt agentic actions aimed at increasing the variety and complexity of tasks and their own autonomy. In restrictive participation, in contrast, apprentices are often poorly integrated into the community of practice and feel devalued as aspiring professionals. These apprentices primarily develop agentic actions to improve their participation in company activities and their apprenticeship, but they are largely unable to develop their skills or become independent in performing complex tasks, and they are limited in their ability to construct a vocational identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Footwear marks database has been the subject of numerous research projects over the past decades with a strong focus on the automation of the process of retrieving candidates for comparison. However, to date, there is still no tool able to perform a fully automate treatment of unknown crime scene marks. Making the assumption that a fully automated tool would not be available before a long time and not necessarily required, a project has emerged in Western Switzerland with the aim to commonly exploit footwear marks across several states. As this type of evidence is mainly collected in the context of volume crime, the exploitation of the footwear marks is mainly focused on the detection of links between cases in order to create forensic intelligence. Nevertheless, the search for associations between unknown marks and seized shoes is also carried out. This project resulted in a database developed in-house and now in operation. Through this tool, several forensic services are able to share their footwear marks, compare them and detect series. The links detected through this database are also shared with criminal analysis and intelligence systems. This project does not exploit any particular technological advance but have led to an operational database. This paper will highlight some of the factors that have led to the development and implementation of a successful footwear marks database connecting several police services. • SID is a footwear marks database linking four different forensic services. • 36.5% of inserted cases are linked to one or more other cases through footwear. • Technology is not a key factor for success of a footwear mark database. • Contextualisation of the trace is one the success factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretation of lung auscultation is highly subjective and relies on non-specific nomenclature. Computer-aided analysis has the potential to better standardize and automate evaluation. We used 35.9 hours of auscultation audio from 572 pediatric outpatients to develop DeepBreath : a deep learning model identifying the audible signatures of acute respiratory illness in children. It comprises a convolutional neural network followed by a logistic regression classifier, aggregating estimates on recordings from eight thoracic sites into a single prediction at the patient-level. Patients were either healthy controls (29%) or had one of three acute respiratory illnesses (71%) including pneumonia, wheezing disorders (bronchitis/asthma), and bronchiolitis). To ensure objective estimates on model generalisability, DeepBreath is trained on patients from two countries (Switzerland, Brazil), and results are reported on an internal 5-fold cross-validation as well as externally validated (extval) on three other countries (Senegal, Cameroon, Morocco). DeepBreath differentiated healthy and pathological breathing with an Area Under the Receiver-Operator Characteristic (AUROC) of 0.93 (standard deviation [SD] ± 0.01 on internal validation). Similarly promising results were obtained for pneumonia (AUROC 0.75 ± 0.10), wheezing disorders (AUROC 0.91 ± 0.03), and bronchiolitis (AUROC 0.94 ± 0.02). Extval AUROCs were 0.89, 0.74, 0.74 and 0.87 respectively. All either matched or were significant improvements on a clinical baseline model using age and respiratory rate. Temporal attention showed clear alignment between model prediction and independently annotated respiratory cycles, providing evidence that DeepBreath extracts physiologically meaningful representations. DeepBreath provides a framework for interpretable deep learning to identify the objective audio signatures of respiratory pathology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing awareness of the undesirable environmental impact of cement-based products has led to rethinking earth construction within the digitally mechanised framework of Industry 4.0. The attempts to mechanise earth construction started nearly a decade ago, yet, the past four years have seen a surge in the intensity of research on the advanced manufacturing of earth construction. Additive manufacturing of clay-rich soil, like in cob and adobe methods, has been attracting the primary attention, while on the contrary, considerably limited research has been conducted to mechanise other methods such as rammed earth. This paper collected, reviewed, and analysed the state-of-the-art research on the advanced manufacturing of rammed earth construction, with a focus on process design aspects and machine development. Two case studies of recent digitally manufactured rammed earth projects in Australia and Switzerland were comprehensively analysed to provide a realistic feasibility assessment of the potential and technical challenges. The insights from this research provide a holistic and tangible roadmap to the digital manufacturing of rammed earth construction, which aids in making it more desirable and capable of meeting contemporary demands of the architecture and construction of Industry 4.0. • State-of-the-art advanced manufacturing methods for rammed earth construction are critically reviewed. • Two case studies of digitally manufactured rammed earth projects in Australia and Switzerland are comprehensively analysed. • Potential and challenges of advanced manufacturing for rammed earth construction are discussed. • Information for enhanced utilisation of digital techniques in rammed earth construction is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the spread of automation it is becoming more important and at the same time harder to assess the effectiveness of training--never an easy task at the best of times. The author of this paper, originally presented to the meeting of experts on automation convened by the I.L.O. in Geneva in March 1964, outlines the new types of skills demanded by automated processes, discusses various criteria that can be used for evaluating training programmes and techniques, and, noting that both industry and outside institutions have specific contributions to make. to a training policy adapted to the particular conditions imposed by automation, suggests ways in which the gap between institutional and in-plant training could be closed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the founding of the Swiss federal state in 1848, government and administration have been constantly reorganized. One important change occurred between the 1960s and 1980s: the automation and standardization of information management. Through two cases, the Zentrales Ausländerregister (ZAR) and the Zentralstelle der Bundesverwaltung für Organisationsfragen (ZOB), this article examines the organization and mechanization of information in Swiss Federal Administration by focusing on data processing as the predominant measure for the operationalization of administrative workflows. The period between the 1960s and 1970s proved decisive in the incremental development of data processing that ultimately led to the digitization of ever larger parts of administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The conference Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) was held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, from June 25 to June 28, 2008. More than 280 international researchers attended this singletrack conference to learn about the most exciting robotics research and most advanced robotic systems. The program committee, led by 16 area chairs, selected 40 papers out of 163 submissions. The program also included seven invited talks and two Early Career Spotlight presentations. The plenary presentations were complemented by 13 workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a system of device control programs, developed for the solar observatory at Locarno/Switzerland (IRSOL). Because these programs are implemented as servers-clearly separated from the higher levels-scientific instruments, for example, telescopes, can be operated both in a user-controlled mode (GUI, telnet) and in a fully automated mode by use of a script. Astronomical instruments such as telescopes or spectrographs will be responded to by ASCII command strings, which are the same for all clients. In case a device control software does not support multiclient operation or in case it is used together with other devices in a complex measuring procedure, it is worthwhile implementing an intermediate layer that relieves the individual device control servers of routine tasks and provides for a safer operational sequence. In addition, the system may make use of an easy-to-learn script language specialised for controlling fully automated processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]