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This paper presents a survey of research into interactive robotic systems for the purpose of identifying the state of the art capabilities as well as the extant gaps in this emerging field. Communication is multimodal. Multimodality is a representation of many modes chosen from rhetorical aspects for its communication potentials. The author seeks to define the available automation capabilities in communication using multimodalities that will support a proposed Interactive Robot System (IRS) as an AI mounted robotic platform to advance the speed and quality of military operational and tactical decision making.

This review will begin by presenting key developments in the robotic interaction field with the objective of identifying essential technological developments that set conditions for robotic platforms to function autonomously. After surveying the key aspects in Human Robot Interaction (HRI), Unmanned Autonomous System (UAS), visualization, Virtual Environment (VE) and prediction, the paper then proceeds to describe the gaps in the application areas that will require extension and integration to enable the prototyping of the IRS. A brief examination of other work in HRI-related fields concludes with a recapitulation of the IRS challenge that will set conditions for future success.

Using insights from a balanced cross section of sources from the government, academic, and commercial entities that contribute to HRI a multimodal IRS in military communication is introduced. Multimodal IRS (MIRS) in military communication has yet to be deployed.

Multimodal robotic interface for the MIRS is an interdisciplinary endeavour. This is not realistic that one can comprehend all expert and related knowledge and skills to design and develop such multimodal interactive robotic interface. In this brief preliminary survey, the author has discussed extant AI, robotics, NLP, CV, VDM, and VE applications that is directly related to multimodal interaction. Each mode of this multimodal communication is an active research area. Multimodal human/military robot communication is the ultimate goal of this research.

A multimodal autonomous robot in military communication using speech, images, gestures, VST and VE has yet to be deployed. Autonomous multimodal communication is expected to open wider possibilities for all armed forces. Given the density of the land domain, the army is in a position to exploit the opportunities for human–machine teaming (HMT) exposure. Naval and air forces will adopt platform specific suites for specially selected operators to integrate with and leverage this emerging technology. The possession of a flexible communications means that readily adapts to virtual training will enhance planning and mission rehearsals tremendously.

Interaction, perception, cognition and visualization based multimodal communication system is yet missing. Options to communicate, express and convey information in HMT setting with multiple options, suggestions and recommendations will certainly enhance military communication, strength, engagement, security, cognition, perception as well as the ability to act confidently for a successful mission.

The objective is to develop a multimodal autonomous interactive robot for military communications. This survey reports the state of the art, what exists and what is missing, what can be done and possibilities of extension that support the military in maintaining effective communication using multimodalities. There are some separate ongoing progresses, such as in machine-enabled speech, image recognition, tracking, visualizations for situational awareness, and virtual environments. At this time, there is no integrated approach for multimodal human robot interaction that proposes a flexible and agile communication. The report briefly introduces the research proposal about multimodal interactive robot in military communication.

This paper aims to propose a simulation-based performance evaluation model for the drone-based delivery of aid items to disaster-affected areas. The objective of the model is to perform analytical studies, evaluate the performance of drone delivery systems for humanitarian logistics and can support the decision-making on the operational design of the system – on where to locate drone take-off points and on assignment and scheduling of delivery tasks to drones.

This simulation model captures the dynamics and variabilities of the drone-based delivery system, including demand rates, location of demand points, time-dependent parameters and possible failures of drones’ operations. An optimization model integrated with the simulation system can update the optimality of drones’ schedules and delivery assignments.

An extensive set of experiments was performed to evaluate alternative strategies to demonstrate the effectiveness for the proposed optimization/simulation system. In the first set of experiments, the authors use the simulation-based evaluation tool for a case study for Central Florida. The goal of this set of experiments is to show how the proposed system can be used for decision-making and decision-support. The second set of experiments presents a series of numerical studies for a set of randomly generated instances.

The goal is to develop a simulation system that can allow one to evaluate performance of drone-based delivery systems, accounting for the uncertainties through simulations of real-life drone delivery flights. The proposed simulation model captures the variations in different system parameters, including interval of updating the system after receiving new information, demand parameters: the demand rate and their spatial distribution (i.e. their locations), service time parameters: travel times, setup and loading times, payload drop-off times and repair times and drone energy level: battery’s energy is impacted and requires battery change/recharging while flying.

Goal setting is a crucial aspect of client-centered practice in occupational therapy (OT) for mental health conditions. However, it remains to be seen how goal-setting has been delivered in mental health, particularly the OT process. The purpose of this scoping review was to explore the nature and extent of goal setting delivered in mental health and informed OT practice.

The authors followed the guidelines of Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and searched three databases using key search terms: “mental disorder,” “goal setting,” and “occupational therapy” and their synonyms.

After excluding duplicate records, the authors initially screened 883 records and resulted in 20 records in total after the screening process. Most of the identified articles used goal-setting delivered by both a health professional and a client (n = 14), and focused on people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder (n = 13), but three interventions were delivered by occupational therapists. Further research needs on goal-setting in mental health OT, exploring the reliability and validity of different goal-setting strategies and investigating the effectiveness of goal-setting for promoting behavior change and client engagement across various mental health conditions and settings.

The scoping review has some limitations, such as not investigating the validity and reliability of goal-setting strategies identified, and excluding conference papers and non-English articles.

This scoping review presents a mapping of how goal-setting has been delivered in mental health and informed OT practice. The findings suggest limited research in OT and highlight the need for more studies to address the evidence gap in individualized client-centered OT.

This paper aims to provide empirical evidence on formal stakeholder participation (or “lobbying”) in the early phase of the International Sustainability Standards Board’s (ISSB’s) standard-setting.

Drawing on a rational-choice framework, this paper conducts a content analysis of comment letters (CLs) submitted to the ISSB in response to its first two exposure drafts (published in 2022) to investigate stakeholder participation across different groups and jurisdictional origins. The analyses examine participation in terms of frequency (measured using the number of participating stakeholders) and intensity (measured using the length of CLs).

Preparers and users of sustainability reports emerge as the largest participating stakeholder groups, while the accounting/sustainability profession participates with high average intensity. Surprisingly, preparers do not outweigh users in terms of participation frequency and intensity; and large preparers outweigh smaller ones in terms of participation intensity but not participation frequency. Internationally, stakeholders from countries with a private financial accounting standard-setting system participate more frequently and intensively than others. In addition, country-level economic wealth and sustainability performance are positively associated with more participating stakeholders.

This study is of interest for organizations and stakeholders involved in or affected by standard-setting in the field of sustainability reporting. The finding of limited participation by investors and from developing countries suggests the ISSB take actions to enhance the voice of those stakeholders.

The imbalances in stakeholder participation that were found pose potential threats to an important aspect of the input legitimacy of the ISSB’s standard-setting process.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to explore stakeholder participation by means of CLs with the ISSB in terms of frequency and intensity.

Transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies is a fairly new concept with respect to new ventures in such challenging economic environments. Formal institutional voids are sometimes held up as a reason for the difficulties present in distressed economies, along with exogenous shocks and other upheavals. In this research, the authors seek to contribute empirically and theoretically as to ways in which formal institutions voids can be filled by a culture developed by transitional entrepreneurs. Indeed, in transition economies, formal institutions need to be enhanced by informal institutions to control corruption and other misbehavior by authorities. Iranian economists emphasize these essential reforms to be able to manage current difficulties, yet top down policies cannot help transitional entrepreneurs benefit from the country’s value-adding cultural heritage to informally address this. To study this, qualitative research methods were used to interpret transitional entrepreneurs’ ideology and ethical routines as the ingredients of a commercial culture that can establish soft law that substitutes for formal institutions. This helps to reduce the disfunctionality of formal institutions in distressed economies.

A thematic analysis interviewing key Iranian entrepreneurs and economists is conducted. Also based on an interpretive paradigm, a hermeneutic cycle has been carried out on selected texts. Results have been verified throughout related literature as to come up with a solid synthesized interpreted outcome.

This paper contributes to theory from a new perspective by discussing transitional entrepreneurship and navigating a distressed economy; in which, ideology and ethics as the ingredients of soft law (Newman and Posner, 2018) are discussed as the base to further develop a commercial culture that fills voids of formal institutions. The formal–informal institutional cycle in distressed economies as the major difficulty entrepreneurs face (Peng and Luo, 2000) is important, because they try to increasingly enhance their move toward a market orientation (Bruton et al., 2008). The authors contribute as to how transitional entrepreneurs can complete this process of adaptation and also the fact that those informal institutions do actually respond to those adaptations. The other contribution is to enrich theories about institutions from the point of view of culture. Knowing these facts helps transitional entrepreneurs, because in distressed communities, formal institutions’ function has an important effect on economic performance (Amorós, 2009). This research’s contributions shed light to help government leaders understand the pros and cons of their actions forced on the industry. As it has been characterized in this research, it can turn in to new formal set of legitimacies (Ahlstrom et al., 2008) to root out corruption and help set the economy on a path to innovation and new venture creation.

Transitional entrepreneurs can depend on the less formal cultural-cognitive aspect of ethics and ideology. These entrepreneurs can be working on the burgeoning private sector, who want to connect with the outside effectively to overcome an economy in distress. Transitional entrepreneurs may face governmental institutional intermediaries as a barrier. Formal intermediaries tend to benefit from inefficiencies caused by hierarchal orders and will improve informality in order to overcome difficulties. In this research, institutional theory from the third pillar of the cultural-cognitive sheds light on transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies, where inquiry is to fill voids of formal institutions as a process of possible linking between new generated soft law derived by beliefs, ideology and professional morality in order to influence (old) legitimacies. The research’s focus evolves on values transitional entrepreneurs utilize to build informal institutions and then impact further on formal institutions to handle distressed communities. This theoretical background expands on subsections to define conceptual building blocks for the study, essential aspects such as individuals as transitional entrepreneurs, the values they utilize to generate soft law, informal institutions and soft law, to manage voids in formal institutions and legitimacy building aspects in policy agenda setting for transitional entrepreneurship in distressed economies.

This paper presents Quick Changeover Design (QCD), which is a structured methodological approach for Original Equipment Manufacturers to drive and support the design of machines in terms of rapid changeover capability.

To improve the performance in terms of set up time, QCD addresses machine design from a single-minute digit exchange of die (SMED). Although conceived to aid the design of completely new machines, QCD can be adapted to support for simple design upgrades on pre-existing machines. The QCD is structured in three consecutive steps, each supported by specific tools and analysis forms to facilitate and better structure the designers' activities.

QCD helps equipment manufacturers to understand the current and future needs of the manufacturers' customers to: (1) anticipate the requirements for new and different set-up process; (2) prioritize the possible technical solutions; (3) build machines and equipment that are easy and fast to set-up under variable contexts. When applied to a production system consisting of machines subject to frequent or time-consuming set-up processes, QCD enhances both responsiveness to external market demands and internal control of factory operations.

The QCD approach is a support system for the development of completely new machines and is also particularly effective in upgrading existing ones. QCD's practical application is demonstrated using a case study concerning a vertical spindle machine.

This study aims to introduce a new methodology for generating synthetic images for facility management purposes. The method starts by leveraging the existing 3D open-source BIM models and using them inside a graphic engine to produce a photorealistic representation of indoor spaces enriched with facility-related objects. The virtual environment creates several images by changing lighting conditions, camera poses or material. Moreover, the created images are labeled and ready to be trained in the model.

This paper focuses on the challenges characterizing object detection models to enrich digital twins with facility management-related information. The automatic detection of small objects, such as sockets, power plugs, etc., requires big, labeled data sets that are costly and time-consuming to create. This study proposes a solution based on existing 3D BIM models to produce quick and automatically labeled synthetic images.

The paper presents a conceptual model for creating synthetic images to increase the performance in training object detection models for facility management. The results show that virtually generated images, rather than an alternative to real images, are a powerful tool for integrating existing data sets. In other words, while a base of real images is still needed, introducing synthetic images helps augment the model’s performance and robustness in covering different types of objects.

This study introduced the first pipeline for creating synthetic images for facility management. Moreover, this paper validates this pipeline by proposing a case study where the performance of object detection models trained on real data or a combination of real and synthetic images are compared.

This study examines how accounting tools and techniques are used to create and support membership and reporting boundaries for a multi-entity sustainability scheme. It also considers whether boundary setting for this initiative helps to connect corporate activity with planetary boundaries and the SDGs.

A case study of a national agrifood sustainability scheme, analysing extensive documentary data and multi-entity sustainability reports. The concept of partial organising is used to frame the analysis.

Accounting, in the form of planning, verification, target setting, annual review and reporting, can be used to create a membership and a reporting boundary. Accounting tools and techniques support the scheme's standard-setting and monitoring elements. The study demonstrates that the scheme offers innovation in how sustainability reporting is managed. However, it does not currently provide a cumulative assessment of the effect of the sector's activity on ecological carrying capacity or connect this activity to global sustainability indicators.

Future research can build on this study's insights to further develop our understanding of multi-entity sustainability reporting and accounting's role in organising for sustainability. The authors identify several research avenues including: boundary setting in ecologically significant sectors, integrating global sustainability indicators at sectoral and organisational levels, sustainability controls in multi-entity settings and the potential of multi-entity reporting to provide substantive disclosure.

This paper provides insight into accounting's role in boundary setting for a multi-entity sustainability initiative. It adds to our understanding of the potential of a multi-entity reporting boundary to support connected measurement between corporate activity and global sustainability indicators. It builds on work on partial organising and provides insight into how accounting can support this form of organising for sustainability.

In order to estimate the value of semi-automated subject indexing in operative library catalogues, the study aimed to investigate five different automated implementations of an open source software package on a large set of Swedish union catalogue metadata records, with Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) as the target classification system. It also aimed to contribute to the body of research on aboutness and related challenges in automated subject indexing and evaluation.

On a sample of over 230,000 records with close to 12,000 distinct DDC classes, an open source tool Annif, developed by the National Library of Finland, was applied in the following implementations: lexical algorithm, support vector classifier, fastText, Omikuji Bonsai and an ensemble approach combing the former four. A qualitative study involving two senior catalogue librarians and three students of library and information studies was also conducted to investigate the value and inter-rater agreement of automatically assigned classes, on a sample of 60 records.

The best results were achieved using the ensemble approach that achieved 66.82% accuracy on the three-digit DDC classification task. The qualitative study confirmed earlier studies reporting low inter-rater agreement but also pointed to the potential value of automatically assigned classes as additional access points in information retrieval.

The paper presents an extensive study of automated classification in an operative library catalogue, accompanied by a qualitative study of automated classes. It demonstrates the value of applying semi-automated indexing in operative information retrieval systems.

This paper is motivated by the need to assess the risk profiles associated with the substantial number of items within military supply chains. The scale of supply chain management processes creates difficulties in both the complexity of the analysis and in performing risk assessments that are based on the manual (human analyst) assessment methods. Thus, analysts require methods that can be automated and that can incorporate on-going operational data on a regular basis.

The approach taken to address the identification of supply chain risk within an operational setting is based on aspects of multiobjective decision analysis (MODA). The approach constructs a risk and importance index for supply chain elements based on operational data. These indices are commensurate in value, leading to interpretable measures for decision-making.

Risk and importance indices were developed for the analysis of items within an example supply chain. Using the data on items, individual MODA models were formed and demonstrated using a prototype tool.

To better prepare risk mitigation strategies, analysts require the ability to identify potential sources of risk, especially in times of disruption such as natural disasters.