Objects In Bins Research Articles

Color inference in visual communication: the meaning of colors in recycling

People interpret abstract meanings from colors, which makes color a useful perceptual feature for visual communication. This process is complicated, however, because there is seldom a one-to-one correspondence between colors and meanings. One color can be associated with many different concepts (one-to-many mapping) and many colors can be associated with the same concept (many-to-one mapping). We propose that to interpret color-coding systems, people perform assignment inference to determine how colors map onto concepts. We studied assignment inference in the domain of recycling. Participants saw images of colored but unlabeled bins and were asked to indicate which bins they would use to discard different kinds of recyclables and trash. In Experiment 1, we tested two hypotheses for how people perform assignment inference. The local assignment hypothesis predicts that people simply match objects with their most strongly associated color. The global assignment hypothesis predicts that people also account for the association strengths between all other objects and colors within the scope of the color-coding system. Participants discarded objects in bins that optimized the color-object associations of the entire set, which is consistent with the global assignment hypothesis. This sometimes resulted in discarding objects in bins whose colors were weakly associated with the object, even when there was a stronger associated option available. In Experiment 2, we tested different methods for encoding color-coding systems and found that people were better at assignment inference when color sets simultaneously maximized the association strength between assigned color-object parings while minimizing associations between unassigned pairings. Our study provides an approach for designing intuitive color-coding systems that facilitate communication through visual media such as graphs, maps, signs, and artifacts.

Una nueva estrategia heurística para el problema de Bin Packing

The Bin Packing problem (BPP) is NP-hard, the use of exact methods for solving BPP instances require a high number of variables and therefore a high computational cost. In this paper a new heuristic strategy for solving the BPP instances, which guarantees obtain optimal solutions, is proposed. The proposed strategy includes the use of a new model based on flow arcs. In the proposed model, the number of variables was reduced by previous allocation of objects in bins. Additionally, our approach includes a heuristic that allows reducing the instance size and thereby the solution algorithm search space. To validate the proposed approach, experiments were performed using the test sets hard28, 53nirup, bin1data and falkenauer, all of them well known in the state of the art. The results show that it using our approach is possible to find the optimal solution for all test set. Also, the execution time was reduced in regard the reported time obtained by using the flow arc model. Time reductions were up to 19.7 and 43% for 53nirup and hard28 test set, respectively.

Fixing the reference frame for PPMXL proper motions using extragalactic sources

We quantify and correct systematic errors in PPMXL proper motions using extragalactic sources from the first two LAMOST data releases and the Vèron-Cetty & Vèron Catalog of Quasars. Although the majority of the sources are from the Vèron catalog, LAMOST makes important contributions in regions that are not well-sampled by previous catalogs, particularly at low Galactic latitudes and in the south Galactic cap. We show that quasars in PPMXL have measurable and significant proper motions, which reflect the systematic zero-point offsets present in the catalog. We confirm the global proper motion shifts seen by Wu et al., and additionally find smaller-scale fluctuations of the QSO-derived corrections to an absolute frame. We average the proper motions of 158 106 extragalactic objects in bins of 3° × 3° and present a table of proper motion corrections.

The vertical force of bulk solids on objects in bins

The vertical force exerted on discs, spheres and horizontal square bars in test bins was measured during gravity flow of bulk solids. Approximate methods for estimating the vertical force on such objects were developed from the equation which expressed the stress in a conical mass flow hopper. With three adjustable parameters, good agreement was obtained between experimental and computed results for discs, provided the disc diameter was more that five times as large as the particle diameter. Identical parameters for a given material were found to be applicable in analyses for spheres and horizontal square bars.