Professional | EPFL Graph Search

A professional is a member of a profession or any person who works in a specified professional activity. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and skills necessary to perform their specific role within that profession. In addition, most professionals are subject to strict codes of conduct, enshrining rigorous ethical and moral obligations. Professional standards of practice and ethics for a particular field are typically agreed upon and maintained through widely recognized professional associations, such as the IEEE. Some definitions of "professional" limit this term to those professions that serve some important aspect of public interest and the general good of society. In some cultures, the term is used as shorthand to describe a particular social stratum of well-educated workers who enjoy considerable work autonomy and who are commonly engaged in creative and intellectually challenging

Le vide

Stephanie Bender

Today the question of how to work in the continuous contemporary urban landscape, is a big concern for urban development professionals. Still marked by the modern obsession to define the building forms, a vision influenced by the functionalist movement of the Thirties, these same professionals have lost their means of working sustainably in a contemporary city which is both continuous and fragmented, like an individualised collection of various materials and shapes without urban links, spreading out without limits in the overall landscape. In this chaos, an urban approach has appeared, changing the interest from the building to its landscape, from the built to the non-built, and above all from the filled to the void, and offers a new approach more adapted to the context of today's urban environment, capable of creating links with the non built, of offering new urban materials through the 'non urban', and generating public spaces in the presence of 'non-form' buildings. This approach, which here is called The void. New urban strategies, works with the 'non-materials' such as the landscape, the infrastructure or the programmes, and tries to meet the challenge of a new urbanism in the contemporary city. To understand this, the thesis will strive to explore the chronology of this idea through its different chapters. A 'prehistory' will provide an understanding of the origins of this, via its discoverers, pioneers and precursors and will present an astonishing picture of first attempts to define the urban environment via the void. The case of Melun-Senart, the urban strategy developed in 1987 by Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), considered as the starting point for this search and as the masterpiece of the Void approach, will demonstrate the extremely innovative phenomena which resulted from what it called by its author as the "Strategy of the void". Putting this into perspective in the work of Rem Koolhaas will reveal a dense web of projects and writings on, or with the void, which again reinforces the idea of its pertinence. The exploration of the artistic fields and parallel philosophies, will demonstrate the pre-existence of the 'void' concepts amongst the protagonists and will prove the huge influence that they had in the construction of this new urban idea for the architects and the urban planners, and in particular Koolhaas. Finally, other contemporary urban protagonists will illustrate through their projects and their writings, a variety of approaches for the void up to the present day. And right at the end, an experiment through the void projects of the author, will offer an introspective vision of the process. More than two decades after the 'Strategy of the void' this approach goes beyond the diagrammatic stage of a competition, confirming not only its pertinence, but also its ability to provide answers that are both varied and renewed to the extremely complex and confused situations that are to be found in today's urban environment. This new way of conceptualising the urban landscape by the void, the reference for the dense area of the historical city, is replaced by the informal void of the contemporary city considered as the very identity of this new continuous urbanism and shows itself ultimately to be the void. a new urban strategy.

EPFL2011

Hand Impedance Measurements During Interactive Manual Welding With a Robot

Aude Billard, Mustafa Suphi Erden

This paper presents a study of hand impedance measurements comparatively across ten professional and 14 novice manual welders, when they are performing tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding interactively with the KUKA lightweight robot arm (LWR). The results show that hand impedance differs across professional and novice welders. The welding torch is attached to the KUKA LWR, which is admittance controlled via a force sensor to give the feeling of a free floating mass at its end-effector. The subjects perform TIG welding on 1.5-mm-thick stainless steel plates by manipulating the torch. Impedance is measured by introducing external force disturbances and fitting a mass-damper-spring model to human hand reactions. The quality of welding is measured using the variance of the position signals above 0.1 Hz. Professional welders demonstrate less variance and, in general, apply larger hand impedance (larger damping and stiffness) than the novice welders. The variance of position during nominal welding is minimal for both professional and novice welders in the direction perpendicular to the welding line in the plane of the plate, which is the most important direction for the quality of the weld. For both professional and novice welders, the mass and damping values are largest in this direction compared with the other two directions. Professional welders demonstrate larger damping than the novice welders in this direction.

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2015

Robotic training for hand movements during manual welding with real-time alarm feedback

Aude Billard, Mustafa Suphi Erden

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to develop a robotic training system for the hand movements during manual welding. The system provides real-time notice-feedback with sound or light alarms, whenever the welding hand vibrates beyond the nominal level observed with professional welders. Design/methodology/approach – The large variations of hand movements are detected by monitoring the deviation of the tool position from a smooth curve estimated in real time by a Kalman filter. An alarm is generated in the form of a flashing light or beep sound whenever the deviations exceed a predetermined threshold. The performance of hand movements is measured in terms of the variations of the position data. Twelve novice and five professional welders took part in the experiments and answered a questionnaire that assessed the usability and work load of the system. Findings – Compared to the sound alarms, the light alarms resulted in a larger and statistically significant decrease in the variation of hand movements of the novice welders and brought the level of variation close to that of the professional welders. The alarms did not result in a significant decrease in the variation of hand movements of the professional welders. The responses to the questionnaire indicated that both professional and novice welders found the system useful and they did not experience any significant work load. Social implications – The system developed in this study can ease the training of novice welders, by speeding up the learning and reducing the need for human tutors. Originality/value – This study is first to provide real-time notice-feedback for training while manual welding, based on a comparison of the performances of novice and professional welders.

2015

Le vide

Stephanie Bender

EPFL2011