The implications for the inclusion of robots in the daily lives of frail older adults, especially in relation to these population needs, have not been extensively studied. The "Multi-Role Shadow Robotic System for Independent Living" (SRS) project has developed a remotely-controlled, semi-autonomous robotic system to be used in domestic environments. The objective of this paper is to document the iterative procedure used to identify, select and prioritize user requirements. Seventy-four requirements were identified by means of focus groups, individual interviews and scenario-based interviews. The list of user requirements, ordered according to impact, number and transnational criteria, revealed a high number of requirements related to basic and instrumental activities of daily living, cognitive and social support and monitorization, and also involving privacy, safety and adaptation issues. Analysing and understanding older users' perceptions and needs when interacting with technological devices adds value to assistive technology and ensures that the systems address currently unmet needs.

In this study, we present the design and implementation of Arabic text classification in regard to university students' opinions through different algorithms such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Naive Bayes (NB). The aim of the study is to develop a framework to analyse Twitter "tweets" as having negative, positive or neutral sentiments in education or, in other words, to illustrate the relationship between the sentiments conveyed in Arabic tweets and the students' learning experiences at universities. Two experiments were carried out, one using negative and positive classes only and the other one with a neutral class. The results show that in Arabic, a sentiments SVM with an n-gram feature achieved higher accuracy than NB both with using negative and positive classes only and with the neutral class.

Social media has recently become a rich resource in mining user sentiments. In this paper, Twitter has been chosen as a platform for opinion mining in trading strategy with Mubasher products, which is a leading stock analysis software provider in the Gulf region. This experiment proposes a model for sentiment analysis of Saudi Arabic (standard and Arabian Gulf dialect) tweets to extract feedback from Mubasher products. A hybrid of natural language processing and machine learning approaches on building models are used to classify tweets according to their sentiment polarity into one of the classes positive, negative and neutral. Firstly, document's Pre-processing are explored on the dataset. Secondly, Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) are applied with different feature selection schemes like TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) and BTO (Binary-Term Occurrence). Thirdly, the proposed model for sentiment analysis is expanded to obtain the results for N-Grams term of tokens. Finally, human has labelled the data and this may involve some mistakes in the labelling process. At this moment, neutral class with generalisation of our classification will take results to different classification accuracy.

Inspired by nature, a number of techniques have been developed to fabricate the bionic structures of lotus leaves and moth eyes in order to realize the extraordinary functions of self-cleaning and antireflection. Compared with the existing technologies, we present a straightforward method to fabricate well-defined micro and nano artificial bio-structures in this work. The proposed method of direct laser interference nanomanufacturing (DLIN) takes a significant advantage of high efficiency as only a single technological procedure is needed without pretreatment, mask, and pattern transfer processes. Meanwhile, the corresponding structures show both antireflection and superhydrophobicity properties simultaneously. The developed four-beam nanosecond laser interference system configuring the TE-TE-TE-TE and TE-TE-TE-TM polarization modes was set up to generate periodic micro cone and hole structures with a huge number of nano features on the surface. The theoretical and experimental results have shown that the periodic microcone structure exhibits excellent properties with both a high contact angle (CA = 156.3°) and low omnidirectional reflectance (5.9–15.4%). Thus, DLIN is a novel and promising method suitable for mass production of self-cleaning and antireflection surface structures.

SRS is a European research project for building robust personal assistant robots using ROS (Robotic Operating System) and Care-O-bot (COB) 3 as the initial demonstration platform. In this paper, experience gained while building the SRS system is presented. A main contribution of the paper is the SRS autonomous control framework. The framework is divided into two parts. First, it has an automatic task planner, which initialises actions on the symbolic level. The planner produces proactive robotic behaviours based on updated semantic knowledge. Second, it has an action executive for coordination actions at the level of sensing and actuation. The executive produces reactive behaviours in well-defined domains. The two parts are integrated by fuzzy logic based symbolic grounding. As a whole, they represent the framework for autonomous control. Based on the framework, several new components and user interfaces are integrated on top of COB's existing capabilities to enable robust fetch and carry in unstructured environments. The implementation strategy and results are discussed at the end of the paper.