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Subjective visual assessment of animals by classifiers is undertaken for several different traits in farm livestock, e.g., linear type traits, body condition score, or carcass conformation. One of the difficulties in assessment is the effect of an individual classifier. To ensure that classifiers rank animals consistently, i.e., the repeatability between classifiers and within classifier, genetic links across routinely scored observations may be used to validate scoring of individual classifiers. Eighteen classifiers of NRS scored 18 traits, and body condition for 91,589 first-lactation heifers, daughters of 601 sires. Genetic parameters were estimated in a series of bivariate analyses. In turn, observations of each individual classifier were trait 1 and all observations of all other classifiers were grouped as trait 2. Likelihoods were used to test whether additive genetic or residual variances for each classifier (trait 1) differed significantly from the grouped records (trait 2), and to test whether the genetic correlation between trait 1 and trait 2 was significantly smaller than unity. Arbitrary criteria were set to mark traits for individual classifiers when a significant deviation was found: genetic correlations of < or = 0.40, and more than 15% deviation for the standard deviation. One classifier had relatively low heritabilities, but high genetic correlations with the others. This might indicate that the repeatability within classifier should be improved. Another classifier had high genetic correlations with the others, but his sire variances were significantly higher than average for most traits. For the genetic correlations, each classifier averaged 3.3 traits marked, ranging from 0 to 9. Overall feet and legs, rump width, central ligament, and foot angle received most marks (12 to 6 classifiers), but no disagreement existed on the definition (i.e., no mark) for body condition score, stature, rump angle, teat length, overall udder, and teat placement. These simple and cheap marks can be used in training sessions to improve the quality of the scoring system.

Abstract. Ambient agents react on humans on the basis of their information obtained by sensoring and their knowledge about human functioning. Appropriate types of reactions depend on in how far an ambient agent understands the human. On the one hand, such an understanding requires that the agent has knowledge to a certain depth about the human's physiological and mental processes in the form of an explicitly represented model of the causal and dynamic relations describing these processes. On the other hand, given such a model representation, the agent needs reasoning methods to derive conclusions from the model and the information available by sensoring. This paper presents a number of such model-based reasoning methods. They have been formally specified in an executable temporal format, which allows for simulation of reasoning traces and automated verification in a dedicated software environment. A number of such simulation experiments and their formal analysis are described.

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For professionals in military and law enforcement domains, learning to regulate one’s emotions under threatening circumstances is crucial. The STRESS project envisions a virtual reality-based system to enable such professionals to train their emotion regulation skills. To explore the possibilities for such a system, this article describes an experiment performed to investigate the impact of virtual training on participants’ experienced emotional responses in threatening situations. A set of 15 participants were asked to rate the subjective emotional intensity of a set of affective pictures at two different time points, separated by 6 h. The participants were divided into three groups: the first group performed a session of virtual training in between, in which they received a choice-reaction task; the second group performed a session of virtual training, in which they had to apply reappraisal strategies; and a control group, that did not have any training session. The results indicate that the reappraisal-based training caused the participants in that group to give significantly lower ratings for the emotional intensity of the negative pictures, whereas the content-based training resulted in significantly higher ratings compared to the group without training. Moreover, a second experiment, performed with the same participants 6 months later, indicated that these effects are fairly persistent over time, and that they transfer to different pictures with similar characteristics.

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