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In ecology, one of the main interests is to understand species population dynamics and to describe its link with various environmental factors, such as habitat characteristics and climate. It is especially important to study the behaviour of animal species that can hosts pathogens, as they can be potential disease reservoirs and/or vectors. Pathogens of vector borne diseases can only be transmitted from an infected to a susceptible individual by a vector. Thus, vector ecology is a crucial factor influencing the transmission dynamics of vector borne diseases and their complexity. The formulation of models able to predict vector abundance are essential tools to implement intervention plans aiming to reduce the spread of vector-borne diseases (e.g. West Nile Virus). The goal of this paper is to explore the possible advantages in using Genetic Programming (GP) in the field of vector ecology. In this study, we present the application of GP to predict the distribution of Culex pipiens, a mosquito species vector of West Nile virus (WNV), in Piedmont, Italy. Our modelling approach took into consideration the ecological factors which affect mosquitoes abundance. Our results showed that GP was able to outperform a statistical model that was used to address the same problem in a previous work. Furthermore, GP performed an implicit feature selection, discovered automatically relationships among variables and produced fully explorable models.

Within the context of Industry 4.0 and of the new emerging Industry 5.0, human factors are becoming increasingly important, especially in Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC). This paper provides a novel study focused on the human aspects involved in industrial HRC by exploring the effects of various HRC setting factors. In particular, this paper aims at investigating the impact of industrial HRC on user experience, affective state, and stress, assessed through both subjective measures (i.e., questionnaires) and objective ones (i.e., physiological signals). A collaborative assembly task was implemented with different configurations, in which the robot movement speed, the distance between the operator and the robot workspace, and the control of the task execution time were varied. Forty-two participants were involved in the study and provided feedbacks on interaction quality and their affective state. Participants’ physiological responses (i.e., electrodermal activity and heart rate) were also collected non-invasively to monitor the amount of stress generated by the interaction. Analysis of both subjective and objective responses revealed how the configuration factors considered influence them. Robot movement speed and control of the task execution time resulted to be the most influential factors. The results also showed the need for customization of HRC to improve ergonomics, both psychological and physical, and the well-being of the operator.

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The introduction of collaborative robots aims to make production more flexible, promoting a greater interaction between humans and robots also from physical point of view. However, working closely with a robot may lead to the creation of stressful situations for the operator, which can negatively affect task performance. In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), robots are expected to be socially intelligent, that is, capable of understanding and reacting accordingly to human social and affective clues. This ability can be exploited implementing affective computing, which concerns the development of systems able to recognize, interpret, process, and simulate human affects. Social intelligence is essential for robots to establish a natural interaction with people in several contexts, including the manufacturing sector with the emergence of Industry 5.0. In order to take full advantage of the human-robot collaboration, the robotic system should be able to perceive the psycho-emotional and mental state of the operator through different sensing modalities (e.g. facial expressions, body language, voice, or physiological signals) and to adapt its behavior accordingly. The development of socially intelligent collaborative robots in the manufacturing sector can lead to a symbiotic human-robot collaboration, arising several research challenges that still need to be addressed. The goals of this paper are the following: (i) providing an overview of affective computing implementation in HRI; (ii) analyzing the state-of-art on this topic in different application contexts (e.g. healthcare, service applications, and manufacturing); (iii) highlighting research challenges for the manufacturing sector.