Paper now available on the internet

The paper about the use of heated floor in farrowing pen that I mentioned here is now available on the webpage of Applied Animal Behaviour Science. Just follow the link below:

L. J. Pedersen, Malmkvist, J. and Jørgensen, E. (2006) The use of a heated floor area by sows and piglets in farrowing pens. Applied Animal Behaviour Science (In press)

It is quite an extraordinary short interval from the final revision to the web-publication. However, there are quite a lot of papers waiting in the "In press" queue, but hopefully it will be formally published this year.

Paper submitted for the ISVEE meeting

Together with Niels Peter Baadsgaard from the Danish Meat Association and Vibeke Sørensen from Danish Institute for Food and Veterinary Research I have made a small paper that has been submitted for the International Symposium on Veterinary Epidemiology and Economics (ISVEE) in Cairns, Australia from 6 - 11 August 2006. The title of the paper is Evaluating A Bayesian Graphical Model For Clinical Herd-Testing and will be presented by Niels Peter at the symposium. I am not participating in the symposium. The paper is concerned with how to combine different sources of diagnostic information in order to estimate herd prevalence of different diseases, and is part of the CEPROS project about health decision support. In addition, I am also involved in another presentation at ISVEE. Nils Toft from the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Copenhagen is going to present The Effect of Correlation Structures on the Properties of Diagnostic Tests for Paratuberculosis .

PigVision images to be reanalysed

Morten Birkholm, who participated in the PigVision project as an employee at Videometer, is currently participating in a course at IMM at the Danish Technical University. As a project in that course he wants to reanalyse the pig images from the experimental setup at Grønhøj. Originally the images were analysed using Active Shape Models (ASM), and now he wants to apply Active Appearence Modelling (AAM) to the images. I have sent him the approximately 1000 images with corresponding weights, and I look forward to see the results in the beginning of June. If you visit Tim Cootes' home page you can find more information about the techniques. By the way, tomorrow I am censor on master thesis about delivery strategies for slaughter pigs. Another off-spring of the PigVision project.

New version of Bayes Net home pages

Two of my home pages concerning bayesian networks have been relocated/redesigned. The first is examples of use of bayesian network in animal production, and the second is the web version (in Danish) of the article in Naturens Verden: Bedre Beslutninger med Bayesianske Netværk, which I coauthored with Steffen L. Lauritzen.

Paper accepted

Our paper has been accepted about the use of heated floor in farrowing pen from the project about loose housing of farrowing sows. The first version was returned with a request for minor revisions, which we have made. The formal citation is:

L. J. Pedersen, Malmkvist, J. and Jørgensen, E. (2006) The use of a heated floor area by sows and piglets in farrowing pens. Applied Animal Behaviour Science (accepted)

I had to make some recalculations concerning the diurnal rythm in behaviour when farrowing approaches. It was a bit tricky because we considered time on two different scales, the chronological scale (time of day) and the time related to time until/since birth of first pig.

Network for Intelligent Farrowing Pen

Our application about the Intelligent farrowing pen of the future has been granted. The purpose is to establish a network between researchers, IT-companies and Housing companies. Lene Juul Pedersen is the project leader.