Realizing public announcements by justifications

Modal public announcement logics study how beliefs change after public announcements. However, these logics cannot express the reason for a new belief. Justification logics fill this gap since they can formally represent evidence and justifications for an agent's belief. We present OPAL(K) and JPAL(K) , two alternative justification counterparts of Gerbrandy–Groeneveld's public announcement logic PAL(K) . We show that PAL(K) is the forgetful projection of both OPAL(K) and JPAL(K) . We also establish that JPAL(K) partially realizes PAL(K) . The question whether a similar result holds for OPAL(K) is still open.

Mining free-text medical records for companion animal enteric syndrome surveillance.

Large amounts of animal health care data are present in veterinary electronic medical records (EMR) and they present an opportunity for companion animal disease surveillance. Veterinary patient records are largely in free-text without clinical coding or fixed vocabulary. Text-mining, a computer and information technology application, is needed to identify cases of interest and to add structure to the otherwise unstructured data. In this study EMR's were extracted from veterinary management programs of 12 participating veterinary practices and stored in a data warehouse. Using commercially available text-mining software (WordStat™), we developed a categorization dictionary that could be used to automatically classify and extract enteric syndrome cases from the warehoused electronic medical records. The diagnostic accuracy of the text-miner for retrieving cases of enteric syndrome was measured against human reviewers who independently categorized a random sample of 2500 cases as enteric syndrome positive or negative. Compared to the reviewers, the text-miner retrieved cases with enteric signs with a sensitivity of 87.6% (95%CI, 80.4-92.9%) and a specificity of 99.3% (95%CI, 98.9-99.6%). Automatic and accurate detection of enteric syndrome cases provides an opportunity for community surveillance of enteric pathogens in companion animals.

The Effect That Project Management Certification Has on Employability: Agent's Perceptions from Spain

This study analyses the effects that the project management certification has on employability. This analysis started with a participative process in which various groups of experts who are involved in the certification of people were consulted. A personal interview was carried out amongst 106 professionals —certifying bodies, training institutions, the civil service, and international organisations— and amongst professional who are certified in project management by the International Project Management Association in Spain. The results show that the certification emerges as a powerful tool for improving employability. The effects are demonstrated across two complementary aspects: internal company aspects and external aspects relating to the labour market. Finally, by compiling the different agents’ opinions, a series of measures emerge for improving the accreditation processes as an employability tool and increasing the mutual learning between public and private actors.

Incorporating proactivity to context-aware recommender systems for e-learning

Recommender systems in e-learning have proved to be powerful tools to find suitable educational material during the learning experience. But traditional user request-response patterns are still being used to generate these recommendations. By including contextual information derived from the use of ubiquitous learning environments, the possibility of incorporating proactivity to the recommendation process has arisen. In this paper we describe methods to push proactive recommendations to e-learning systems users when the situation is appropriate without being needed their explicit request. As a result, interesting learning objects can be recommended attending to the user?s needs in every situation. The impact of this proactive recommendations generated have been evaluated among teachers and scientists in a real e-learning social network called Virtual Science Hub related to the GLOBAL excursion European project. Outcomes indicate that the methods proposed are valid to generate such kind of recommendations in e-learning scenarios. The results also show that the users' perceived appropriateness of having proactive recommendations is high.

Adaptive cross-device videoconferencing solution for wireless networks based on QoS monitoring

The increase in CPU power and screen quality of todays smartphones as well as the availability of high bandwidth wireless networks has enabled high quality mobile videoconfer- encing never seen before. However, adapting to the variety of devices and network conditions that come as a result is still not a trivial issue. In this paper, we present a multiple participant videoconferencing service that adapts to different kind of devices and access networks while providing an stable communication. By combining network quality detection and the use of a multipoint control unit for video mixing and transcoding, desktop, tablet and mobile clients can participate seamlessly. We also describe the cost in terms of bandwidth and CPU usage of this approach in a variety of scenarios.

Collective behaviour in a square lattice of driven Duffing resonators coupled to van der Pol oscillators

The global and local synchronisation of a square lattice composed of alternating Duffing resonators and van der Pol oscillators coupled through displacement is studied. The lattice acts as a sensing device in which the input signal is characterised by an external driving force that is injected into the system through a subset of the Duffing resonators. The parameters of the system are taken from MEMS devices. The effects of the system parameters, the lattice architecture and size are discussed.

Discovering the preferences of physicians with regards to rank-ordered medical documents

The practice of evidence-based medicine involves consulting documents from repositories such as Scopus, PubMed, or the Cochrane Library. The most common approach for presenting retrieved documents is in the form of a list, with the assumption that the higher a document is on a list, the more relevant it is. Despite this list-based presentation, it is seldom studied how physicians perceive the importance of the order of documents presented in a list. This paper describes an empirical study that elicited and modeled physicians' preferences with regard to list-based results. Preferences were analyzed using a GRIP method that relies on pairwise comparisons of selected subsets of possible rank-ordered lists composed of 3 documents. The results allow us to draw conclusions regarding physicians' attitudes towards the importance of having documents ranked correctly on a result list, versus the importance of retrieving relevant but misplaced documents. Our findings should help developers of clinical information retrieval applications when deciding how retrieved documents should be presented and how performance of the application should be assessed. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Combining ERP systems with enterprise 2.0

The paper discusses both the complementary factors and contradictions of adoption ERP based systems with enterprise 2.0. ERP is well known as its' efficient business process management. Also the high failure rate the system implementation is famous as well. According to [1], ERP systems could achieve efficient business performance by enabling a standardized business process design, but at a cost of flexibility in operations. However, enterprise 2.0 supports flexible business process management, informal and less structured interactions [3],[4],[21]. Traditional researcher claimed efficiency and flexibility may seem incompatible in that they are different business objectives and may exist in different organizational environments. However, the paper will break traditional norms that combine ERP and enterprise 2.0 in a single enterprise to improve both efficient and flexible operations simultaneously. Based on the multiple cases studies, four cases presented different attitudes on usage ERP systems and enterprise social systems. Based on socio-technical theory, the paper presents in-depth analysis benefits of combination ERP with enterprise 2.0 for these firms.

An adaptive IEEE 802.15.4 data transmission scheme for smart grid applications

IEEE 802.15.4 networks (also known as ZigBee networks) has the features of low data rate and low power consumption. In this paper we propose an adaptive data transmission scheme which is based on CSMA/CA access control scheme, for applications which may have heavy traffic loads such as smart grids. In the proposed scheme, the personal area network (PAN) coordinator will adaptively broadcast a frame length threshold, which is used by the sensors to make decision whether a data frame should be transmitted directly to the target destinations, or follow a short data request frame. If the data frame is long and prone to collision, use of a short data request frame can efficiently reduce the costs of the potential collision on the energy and bandwidth. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme with largely improve bandwidth and power efficiency. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.

Energy efficient adaptive cooperative communications in wireless sensor networks

Energy efficiency is one of the most important performances of a wireless sensor network. In this paper, we show that choosing a proper transmission scheme given the channel and network conditions can ensure a high energy performance in different transmission environments. Based on the energy models we established for both cooperative and non-cooperative communications, the efficiency in terms of energy consumption per bit for different transmission schemes is investigated. It is shown that cooperative transmission schemes can outperform non-cooperative schemes in energy efficiency in severe channel conditions and when the source-destination distance is in a medium or long range. But the latter is more energy efficient than the former for short-range transmission. For cooperative transmission schemes, the number of transmission branches and the number of relays per branch can also be properly selected to adapt to the variations of the transmission environment, so that the total energy consumption can be minimized.

Client QoE-oriented segment selection for DASH

A segment selection method controlled by Quality of Experience (QoE) factors for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is presented in this paper. Current rate adaption algorithms aim to eliminate buffer underrun events by significantly reducing the code rate when experiencing pauses in replay. In reality, however, viewers may choose to accept a level of buffer underrun in order to achieve an improved level of picture fidelity or to accept the degradation in picture fidelity in order to maintain the service continuity. The proposed rate adaption scheme in our work can maximize the user QoE in terms of both continuity and fidelity (picture quality) in DASH applications. It is shown that using this scheme a high level of quality for streaming services, especially at low packet loss rates, can be achieved. Our scheme can also maintain a best trade-off between continuity-based quality and fidelity-based quality, by determining proper threshold values for the level of quality intended by clients with different quality requirements. In addition, the integration of the rate adaptation mechanism with the scheduling process is investigated in the context of a mobile communication network and related performances are analyzed.

Exploring the effect of buffer behaviour on perceived video quality

In this work we deal with video streams over TCP networks and propose an alternative measurement to the widely used and accepted peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) due to the limitations of this metric in the presence of temporal errors. A test-bed was created to simulate buffer under-run in scalable video streams and the pauses produced as a result of the buffer under-run were inserted into the video before being employed as the subject of subjective testing. The pause intensity metric proposed in [1] was compared with the subjective results and it was shown that in spite of reductions in frame rate and resolution, a correlation with pause intensity still exists. Due to these conclusions, the metric may be employed in layer selection in scalable video streams. © 2011 IEEE.

The relationship of instructor technical literacy to the academic performance of students in career academies

Career Academy instructors' technical literacy is vital to the academic success of students. This nonexperimental ex post facto study examined the relationships between the level of technical literacy of instructors in career academies and student academic performance. It was also undertaken to explore the relationship between the pedagogical training of instructors and the academic performance of students. ^ Out of a heterogeneous population of 564 teachers in six targeted schools, 136 teachers (26.0 %) responded to an online survey. The survey was designed to gather demographic and teaching experience data. Each demographic item was linked by researchers to teachers' technology use in the classroom. Student achievement was measured by student learning gains as assessed by the reading section of the FCAT from the previous to the present school year. ^ Linear and hierarchical regressions were conducted to examine the research questions. To clarify the possibility of teacher gender and teacher race/ethnic group differences by research variable, a series of one-way ANOVAs were conducted. As revealed by the ANOVA results, there were not statistically significant group differences in any of the research variables by teacher gender or teacher race/ethnicity. Greater student learning gains were associated with greater teacher technical expertise integrating computers and technology into the classroom, even after controlling for teacher attitude towards computers. Neither teacher attitude toward technology integration nor years of experience in integrating computers into the curriculum significantly predicted student learning gains in the regression models. ^ Implications for HRD theory, research, and practice suggest that identifying teacher levels of technical literacy may help improve student academic performance by facilitating professional development strategies and new parameters for defining highly qualified instructors with 21st century skills. District professional development programs can benefit by increasing their offerings to include more computer and information communication technology courses. Teacher preparation programs can benefit by including technical literacy as part of their curriculum. State certification requirements could be expanded to include formal surveys to assess teacher use of technology.^

Serial evolutionary networks of within-patient HIV-1 sequences reveal patterns of evolution of X4 strains

Background The HIV virus is known for its ability to exploit numerous genetic and evolutionary mechanisms to ensure its proliferation, among them, high replication, mutation and recombination rates. Sliding MinPD, a recently introduced computational method [1], was used to investigate the patterns of evolution of serially-sampled HIV-1 sequence data from eight patients with a special focus on the emergence of X4 strains. Unlike other phylogenetic methods, Sliding MinPD combines distance-based inference with a nonparametric bootstrap procedure and automated recombination detection to reconstruct the evolutionary history of longitudinal sequence data. We present serial evolutionary networks as a longitudinal representation of the mutational pathways of a viral population in a within-host environment. The longitudinal representation of the evolutionary networks was complemented with charts of clinical markers to facilitate correlation analysis between pertinent clinical information and the evolutionary relationships. Results Analysis based on the predicted networks suggests the following:: significantly stronger recombination signals (p = 0.003) for the inferred ancestors of the X4 strains, recombination events between different lineages and recombination events between putative reservoir virus and those from a later population, an early star-like topology observed for four of the patients who died of AIDS. A significantly higher number of recombinants were predicted at sampling points that corresponded to peaks in the viral load levels (p = 0.0042). Conclusion Our results indicate that serial evolutionary networks of HIV sequences enable systematic statistical analysis of the implicit relations embedded in the topology of the structure and can greatly facilitate identification of patterns of evolution that can lead to specific hypotheses and new insights. The conclusions of applying our method to empirical HIV data support the conventional wisdom of the new generation HIV treatments, that in order to keep the virus in check, viral loads need to be suppressed to almost undetectable levels.