IN-VIVO CT DOSIMETRY DURING VIRTUAL COLONOSCOPY

Virtual colonoscopy (VC) is a minimally invasive means for identifying colorectal polyps and colorectal lesions by insufflating a patient’s bowel, applying contrast agent via rectal catheter, and performing multi-detector computed tomography (MDCT) scans. The technique is recommended for colonic health screening by the American Cancer Society but not funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) partially because of potential risks from radiation exposure. To date, no in‐vivo organ dose measurements have been performed for MDCT scans; thus, the accuracy of any current dose estimates is currently unknown. In this study, two TLDs were affixed to the inner lumen of standard rectal catheters used in VC, and in-vivo rectal dose measurements were obtained within 6 VC patients. In order to calculate rectal dose, TLD-100 powder response was characterized at diagnostic doses such that appropriate correction factors could be determined for VC. A third-order polynomial regression with a goodness of fit factor of R2=0.992 was constructed from this data. Rectal dose measurements were acquired with TLDs during simulated VC within a modified anthropomorphic phantom configured to represent three sizes of patients undergoing VC. The measured rectal doses decreased in an exponential manner with increasing phantom effective diameter, with R2=0.993 for the exponential regression model and a maximum percent coefficient of variation (%CoV) of 4.33%. In-vivo measurements yielded rectal doses ranged from that decreased exponentially with increasing patient effective diameter, in a manner that was also favorably predicted by the size specific dose estimate (SSDE) model for all VC patients that were of similar age, body composition, and TLD placement. The measured rectal dose within a younger patient was favorably predicted by the anthropomorphic phantom dose regression model due to similarities in the percentages of highly attenuating material at the respective measurement locations and in the placement of the TLDs. The in-vivo TLD response did not increase in %CoV with decreasing dose, and the largest %CoV was 10.0%.

Virtual reality and the role of the prefrontal cortex in adults and children

In this review, the neural underpinnings of the experience of presence are outlined. Firstly, it is shown that presence is associated with activation of a distributed network, which includes the dorsal and ventral visual stream, the parietal cortex, the premotor cortex, mesial temporal areas, the brainstem and the thalamus. Secondly, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is identified as a key node of the network as it modulates the activity of the network and the associated experience of presence. Thirdly, children lack the strong modulatory influence of the DLPFC on the network due to their unmatured frontal cortex. Fourthly, it is shown that presence-related measures are influenced by manipulating the activation in the DLPFC using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) while participants are exposed to the virtual roller coaster ride. Finally, the findings are discussed in the context of current models explaining the experience of presence, the rubber hand illusion, and out-of-body experiences.

Facebook style: The use of non-standard features in virtual speech conditioned by the medium Facebook

Over the last few years Facebook has become a widespread and continuously expanding medium of communication. Being a new medium of social interaction, Facebook produces its own communication style. My focus of analysis is how Facebook users from the city of Malaga create this style by means of phonic features typical of the Andalusian variety and how the users reflect on the use of these phonic features. This project is based on a theoretical framework which combines variationist sociolinguistics with CMC to study the emergence of a style peculiar of the online social networks. In a corpus of Facebook users from three zones of Malaga, I have analysed the use of non-standard phonic features and then compared them with the same features in a reference corpus collected on three beaches of Malaga. From this comparison it can be deduced that the analysed social and linguistic factors work differently in real and virtual speech. Due to these different uses we can consider the peculiar electronic communication of Facebook as a style constrained by the electronic medium. It is a style which serves the users to create social meaning and to express their linguistic identities.

Project Management Learning in a Collaborative Distant Learning Context - An Actual On-going Experience

The goal of this paper is to show the results of an on-going experience on teaching project management to grade students by following a development scheme of management related competencies on an individual basis. In order to achieve that goal, the students are organized in teams that must solve a problem and manage the development of a feasible solution to satisfy the needs of a client. The innovative component advocated in this paper is the formal introduction of negotiating and virtual team management aspects, as different teams from different universities at different locations and comprising students with different backgrounds must collaborate and compete amongst them. The different learning aspects are identified and the improvement levels are reflected in a rubric that has been designed ad hoc for this experience. Finally, the effort frameworks for the student and instructor have been established according to the requirements of the Bologna paradigms. This experience is developed through a software-based support system allowing blended learning for the theoretical and individual?s work aspects, blogs, wikis, etc., as well as project management tools based on WWW that allow the monitoring of not only the expected deliverables and the achievement of the goals but also the progress made on learning as established in the defined rubric

Desing and Validation of a Light Inference System to Support Embedded Context Reasoning

Embedded context management in resource-constrained devices (e.g. mobile phones, autonomous sensors or smart objects) imposes special requirements in terms of lightness for data modelling and reasoning. In this paper, we explore the state-of-the-art on data representation and reasoning tools for embedded mobile reasoning and propose a light inference system (LIS) aiming at simplifying embedded inference processes offering a set of functionalities to avoid redundancy in context management operations. The system is part of a service-oriented mobile software framework, conceived to facilitate the creation of context-aware applications—it decouples sensor data acquisition and context processing from the application logic. LIS, composed of several modules, encapsulates existing lightweight tools for ontology data management and rule-based reasoning, and it is ready to run on Java-enabled handheld devices. Data management and reasoning processes are designed to handle a general ontology that enables communication among framework components. Both the applications running on top of the framework and the framework components themselves can configure the rule and query sets in order to retrieve the information they need from LIS. In order to test LIS features in a real application scenario, an ‘Activity Monitor’ has been designed and implemented: a personal health-persuasive application that provides feedback on the user’s lifestyle, combining data from physical and virtual sensors. In this case of use, LIS is used to timely evaluate the user’s activity level, to decide on the convenience of triggering notifications and to determine the best interface or channel to deliver these context-aware alerts.d

Behavior competence development through e-learning: experience at the undergraduate level in the context of Aula a Distancia Abierta (ADA) Madrid, Spain

This communication presents the results of an innovative approach for competencedevelopment suggesting a new methodology for the integration of these elements in professional development within the ADA initiative (AulaaDistanciaAbierta, Distance and Open Classroom) of the Community of Madrid. The main objective of this initiative is to promote the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for educational activities by creating a new learning environment structured on the premises of commitment to self–learning, individual work, communication and virtual interaction, and self and continuous assessment. Results from this experience showed that conceptualization is a positive contribution to learning, as students added names and characteristics to competences and abilities that were previously unknown or underestimated. Also, the diversity of participants’ disciplines indicated multidimensional interest in this idea and supported the theory that this approach to competencedevelopment could be successful in all knowledge areas.

Strengthening communication skills in an innovative context of engineering project management learning

This document presents an innovative, formal educational initiative that is aimed at enhancing the development of engineering students’ specific competences when studying Project Management (PM) subject. The framework of the experience combines (1) theoretical concepts, (2) the development of a real-case project carried out by multidisciplinary groups of three different universities, (3) the use of software web 2.0 tools and (4) group and individual assignments of students that play different roles (project managers and team members). Under this scenario, the study focuses on monitoring the communication competence in the ever growing PM virtual environment. Factors such as corporal language, technical means, stage, and PM specific vocabulary among others have been considered in order to assess the students’ performance on this issue. As a main contribution, the paper introduces an ad-hoc rubric that, based on previous investigations, has been adapted and tested for the first time to this new and specific context. Additionally, the research conducted has provided some interesting findings that suggest further actions to improve and better define future rubrics, oriented to communication or even other competences. As specific PM subject concerns, it has been detected that students playing the role of Project Managers strengthen their competences more than those ones that play the role of Team Members. It has also been detected that students have more difficulty assimilating concepts related to risk and quality management. However those concepts related with scope, time or cost areas of knowledge have been better assimilated by the students.

Design and Validation of a Light Inference System to Support Embedded Context Reasoning

Embedded context management in resource-constrained devices (e.g. mobile phones, autonomous sensors or smart objects) imposes special requirements in terms of lightness for data modelling and reasoning. In this paper, we explore the state-of-the-art on data representation and reasoning tools for embedded mobile reasoning and propose a light inference system (LIS) aiming at simplifying embedded inference processes offering a set of functionalities to avoid redundancy in context management operations. The system is part of a service-oriented mobile software framework, conceived to facilitate the creation of context-aware applications?it decouples sensor data acquisition and context processing from the application logic. LIS, composed of several modules, encapsulates existing lightweight tools for ontology data management and rule-based reasoning, and it is ready to run on Java-enabled handheld devices. Data management and reasoning processes are designed to handle a general ontology that enables communication among framework components. Both the applications running on top of the framework and the framework components themselves can configure the rule and query sets in order to retrieve the information they need from LIS. In order to test LIS features in a real application scenario, an ?Activity Monitor? has been designed and implemented: a personal health-persuasive application that provides feedback on the user?s lifestyle, combining data from physical and virtual sensors. In this case of use, LIS is used to timely evaluate the user?s activity level, to decide on the convenience of triggering notifications and to determine the best interface or channel to deliver these context-aware alerts.

Virtual Excursions: a new way to explore science in class

The educational platform Virtual Science Hub (ViSH) has been developed as part of the GLOBAL excursion European project. ViSH (http://vishub.org/) is a portal where teachers and scientist interact to create virtual excursions to science infrastructures. The main motivation behind the project was to connect teachers - and in consequence their students - to scientific institutions and their wide amount of infrastructures and resources they are working with. Thus the idea of a hub was born that would allow the two worlds of scientists and teachers to connect and to innovate science teaching. The core of the ViSH?s concept design is based on virtual excursions, which allow for a number of pedagogical models to be applied. According to our internal definition a virtual excursion is a tour through some digital context by teachers and pupils on a given topic that is attractive and has an educational purpose. Inquiry-based learning, project-based and problem-based learning are the most prominent approaches that a virtual excursion may serve. The domain specific resources and scientific infrastructures currently available on the ViSH are focusing on life sciences, nano-technology, biotechnology, grid and volunteer computing. The virtual excursion approach allows an easy combination of these resources into interdisciplinary teaching scenarios. In addition, social networking features support the users in collaborating and communicating in relation to these excursions and thus create a community of interest for innovative science teaching. The design and development phases were performed following a participatory design approach. An important aspect in this process was to create design partnerships amongst all actors involved, researchers, developers, infrastructure providers, teachers, social scientists, and pedagogical experts early in the project. A joint sense of ownership was created and important changes during the conceptual phase were implemented in the ViSH due to early user feedback. Technology-wise the ViSH is based on the latest web technologies in order to make it cross-platform compatible so that it works on several operative systems such as Windows, Mac or Linux and multi-device accessible, such as desktop, tablet and mobile devices. The platform has been developed in HTML5, the latest standard for web development, assuring that it can run on any modern browser. In addition to social networking features a core element on the ViSH is the virtual excursions editor. It is a web tool that allows teachers and scientists to create rich mash-ups of learning resources provided by the e-Infrastructures (i.e. remote laboratories and live webcams). These rich mash-ups can be presented in either slides or flashcards format. Taking advantage of the web architecture supported, additional powerful components have been integrated like a recommendation engine to provide personalized suggestions about educational content or interesting users and a videoconference tool to enhance real-time collaboration like MashMeTV (http://www.mashme.tv/).

Monitoring the communication competence in an innovative context of project management learning

This document presents an innovative, formal educational initiative that is aimed at enhancing the development of engineering students' specific competences. The subject of project management is the common theoretical and practical framework that articulates an experience that is carried out by multidisciplinary groups. Full utilization of Web 2.0 platforms and Project Based Learning constitutes the applied methodology. More specifically, this study focuses on monitoring communication competence when working in virtual environments, providing an ad-hoc rubric as a final result.

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.

RECLAMO: virtual and collaborative honeynets based on trust management and autonomous systems applied to intrusion management

Security intrusions in large systems is a problem due to its lack of scalability with the current IDS-based approaches. This paper describes the RECLAMO project, where an architecture for an Automated Intrusion Response System (AIRS) is being proposed. This system will infer the most appropriate response for a given attack, taking into account the attack type, context information, and the trust and reputation of the reporting IDSs. RECLAMO is proposing a novel approach: diverting the attack to a specific honeynet that has been dynamically built based on the attack information. Among all components forming the RECLAMO's architecture, this paper is mainly focused on defining a trust and reputation management model, essential to recognize if IDSs are exposing an honest behavior in order to accept their alerts as true. Experimental results confirm that our model helps to encourage or discourage the launch of the automatic reaction process.

Increasing the Intelligence of Virtual Sales Assistants through Knowledge Modeling Techniques

Shopping agents are web-based applications that help consumers to find appropriate products in the context of e-commerce. In this paper we argue about the utility of advanced model-based techniques that recently have been proposed in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Engineering, in order to increase the level of support provided by this type of applications. We illustrate this approach with a virtual sales assistant that dynamically configures a product according to the needs and preferences of customers.

Context modelling for natural Human Computer Interaction applications in e-health

The conception of IoT (Internet of Things) is accepted as the future tendency of Internet among academia and industry. It will enable people and things to be connected at anytime and anyplace, with anything and anyone. IoT has been proposed to be applied into many areas such as Healthcare, Transportation，Logistics, and Smart environment etc. However, this thesis emphasizes on the home healthcare area as it is the potential healthcare model to solve many problems such as the limited medical resources, the increasing demands for healthcare from elderly and chronic patients which the traditional model is not capable of. A remarkable change in IoT in semantic oriented vision is that vast sensors or devices are involved which could generate enormous data. Methods to manage the data including acquiring, interpreting, processing and storing data need to be implemented. Apart from this, other abilities that IoT is not capable of are concluded, namely, interoperation, context awareness and security & privacy. Context awareness is an emerging technology to manage and take advantage of context to enable any type of system to provide personalized services. The aim of this thesis is to explore ways to facilitate context awareness in IoT. In order to realize this objective, a preliminary research is carried out in this thesis. The most basic premise to realize context awareness is to collect, model, understand, reason and make use of context. A complete literature review for the existing context modelling and context reasoning techniques is conducted. The conclusion is that the ontology-based context modelling and ontology-based context reasoning are the most promising and efficient techniques to manage context. In order to fuse ontology into IoT, a specific ontology-based context awareness framework is proposed for IoT applications. In general, the framework is composed of eight components which are hardware, UI (User Interface), Context modelling, Context fusion, Context reasoning, Context repository, Security unit and Context dissemination. Moreover, on the basis of TOVE (Toronto Virtual Enterprise), a formal ontology developing methodology is proposed and illustrated which consists of four stages: Specification & Conceptualization, Competency Formulation, Implementation and Validation & Documentation. In addition, a home healthcare scenario is elaborated by listing its well-defined functionalities. Aiming at representing this specific scenario, the proposed ontology developing methodology is applied and the ontology-based model is developed in a free and open-source ontology editor called Protégé. Finally, the accuracy and completeness of the proposed ontology are validated to show that this proposed ontology is able to accurately represent the scenario of interest.