This paper presents team computing, TeC, a framework for end-user design, deployment, and evolution of applications for ubiquitous computing. Systems in TeC act as teams of elements with no central ...control: elements play their roles autonomously, and system behavior is emergent. The paper presents five small but illustrative systems in the domains of home automation, energy management, and surveillance. TeC's features include the ability to relate, at the design level, system behaviors to physical location and to the presence and identity of users. TeC also allows for the secure integration of parts of design contributed by different users. The paper discusses the implementation of a software infrastructure for the design and automated deployment of systems.
Privacy conscious online shoppers find themselves forced to disseminate and share private data with new entities when engaging in online transactions. This paper provides a solution that limits ...private data exposure to entities that already have it. First, we provide a high-level classification of current privacy assurance practices. We identify three categories that are based on who is responsible for the protection of private data access and usage. Next, we present a detailed classification based on the degree of user anonymity and the degree of transaction traceability a privacy assurance model provides. Finally, we propose a new online shopping model that limits private data sharing to the userpsilas bank, which we argue does not constitute a new exposure of the userpsilas data.
Restructuring Ontologies through Knowledge Discovery Henshaw, S.M.; El-Masri, A.; Sage, P.A.
2008 10th IEEE Conference on E-Commerce Technology and the Fifth IEEE Conference on Enterprise Computing, E-Commerce and E-Services,
2008-July
Conference Proceeding
In this work, we describe an approach for maintaining self-adapting personalized ontologies. We motivate this work with the observation that users are often interested in only small parts of larger ...domain ontologies; however, we also observe that users are frequently unaware of concepts that may be of interest given their past preferences. As such, we suggest that personalized ontologies should be continuously specialized and generalized to represent only those concepts that have proven to be of value to the user.
The aim of this study was to investigate the association of albumin levels on admission and change in levels during hospitalization with hospitalization outcomes.
Historical prospective data of ...patients hospitalized between 2011 and 2013 were collected. Levels of albumin were classified as marked hypoalbuminemia (<2.5 mg/dL), mild hypoalbuminemia (2.5-3.5 mg/dL), normal albumin (3.5-4.5 mg/dL), and hyperalbuminemia (>4.5 mg/dL). Main outcomes were length of hospitalization, in-hospital mortality, and long-term mortality.
The cohort included 30,732 patients (mean age 67 ± 18 years, 51% male). Most patients had normal albumin levels on admission (n = 20,124, 65%), 29% of patients had hypoalbuminemia, mostly mild (n = 7,334, 24%), and 5% of patients had marked hypoalbuminemia (n = 1436). Hyperalbuminemia on admission was evident in 6% of the patients (n = 1838). Follow-up (median ± standard deviation) was 1675 ± 325 days. Compared with in-hospital mortality with normal albumin on admission (2%), mortality was higher with mild (12%) and marked hypoalbuminemia (34%) and lower with hyperalbuminemia (0.3%). Mortality rate at the end of follow-up was 29% with normal albumin levels, 67% and 83% with mild and marked hypoalbuminemia, respectively. Patients with hyperalbuminemia on admission and before discharge have the best short- and long-term survival. This pattern was similar when analyzed separately in different age groups. In patients with hypoalbuminemia on admission, normalization of albumin levels before discharge was associated with better short- and long-term survival, compared with patients with hypoalbuminemia before discharge.
Low albumin levels on admission are associated with increased short- and long-term mortality. Normalization of albumin levels before discharge was associated with lower mortality risk, compared with hypoalbuminemia before discharge.
Objective
To assess Lebanese medical students’ attitudes towards patient safety and medical error disclosure.
Methods
This was a cross-sectional study involving medical students from seven different ...medical schools in Lebanon. The participants completed the Attitudes to Patient Safety Questionnaire (APSQ-III) online, which consists of 26 items across nine key patient safety domains. Items were scored from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Demographic data were also collected.
Results
Of the 549 students enrolled in the study, 325 (59%) were female and 224 (41%) were male. More than half (287, 52%) were aged between 20 and 22 years and 95% were Lebanese. The overall attitude of students towards patient safety was positive (3.59 ± 0.85) with the most positive attitudes in the domains of ‘Team functioning’ followed by ‘Working hours as an error cause’. More positive attitudes were perceived among male students in the domains of ‘Professional incompetence as an error cause’ and ‘Disclosure responsibility’ whereas more positive attitudes were seen in female students in the domain of ‘Working hour as an error cause’. Older medical students had more positive attitudes in the domain of ‘Team functioning’ than younger students.
Conclusion
Medical students in Lebanon had an overall positive attitude towards patient safety. These findings may be used to guide improvements in patient safety education and enhance patient-centred care in medical institutions in Lebanon.
Bird mating optimizer (BMO) is a population-based metaheuristic that has been recently extended to solve combinatorial optimization problems. Even though the algorithm shows promising performance in ...solving combinatorial optimization problems, it suffers from slow convergence and poor efficiency which leads to poor solution quality for some problem instances. This is due to the limited capability of BMO in exploiting the search space and identifying more promising regions. Therefore, in this work we propose a hybrid BMO with five single-based metaheuristics: hill-climbing, late acceptance hill-climbing, simulated annealing, iterated greedy heuristic and variable iterated greedy heuristic. Each of these algorithms is used inside the BMO to exploit the search space, and improve the quality of solution generated from the BMO population. This work also compares which one of these five is better for hybridizing with BMO. The performance of these algorithms is tested on two combinatorial problems: travelling salesman problem and berth allocation problem. Experimental results demonstrate that the hybrid algorithm is superior to BMO when applied to both problems and it improved the BMO by 1.13% for BAP and by 4.13% for TSP. Furthermore, the hybrid algorithm is able to match the best-known results for most of the instances. In addition, the proposed hybrid approaches perform well over both tested domains and obtain competitive results when compared to the best-known results that have previously been presented in the scientific literature.
•Combustion process occurs at different mixture inhomogeneity levels.•Investigating the mixing field upstream of the reaction zones of inhomogeneous flames is an essential step toward flame ...stability.•Air-to-fuel velocity ratio was the critical parameter affecting the mixture fraction field for the short premixing length.
In most practical combustion devices, the actual combustion process occurs within different mixture inhomogeneity levels. Investigating the mixture fraction field upstream of the reaction zones of these flames is an essential step toward understanding their structure, stability, and emission formation. In this study, the mixture fraction fields were measured for turbulent non-reacting inhomogeneous mixtures immediately downstream from the slot burner exit, using Rayleigh scattering imaging. The slot burner had two concentric slots. The inner air slot can be recessed at distances upstream from the exit of the outer fuel slot, allowing various degrees of mixture inhomogeneity. Mixture fraction field statistics and the two-dimensional gradient were utilized to characterize the impact of the air-to-fuel velocity ratio, global equivalence ratio, fuel composition, Reynolds number, and the premixing length on the mixture mixing field, and thus flame stability. These impacts were evaluated by tracking the normalized mean mixture fraction and mixture fraction fluctuation transition across the regime diagram for partially premixed flames. The results showed that the air-to-fuel velocity ratio was the critical parameter affecting the mixture fraction field for the short premixing length. Stability results showed that the level of mixture inhomogeneity mainly influenced the flame stability. High flame stability is achieved if a large portion of the inhomogeneous mixture fraction is within the fuel flammability limits.
The bird mating optimizer is a new metaheuristic algorithm that was originally proposed to solve continuous optimization problems with a very promising performance. However, the algorithm has not yet ...been applied for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Thus, the formulation may not be able to generate a discrete feasible solution. Many continuous algorithms used random-key representation to represent the discrete solution using real numbers or a discrete variant of the algorithm is used to deal with the discrete solution of the problem. However, there is no evidence which methodology is better for solving combinatorial optimization problems. Therefore, this work proposes two variants of bird mating optimizer (random-key bird mating optimizer and the discrete bird mating optimizer), to identify which one is more efficient in solving combinatorial optimization problems. In the first one, we use a random-key encoding scheme, whilst, in the later one, we use crossover (multi-parent) and mutation operators to combine the components of the selected parents to generate new broods. The performance of these algorithms is tested on the travelling salesman problem and berth allocation problem, and are compared with the results of two well-known optimization algorithms: Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm Optimization. Experimental results show that the discrete bird mating optimizer is more efficient than the others on all tested benchmark instances. Indeed, it is able to attain the best-known results in some of the BAP benchmark instances. These indicate the applicability and the effectiveness of the proposed discrete bird mating optimizer in solving combinatorial optimization problems.
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