1,720,998 research outputs found
Human activity recognition in pervasive health-care: Supporting efficient remote collaboration
No full textTechnological advancements, including advancements in the medical field have drastically improved our quality of life, thus pushing life expectancy increasingly higher. This has also had the effect of increasing the number of elderly population. More than ever, health-care institutions must now care for a large number of elderly patients, which is one of the contributing factors in the rising health-care costs. Rising costs have prompted hospitals and other health-care institutions to seek various cost-cutting measures in order to remain competitive. One avenue being explored lies in the technological advancements that can make hospital working environments much more efficient. Various communication technologies, mobile computing devices, micro-embedded devices and sensors have the ability to support medical staff efficiency and improve health-care systems. In particular, one promising application of these technologies is towards deducing medical staff activities. Having this continuous knowledge about health-care staff activities can provide medical staff with crucial information of particular patients, interconnect with other supporting applications in a seamless manner (e.g. a doctor diagnosing a patient can automatically be sent the patient's lab report from the pathologist), a clear picture of the time utilisation of doctors and nurses and also enable remote virtual collaboration between activities, thus creating a strong base for establishment of an efficient collaborative environment. In this paper, we describe our activity recognition system that in conjunction with our efficiency mechanism has the potential to cut down health-care costs by making the working environments more efficient. Initially, we outline the activity recognition process that has the ability to infer user activities based on the self-organisation of surrounding objects that user may manipulate. We then use the activity recognition information to enhance virtual collaboration in order to improve overall efficiency of tasks within a hospital environment. We have analysed a number of medical staff activities to guide our simulation setup. Our results show an accurate activity recognition process for individual users with respect to their behaviour. At the same time we support remote virtual collaboration through tasks allocation process between doctors and nurses with results showing maximum efficiency within the resource constraints
A Bayesian Network and Rule-Base Approach Towards Activity Inference
No full textWe describe an activity recognition system capable of monitoring user activities in home environments. Activities are monitored by processing information from various sensors embedded in the environment that provide information pertinent to user's actions. We utilise the concept of self-organising object networks to gather and hierarchically process information related to user actions in a distributed manner. This information is then fed to the decision module which matches this information in the user's activity map in order to deduce user's activity. The decision module comprises a Bayesian network coupled with a rule-based engine which is used to provide accurate activity inference process
A flexible, abstract network optimisation framework and its application to telecommunications network design and configuration problems
Get PDFA flexible, generic network optimisation framework is described. The purpose of this framework is to reduce the effort required to solve particular network optimisation problems. The essential idea behind the framework is to develop a generic network optimisation problem to which many network optimisation problems can be mapped. A number of approaches to solve this generic problem can then be developed. To solve some specific network design or configuration problem the specific problem is mapped to the generic problem and one of the problem solvers is used to obtain a solution. This solution is then mapped back to the specific problem domain. Using the framework in this way, a network optimisation problem can be solved using less effort than modelling the problem and developing some algorithm to solve the model.
The use of the framework is illustrated in two separate problems: design of an enterprise network to accommodate voice and data traffic and configuration of a core diffserv/MPLS network. In both cases, the framework enabled solutions to be found with less effort than would be required if a more direct approach was used
An investigation into intelligent network congestion control strategies
Get PDFThis thesis examines the congestion control issues that arise in Intelligent Networks, when it is necessary to support multiple service types with different load requirements and priorities. The area of Intelligent Network (IN) congestion control has been under investigation for over a decade, but in general, the models used in this research were over-simplified and all service types were assumed to have the same priority levels and load requirements at the various IN physical elements. However, as the IN is a dynamic network that must process many different service types that have radically different call load profiles and are based on different service level agreements and charging schemes, the validity of the above assumptions is questionable. The aim of this work,
therefore, is to remove a number of the classic assumptions made in IN congestion control research, by:
• developing a detailed model of an IN, catering for multiple traffic types,
• using this model to establish the shortcomings of classic congestion control strategies,
• devising a new IN congestion control strategy and verifying its superiority on the model.
To achieve these aims, an IN model (both simulation and analytic) is developed to reflect the physical and functional architecture of the network and model the information flows required between network entities in order to execute services. The effectiveness of various classic active and reactive congestion control strategies are then investigated using this model and it is
established that none of these strategies are capable of protecting both the Service Control Point and Service Switching Points under all possible traffic mixes and loads. This is partially due to the fact that all of these strategies are based on the use of fixed parameters (and are therefore not flexible enough to deal with IN traffic) and partially because none of these strategies take into
account the different load requirements of the different service types.
A new, flexible strategy is then devised to facilitate global IN congestion control and cater for service types with different characteristics. This strategy maximises IN performance by protecting all network elements from overload while maximising network revenue and preserving fairness between service types during overload. A number of factors determining the relative importance or weight of different traffic types are also identified and used by the strategy to maintain call importance during overload. The efficiency of this strategy is demonstrated by comparing its
operation to that of the best classic IN overload controls and also to a new strategy, which has scalable and dynamic behaviour (and which was devised for the purpose of providing a fair comparison to the optimisation strategy). The optimisation-based strategy and dynamic strategy
are found to be equally effective and far superior to the classic strategies. However, the optimisation algorithm also preserves relative importance and fairness, while maximising network revenue - but at the cost of a not insignificant processing overhead
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
- …
