American Chapter Research Articles

Envisioning the future of learning and teaching engineering in the artificial intelligence era: Opportunities and challenges

Envisioning the future of learning and teaching engineering in the artificial intelligence era: Opportunities and challenges

A long but fruitful journey: From clinical psychoanalysis to public mental health in Chile

AbstractThe authors, both professors of psychiatry, trained as psychoanalysts according to the standards of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), recount 30 years of conceptual and empirical research work for the construction of a model of brief and adaptive psychodynamic psychotherapy applicable at the Primary Health Care level. The many milestones of this journey are reviewed, starting with the difficulties and obstacles encountered when pursuing this task within IPA institutions. Once the authors decided to conduct the task outside the analytic institution, they created two training programs for psychodynamic therapists and a research group in psychotherapy, all of which have attained excellence. This effort gave birth to several institutions that are still in operation, such as the Chilean and Latin American chapters of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, the Chilean Congress of Psychotherapy, the PhD Program in Psychotherapy, and finally the Millennium Institute for Research and Personality (MIDAP). In its 8 years of existence, MIDAP has become a national and Latin American reference center for research in Mental Health, aimed at implementing preventive and psychotherapeutic interventions in vulnerable populations at the primary health care and community level. The article ends with a description of the main components and the final process of the construction of the Protocol of Psychotherapeutic Competences for the Treatment of Depression in Primary Health Care level.

ID Asks/Kenneth Werner

ID Asks/Kenneth Werner

The role of the University in the formation, discussion and training of researchers in environmental epidemiology. How to strengthen Latin America?

Since the 1990s, various initiatives have been organized to train persons on environmental health, and epidemiology with the support of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), governments, and public health centers. In Latin America and the Caribbean counties (LAC), a high prevalence of smoking, obesity, chronic respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, cancer, social vulnerability, and air and water pollution are reported. The consequences of COVID-19 and the evident biological, social and cultural crisis that Climate Change represents, are added. This work analyzes the education and training of researchers on environmental epidemiology and its impact on public health actions in LAC. Training programs in public health, environmental health, and epidemiology in LAC were reviewed, and a training case conducted by the PAHO and the Latin American chapter of the Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE-LAC) is described. Until March 2022, most of the LAC countries have postgraduate programs in Environmental management and control; a few programs are a focused on Environmental Epidemiology. Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Colombia, and Costa Rica stand out, and they have developed Environmental Health programs, including online versions. Given the limitations in the training of people specialized in Environmental Epidemiology, researchers from LAC universities and members of the ISEE-LAC, designed and executed the Basic Self-Learning Course in Environmental Epidemiology, on Campus Virtual Public Health. More than 6,000 participants from various LAC countries have signed up; of them, 932 people from different disciplines and countries have completed their training and are in a position to apply basic knowledge in environmental epidemiology. Strengthening is required at all levels in the training of people in environmental epidemiology, with the support of governments and international agencies such as PAHO, to address environmental hazards, the health burden due to environmental deterioration, and the impacts due to climate change in LAC populations.

Proceedings to the 7th Annual Conference of the Particle Therapy Cooperative Group North America (PTCOG-NA)

Proceedings to the 7th Annual Conference of the Particle Therapy Cooperative Group North America (PTCOG-NA)

ScAN: Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events Dataset.

Suicide is an important public health concern and one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Suicidal behaviors, including suicide attempts (SA) and suicide ideations (SI), are leading risk factors for death by suicide. Information related to patients' previous and current SA and SI are frequently documented in the electronic health record (EHR) notes. Accurate detection of such documentation may help improve surveillance and predictions of patients' suicidal behaviors and alert medical professionals for suicide prevention efforts. In this study, we first built Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events (ScAN) dataset, a subset of the publicly available MIMIC III dataset spanning over 12k+ EHR notes with 19k+ annotated SA and SI events information. The annotations also contain attributes such as method of suicide attempt. We also provide a strong baseline model ScANER (Suicide Attempt and Ideation Events Retreiver), a multi-task RoBERTa-based model with a retrieval module to extract all the relevant suicidal behavioral evidences from EHR notes of an hospital-stay and, and a prediction module to identify the type of suicidal behavior (SA and SI) concluded during the patient's stay at the hospital. ScANER achieved a macro-weighted F1-score of 0.83 for identifying suicidal behavioral evidences and a macro F1-score of 0.78 and 0.60 for classification of SA and SI for the patient's hospital-stay, respectively. ScAN and ScANER are publicly available.

Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile, Colombia, and Peru from a children's rights perspectiveResposta à pandemia de COVID-19 no Chile, Colômbia e Peru com foco nos direitos da criança

RESUMENObjetivo.Describir las estrategias que fueron establecidas por Chile, Colombia y Perú durante el primer año de la pandemia por COVID-19 y compararlas desde el enfoque de derechos de la niñez.Métodos.Se realizó un estudio cualitativo de análisis comparado de políticas públicas, tomando como eje siete categorías construidas por el Capítulo Latinoamericano de la International-Society-for-Social-Pediatrics-and-Child-Health a partir de la Convención de Derechos de la Niñez (CDN). La selección de los documentos de los países se realizó por conveniencia y su análisis en diálogos deliberativos.Resultados.Se revisaron 173 documentos de los tres países. Destaca como convergencia la priorización de la prevención de la transmisión comunitaria del virus, por sobre la promoción del ejercicio de derechos de la niñez, la falta de participación de niños, niñas y adolescentes (NNA) en el proceso de elaboración de las políticas públicas, y la falta de avance en el reconocimiento y protección del ejercicio de todos sus derechos. No hubo mayores divergencias más allá de brechas de desigualdad identificadas con base a la realidad de cada país.Conclusión.La pandemia ha afectado el funcionamiento de los sistemas económicos, sociales, de salud, educación, medioambiente y gobernanza de estos tres países. Si bien este estudio muestra un avance en la inclusión del enfoque de derechos de NNA en las políticas formuladas, su comprensión como sujetos sociales y políticos titulares de derecho podría permitir la construcción de alternativas colectivas que garanticen la salud y el bienestar para todas las personas en el curso de vida.

Scientist Civic Engagement and the US EPA’s “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” Rule

BACKGROUND AND AIM: For decades, vested interests, including tobacco and oil companies, have sought access to data used by observational epidemiologists, even when involving private health data. This has included attacks on environmental epidemiology, calling it “Secret Science”, in tandem with efforts to push legislation through the US Congress. History has shown that vested industries have abused such data access, and the legislation failed. More recently, the Trump Administration attempted a regulatory “end around” of Congress, via the so-called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” rule. METHODS: The North American Chapter (NAC) Policy Committee participated in preparing and presenting written and oral testimony to the US EPA and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) during hearings and requested meetings. These submissions are online at our web page: https://isee-northamerica.github.io/isee-nac/policy.html. These records documented the many problems with the proposed regulation, including: increased potential for compromise of medical record confidentiality; a loss of intellectual property; imposition of a government unfunded mandate; likely abuse of the research data to inappropriately undermine science credibility; and, damage to future scientific research recruitment efforts. RESULTS:The ISEE NAC Policy Committee recognized the above noted dangers to scientific research, and especially environmental epidemiology and took action, via civic engagement with the government, to put in place a record of those problems for future consideration by the courts in likely later legal efforts to overturn the ill-conceived regulation. At the same time, these government meetings, along with those by other scientific societies, slowed the progress of this potential regulation. In addition, scientists worked with lawyers to prepare legal challenges to the regulation. Ultimately, these efforts succeeded in delaying the regulation long enough for it to be successfully revoked by the incoming Biden Administration. CONCLUSIONS:The ISEE NAC Policy Committee provides a means for our member scientists to successfully influence government decision-making through civic engagement. KEYWORDS: Policy, Research translation, Science communication, Transparency, Civic engagement

Scientist Civic Engagement and the US Ozone Standards in 2020

BACKGROUND AND AIM: In 2020, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed to retain, without revision, its national primary and secondary ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). As exposure scientists and environmental epidemiologists, we recognized that this decision may not have reflected the most updated research on ozone and population health effects. We thus aimed to inform the EPA of the state-of-the-science through official channels. METHODS: Within the North American Chapter (NAC) of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE), the Policy Committee worked as a team to gather, synthesize, and communicate evidence on ozone effects on population health. For the ozone NAAQS, one member attended the oral comment sessions and led the effort to draft and submit a written comment to the EPA. RESULTS:At the ISEE NAC Policy Committee, we recognized a proposed ruling that would have affected air quality in the US. We effectively organized to engage government stakeholders and communicate the latest research on ozone and population health. These actions entered into the public record a statement aimed at a general audience on the effects of ozone along with supporting scientific articles. Such materials could be considered in a court of law if and when a decision on the ozone NAAQS is contested. CONCLUSIONS:Environmental exposure and epidemiology research have the potential to inform policy decisions. The ISEE NAC Policy Committee provides an avenue for scientists to gain experience in communicating the research implications to decision-makers. KEYWORDS: Ozone, Research translation, Science communication, Policy

Scientist Civic Engagement and the US 2020 Fine Particulate Matter Standards

BACKGROUND AND AIM: In 2020 the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) decided to retain the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) for fine particles (PM2.5), despite very strong evidence of an association between long- and short-term exposure to PM2.5 and numerous adverse health outcomes below the current standard. The ISEE North American Chapter (NAC) submitted a public comment in strong opposition to this EPA decision. Furthermore, ISEE NAC members also scheduled a teleconference with the Office of Management and Budget at the White House to express our continued concern about the unwarranted changes the EPA made to the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee and the NAAQS review process. METHODS: ISEE NAC and the NAC Policy Committee have set up a rigorous process to prepare and submit public comments in response to proposed EPA rules. One or two Policy Committee members prepare the first draft of the comment. Subsequently, the full Policy Committee edits and approves. Finally, the ISEE NAC Executive Council reads, edits, and approves the comment. A member of the Policy Committee submits the approved comment accompanied with pdfs of papers referenced in the comment. RESULTS:In June 2020, ISEE NAC submitted a four-page comment on EPA’s decision to retain the PM2.5 standards. This decision was contrary to the state of the science and EPA’s Integrated Science Assessment (ISA), which clearly demonstrates that deaths and cardiovascular events, such as heart attacks, are produced by PM2.5 below 12 µg/m3 (the previous standard) and, hence, the Administrator’s decision violated the Clean Air Act requirement to use the “best available science” and set standards “to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety.” CONCLUSIONS:In this case study, we will describe the process activities and issues raised by the ISEE NAC Policy Committee during the EPA setting of the US PM2.5 standard in 2020 and future prospects. KEYWORDS: Particulate Matter, Policy, Air Pollution

A Deep Learning Model of Multiple Knowledge Sources Integration for Community Question Answering

The community Question Answering (cQA) problem requires the task that given a question it aims at selecting the most related question-answer tuples (a question and its answers) from the stored question-answer tuples data set. The core mission of this task is to measure the similarity (or relationship) between an input question and questions from the given question-answer data set. Under our observation, there are either various information sources as well as di erent measurement models which can provide complementary knowledge for indicating the relationship between questions and question-answer tuples. In this paper we address the problem of modeling and combining multiple knowledge sources for determining and ranking the most related question-answer tuples given an input question for cQA problem. Our proposed model will generate di erent features based on di erent representations of the data as well as on di erent methods and then integrate this information into the BERT model for similarity measurement in cQA problem. We evaluate our proposed model on the SemEval 2016 data set and achieve the state-of-the-art result.
 Keywords
 Community question answering, Multi knowledge sources, Deep learning, The BERT model
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Perceptions of adult and child neurologists of transition programs in epilepsy in Latin America: A cross-sectional study

PurposeThe objective of this study was to review the existence and opinion Latin American adult and child neurologists have about the development and function of transition programs in epilepsy. MethodsThis was a cross-sectional study. A questionnaire was constructed with sociodemographic variables, knowledge about transition programs, barriers for building up transition programs, and 21 topics regarding the degree of involvement of healthcare providers and carers should have during the transition process. The online questionnaire was sent to 136 Latin American chapter officers registered in the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) webpage and to 36 clinicians assisting to the 13th Latin American Summer School on Epilepsy. ResultsThe answer rate was 68% (117/172), and all 19 Latin American countries were represented. Adult neurologists represented 60.7%. Only 16.2% knew of transition programs in epilepsy. The main limitations for transition programs were poor education about transition (76.9%), inflexible healthcare systems (75.2%), absence of financial support (61.5%), need of multidisciplinary teams (59%), and scarce communication between child and adult neurologists (53%). Providers and carers are expected to get involved at a high degree in all 21 presented topics for a transition process. The topics with highest percentage of commitment were violence and carrying weapons (93.2%), mental health (92.3%), alcohol and drugs (91.4%), suicide (90.6%), care of own's disease (90.5%), mortality risk (89.7%), and integral healthcare (92.2%). ConclusionOnly a few transition programs exist in Latin America. Knowing the benefits of and barriers for transition programs opens the opportunity to move further this strategy in the region considering local specificities. Education, communication skills, team working, and advocacy for adolescents with epilepsy could be initial starting points.

Single Concatenated Input is Better than Indenpendent Multiple-input for CNNs to Predict Chemical-induced Disease Relation from Literature

Single Concatenated Input is Better than Indenpendent Multiple-input for CNNs to Predict Chemical-induced Disease Relation from Literature

Vascular surgery's identity

Vascular surgery's identity

Quantifying the risk of insertion-related peritoneal dialysis catheter complications following laparoscopic placement: Results from the North American PD Catheter Registry

Peritoneal dialysis (PD) is a more cost-effective therapy to treat kidney failure than in-center hemodialysis, but successful therapy requires a functioning PD catheter that causes minimal complications. In 2015, the North American Chapter of the International Society for Peritoneal Dialysis established the North American PD Catheter Registry to improve practices and patient outcomes following PD catheter insertion. The objective of this study is to propose a methodology for defining insertion-related complications that lead to significant adverse events and report the risk of these complications among patients undergoing laparoscopic PD catheter insertion. Patients undergoing laparoscopic PD catheter insertion were enrolled at 14 participating centers in Canada and the United States and followed using a Web-based registry. Insertion-related complications were defined as flow restriction, exit-site leak, or abdominal pain at any point during follow-up. We also included infections or bleeding within 30 days of insertion, and any immediate postoperative complications. Adverse events were categorized as PD never starting or termination of PD therapy, delay in the start of PD therapy or interruption of PD therapy, an emergency department visit or hospitalization, or need for invasive procedures. Cause-specific cumulative incidence functions were used to estimate risk. Five hundred patients underwent laparoscopic PD catheter insertion between 10 November 2015 and 24 July 2018. The cumulative risk of insertion-related complications 6 months from the date of insertion that led to an adverse event was 24%. The risk of flow restriction, exit-site leak, and pain at 6 months was 10.2%, 5.7%, and 5.3%, respectively. PD was never started or terminated in 6.4% of patients due to an insertion-related complication. Leaks and flow restrictions were most likely to delay or interrupt PD therapy. Flow restrictions were the primary cause of invasive procedures. Fifty percent of the complications occurred before the start of PD therapy. Insertion-related complications leading to significant adverse events following laparoscopic placement of PD catheters are common. Many complications occur before the start of PD. Insertion-related complications are an important area of focus for future research and quality improvement efforts.

Revolutionaries for the Right: Anticommunist Internationalism and Paramilitary Warfare in the Cold War

Two, three, many Afghanistans? In what ways did the paramilitary Right mirror its leftist enemies to imagine and carry out its own unconventional wars? In Revolutionaries for the Right, Kyle Burke offers a compelling account of how American activists and “covert warriors” participated in the making of a vast global network of anticommunist fellow travelers who posed a radical challenge to Left internationalism. Based on a wide array of multinational archival sources, Burke links the development of an “anticommunist international,” the increasing privatization of organized anticommunist violence, and the emergence of an American subculture of paramilitarism.Burke glimpses at key segments of the global networks in which American covert warriors took part and insightfully examines these activists' ambivalent (and often-contentious) relationship with state actors. While delving at times into too many international subplots, Burke stresses a fundamental tension in the actions of these American activists: their recurrent plea for government support and their desire for greater autonomy in their endeavors abroad. As Burke recounts, by the early 1960s activists such as Marvin Liebman dealt with limited financial and political capital and with the unsurmountable difficulties of implementing a global anticommunist platform. They were pushed into “the shadow of the state,” clashing with government operatives and attaining only modest goals when collaborating with overseas allies. With South America's Operation Condor as an example, Burke rightly argues that the creation of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in 1967 was a key turning point for the anticommunist international and the radicalization of anticommunist “political warfare.” Yet the obstacles for American covert warriors did not disappear but were rather exacerbated by the plurality of the WACL and the strong influence retained by the Taiwanese, South Korean, and Latin American chapters of the organization.The analysis then moves into the 1980s, when, driven by the “Vietnam Syndrome,” American activists (such as the sinister John K. Singlaub) capitalized on the Ronald Reagan administration's anticommunist zeal and on their links with (but mostly beyond) the WACL to insert themselves as advisers, arms smugglers, and fighters for anticommunist insurgencies, from Nicaragua to Rhodesia, El Salvador, Afghanistan, and more. Even for the most successful cases (e.g., the Nicaraguan contras), Burke's account seems to stress the frustration of these covert warriors, who embraced the methods and ethos of leftist insurgents to bring victory to the cause but often hit the walls of public scrutiny, government oversight, and unfavorable local conditions and were forced to retreat to their domestic audiences.Herein lies one of Burke's most significant contributions: the feedback effect that anticommunist guerrilla warfare had in the imagination of a seemingly disparate group of military and Central Intelligence Agency officers, veterans, and paramilitary enthusiasts. They saw the Nicaraguan contras and the Afghan mujahideen, for instance, as embodying their own aspirations to carry out revolutions to liberate nations under the yoke of Soviet imperialism. They took their experience in and perception of these conflicts as opportunities to articulate (and profit from) ideas of anticommunist solidarity, patriotism, (purportedly white) masculinity, distrust for government, and a thrill for war. The resulting American paramilitary subculture was expressed remarkably in underground mercenary publications and academies, Hollywood productions, and, later, private military firms. For Burke, this paramilitary subculture was not the creation of provincial white supremacists and conspiracy theorists (at least not exclusively) but the result of American fears of civilizational decline projected onto armed conflicts abroad and then projected back to the home front. Hence Burke makes a very strong case for his portrayal of this sector of the American Right as shaped by its own global interactions and its efforts (successful or not) to privatize, radicalize, and reinvent anticommunist internationalism.The book ultimately raises questions about the genetic flaws of “anticommunist internationalism” and the elusive notion of a “revolution for the Right” (p. 159). Democracy, free markets, and Christianity were key tenets for the activists and occupy most of Burke's analysis. But they were not enough to cement a full-fledged anticommunist revolution, as they clashed with other versions of the struggle, from the violent national liberation wars of Eastern bloc and Cuban exiles to the anti-American and antiliberal impulses of vast sectors of the Latin American Right. Throughout the book, Burke gestures at this tension but tends to downplay it, leaning instead toward fitting anticommunism back into those American parameters. Despite their internationalist appeal, perhaps his covert warriors were too deeply imbued in exceptionalist notions of American individual and corporate prowess to carry out a deeply transformative revolution for the global Right, including its more nefarious neofascist elements. All in all, this study accomplishes a rare feat: it locates this segment of the American Right in a global Cold War stage while offering Cold War historians a solid and well-researched point of reference for further studies on the past and present of the Right's internationalist projects.

Discriminative ridge regression algorithm for adaptation in statistical machine translation

We present a simple and reliable method for estimating the log-linear weights of a state-of-the-art machine translation system, which takes advantage of the method known as discriminative ridge regression (DRR). Since inappropriate weight estimations lead to a wide variability of translation quality results, reaching a reliable estimate for such weights is critical for machine translation research. For this reason, a variety of methods have been proposed to reach reasonable estimates. In this paper, we present an algorithmic description and empirical results proving that DRR is able to provide comparable translation quality when compared to state-of-the-art estimation methods [i.e. MERT (Och in Proceedings of the annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, 2003) and MIRA (Cherry and Foster in Proceedings of the North American chapter of the association for computational linguistics, 2012)], with a reduction in computational cost. Moreover, the empirical results reported are coherent across different corpora and language pairs.

Editorial: New Energy for Water Quality Research!

When Ron Droste, my colleague Editor-in-Chief, announced last year he felt it was time for him to step down and give a chance to somebody else to team up with me as Editor-in-Chief, a little panic attack followed. How do you replace a devoted, experienced and meticulous person as Ron? Well, we found a person that comes with an extraordinary skill set: Dr Arash Zamyadi, recently appointed assistant professor at Polytechnique Montreal. He is young and eager and has shown his devotion to the International Water Association in many ways, as recognized with the IWA Fellowship he obtained in 2016. For instance, in 2010 he initiated the North American chapter of IWA's Young Water Professionals. People that know him, can certainly vouch for his optimism, his incredible energy and high emotional intelligence quotient. However, in order to take up the challenging task of being Editor-in-Chief of a peer-reviewed journal that seeks to increase its impact, an excellent scientific reputation is key and the wide scope …

Citation Analysis of North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO) proceedings (2007-2015)

Knowledge Organization (KO) theoretical foundations are still being developed in a continuous process of epistemological, theoretical and methodological consolidation. The remarkable growth of scientific records has stimulated the analysis of this production and the creation of instruments to evaluate the behavior of science became indispensable. We propose the Domain Analysis of KO in North America through the citation analysis of North American Symposium on Knowledge Organization (NASKO) proceedings (2007-2015). We present the citation, co-citation and bibliographic coupling analysis to visualize and recognize the researchers that influence the scholarly communication in this domain. The most prolific authors through NASKO conferences are Smiraglia, Tennis, Green, Dousa, Grant Campbell, Pimentel, Beak, La Barre, Kipp and Fox. Regarding their theoretical references, Hjorland, Olson, Smiraglia, and Ranganathan are the authors who most inspired the event's studies. The co-citation network shows the highest frequency is between Olson and Mai, followed by Hjorland and Mai and Beghtol and Mai, consolidating Mai and Hjorland as the central authors of the theoretical references in NASKO. The strongest theoretical proximity in author bibliographic coupling network occurs between Fox and Tennis, Dousa and Tennis, Tennis and Smiraglia, Dousa and Beak, and Pimentel and Tennis, highlighting Tennis as central author, that interconnects the others in relation to KO theoretical references in NASKO. The North American chapter has demonstrated a strong scientific production as well as a high level of concern with theoretical and epistemological questions, gathering researchers from different countries, universities and knowledge areas.

Cross-Disciplinary Thematic Special Series

This article introduces the thematic special series on intersection of mathematics education and special education. This special series will include four research papers and one commentary. The four research papers rooted in a working group from the annual conferences of the International Group of the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) as well as its North American Chapter (PME-NA).