Asynchronous Communication Methods Research Articles

Reading Room Interruptions are Less Disruptive When Using Asynchronous Communication Methods.

Radiologist interruptions, though often necessary, can be disruptive. Prior literature has shown interruptions to be frequent, occurring during cases, and predominantly through synchronous communication methods such as phone or in person causing significant disengagement from the study being read. Asynchronous communication methods are now more widely available in hospital systems such as ours. Considering the increasing use of asynchronous communication methods, we conducted an observational study to understand the evolving nature of radiology interruptions. We hypothesize that compared to interruptions occurring through synchronous methods, interruptions via asynchronous methods reduce the disruptive nature of interruptions by occurring between cases, being shorter, and less severe. During standard weekday hours, 30 radiologists (14 attendings, 12 residents, and 4 fellows) were directly observed for approximately 90-min sessions across three different reading rooms (body, neuroradiology, general). The frequency of interruptions was documented including characteristics such as timing, severity, method, and length. Two hundred twenty-five interruptions (43 Teams, 47 phone, 89 in-person, 46 other) occurred, averaging 2min and 5s with 5.2 interruptions per hour. Microsoft Teams interruptions averaged 1min 12s with only 60.5% during cases. In-person interruptions averaged 2min 12s with 82% during cases. Phone interruptions averaged 2min and 48s with 97.9% during cases. A substantial portion of reading room interruptions occur via predominantly asynchronous communication tools, a new development compared to prior literature. Interruptions via predominantly asynchronous communications tools are shorter and less likely to occur during cases. In our practice, we are developing tools and mechanisms to promote asynchronous communication to harness these benefits.

간찰서식집 DB의 활용방안 연구

The formularies of letters published from can be said to be a letter writing textbook. It gained great popularity as letter writing became popular in the late Joseon Dynasty. Based on the intermediate results of the interrogation template DB, this paper considered ways to utilize it for the public. The first is to publish a standard letter template that selects the most exemplary letters. Second, we proposed a way to recreate a DB that can be used in asynchronous communication methods and use it in various ways. Thirdly, it can be used for writing education, etc. Interpretation is data that is closely related to people's lives, and if the DB is properly processed and made available to the public, it can become a positive example of the results being spread to the public and actively used. Especially now that various means of communication have emerged due to the development of technology, it is expected that higher added value can be created by utilizing the interrogation form DB.

A Clustered Federated Learning Method of User Behavior Analysis Based on Non-IID Data

Federated learning (FL) is a novel distributed machine learning paradigm. It can protect data privacy in distributed machine learning. Hence, FL provides new ideas for user behavior analysis. User behavior analysis can be modeled using multiple data sources. However, differences between different data sources can lead to different data distributions, i.e., non-identically and non-independently distributed (Non-IID). Non-IID data usually introduce bias in the training process of FL models, which will affect the model accuracy and convergence speed. In this paper, a new federated learning algorithm is proposed to mitigate the impact of Non-IID data on the model, named federated learning with a two-tier caching mechanism (FedTCM). First, FedTCM clustered similar clients based on their data distribution. Clustering reduces the extent of Non-IID between clients in a cluster. Second, FedTCM uses asynchronous communication methods to alleviate the problem of inconsistent computation speed across different clients. Finally, FedTCM sets up a two-tier caching mechanism on the server for mitigating the Non-IID data between different clusters. In multiple simulated datasets, compared to the method without the federated framework, the FedTCM is maximum 15.8% higher than it and average 12.6% higher than it. Compared to the typical federated method FedAvg, the accuracy of FedTCM is maximum 2.3% higher than it and average 1.6% higher than it. Additionally, FedTCM achieves more excellent communication performance than FedAvg.

Doctors' Preferences in the Selection of Patients in Online Medical Consultations: An Empirical Study with Doctor-Patient Consultation Data.

Online medical consultation (OMC) allows doctors and patients to communicate with each other in an online synchronous or asynchronous setting. Unlike face-to-face consultations in which doctors are only passively chosen by patients with appointments, doctors engaging in voluntary online consultation have the option of choosing patients they hope to treat when faced with a large number of online questions from patients. It is necessary to characterize doctors’ preferences for patient selection in OMC, which can contribute to their more active participation in OMC services. We proposed to exploit a bipartite graph to describe the doctor–patient interaction and use an exponential random graph model (ERGM) to analyze the doctors’ preferences for patient selection. A total of 1404 doctor–patient consultation data retrieved from an online medical platform in China were used for empirical analysis. It was found that first, mildly ill patients will be prioritized by doctors, but the doctors with more professional experience may be more likely to prefer more severely ill patients. Second, doctors appear to be more willing to provide consultation services to patients from urban areas, but the doctors with more professional experience or from higher-quality hospitals give higher priority to patients from rural and medically underserved areas. Finally, doctors generally prefer asynchronous communication methods such as picture/text consultation, while the doctors with more professional experience may be more willing to communicate with patients via synchronous communication methods, such as voice consultation or video consultation.

Communication Scheduling for Gossip SGD in a Wide Area Network

Deep neural networks (DNNs) achieve higher accuracy as the amount of training data increases. However, training data such as personal medical data are often privacy sensitive and cannot be collected. Methods have been proposed for training with distributed data that remain in a wide area network. Due to heterogeneity in a wide area network, methods based on synchronous communication, such as all-reduce stochastic gradient descent (SGD), are not suitable, and gossip SGD is promising because it is based on asynchronous communication. Communication time is a problem in a wide area network. Gossip SGD cannot use double buffering that is a technique for hiding the communication time, since gossip SGD uses an asynchronous communication method. In this paper, we propose a type of gossip SGD in which computation and communication overlap to accelerate learning. The proposed method shares newer models by scheduling communication. To schedule the communication, the nodes share the information of the estimated communication time and communication-enabled nodes. This method is effective in both homogeneous and heterogeneous networks. The experimental results using the CIFAR-100 and Fashion-MNIST datasets demonstrate the faster convergence of the proposed method.

Block Data Record-Based Dynamic Encryption Key Generation Method for Security between Devices in Low Power Wireless Communication Environment of IoT

The Internet of Things uses low-power wireless communication for wireless connectivity and efficient energy. Low-power wireless communication is applied to IoT for wireless connection and efficient energy consumption in various areas such as wearable devices, smart homes, and power plants in order to send and receive data and control the environment. Security is becoming more important because the Internet of Things controls real physical systems. For the security of the Internet of Things, the encryption key is important to identify and authenticate devices that are trusted. The static encryption key method used for devices is likely to be calculated in reverse through the value of the key and is vulnerable to exploitation attacks. This requires the application of dynamic encryption keys that generate keys periodically. However, in the case of low-power wireless communication, the asynchronous communication method and the packet loss make it difficult to apply existing dynamic encryption key technologies. In this paper, we proposed dynamic encryption key method that applies the mechanism of the block chain to solve these problems. Based on the history of sensor data between devices, encryption keys are dynamically generated. The proposed method is to generate the same encryption key between devices with only one step of asynchronous communication considering packet loss. The proposed method is also validated in terms of availability and security in the Internet of Things low-power wireless communication.

An Energy Efficiency Study of Web-Based Communication in Android Phones

Currently, mobile devices are the most popular pervasive computing devices, and they are becoming the primary way for accessing Internet. Battery is a critical resource in such personal computing gadgets, network communications being one of the primary energy consuming activities in any mobile app. Indeed, as web-based communication is the most used explicitly or implicitly by mobile devices, HTTP-based traffic is the most power demanding one. So, mobile web developers should be aware of how much energy demands the different web-based communication alternatives. The goal of this paper is to measure and compare the energy consumption of three asynchronous HTTP-based methods in mobile devices in different browsers. Our experiments focus on three HTTP-based asynchronous communication models that allow a web server to push data to a client browser through a HTTP/1.1 interaction: Polling, Long Polling, and WebSockets. The resulted measurements are then analysed to get more accurate understanding of the impact of the selected method, and the mobile browser, in the energy consumption of the asynchronous HTTP-based communication. The utility of these experiments is to show developers what are the factors and settings that mostly influence the energy consumption when different web-based asynchronous communication methods are used, helping them to choose the most beneficial solution if possible. With this information, mobile web developers should be able to reduce the power consumption of the front-end of web applications for mobile devices, just selecting and configuring the best asynchronous method or mobile browser, improving the performance of HTTP-based communication in terms of energy demand.

Directly and Indirectly Synchronous Communication Mechanisms for Client-Server Systems Using Event-Based Asynchronous Communication Framework

In this paper, we propose a synchronous communication mechanism that can be used with asynchronous communication in an event-based communication framework (CM). The proposed synchronous communication mechanism supports directly synchronous communication between client and server, indirectly synchronous communication between two clients through server mediation, and indirectly one-to-many synchronous communication with multiple clients. In order to support synchronous communication, the CM uses the synchronization mechanism between the main thread and the processing thread while maintaining the multi-thread structure. The application can utilize both the asynchronous and the synchronous communication service of the CM together according to its requirements. For performance analysis, we compared the CM synchronous and asynchronous communication methods with qualitative and quantitative experiments, respectively. Through qualitative analysis, developing applications using synchronous services can more intuitively design application logic than asynchronous services. From the quantitative experiment, we also verified that the response delay time in the synchronous method is shorter than that in the asynchronous method although the difference in the response delay is not large.

Staying connected on the home front: communication and well-being of civilian spouses during deployment

ABSTRACTIn this study, we examined communication frequency via asynchronous (i.e. email/internet, postal mail) and synchronous (i.e. commercial telephone, DSN telephone, military exchange provided phone, military video phone, and video teleconference) communication methods as associated with well-being (i.e. marital quality and psychological well-being) in civilian wives during their Service member husbands’ deployment in the US military (N = 2230). We expected a curvilinear effect, such that increased communication frequency is beneficial up to a point where it then becomes detrimental for well-being. For asynchronous communication, we did not find this curvilinear relationship and instead identified a positive linear relationship for both marital quality and psychological well-being. For synchronous communication, we found this curvilinear relationship between communication and marital quality, but no significant association with psychological well-being. Overall, this study suggests military spouses might be encouraged to utilize asynchronous communication methods such as email and postal mail very frequently and moderate “real-time” communication.

ANSIBLE: Virtual Reality for Behavioral Health

We describe a virtual reality telecommunications ecosystem developed under funding from NASA entitled ANSIBLE: A Network of Social Interactions for Bilateral Life Enhancement. ANSIBLE is a communication support toolset which enables multi-faceted human-human and human-virtual agent interactions designed to accommodate technical and environmental limitations of long duration space flight. The primary objectives are to address communication limitations and provide telehealth options to combat behavioral health threats in future long duration exploration class missions. The system is current being evaluated in a human subject study that takes place at the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) facilities in Waimea, HI. There, an international mixed gender group of scientists are undergoing adjustments in physiology and lifestyle that are analogous to some of the challenges in a confined environment over twelve month isolation mission under Mars-exploration conditions (e.g. with communication latencies and blackouts, in close quarters, under restricted water and energy use). Preliminary analysis show that the ANSIBLE treatment group scored better perceived social closeness and perceived relationship satisfaction in self-report surveys compared to a control group who participated in a prior eight month isolation mission in the same facility and used only conventional asynchronous communication methods (i.e. email, voice and video recordings). In the real world, verbal interactions go hand-in-hand with interactions with tangible things. Virtual items can be called upon to serve as powerful and meaningful aides for communications. We posit that the observed increase in social connectedness is due to the affordances of VR, where situational contexts that are often not communicated in traditional telecommunications are made explicit in the virtual world.

High Performance LDA through Collective Model Communication Optimization

LDA is a widely used machine learning technique for big data analysis. The application includes an inference algorithm that iteratively updates a model until it converges. A major challenge is the scaling issue in parallelization owing to the fact that the model size is huge and parallel workers need to communicate the model continually. We identify three important features of the model in parallel LDA computation: 1. The volume of model parameters required for local computation is high; 2. The time complexity of local computation is proportional to the required model size; 3. The model size shrinks as it converges. By investigating collective and asynchronous methods for model communication in different tools, we discover that optimized collective communication can improve the model update speed, thus allowing the model to converge faster. The performance improvement derives not only from accelerated communication but also from reduced iteration computation time as the model size shrinks during the model convergence. To foster faster model convergence, we design new collective communication abstractions and implement two Harp-LDA applications, “lgs” and “rtt”. We compare our new approach with Yahoo! LDA and Petuum LDA, two leading implementations favoring asynchronous communication methods in the field, on a 100-node, 4000-thread Intel Haswell cluster. The experiments show that “lgs” can reach higher model likelihood with shorter or similar execution time compared with Yahoo! LDA, while “rtt” can run up to 3.9 times faster compared with Petuum LDA when achieving similar model likelihood.

Research on Data Acquisition Technology of Wind Turbine Monitoring System

In order to guarantee the safety of wind turbine, online monitoring system of wind turbine was utilized. Data acquisition technology is one of key technologies in monitoring systems. To reduce communication error rate of wind turbine monitoring system, the reliable data acquisition methods were presented in this paper. It utilized TCP protocol and double buffer asynchronous communication method on system server. The cycle buffer and multithread processing method was utilized on the acquisition terminal. The working state data were saved into PostgreSQL database with Npgsql dynamic link library. The data acquisition methods realized high speed, large capacity, and reliable data transmission. They can improve the accuracy and lower the cost of wind turbine monitoring system.

Kokybiniai vartotojų elgsenos tyrimai internete: metodologiniai iššūkiai

The aim of this paper is to reveal and discuss the methodological issues related to online qualitative consumer behavior research. A number of methodological issues are examined, related with the online qualitative research on consumer in-store emotional experience implemented by the authors. It is concluded that the Internet is becoming an increasingly attractive environment for consumer behavior research. A large part of scholars use the Internet as a medium for data collection and analysis. At the same time, researchers study the Internet as a source of information about consumer preferences, their virtual communities, prevailing relationships, traditions and attitudes. The Internet is analyzed as a phenomenon in itself, too. In this article, the Internet is analyzed as a tool for communicating with research participants, and collecting, storing and analyzing data. In general, qualitative inquiry is characterized by contextual and naturalistic approach to the study of objects and processes. Therefore, decision to carry out qualitative study in virtual environment must take additional strategic and tactical solutions. Most often, researchers need to decide about the mode of communication that solves time management, spontaneity and security problems. It is also relevant to sampling and its contents. Different solutions from quantitative studies are required in ensuring the ethics and quality of the study. During the analysis of the qualitative data collected through the Internet, mostly in a form of computer communication language (text), specific characteristics, such as backspacing and correction during the communication that impact spontaneity rate, the absence of non-verbal language, etc., are necessary to be taken into accountIt is concluded that all the above-mentioned issues must be addressed individually to the research topic, object, aim, research problem and the specifics of the respondents. When deciding about the method of communication, it is important to assess which synchronous or asynchronous communication method is appropriate for the study participants. This decision relates to both computer literacy and psychological and personal factors of the researcher and a person involved. Asynchronous communication eliminates “rush” factor and solves organizational problems. Decision about communication synchronicity is closely associated with the interaction anonymity level. When the research question covers sensitive topics, on which the respondents may find it difficult to talk, it is recommended to choose the anonymous environment that encourages communication to be more open and free. In this case, it is likely preferable to use an asynchronous communication mode.On the basis of the analysis, it is concluded that qualitative research online population perception and evaluation differ from the reality research. The differences here relate to geographical uncertainty, cyberspace users’ sex, age, social status and other demographic characteristics intangibility. One way to solve the problem mentioned, especially in cases, where the investigation is carried out in the wider population, is to avoid studying as the unit of analysis individuals, and to choose unit of analysis as social interactions (e.g. unsuccessful purchases, in-store conflict, etc.), social artifacts (e.g. advertising) and so on.Ethical concerns analysis showed that although the online investigator is less constrained by the structure, space and time of communication, virtual environment complicates some ethical solutions (e.g. receiving informed consent). It is concluded that in cases, where the object of investigation or research field is not associated with sensitive aspects of personal life, there is no threat or harmful consequences for research participants and analyzes the generic nature of the problem, the study participants’ voluntary participation is seen as an implied consent. The study participant’s consent is difficult to obtain and can be excluded when data is collected anonymously. By using pseudonyms and responsibly citing the study participants’ computer communication language (text), confidentiality can be achieved.The authors indicate some limitations of the article. They examined the issues identified only in the context of a particular research and more samples were not discussed. This prevents access to general conclusions and contributes only in small aspects of the field. On the other side, each attempt to analyze Internet specificity caused issues lead to methodological qualitative online research perspicuity, research validity and reliability improvement.

Exploring the link among entry characteristics, participation behaviors and course outcomes of online learners: An examination of learner profile using cluster analysis

AbstractOnline learner profiles have diversified such that now, they include all types of participants from a variety of backgrounds. This study analyzed online learner profiles in regard to their entry characteristics, participation behaviors and achievement of course outcomes. The sample consisted of 186 participants from an online course that required the employment of synchronous and asynchronous communication methods over the Internet. The data were collected through five online questionnaires and included 10 variables (gender, age, work status, self‐efficacy, online readiness, self‐regulation, participation in discussion list, participation in chat sessions, satisfaction and achievement). A two‐step cluster analysis, chi‐square analysis and multivariate analysis were used to analyze the collected data. The results indicated that online learners fell into three significantly different clusters and within each cluster, learners had a close combination of employment characteristics, gender type, age level, perception of self‐efficacy for online technologies and participation behavior level.

Multi-professional patterns and methods of communication during patient handoffs

Objective Health information technology has been shown to influence the communication patterns of healthcare providers. The goal of this study was to learn more about how healthcare providers communicate and exchange patient clinical information during patient handoffs (transfers) between units in an acute care setting. Methods Convenience sampling was used to select five patient handoffs. Questionnaires were distributed to providers identified through observation and snowball sampling. Social network analysis methodology was used to develop sociograms of the emergent communication patterns and identify the role of individual providers in the handoff process based on the number of contacts with other providers and incoming and outgoing communication activity. Individual handoff network size ranged from 11 to 20 providers. Participants were asked to describe the method of communication they used to access or share clinical information with other providers, their preferred method of communication; their satisfaction with the available options; and their suggestions for how the process could be improved. Results The network patterns that emerged uncovered the overlapping use of synchronous and asynchronous communication methods (verbally via phone or in person; or written via paper charts and/or an electronic records). No particular professional group dominated or coordinated information flow; instead each handoff network exhibited unique communication patterns and information coordination by two or more influential providers from nursing, medicine, or pharmacy. Most (84%) participants preferred verbal communication. Overall satisfaction with the current communication process varied by unit: 82% of emergency department providers and 54% of the providers working in the admitting units stated they were satisfied or very satisfied. Recommendations for improvement included converting all units to the electronic health record, electronic handoff communication modules and asynchronous multi-professional communication logs. Conclusions The results of this exploratory study provide a foundation for future research examining how network structure and communication principles can be used to design health information technology that compliments the non-linear information gathering and dissemination behaviors of providers from multiple professions.

ONLINE COURSE SUPPORT IN DISTANCE LEARNING: Student Evaluation of English Language Teaching Bachelor of Arts Program

Hereby in this study; the opinions of the senior students, who took course support through web based asynchronous communication methods in the academic year 2007–2008 at the Open Education Faculty, English Language Teaching Bachelor of Arts Program (OEF ELT BA) at Anadolu University, about the general online courses are presented. According to the results of the study favorable and unfavorable aspects of online courses for OEF ELT BA students are defined and amendatory precautions are proposed. ELT BA began accepting student enrollments in 2000–2001 academic years. Aforesaid program is a Bachelor of Arts Program which is identical to the program offered by English Language Teaching Departments of faculties providing formal (face to face) education. In this program web based asynchronous courses have been provided for junior and senior students since the academic year 2003–2004. Online courses are given by instructors from Faculty of Education ELT Department of Anadolu University. Data of the study were acquired from the questionnaires filled by 504 senior students enrolled in the academic year 2007–2008. These students were chosen among 1586 students who lived in Eskisehir during their study. The results show that 58,2% of students have computer and internet connection in their houses. Students generally attend online courses once or twice a week. Attendance to online courses increases during examination terms. Students, who don’t believe in the contribution of online courses don’t attend those courses.

3차원 사용자 인터페이스 장비와 PC 클러스터 환경 타일 가시화 시스템의 효율적인 연동

본 논문에서는 3차원 사용자 인터페이스를 PC 클러스터에 기반한 타일 가시화 시스템에 효율적으로 연동시킬 수 있는 방법을 제안하였다. 사용자 편의성을 증대하기 위해 개발된 3차원 사용자 인터페이스 소프트웨어에는 모델 자세조종 명령어를 비롯한 각종 메뉴가 포함되어있으며, 3차원 사용자 인터페이스 장비에서 발생되는 신호 잡음을 없애기 위해 박스형 필터를 사용하였다. 또한 타일 가시화 시스템과 3차원 사용자 인터페이스 사이에서 신호 대기로 인해 발생하는 모델 운동 지연 문제를 해결하기 위해 비동기식 통신형태에 기반한 새로운 ‘통신 분리’ 알고리듬을 제안하였으며, 검증 테스트를 통해 제안된 방안의 효율성을 확인하였다. In this paper, an efficient technique is proposed to integrate the 3D user interface with the tiled display system in PC cluster environment. In the developed 3D user interface software, various menus are provided to increase the user friendliness of the interface, including the several model-control-commands. To eliminate the noise produced from the 3D user interface devices, the box filtering algorithm is employed. Further, a communication splitting algorithm, which is a kind of asynchronous communication method, is proposed to reduce the motion delay between the 3D interface and the tiled display system, and its efficiency is validated through the benchmarking tests.

Online Information Technologies Certificate Program

In this study, Information Technologies Certificate Program which is based on synchronous and asynchronous communication methods over the Internet offered by cooperation of Middle East Technical University, Computer Engineering Department and Continuing Education Center were examined. This online certificate program started in May 1998 and it is still active. The program includes eight fundamental courses of Computer Engineering Department and comprised of four semesters lasting totally nine months. The main aim of this program is to train the participants in IT field to meet demand in the field of computer technologies in Turkey. As a conclusion, the properties of this program were discussed in a detailed way.