Different Kinds Of Users Research Articles

Fitness for purpose when there are many different purposes: Who are electronic patient records for?

Electronic patient record systems serve many purposes for many different kinds of users. Four case studies are reported of the use made by health-care staff of electronic patient record systems that supported health-care pathways. The results demonstrate that the systems fit the purposes of strategic and managerial users of the record, but they are problematic as tools for use by the frontline staff delivering care. As a result, these staff frequently resort to workarounds to accomplish their work goals. An analysis of the design processes that created these systems shows that the specification of the systems was based on strategic and managerial requirements and there was no formal assessment of the needs of frontline users. Efforts to address the needs of frontline staff in the provisions of electronic systems were most often made after the main system was implemented.

INGS: a prototype tool for genome interpretation and annotation

Currently, clinical interpretation of whole-genome NGS genetic findings are very low-throughput because of a lack of computational tools/software. The current bottleneck of whole-genome and whole-exome sequencing projects is in structured data management and sophisticated computational analysis of experimental data. In this work, we have started designing a platform for integrating, in a first step, existing analysis tools and adding annotations from public databases to the findings of these tools. This platform can be used to produce tools for different kind of users. As a first experiment with this platform, we have developed a Web tools for running multiple analysis tasks, completing the findings with public data and producing a simple report similar to blood test reports.

Training and Research in Phonetics for Spanish as a Second Language with Technological Support

Foreign language acquisition must inevitably start with phonetics, an aspect of language whose importance is matched only by its neglect. Different research has shown how the systematic teaching of pronunciation is beneficial not only because it aids the comprehension of messages and their expression, but also because it diminishes the anxiety students feel when communicating orally. Furthermore, pronunciation is the first indication of social identity, with all that means for one's integration in or exclusion from a speech community. But nevertheless, phonetics practice takes a back seat in foreign language teaching programmes, in teacher training, in teaching material and, above all, in research work, and this is particularly true in the case of teaching Spanish as a second language. In order to redress this situation, researchers from nine universities have put together an oral corpus and developed a series of resources, tools and applications which can all be accessed at a website for cooperative and interactive work called Fono.ele. The corpus is the first to gather together a significant and representative number of oral recordings of learners of Spanish. It also breaks new ground in embarking on a general study of the pronunciation of Spanish/L2 in relation to social, cultural and educational factors. In addition, it makes available data regarding oral production and auditory perception. As for its applications, they enable those who may be interested (researchers and/or teachers) to handle and manage the speech extracts from the oral corpus, to carry out searches in the phonological errors data base, to obtain quantitative and statistical data, to interconnect text, sound and data, and to devise training exercises. All the foregoing can be done using our materials (that is, in collaboration with the AACFELE Project) or the user's own materials (for the preparation of new projects). Our article describes these resources, explains their features and functions, and indicates the options they offer different kinds of users.

A unified algorithm for mobility load balancing in 3GPP LTE multi-cell networks

3GPP long term evolution (LTE) is a promising candidate for the next-generation wireless network, which is expected to achieve high spectrum efficiency by using advanced physical layer techniques and flat network structures. However, the LTE network still faces the problem of load imbalance as in GSM/WCDMA networks, and this may cause significant deterioration of system performance. To deal with this problem, mobility load balancing (MLB) has been proposed as an important use case in 3GPP self-organizing network (SON), in which the serving cell of a user can be selected to achieve load balancing rather than act as the cell with the maximum received power. Furthermore, the LTE network aims to serve users with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, and the network-wide objective function for load balancing is distinct for different kinds of users. Thus, in this paper, a unified algorithm is proposed for MLB in the LTE network. The load balancing problem is first formulated as an optimization problem with the optimizing variables being cell-user connections. Then the complexity and overhead of the optimal solution is analyzed and a practical and distributed algorithm is given. After that, the proposed algorithm is evaluated for users with different kinds of QoS requirements, i.e., guaranteed bit rate (GBR) users with the objective function of load balance index and non-GBR (nGBR) users with the objective function of total utility, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm leads to significantly balanced load distribution for GBR users to decrease the new call blocking rate, and for nGBR users to improve the cell-edge throughput at the cost of only slight deterioration of total throughput.

Measuring Social Progress by Sustainable Development Indicators: Cases of Croatia and Slovenia

This paper presents an overview of the progress in the development of indicators of sustainable development (SDI) in Croatia and Slovenia in the context of global challenges. The analysis of indicators is based on the national sets of SDIs developed in recent time by different developers with focus on the EU level in comparison with other regions in the world. Key challenges include: (1) comparability and aggregation variability of SDI in relation to the quality of data determined by the sustainable development policies; (2) impacts and reflections of compiled SDIs on different kinds of user needs; and (3) Social responsibility, as a contribution to, and framework of sustainability. The paper concludes with a consideration of a critical role of SD in measurement of progress in society and some key lessons learned related to the difficulties in implementation of SDI coming from highly fragmented compilation of SDI that usually depends on the needs of the end-users.

User preferences of office occupiers: investigating the differences

PurposeThe work environment has been identified to influence employee satisfaction and work performance. In order to develop and provide work environments that meet the preferences of as many employees as possible, more information about user preferences and possible preference differences between different kinds of users is required. The purpose of this paper is to increase the understanding concerning office users' work environment preferences. The aim is to investigate whether there are differences in the preferences of office users based on their age, gender, their mobility, and whether they work individually or with others.Design/methodology/approachOffice users' work environment preferences are studied through a survey directed to office employees. Statistical analysis is used in order to identify work environment preference differences between respondents of different age, gender, and the way they work.FindingsThe results indicate that there are differences between office users' work environment preferences concerning some characteristics of the work environment. The results show that the preferences vary both based on demographic issues such as age and gender as well as based on how they work.Research limitations/implicationsThe research is limited to the Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland, so the cultural context has to be taken into account when generalising the results.Originality/valueThe paper provides several stakeholders, such as user organisations, designers, consultants, and investors, valuable information on what kind of work environments office users prefer.

OGS NODC Meta-data standardization, discovery and reporting from a relational database

no abstract

Improving understandability of semantic search explanations

Explanation-aware software design aims at making software systems smarter in interactions with their users. The long-term goal is to provide methods and tools for systematically engineering understandability into the respective (knowledge-based) software system. In this paper, we describe how we improved a semantic search engine, i.e., RadSem, regarding understandability. The research project MEDICO aims at developing an intelligent, robust and scalable semantic search engine for medical documents. RadSem is based on formal ontologies and designated for different kinds of users. Since semantic search results are often hard to understand, an explanation facility for justifying and exploring search results was integrated into RadSem employing the same ontologies used for searching also for explanation generation. We evaluated the understandability of selected concept labels in an experiment with different user groups using semantic networks as form of depicting explanations and using a class frequency approach for selecting appropriate labels.

Analyzing collaborative networks emerging in Enterprise 2.0: the Taolin Platform

Coordination and networking among people working in the same organization is not a trivial activity: competences, positions, and the structural characteristics of the company together with communication preferences and group assets may prevent a positive flow of knowledge and decrease opportunities for collaboration. Technologies and, in particular, Web platforms have great potential to serve as a solution to these issues and to promote the spread of innovation and effectiveness inside the work environment. These platforms were usually referred to as Intranets and, more recently, as Enterprise2.0, a new keyword representing how some of the most important characteristics of Web2.0, mainly user participation, can be adopted inside organizations. In this working paper we report the ongoing creation of an open source Enterprise2.0 platform and its deployment inside Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), a research institute with around 400 researchers and employees conducting studies in different research areas. We also investigate the usage and communication patterns in the platform, and analyze the activities of different kinds of users in the platform and their group relations. Our initial investigation reveals that the main social activities, such as chatting and profile viewing, are performed by users more often towards members of their own research group than with other colleagues. When we analyze users according to their seniority level, we find that colleagues who recently joined FBK exhibit larger betweenness centrality both in chat and profile view networks.

Energy-Efficient Long-Reach Passive Optical Network: A Network Planning Approach Based on User Behaviors

Long-reach passive optical network (LR-PON) is a cost-effective solution for providing broadband access spanning large areas. LR-PON extends the coverage span of PONs from the traditional 20 km range to 100 km and consolidates the multiple optical line terminals (OLTs) and central offices, thus reducing the operational cost and serving many more users. There are two type of LR-PONs: “tree-and-branch” and “ring-and-spur” LR-PON. To “green” the LR-PON and make it energy-efficient, we study a network planning approach based on user behaviors. By considering the different network usage behaviors of different kind of users (i.e., daily bandwidth demand profiles), we can assign users (e.g., business and residential users) efficiently to different wavelengths in “tree-and-branch” or “ring-and-spur” LR-PONs at networking planning stage and achieve high network utilization at all times. Heuristic searches can provide such assignments and their approximate solutions are very close to the lower bound. The behavior-aware user assignment achieves significant improvement over the traditional method in terms of used wavelengths and could thus saves the energy consumed by the LR-PON.

Impact of a Chest Support on Lower Back Muscles Activity During Forward Bending

The present study is based on previous research on the poor body posture of surgeons and their experienced discomfort during surgical procedures. Since surgeons have head-bent and back-bent posture during open surgical procedures, a chest support is a viable supporting principle. This support is meant to reduce lower back pain by minimising lower back muscle activity. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of a chest support on lower back muscle activity during forward bending and to establish a possible relation between supporting force and the kind of balancing strategy a person adopts. Use of the chest support shows a significant reduction of muscle activity in the lower back and leg muscles. Within the participants three user groups are identified as “sceptical users”, “non-trusters” and “fully trusters”, each following a different balancing strategy. Since there are different kinds of users, the designed body support should offer the possibility for altering the posture and should not constrain the user to take a certain body posture.

The impact of MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms on information seeking effectiveness

To what extent do MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) terms improve search effectiveness of different kinds of users? We observed four different kinds of searchers using an experimental information retrieval (IR) system: (1) search novices; (2) domain experts; (3) search experts and (4) medical librarians. The information needs were a subset of the relatively difficult topics originally created for the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC). By experimental design, we used 20 search topics in an IR user experiment to alleviate search topic variability. Effectiveness of retrieval was based on the relevance judgments set provided by TREC. Thirty-two participants searched either using a version of the system in which abstracts and MeSH terms were displayed or another version in which they had to formulate their own terms based only on the display of abstracts. We found that MeSH terms were more useful for domain experts than for search experts in terms of the precision measure, even though domain experts did not perceive that MeSH terms were useful. We speculate that because of the technical topics, only the domain experts had the knowledge to understand and therefore make use of the MeSH terms. The primary contributions of this research are: (1) assessment of relative impact of searchers characteristics of domain knowledge and search training on search effectiveness and (2) design and methodology for assessing the usefulness of controlled vocabulary. The effort to create MeSH terms is worthwhile for domain experts' searches on technical topics.

A system for visual role-based policy modelling

The definition of security policies in information systems and programming applications is often accomplished through traditional low level languages that are difficult to use. This is a remarkable drawback if we consider that security policies are often specified and maintained by top level enterprise managers who would probably prefer to use simplified, metaphor oriented policy management tools. To support all the different kinds of users we propose a suite of visual languages to specify access and security policies according to the role based access control (RBAC) model. Moreover, a system implementing the proposed visual languages is proposed. The system provides a set of tools to enable a user to visually edit security policies and to successively translate them into (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) code, which can be managed by a Policy Based Management System supporting such policy language. The system and the visual approach have been assessed by means of usability studies and of several case studies. The one presented in this paper regards the configuration of access policies for a multimedia content management platform providing video streaming services also accessible through mobile devices.

SEMA4A: An ontology for emergency notification systems accessibility

Providing alert communication in emergency situations is vital to reduce the number of victims. Reaching this goal is challenging due to users’ diversity: people with disabilities, elderly and children, and other vulnerable groups. Notifications are critical when an emergency scenario is going to happen (e.g. a typhoon approaching) so the ability to transmit notifications to different kind of users is a crucial feature for such systems. In this work an ontology was developed by investigating different sources: accessibility guidelines, emergency response systems, communication devices and technologies, taking into account the different abilities of people to react to different alarms (e.g. mobile phone vibration as an alarm for deafblind people). We think that the proposed ontology addresses the information needs for sharing and integrating emergency notification messages over distinct emergency response information systems providing accessibility under different conditions and for different kind of users.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF REMOTE SENSING DATA OF THE BASE PLATFORM AND ITS POSITION IN THE SPATIAL INFORMATION DATA CHINA

The remote sensing data of the Shanghai base data platform constitute the basic data that contain the urban spatial information, and they have been widely used in different departments of the government. This paper puts forward the main idea concerning the construction of remote sensing data of the Shanghai base data platform. Having been constructed through several links, the remote sensing data of the Shanghai base data platform are issued in three ways for different kinds of users. Practice has demonstrated that the remote sensing data of the Shanghai base platform occupy a key basic position in the spatial information data chain.

Managing Variability of Ambient Intelligence Middleware

AmI technologies have to produce software embedded in a wide variety of everyday objects and devices with critical resource limitations. Furthermore, they must provide support to different types of applications and to many different kinds of users. The application of a Software Product Line approach would be very useful to express the different requirements of either devices or applications in terms of commonalities and variabilities when defining a family of AmI middleware platforms. A feature model for the AmI domain will help to specify and automatically derive different configurations of middleware tailored according to a large number of constraints. The aim of this article is to highlight the complexity of managing different types of variability during the development of applications for AmI environments. A generic process for automatically generating a custom configuration of a middleware variant is also presented.

Specifying the personalization reasoning mechanism for an intelligent medical e-learning system on Atheromatosis: An empirical study

Computer-based education has already been acknowledged as an important asset for medical education. For example, web-based educational systems for medicine and health provide an additional important advantage to remote learners through platform- and time-independence. However, such systems are difficult to create as they require a lot of effort from both medical tutors and software engineers. Therefore, repetition of effort has to be avoided and such systems should be able to be used to their full extent from whoever requires medical and health knowledge on the specific topics. This means that they need to incorporate intelligent techniques in order to be able to adapt dynamically to the needs of individual users rather than have many static educational systems designed solely for different kinds of users. In view of this, in this paper we address the problem of developing an adaptive e-learning system for the medical domain of Atheromatosis. Atheromatosis of the aortic arch has been recognized as an important source of embolism, which is a frequent cause of stroke. This is the main reason that the particular topic is of interest to a wide range of users with different background knowledge and needs (e.g. medical students, nurses, common people interested in maintaining a good health, etc.). The inference mechanism of the system uses a combination of rule-based reasoning and a decision making theory. In order to design the reasoning mechanism of the system, and thus incorporate the decision making theory successfully, we conducted an empirical study. The empirical study involved distribution of questionnaires to several classes of potential users of an e-learning system about Atheromatosis and analysis of the results by computer and medical experts. The results of the empirical study were used for designing the reasoning mechanism of the system.

Elastic service availability: utility framework and optimal provisioning

Service availability is one of the most closely scrutinized metrics in offering network services. It is important to cost- effectively provision a managed and differentiated network with various service availability guarantees under a unified platform. In particular, demands for availability may be elastic and such elasticity can be leveraged to improve cost-effectiveness. In this paper, we establish the framework of provisioning elastic service availability through network utility maximization, and propose an optimal and distributed solution using differentiated failure recovery schemes. First, we develop a utility function with configurable parameters to represent the satisfaction perceived by a user upon service availability as well as its allowed source rate. Second, adopting Quality of Protection [1] and shared path protection, we transform optimal provisioning of elastic service availability into a convex optimization problem. The desirable service availability and source rate for each user can be achieved using a price-based distributed algorithm. Finally, we numerically show the tradeoff between the throughput and the service availability obtained by users in various network topologies. This investigation quantifies several engineering implications. For example, indiscriminately provisioning service availabilities for different kinds of users within one network leads to noteworthy sub-optimality in total network utility. The profile of bandwidth usage also illustrates that provisioning high service availability exclusively for critical applications leads to significant waste in bandwidth resource.

Health for All - Italia, an informative health system

Background: On ISTAT website the informative system Health for All – Italia is available. It collects indicatorson health coming from various sources to make up a basis for constructing an organic and joint framework onthe country’s health reality. The system includes more than 4000 indicators about: demographic and socio-economic context; causes of death; life styles; disease prevention; chronic and infectious diseases; disability;health status and life expectancy; health facilities; hospital discharges by diagnosis; health care resources.The database-related software was developed by the World Health Organization to make it easier for any userto access the information available either as tables, graphs and territorial maps.Methods: The system has been built considering data coming from different sources and using, if possible,the same definitions, classifications and desegregations. Time series goes from 1980 to the last year available(which can differ among the different sources). Indicators are calculated by provinces (if possible), regions,big areas and Italy. In order to compare indicators over time and space, standardised rates are calculated,using the same population reference.For each indicator metadata are available to give users additional notes necessary to correctly read and usethe data, and publications or internet websites to examine more in-depth the argument.Results: Different kind of users find Health for All – Italia very useful for their aims: students, researchers,doctors, socio-sanitary operators, policy makers. Some examples of official reports from public institutionsare briefly described in the paper.Conclusions: The increasing number of users of Health for All – Italia make necessary the online version andan English version for international comparisons.

Optimization of an Industrial Sensor and Data Acquisition Laboratory Through Time Sharing and Remote Access

This paper presents an educational laboratory that has been implemented for the practical education in sensors, data acquisition, and basic control skills. The use of the laboratory has been optimized by the availability of a remote access infrastructure that allows the definition and booking of time slots related to the laboratory sites. Given the many kinds of existing sensors, conditioning circuits, and actuators, setting up an educational framework is a complex (and expensive) task, even if only the main design alternatives are taken into account. An additional and fundamental issue to be considered for the optimization of any educational resource or teaching/learning methodology is the possibility to adapt it to the capabilities of different profiles, i.e., students enrolled in different courses. The proposed solution has been designed to be used by both nonexperienced students, who act as plain users testing predefined experiments, and advanced ones, who can demonstrate the design skills they have learnt, by developing their own applications and conditioning circuits. Accordingly, the remote access infrastructure allows different kinds of users to be defined, whose capabilities, restrictions, and software requirements depend on their level of knowledge.