Distance Supervision Research Articles

NeuralTPS: Learning Signed Distance Functions without Priors from Single Sparse Point Clouds.

Surface reconstruction for point clouds is one of the important tasks in 3D computer vision. The latest methods rely on generalizing the priors learned from large scale supervision. However, the learned priors usually do not generalize well to various geometric variations that are unseen during training, especially for extremely sparse point clouds. To resolve this issue, we present a neural network to directly infer SDFs from single sparse point clouds without using signed distance supervision, learned priors or even normals. Our insight here is to learn surface parameterization and SDFs inference in an end-to-end manner. To make up the sparsity, we leverage parameterized surfaces as a coarse surface sampler to provide many coarse surface estimations in training iterations, according to which we mine supervision for our thin plate splines (TPS) based network to infer smooth SDFs in a statistical way. Our method significantly improves the generalization ability and accuracy on unseen point clouds. Our experimental results show our advantages over the state-of-the-art methods in surface reconstruction for sparse point clouds under synthetic datasets and real scans.

Distance supervision as experienced by occupational therapists in mental health: An interpretative phenomenological study

Introduction: Distance methods of supervision rapidly increased in use during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and it is important to consider if these methods meet the needs of supervisees when deciding whether to retain these practices moving forward. Methods: An interpretative phenomenological approach was used to gain insight into the lived experience of distance supervision. Semi-structured interviews were completed with six occupational therapists who had experience receiving distance supervision as a supervisee, all of whom work in inpatient mental health units within a private healthcare company. Results: Interpretative phenomenological analysis revealed four superordinate themes of an altered interaction; the importance of a protected space; factors within the supervisory relationship and maximising the best of both worlds. Conclusion: Distance supervision methods afford increased access for supervisees and a reduction in the practical demands when supervised by an off-site supervisor. There are, however, clear differences in the nature of the experience which need to be considered to ensure that supervisee needs are met. This study provides insight into how distance supervision methods impact on the experience for supervisees and suggests areas for further consideration in moving forward with such approaches.

Effects of the exercise mobile app and distance supervision on the functional performance of the older adults. Protocol of a clinical, randomized, controlled trial.

Objective: To check the effects of the exercise mobile app with face-to-face and distance supervision on the functional performance, postural balance, and lower limb strength of older adults. Methods: This is a protocol of a controlled, randomized, and blind clinical trial in which we will recruit older adults of both genders, who will be randomized into two types of training: a control group (exercises using a mobile app with face-to-face monitoring by the therapist) and an experimental group (exercises with a mobile app without face-to-face monitoring by the therapist). The training will be carried out with the free app "Exercício para idosos", which should be installed on the participants' smartphones. The participants should do the proposed exercises three times a week for eight consecutive weeks. The evaluations will be conducted in person pre-training and after the 12th and 24th sessions. Functional performance, postural balance, and lower limb strength will be assessed. The data in each evaluation will be compared as well as the difference between the groups. It is believed that physical exercise apps for older people will benefit both groups by improving functional capacity, postural balance, and lower limbs of older adults.

Knowledge guided distance supervision for biomedical relation extraction in Chinese electronic medical records

The goal of biomedical relation extraction is to obtain structured information from electronic medical records by identifying relations among clinical entities. By integrating the advantages of unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, the distant supervision approach has achieved significant success for a relation extraction task without a large amount of labeled corpora. However, in many cases, the recognized entities from the Chinese clinical text are not defined in semantic knowledge base, which limits the application of distant supervision for biomedical relation extraction. This work proposes a Knowledge Guided Distance Supervision (KGDS) model for handling the biomedical relation extraction task in Chinese electronic medical records. To handle the unknown entities, entity-type alignment (instead of entity alignment in traditional distant supervision) is employed for extracting coarse-grained relations. Then, by learning the relation embeddings both from semantic knowledge base and electronic medical record dataset as knowledge-enhanced features, this work presents a knowledge-enhanced bootstrapping learning process for fine-grained relation disambiguation. The empirical experiments on the real-world dataset of electronic medical records illustrate that our KGDS model achieves the best performance comparing to other state-of-the-art models, thereby advancing the field of biomedical relation extraction from Chinese electronic medical records.

Multidimensional Factors Can Explain the Clinical Worsening in People With Parkinson's Disease During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Multicenter Cross-Sectional Trial.

Background: Self-reported clinical worsening by people with Parkinson's disease (PD) during social distancing may be aggravated in Brazil, where the e/tele-health system is precarious.Objectives: This study aims to investigate self-reported changes in motor and non-motor aspects during social distancing in people with PD living in Brazil and to investigate the factors that might explain these changes.Methods: In this multicenter cross-sectional trial, 478 people with a diagnosis of idiopathic PD (mean age = 67, SD = 9.5; 167 female) were recruited from 14 centers distributed throughout the five geographical regions of Brazil. The evaluators from each center applied a questionnaire by telephone, which included questions (previous and current period of social distancing) about the motor and non-motor experiences of daily living, quality of life, daily routine, and physical activity volume.Results: Self-reported clinical worsening in non-motor and motor aspects of daily life experiences (Movement Disorder Society-Unified PD Rating Scale—parts IB and II—emotional and mental health, and fear of falling) and in the quality of life was observed. Only 31% of the participants reported a guided home-based physical activity with distance supervision. Perceived changes in the quality of life, freezing of gait, decreased physical activity volume, daily routine, and fear of falling explained the self-reported clinical worsening (P < 0.05).Conclusions: Self-reported clinical worsening in people with PD living in Brazil during social distancing can also be aggravated by the precarious e/tele-health system, as perception of decreased physical activity volume and impoverishment in daily routine were some of the explanatory factors. Considering the multifaceted worsening, the implementation of a remote multi-professional support for these people is urgent.

Cross-Cultural Counselling Supervision in Ukraine.

Counsellor educators face complex challenges in the advancement of the counselling profession internationally. One way the counselling profession in Ukraine has been developed is through the use of cross-cultural engagement between local supervisees and U.S.-trained international supervisors. This qualitative study examined the phenomenon of the cross-cultural supervisory experiences of twelve participants involved in transnational distance supervision among Ukrainian supervisees, and their U.S.-trained, non-Ukrainian supervisors. Semi-structured interviews were used to elicit participants’ descriptions of their supervisory experiences. Participants identified commitment to the supervisory relationship, the importance of felt supervisor support, shared resources to promote counsellor growth, and in-person meetings in the supervisee’s context prior to the start of the supervisory relationship as the most important aspects of supervision. The researchers highlight implications and propose recommendations for counsellor educators and supervisors desiring to implement cross-cultural or transnational supervision in different cultural contexts.

Distance Neurological Supervision Using Telestroke Does Not Increase Door-to-Needle Time in Acute Ischemic Stroke Management: The Experience of Two Regional Stroke Units.

Background and Aims: Timely administration of recombinant tissue plasminogen activator (r-tPA) improves clinical outcomes in acute ischemic stroke patients. This study aims to explore the influence of the systematic presence on site of a neurologist compared with telestroke management on door-to-needle time in acute ischemic stroke outside of working hours (OWH).Methods: This retrospective cohort study included all r-tPA-treated patients in the emergency rooms of two Swiss stroke units, Nyon Hospital [Groupement Hospitalier de l'Ouest Lémanique (GHOL)] and Fribourg Hospital [Hôpital de Fribourg (HFR)], between February 2014 and September 2018. Door-to-needle time was analyzed for patients admitted during working hours (WH' weekdays 08:00–18:00) and OWH (weekdays 18:00–08:00, weekends, and public holidays). The latter was compared between centers; OWH, every patient was evaluated prior to thrombolysis by a neurologist on site in GHOL, while HFR adopted distance neurological supervision with teleradiology, performed by telephone evaluation of relevant clinical information with online real-time access to brain imaging.Results: Data were analyzed for 157 patients in HFR and 101 patients in GHOL. No statistically significant differences in baseline characteristics were found for the 258 r-tPA-treated acute ischemic stroke patients, in terms of age, gender, cardiovascular risk factors (hypertension, diabetes, and atrial fibrillation), and pre-Modified Rankin Scale (pre-mRs) between centers, with the exception of smoking and anticoagulation status. Patients in HFR presented with more severe strokes {median National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) [6 (SD 6.88) (GHOL), 8 (SD 6.98) (HFR), p = 0.005]}. No significant differences in baseline characteristics were found as per admission time independently of the center. Door-to-needle time was significantly longer in the HFR cohort when compared with GHOL, irrespective of admission time. Both centers demonstrated significantly longer median door-to-needle time OWH. However, analysis of the door-to-needle time differences between WH and OWH showed no significant interaction using robust ANCOVA WRS2 analysis (p = 0.952) and a Bayesian model (BF01 = 3.97).Conclusions: On-site systematic evaluation by a neurologist did not appear to influence door-to-needle time OWH, suggesting distance supervision may be time-efficient in thrombolysis. This supports existing prospective studies in hyperacute telestroke management. The relevance lies in optimizing resource use considering the increasing demand for emergency neurological management.

A Meta-Analysis of the Counseling Literature on Technology-Assisted Distance Supervision

In this meta-analysis, we examined the effect of distance clinical supervision in comparison with traditional face-to-face supervision in conformity with the guidelines offered by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA). We analyzed empirical studies (i.e., three journal articles and one dissertation) on clinical supervision published between 2000 and 2018. Analyses determined the overall effect sizes of supervision by format (i.e., distance vs. face-to-face) and compared the effect sizes of distance vs. face-to-face supervision, specifically, by supervisee satisfaction, supervisory alliance, and supervisee competency. Results indicated that the overall effect sizes of supervision, as well as the effect sizes for the three variables, did not significantly differ by format. Implications of non-significant difference in the effect sizes by different formats of clinical supervision (distance vs. face-to-face) are discussed.

Impact of ICT-assisted thesis writing on Student researchers’ psychological empowerment: Indonesian case

Internet of Things (IoT) in the 4.0 industrial revolution is crucial for higher education. This mode is often assisted by the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT), e.g. in the context of thesis writing. The ICT-assisted thesis writing is now a demand to empower student researchers. Thus, this paper attempts to evaluate the impact of the multimode thesis writing on the student psychological empowerment. Employing a case study, sixteen student-researchers from a private English college participated in this study. All participants had involved in multimode ICT-assisted thesis writing. Supervisor’ website, youtube, edmodo, and whatsApp were used to facilitate student researchers distance supervision. The data were gathered through questionnaires and a focused-group interview. The results revealed that the student researcher became voiced and more autonomous. They also felt more motivated for the thesis completion. Instead of having individual work, the student researchers engaged in a direct collaborative works. Thus, ICT-assisted thesis writing was empowering both for the supervisor and the student researchers. In addition, emerging issues and pedagogical implication were also discussed.

A snapshot of cyber supervision in Mainland China

This article presents a qualitative study that explores the use of technology in distance supervision by social work supervisors in Mainland China. From the interviews with 24 participants, four themes emerged concerning the participants’ supervision needs, supervision context, supervision ethics, and supervision skills. Overall, the participants’ experiences and views are given in detail: (1) the development of cyber supervision in Mainland China; (2) the contribution this new supervision method makes to ever-increasing supervisory demands; (3) the supervisory knowledge and skills required for successful cyber supervision, and (4) the government’s influence on the development and promotion of cyber supervision. The themes and views of the participants contribute to the development of the “4S” model for cyber supervision in Mainland China.

Distance supervision in the Aiglé Foundation's Latin American Psychotherapy Training Program.

Latin American literature on clinical supervision is limited and literature concerning technology-assisted supervision is virtually nonexistent. We address this gap, providing our perspective on the use of technology in distance supervision within Argentina and Guatemala. Despite important differences, these two countries share many sociocultural features. We contextualize these perspectives, describing therapist training according to the Integrative Model of Fundación Aiglé. Through the use of vignettes, we illustrate contextualized training experiences, concluding with a synthesis of strengths and weaknesses encountered when implementing the use of technology in distance supervision.

The Use of Remote Monitoring to Increase Staff Fidelity of Protocol Implementation When Working with Adults with Autism

With the increase of individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) leaving the public school systems with centralized training environments, there needs to be innovation in supporting staff who will find themselves working in various community environments with adolescent or adult learners. Staff training and ongoing supervision is important for enhancing student skill acquisition and long-term maintenance of important life skills. Current day technology has been shown to be effective in augmenting staff training and supervision efforts. The purpose of the current study was to use existing FaceTime® technology to conduct remote live supervision of staff participants who were in the community with adult learners engaged in various learning tasks. Staff were trained on specific instructional protocols to implement, and the staff trainers, miles away, watched and listened to the training being delivered by the staff to the adult participants. When staff made implementation errors, the staff trainer corrected by speaking through the smartphone. Results showed that staff improved their fidelity of implementing the training protocols when distance feedback was provided. The results of this study provide more evidence that distance supervision of staff works and is another available method for training and supervising staff.

The final year project supervision in online distance learning: assessing students and faculty perceptions about communication tools

ABSTRACTCommunication in Online Distance Learning courses revolves around two distinct forms: synchronous and asynchronous. A lot of work has been already developed focused on better understanding the roles that each of these forms of communication plays in Distance Learning and to which extent they are sufficient to provide rich and in-depth interaction experience for students and professors. The present paper focuses on better understanding the perceptions of Online Distance Learning students and supervisors about communication tools available for them during the Final Year Project supervision (FYP). A total of 262 students and 62 professors were surveyed about their impressions related to three different aspects of communication during FYP distance supervision: preferences for one form of communication over the other (synchronous versus asynchronous), appropriateness of both forms of communication to different types of discussions, and the sufficiency of these forms of communication as the sole forms of communication in the FYP discipline. Among other things, results point out an explicit preference from students and supervisors for using the asynchronous form throughout the discipline (even though the synchronous form also received good ratings). Moreover, both forms of communication were more used by students and supervisors for the discussion of academic and important topics. At last, both students and supervisors consider distance supervision as efficient as face-to-face supervision, and less experienced students consider more important to have face-to-face meetings with their supervisors than more experienced students.

Extraction of Professional Details from Web-URLs using DeepDive

Manual extraction of data from unstructured data sources like websites is labour intensive and becomes almost in-feasible at large scale. Recent state-of-the-art techniques for the task of information extraction show encouraging results. In this work, we make an attempt to extract professional details like name, email, address, contact number, and specialization from home pages of doctors. The work covers two possible scenarios of websites having these details. One scenario is where a website contains details of a single doctor. Another scenario is where a website may contain multiple information of multiple doctors/professionals at the same time. The problem is attempted to be solved as a relation extraction task for Information Extraction. The proposed solution has been built on top of DeepDive, a tool developed by Stanford. In both scenarios, DeepDive takes pre-processed data sentences as input and constructs entity-relations. For each entity-relation, DeepDive computes a probability that the relationship is a correct match using distance supervision and user-defined heuristic rules. In case of experiment-1, our system achieves 69.14% accuracy for the name, 88.67% accuracy for location and 100% for email, number and specialization. In case of experiment-2, the observed probabilities are not so significant and mostly around 0.5-0.7 but we present some solutions for future work. The techniques presented here can easily be extended to generalize for other types of professionals too and not just doctors.

Impact of a provider training program on the treatment of children with autism spectrum disorder at psychosocial care units in Brazil.

Objective:To develop, implement, and verify the impact of a training program for health care providers working with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in psychosocial care centers for children and adolescents (Centro de Atenção Psicossocial à Infância e à Adolescência – CAPSi) in São Paulo, Brazil.Methods:This quasi-experimental study was conducted with 14 professionals from four CAPSi units. The training program consisted of six phases: 1) pre-intervention observation; 2) meeting with staff to assess the main needs of the training program; 3) developing materials for training and evaluation; 4) meetings to discuss program implementation; 5) a final meeting for case discussion and evaluation; and 6) distance supervision. Three measures were used to evaluate the training program: i) the Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices (KAP) questionnaire; ii) videos containing questions designed to assess program comprehension; and iii) a satisfaction survey.Results:Thirteen videos were produced to as visual aids for use during the training program, and a further 26 videos were developed to evaluate it. The program was well evaluated by the participants. The video responses and KAP questionnaire scores suggest that staff knowledge and attitudes improved after training.Conclusion:The positive findings of this study suggest that the tested training program is feasible for use with multidisciplinary teams working in the CAPSi environment.

The use of a telemedicine model and its logistics to reach as many european refugees as possible

Current refugee crisis challenges mental health care systems all over the Europe. There is a number of research describing difficulties in dealing with cross-cultural patients. Access to relevant care as well as its availability are often limited due to: a) lack of respective qualified resources b) linguistically, cultural and even racial barriers in addressing of mental health care needs of cross-cultural patient population. By use of various e-Mental health applications, primarily videoconference, we may improve assessment and/or treatment of refugees and asylum seekers on distance e.g. Arabic speaking psychiatrist located in Sweden would be able to assess and/or treat refugees from Syria located in Germany). Specialized centers for treatment of refugees would also be able to get second-opinion service from remote experts and use it in order to confirm or re-consider diagnosis as well as the treatment options. Establishment of international network of cross-cultural experts enables to:– Improve the mental health care across national boundaries by providing psychiatric consultations to other countries within EU– Conduct International Treatment Team with Select Skills (e.g. Sign Language and Many Foreign Languages Staff)– Provide Distance Supervision and Staff Consultation– Provide Psycho Education of caregivers– Improve Distance Learning via Case Conferencing and Best Practice Demonstration Across the National Boundaries– Create Data Base over cross-cultural and other select skills professionals within EUDisclosure of interestThe author has not supplied his declaration of competing interest.

Educational Technology and Distance Supervision in Counselor Education

The authors used a nonexperimental descriptive design to examine the prevalence of distance supervision in counselor education programs, educational technology used in supervision, training on technology in supervision, and participants' (N = 673) perceptions of legal and ethical compliance. Program policies are recommended to guide the training and use of technology in supervision.

Observation and Feedback in Walkthrough Visits: Traditional vs. Distance Supervision Settings

Observation and Feedback in Walkthrough Visits: Traditional vs. Distance Supervision Settings

원거리 감독과 능동 배깅을 이용한 개체명 인식

Named entity recognition is a process which extracts named entities in sentences and determines categories of the named entities. Previous studies on named entity recognition have primarily been used for supervised learning. For supervised learning, a large training corpus manually annotated with named entity categories is needed, and it is a time-consuming and labor-intensive job to manually construct a large training corpus. We propose a semi-supervised learning method to minimize the cost needed for training corpus construction and to rapidly enhance the performance of named entity recognition. The proposed method uses distance supervision for the construction of the initial training corpus. It can then effectively remove noise sentences in the initial training corpus through the use of an active bagging method, an ensemble method of bagging and active learning. In the experiments, the proposed method improved the F1-score of named entity recognition from 67.36% to 76.42% after active bagging for 15 times.

Bringing the Field to the Supervisor: Innovation in Distance Supervision for Field-Based Experiences Using Mobile Technologies

This paper provides a summary of the design, development, and evaluation of a mobile distance supervision system for teacher interns in their field-based teaching experiences. Developed as part of the University of Florida's Restructuring and Improving Teacher Education 325T grant project, the prototype system streams video of teachers in rural classrooms using iPad Minis equipped with a variety of peripheral devices to provide enhanced optics and multi-source audio. A description of the prototype, including hardware and software components, is provided.