Placement Budget Research Articles

Resilient Sensor Placement for Kalman Filtering in Networked Systems: Complexity and Algorithms

Given a linear dynamical system affected by noise, we study the problem of optimally placing sensors (at design-time) subject to a sensor placement budget constraint in order to minimize the trace of the steady-state error covariance of the corresponding Kalman filter. While this problem is NP-hard in general, we consider the underlying graph associated with the system dynamics matrix, and focus on the case when there is a single input at one of the nodes in the graph. We provide an optimal strategy (computed in polynomial-time) to place the sensors over the network. Next, we consider the problem of attacking (i.e., removing) the placed sensors under a sensor attack budget constraint in order to maximize the trace of the steady-state error covariance of the resulting Kalman filter. Using the insights obtained for the sensor placement problem, we provide an optimal strategy (computed in polynomial-time) to attack the placed sensors. Finally, we consider the scenario where a system designer places the sensors under a sensor placement budget constraint, and an adversary then attacks the placed sensors subject to a sensor attack budget constraint. The resilient sensor placement problem is to find a sensor placement strategy to minimize the trace of the steady-state error covariance of the Kalman filter corresponding to the sensors that survive the attack. We show that this problem is NP-hard, and provide a pseudo-polynomial-time algorithm to solve it.

Predictors of Employment for People With Mental Illness: Results of a Multicenter Randomized Trial on the Effectiveness of Placement Budgets for Supported Employment.

Background: Individual placement and support (IPS) has proven to be effective for vocational outcomes in people with mental illness. The original concept of IPS requires temporally unlimited provision of support. Using limited placement budgets and investigating factors that predict their effectiveness may inform decisions about resource allocation. Methods: A range of patient characteristics were tested as predictors of employment outcomes in participants who attended six outpatient psychiatric clinics in Switzerland between June 2010 and May 2011. Overall, 116 patients with the full spectrum of psychiatric conditions were randomly assigned and started an IPS intervention, which was provided by three different placement budgets. Support lasted 2 years for those who found a job, and outcomes were repeatedly assessed over 3 years. The intervention ended for those who failed to find competitive employment by the time their placement budget had run out. Results: Of the 15 variables tested, only Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) and Clinical Global Impression (CGI) scores were predictors for obtaining work (for ≥1 day) and for maintaining it over a longer period (>3 months). Higher GAF and lower CGI scores increased the odds of obtaining employment and keeping it for at least 3 months. Functional role impairment, quality of life, self-esteem, or education level did not predict employment. Conclusion: Our data suggest that, if time-restricted budgets are offered to a wide range of patients, such as those included in this study, better functioning and lower symptom severity at baseline are predictive of better employment outcomes (finding and maintaining work) on the first (competitive) labor market in Switzerland. It remains to be investigated whether this holds true under different environmental factors. Clinical Trial Registration: ISRCTN, trial number: ISRCTN89670872.

'Placement budgets' for supported employment: impact on employment rates in a multicentre randomised controlled trial.

The most effective rehabilitation model for job (re-)entry of people with mental illness is supported employment. A barrier to introducing supported employment into standard care is its temporally unlimited provision, which conflicts with health and social legislation in many European countries. To test the impact of different 'placement budgets', i.e. a predefined maximum time budget for job seeking until take-up of competitive employment. Participants (116) were randomly assigned to 25 h, 40 h or 55 h placement budgets in an intent-to-treat analysis. We applied the individual placement and support model over 24 months, following participants for 36 months. Primary outcome was employment in the labour market for at least 3 months. The proportion of participants obtaining competitive employment was 55.1% in the 25 h group, 37.8% in the 40 h group and 35.8% in the 55 h group. In a Cox regression analysis, time to employment was slightly lower in the 25 h group relative to the 40 h (hazard ratio 1.78, 95% CI 0.88-3.57, P = 0.107) and 55 h groups (hazard ratio 1.74, 95% CI 0.86-3.49, P = 0.122), but this was not statistically significant. The vast majority of all participants who found a job did so within the first 12 months (80.4%). A restricted time budget for job finding and placement does not affect the rate of successful employment. In accordance with legislation, a restriction of care provision seems justified and enhances the chances of supported employment being introduced in statutory services.

“Placement Budgets” for Supported Employment—Impact on Quality of Life in a Multicenter Randomized Controlled Trial

Background: Employment is an important aspect of psychiatric rehabilitation. The objective of this analysis was to explore how quality of life (QoL) may affect the outcome of supported employment and vice versa.Methods: A total of 116 participants with severe mental disorders were randomly assigned to either 25, 40, or 55 h placement budgets, which comprises job coaches' time resources to support a client in finding a job. The intervention followed the individual placement and support model and lasted up to 36 months. Primary outcome was employment in the first labor market for at least 3 months. QoL was assessed 7 times over the entire 36-months observation period using the WHO QoL Bref, which comprises the dimensions physical health, psychological, social relationships, and environment.Results: The three placement budgets did not differentially relate to QoL, but QoL environment showed a significant increase over time across all three groups. Baseline QoL environment weakly predicted subsequent obtainment of employment (F = 4.08, df = 1, p = 0.046, Cohen's d = 0.39). Controlling for baseline QoL, those participants who obtained a job, as compared to those who did not, showed persistent increases in QoL physical health (b = 0.39, p = 0.002, Cohen's d = 0.50) and QoL psychological (b = 0.40, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.47).Conclusion: Obtaining employment in the first labor market improves patients' QoL. Supported employment is a valuable intervention that may benefit patients with severe mental disorder.

Fuzzy Logic Based Coverage and Cost Effective Placement of Serving Nodes for 4G and Beyond Cellular Networks

The densification of serving nodes is one of the potential solutions to maximize the spectral efficiency per unit area. This is preposterous on account of conventional base stations (BS) for which site procurement is costly. Long term evolution-advanced (LTE-A) defines the idea of heterogeneous networks (HetNets), where BSs with different coverage and capacity are utilized to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) requirements of the clients. To maximize the transmission quality of the clients in the coverage holes, LTE-A also defines multihop relay (MHR) networks, where the relay stations (RSs) are also placed along with the BSs. Unfortunately, the placement approaches for HetNet and MHR serving nodes are not standardized. In this work, two different approaches like site selection with maximum service coverage (SSMSC) and site selection with minimum placement cost (SSMPC) are proposed, which identifies the required number of serving nodes, their types, and the placement locations to maximize the coverage and to maintain the placement cost (PC) within the limits of the total placement budget. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approaches are computationally less complex and offer enhanced performance in terms of aggregate PC, coverage, and power proportion compared to the other conventional approaches.

(Invited) Patterning Process Model Challenges for 14 Nm

The taxonomy of semiconductor technology nodes has long since decoupled from the minimum critical dimension (CD) associated with the designs, but each new node nonetheless features a variety of difficult challenges. CD control and placement budgets continue to tighten with each node as new and more complex RET strategies such as multi-layer patterning, model-based assist feature, pixelated illumination sources, and negative tone develop processes are deployed. Optical Proximity Correction (OPC) is of course a vital enabler for advanced manufacturing, and OPC models describe the entire patterning process, including photomask, optics, resist, and etch as a set of separate modules. There are many factors which impact the accuracy and predictive power of these semi-empirical photomask, optical, and resist models, and care must be taken to ensure appropriate representation of all physical system parameters. These include mask critical dimension (XY) and optical (Z) properties, since 3DEMF effects are important at 14 nm node dimensions. In addition to single plane CD prediction, models must be aware of various three dimensional patterning failure modes such as SRAF printing, resist toploss, and resist pattern collapse. This paper will review the critical challenges for patterning process models for the 14 nm node.

An Information-Theoretic Approach to PMU Placement in Electric Power Systems

This paper presents an information-theoretic approach to address the phasor measurement unit (PMU) placement problem in electric power systems. Different from the conventional 'topological observability' based approaches, this paper advocates a much more refined, information-theoretic criterion, namely the mutual information (MI) between the PMU measurements and the power system states. The proposed MI criterion can not only include the full system observability as a special case, but also can rigorously model the remaining uncertainties in the power system states with PMU measurements, so as to generate highly informative PMU configurations. Further, the MI criterion can facilitate robust PMU placement by explicitly modeling probabilistic PMU outages. We propose a greedy PMU placement algorithm, and show that it achieves an approximation ratio of (1-1/e) for any PMU placement budget. We further show that the performance is the best that one can achieve in practice, in the sense that it is NP-hard to achieve any approximation ratio beyond (1-1/e). Such performance guarantee makes the greedy algorithm very attractive in the practical scenario of multi-stage installations for utilities with limited budgets. Finally, simulation results demonstrate near-optimal performance of the proposed PMU placement algorithm.

Turning away from the public sector in children's out-of-home care: An English experiment

This paper reports on the evaluation of an English experiment which, for the first time, moved statutory social work support for children and young people in out-of-home care from the public to the private or independent sector. Five social work practices (SWPs), independent or semi-independent of local government, were established and evaluated using a matched control design with integrated process evaluation. Social work teams in the public sector, selected to correspond to key characteristics of the SWP sites, provided control sites. While most SWPs were perceived to be accessible and user-friendly organizations, children's and young people's accounts showed no differences between pilots and control sites in terms of workers' accessibility and responsiveness. Perceptions of SWP staff's decision-making were mixed. SWP staff reported spending more time in direct face-to-face work with children and families but this was attributed to reduced caseload size and a tight remit which excluded child protection work rather than to decreased bureaucracy. SWP staff morale was generally found to be high in terms of depersonalization and social support, reflecting an emphasis on staff supervision in these organizations. However, this was offset by slightly higher job insecurity which reflected the precariousness of employment in the independent as opposed to state sector. Staff retention varied between the SWPs, but although children and young people in the pilots were more likely to retain their key worker than those in control sites, they experienced disruption in the move into SWPs and back to public services when SWP contracts were not renewed. While some SWPs succeeded in reducing placement change rates for children and young people, a policy of switching placement providers to achieve flexibility and savings increased placement change rates in some SWPs. SWPs did not achieve financial independence from the local authority commissioners with only one assuming full responsibility for managing the placement budget. Payment by results was not used consistently. None of the commissioners interviewed considered that the SWP model had resulted in savings. The study highlighted the interdependence of public and private sectors. As small organizations, most of the SWPs succeeded in offering an accessible and personalized service, and public services should consider reorganizing to achieve similar outcomes. However, this evaluation found that contracted-out organizations struggled to provide children in out-of home care with the consistency and continuity they require. ► This paper reports on a national evaluation of a policy experiment in England. ► Social work for children in out-of-home care was moved to independent organizations. ► The evaluation employed a mixed methods, matched control design. ► Social workers in the new services enjoyed lower caseloads and greater autonomy. ► Privatization led to job insecurity and did not increase continuity for children.

‘Placement budgets’ for supported employment – improving competitive employment for people with mental illness: study protocol of a multicentre randomized controlled trial

BackgroundVocational integration of people with mental illness is poor despite their willingness to work. The ‘Individual Placement and Support’ (IPS) model which emphasises rapid and direct job placement and continuing support to patient and employer has proven to be the most effective vocational intervention programme. Various studies have shown that every second patient with severe mental illness was able to find competitive employment within 18 months. However, the goal of taking up employment within two months was rarely achieved. Thus, we aim to test whether the new concept of limited placement budgets increases the effectiveness of IPS.Methods/DesignSix job coaches in six out-patients psychiatric clinics in the Canton of Zurich support unemployed patients of their clinic who seek competitive employment. Between June 2010 and May 2011 patients (N=100) are randomly assigned to three different placement budgets of 25h, 40h, or 55h working hours of job coaches. Support lasts two years for those who find a job. The intervention ends for those who fail to find competitive employment when the respective placement budgets run out. The primary outcome measure is the time between study inclusion and first competitive employment that lasted three months or longer. Over a period of three years interviews are carried out every six months to measure changes in motivation, stigmatization, social network and social support, quality of life, job satisfaction, financial situation, and health conditions. Cognitive and social-cognitive tests are conducted at baseline to control for confounding variables.DiscussionThis study will show whether the effectiveness of IPS can be increased by the new concept of limited placement budgets. It will also be examined whether competitive employment leads in the long term to an improvement of mental illness, to a transfer of the psychiatric support system to private and vocational networks, to an increase in financial independence, to a reduction of perceived and internalized stigma, and to an increase in quality of life and job satisfaction of the patient. In addition, factors connected with fast competitive employment and holding that job down in the long term are being examined (motivation, stigmatization, social and financial situation).Trial registerISRCTN89670872

Establishing Social Work Practices in England: The Early Evidence

Social Work Practices (SWPs) were established in England in 2009 to deliver social work services to looked after children and care leavers. The introduction of independent social work-led organisations generated controversy focused on issues such as the privatisation of children's services and social workers' conditions of employment. This paper reports early findings from the evaluation of four of these pilots, drawing on interviews with children and young people, staff, and local authority and national stakeholders. The SWPs assumed a variety of organisational forms. The procurement process was demanding, with protracted negotiations over matters such as budgetary control and providing a round-the-clock service. Start-up was facilitated by an established relationship between the SWP provider and the local authority. Once operational, SWPs continued to rely on local authorities for various functions; in most cases, local authorities retained control of placement budgets. Levels of consultation and choice offered to children and young people regarding the move to an SWP varied considerably. Children's understanding about SWPs was generally low except in the pilot where most children retained their original social worker. These early findings show some dilution of the original SWP model, while the pilots' diversity allows the benefits of particular models to emerge.

The Community Child Placement Budget:

This article presents a mechanism for empowering communities to take responsibility and control for their vulnerable children. The community placement budget is based on the daily living costs associated with children in state custody. Based on data from a real community, the budget includes where these children are living, the cost associated with these placements, and who is paying. Strategies are suggested that will help community groups compare ideas about what they want for children in their community and identify possible areas for change.

Targeting the Media Message: “You Can't Hit the Bullseye Without A Target”

ABSTRACT The targeting of advertising messages to potential customers is one of the most challenging tasks facing small businesses today. Most small businesses do not feel that their advertising dollar is spent with any real sense of accuracy. Despite information from national rating services, local and/or regional media representatives and their own past experiences, most small businesses feel that their advertising placement budgets are based on instincts rather than planning based on empirical data. This article is the first in a series of six which describe a regional Media Buyer Guide Model and the process utilized to establish the model and related start-up business. The business was started in one rural midwestern, relatively small, Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA). Based on the success in that area, it appears that the effort and business can be successfully replicated elsewhere. The authors are also the entrepreneurs who have been involved in the project from the initial creative ide...