Relevant Domains Research Articles

Distribution shift alignment in visual domain adaptation

Domain adaptation provides the possibility of utilizing the knowledge gained from an auxiliary domain to accomplish the task in another related domain. In this paper, a common feature representation of these domains is learned through a new proposed idea to reduce inter-domain differences more precisely which results in higher accuracy for unsupervised domain adaptation. To decrease these divergences, the proposed method finds a subspace that reduces data distribution discrepancy between domains. To achieve this goal, minimization of the divergence of the class conditional probability distributions is considered. By considering class conditional distributions, more discriminative information of data is preserved compared to applying marginal distributions. Also, an explicit parametric distribution of the source and target domains is considered to reduce the discrepancy between the two domains data which results in higher accuracy compared to the other relevant domain adaptation methods. Experimental studies on benchmark image classification tasks confirmed our assumptions and indicated the significant improvement given by the proposed method compared to the other state-of-the-art methods.

Facilitators and barriers to physical activity among English adolescents in secondary schools: a mixed method study.

It is evident that physical activity (PA) programmes implemented in schools were not effective in improving PA behaviours among adolescents. This study investigated students' perceptions of barriers to PA among inactive English adolescents in secondary schools based on the Capability, Opportunity, Motivation, and Behaviour (COM-B) model, the Behaviour Change Wheel (BCW), and Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF). The study compared barriers faced by inactive and active groups participating in sports and PA in secondary schools to identify sources of behaviour contributing to inactivity. A pre-intervention online survey was distributed to affiliated schools by 233 Teaching Schools Alliances (TSAs) as part of the monitoring and evaluation of the Secondary Teacher Training study. Data were cross-tabulated to analyse activity levels and behavioural barriers for active and inactive groups, using the COM-B domains. The research team followed a seven-step process to categorise barriers based on their relevant domain in the TDF mapped to the COM-B. The findings were derived from one of the most extensive surveys of adolescents ever undertaken involving 200,623 active and 8,231 inactive respondents. The study identified 52 barriers and 68 behaviours that prevent adolescents from participating in PA. Psychological and social barriers were found to affect all activity levels, genders, and ethnic groups, with a lack of confidence and self-consciousness being the most prevalent. Certain demographic groups, such as those from minority ethnic groups and disabled individuals, were found to be overrepresented among inactive populations. The finding of the study indicated that there were common barriers that affected both inactive and active groups, with further similarity when examining barriers between active and inactive girls. The study also found that girls were more likely to experience the main barriers compared to boys, while inactive boys were more likely to encounter these barriers compared to active boys. The findings suggest that common barriers could be addressed across the population, while recognising some differences in demographics, and the need to provide personalised support. Targeted interventions are also suggested for all girls and inactive boys. This study highlights the range of barriers that impact adolescents and provides insight into potential mechanisms for behaviour change, including intervention functions, policy categories, and evidence-based behaviour change tools. The study highlights the need for further research to address the barriers to PA among adolescents, particularly those who are inactive. Utilising the findings of this study, future research should investigate the effectiveness of novel digital exercise interventions and policies in increasing PA levels among children and adolescents. Complex digital exercise interventions, including conversational AI solutions, could provide personalised tools to identify and revolutionise support around the multitude of barriers that impact adolescents globally."For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission."

Conceptual and Contextual Analysis of Spirituality in Adolescents with Grounded Theory Approach

This research aims to contribute to understanding the concept of spirituality among individuals of the Z Generation by delineating more specific boundaries within the field of spiritual studies. The connections within the minds of adolescent individuals between the concept of spirituality and the areas of socialization that start in childhood and accelerate during adolescence, within the context of their own cultural codes, have been examined to address the need for understanding. Given the developmental stage that the youth of the 21st century are in, where they construct their own concepts of value, it is noteworthy how they establish cognitive contexts, social interaction areas, and their associations with the concept of spirituality at this critical juncture. The notion of spirituality among young individuals, which is continuously discussed to a certain extent in relevant media and public domains, necessitates opening up to their world, and understanding the spiritual perception needs and expectations of young individuals, from their perspective. This study aims to reveal the perception of spirituality in adolescents, understanding the conceptual, operational, traditional, environmental, and socio-political codes of spirituality within their contexts. In line with this purpose, the behaviors attributed to spirituality by young individuals, the values they inherit as cultural, spiritual heritage, their awareness of the spiritual values of their peer groups, their perspectives on the societal order they live in, the characteristics they emphasize in their self-identifications, the relationship they establish between religion and spirituality, and their perceived levels of religiousness have been investigated. To both trace the connections of the individual and interpret the regions being studied and analyzed, a predictive paradigm was adopted, and a qualitative design was preferred. Ethical committee permission was obtained on 09.03.2023. The research was conducted between 10.04.2023 and 10.05.2023 for data collection. The sample group was composed of students attending formal education in Ankara, from Yenimahalle Tevfik İleri Anatolian Imam Hatip High School, Mamak Hüseyin Gazi Anatolian Imam Hatip High School, and Mamak Volkan Gürbüzalp Anatolian High School. Data were obtained from 36 young individuals aged between 13 and 18, through 11 fully structured open-ended questions. The data were collected using a semi-structured interview form. Following one-on-one interviews, the data obtained were analyzed through thematic coding and grounded theory analysis. As a result of the study, participants' spirituality was shaped around three core categories. When positioning their spirituality, adolescent individuals create relational connections, such as friendships, institutions (religious and national education institutions), social relationships, politics, and structural connections. They develop their concepts of spirituality by drawing on information from family, culture, and religious institutions. Furthermore, in intrinsic experiences, the concept of spirituality shaped through material phenomena, self-state, and connection with the transcendent stands apart from others. Each core category provides a detailed structure of adolescent individuals' spirituality through sub-categories. Contrary to common belief, it was observed that the concept of spirituality among adolescent individuals is similarly nourished as in adults. Additionally, feelings related to individual well-being, material possessions received as gifts, and established family and friendship bonds, were found to be part of adolescents' definitions of spirituality, distinct from a purely religious context. Feelings of individual well-being are defined as their spirituality, independent of religious sentiment. These feelings encompass the sense of belonging felt in established family and friendship bonds, the memory of gifted and cherished items, and the pride of being an individual who displays socially accepted behavior and does what is right when interacting with society. It was found that young individuals express these feelings in the form of spirituality. * This study was started in 2023 under the supervision of Assist. Assoc. Dr. Zehra Erşahin's master's thesis titled "Conceptual and Contextual Analysis of Spirituality

Applying the theoretical domains framework and behavior change wheel to inform interventions for food and food-related waste audits in hospital foodservices.

Completing aggregate food and food-related waste audits in hospital foodservices is an intense practice, however they can demonstrate problem areas that require attention to reduce waste. Identifying interventions to facilitate and improve the implementation of these audits can be guided by behavior change science. The aims of this study were to use behavior change theories and frameworks to (1) describe the drivers of behavior to complete food and food-related waste audits and (2) identify possible interventions that support the implementation and uptake of these audits. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants from hospitals in Victoria, Australia who worked in their foodservice system. Semi-structured interviews sought knowledge of participant's perceived barriers and enablers to completing food and food-related waste audits. Deductive analysis using the Theoretical Domains Framework (TDF) and Capability Opportunity Motivation Behavior theory (COM-B) identified dominant drivers of behavior. TDF domains were then matched to their corresponding intervention functions according to the Behavior Change Wheel framework (BCW) to identify relevant strategies that may support audit implementation. Data from 20 interviews found the dominant COM-B constructs (TDF domains) were psychological capability (knowledge, skills), physical opportunity (environmental context and resources), and reflective motivation (social/professional role and identity, beliefs about capabilities). These dominant domains come from narratives that participants shared about foodservice staffs' lack of knowledge, labor, time, and the hospital avoiding responsibility for audit completion. Corresponding intervention functions that could have the most potential for implementing waste audits were education, training, environmental restructuring, modeling, and enablement. Participants' shared perspectives of audit enablers resembled these: for example, obtaining staff buy-in, reinforcing behavior through incentives and installing an audit champion. To transition toward regular food and food-related waste auditing practices in hospital foodservices these findings may help identify practice and policy change that delivers standardized auditing activities to encourage long term behavior change. Interventions to support audit completion should address each behavioral construct and relevant domain, as individual hospital sites will experience unique contextual factors and expectations influencing audit outcomes. A co-design process that includes staff and stakeholders of hospital foodservices is recommended to enable engagement and practical solutions to audit implementation.

Exploring the state of the art in legal QA systems

Answering questions related to the legal domain is a complex task, primarily due to the intricate nature and diverse range of legal document systems. Providing an accurate answer to a legal query typically necessitates specialized knowledge in the relevant domain, which makes this task more challenging, even for human experts. Question answering (QA) systems are designed to generate answers to questions asked in natural languages. QA uses natural language processing to understand questions and search through information to find relevant answers. At this time, there is a lack of surveys that discuss legal question answering. To address this problem, we provide a comprehensive survey that reviews 14 benchmark datasets for question-answering in the legal field as well as presents a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art Legal Question Answering deep learning models. We cover the different architectures and techniques used in these studies and discuss the performance and limitations of these models. Moreover, we have established a public GitHub repository that contains a collection of resources, including the most recent articles related to Legal Question Answering, open datasets used in the surveyed studies, and the source code for implementing the reviewed deep learning models (The repository is available at: https://github.com/abdoelsayed2016/Legal-Question-Answering-Review). The key findings of our survey highlight the effectiveness of deep learning models in addressing the challenges of legal question answering and provide insights into their performance and limitations in the legal domain.

An extension of the BioAssay Ontology to include pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic terminology for the enrichment of scientific workflows

With the capacity to produce and record data electronically, Scientific research and the data associated with it have grown at an unprecedented rate. However, despite a decent amount of data now existing in an electronic form, it is still common for scientific research to be recorded in an unstructured text format with inconsistent context (vocabularies) which vastly reduces the potential for direct intelligent analysis. Research has demonstrated that the use of semantic technologies such as ontologies to structure and enrich scientific data can greatly improve this potential. However, whilst there are many ontologies that can be used for this purpose, there is still a vast quantity of scientific terminology that does not have adequate semantic representation. A key area for expansion identified by the authors was the pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic (PK/PD) domain due to its high usage across many areas of Pharma. As such we have produced a set of these terms and other bioassay related terms to be incorporated into the BioAssay Ontology (BAO), which was identified as the most relevant ontology for this work. A number of use cases developed by experts in the field were used to demonstrate how these new ontology terms can be used, and to set the scene for the continuation of this work with a look to expanding this work out into further relevant domains. The work done in this paper was part of Phase 1 of the SEED project (Semantically Enriching electronic laboratory notebook (eLN) Data).

Evaluating the Psychometric Properties and Clinical Utility of a Digital Psychosocial Self-Screening Tool (HEARTSMAP-U) for Postsecondary Students: Prospective Cohort Study.

Existing screening tools for mental health issues among postsecondary students have several challenges, including a lack of standardization and codevelopment by students. HEARTSMAP-U was adapted to address these issues. This study aimed to evaluate the suitability of HEARTSMAP-U as a self-screening tool for psychosocial issues among postsecondary students by evaluating its validity evidence and clinical utility. A prospective cohort study was conducted with University of British Columbia Vancouver students to evaluate HEARTSMAP-U's predictive validity and convergent validity. Participating students completed baseline and 3-month follow-up assessments via HEARTSMAP-U and a clinician-administered interview. In a diverse student sample (n=100), HEARTSMAP-U demonstrated high sensitivity (95%-100%) in identifying any psychiatric concerns that were flagged by a research clinician, with lower specificity (21%-25%). Strong convergent validity (r=0.54-0.68) was demonstrated when relevant domains and sections of HEARTSMAP-U were compared with those of other conceptually similar instruments. This preliminary evaluation suggests that HEARTSMAP-U may be suitable for screening in the postsecondary educational setting. However, a larger-scale evaluation is necessary to confirm and expand on these findings.

Antecedent Energizing Profesional Networks And Marketing Performance Fashion Industry: Conceptual Framworks And Research Proposition

Many studies on the connection between an entrepreneurial mindset and business performance were conducted in the preceding year. As a result, this study puts forth a fresh notion that sets it apart from the competition: the necessity of professional networks for reviving the link between entrepreneurial orientation and marketing efficiency. This study seeks to understand the relationships between three dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation—being proactive, taking risks, and being innovative and the marketing success and thriving professional networks of Indonesian fashion SMEs. The process's output is the energization of professional networks based on a synthesis of the theories of dynamic marketing capabilities and achievement goals. A single informant survey of Fashion SMEs owners in the relevant domain using structural equation modeling (SEM) and a moderator test is the suggested methodology for testing the proposed model. While the study's statistical population including all business owners of Indonesian fashion SMEs. Purposive sampling was employed in this investigation, with a sample size of 250 respondents. All respondents received questionnaires, which were then used as the primary data collection tool. The paper finishes with recommendations and lines of inquiry for additional study.

Intersexual and Intrasexual Differences in Mate Selection Preferences Among Lesbian Women, Gay Men, and Bisexual Women and Men

Sex differences in mating strategies and partner preferences are well established. However, most research solely focused on heterosexual women and men. We examined the mate selection, marriage, and age preferences of a sample of lesbian women, gay men, and bisexual women and men (LGB) who took part in an online dating survey. Additionally, we analyzed inter- and intrasexual differences in these preferences. A total of 710 participants rated the importance of 82 mate selection criteria and 10 marriage criteria, and they also indicated their age preferences and short-term and long-term relationship orientation. An exploratory factor analysis suggested 11 relevant domains of mate selection in the LGB sample, with sex, age, and long-term relationship orientation being relevant predictors of differences in these domains. We compared the LGB data with data collected from 21,245 heterosexual women and men on the same mate selection criteria. Results showed that the participants’ sex was the most important predictor of differences in mate selection and marriage preferences, while intrasexual variables (sexual orientation and relationship orientation) explained only a small part of the variance. We incorporated the results into the current discussion about partner preferences and sexual orientation.

SLC12A Cryo-EM: Analysis of relevant ion binding sites, structural domains and amino acids.

The SLC12A superfamily of membrane transporters modulate the movement of cations coupled with chloride across the membrane. In doing so, these cotransporters are involved in numerous aspects of human physiology: cell volume regulation, ion homeostasis, blood pressure regulation, and neurological action potential via intracellular chloride concentration modulation. Their physiological characterization has been largely studied; however, understanding the mechanics of their function and relevance of structural domains or specific amino acids has been a pending task. In recent years, single-particle cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), has been successfully applied to members of the SLC12A family including all KCCs, NKCC1 and recently NCC; revealing structural elements that play key roles in their function. The present review analyzes the data provided by these cryo-EM reports focusing on structural domains and specific amino acids involved in ion binding, domain interactions, and other important SCL12A structural elements. Comparison of cryo-EM data from NKCC1 and KCCs is presented in the light of the two recent NCC cryo-EM studies, to propose insight into structural elements that might also be found in NCC and are necessary for its proper function. On the final sections, the importance of key coordination residues for substrate specificity and their implication on various pathophysiological conditions and genetic disorders is reviewed, as this could provide the basis to correlate structural elements with the development of novel and selective treatments, as well as mechanistic insight into the function and regulation of CCCs.

A serious web game for children with attentive disorders: design and experiences from two trials

ABSTRACT Cognitive developmental disorders are common in children and can affect various abilities. Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most prevalent childhood psychiatric condition. This work presents PlayToPickUp, a serious game that aims to stimulate children in relevant cognitive domains (attention and error monitoring). A multidisciplinary team of experts and caregivers from two different centers that support therapeutic activities with such children participated from the games’s inception to the design and the evaluation of the game. Depending on the characteristics and abilities of the player, therapists can customize the game to provide training that best fits the skills and the needs of the child while maintaining the player’s motivation. After its development, the game was used over 2 months “in the wild” by children recruited by the two centers. In one case the children played with it within the regular activities offered by the training center. In the other one, the parents of the children were instructed by caregivers to have the children play the game at home. In the paper, we describe the experience gathered from such two studies run in parallel, discussing the aspects that worked better, those that represented difficulties, and the lesson learnt for future studies.

OPERA: perception of information in patients with gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors on lanreotide autogel.

Gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumors (GEP-NETs) can affect patient health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Appropriate information may improve their adherence to treatment and quality of life. To evaluate the change in patient's perceptions of the level of information at lanreotide (LAN) treatment initiation for GEP-NETs vs after 6 months. OPERA (NCT03562091) was a prospective, longitudinal, noninterventional study. Thirty-one centers in France specialized in the management of patients with NETs. Planned clinical visits at enrollment and end-of-study visits at month 6, with completion of the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer 25-item Quality of Life Questionnaire-Information Module (QLQ-INFO25) and 30-item Quality of Life Questionnaire-Core. Absolute change in the patient's perception of the information between baseline and month 6, using the relevant domains of the QLQ-INFO25. Endpoints measured at baseline and month 6 for at least 1 of the 3 targeted QLQ-INFO25 dimensions of the primary endpoint. Ninety-three of the 115 patients enrolled completed ≥1 primary endpoint information dimension. Mean (SD) scores for the primary endpoint information dimensions were high at baseline (disease, 63.41 [20.71]; treatment, 58.85 [19.00]; supportive care, 26.53 [24.69]; maximum 100). There were no significant changes between baseline (98.34% CI) and 6 months (disease, -2.84 [-8.69, 3.01; P = .24]; treatment, -4.37 [-11.26, 2.52; P = .13]; supportive care, 0.46 [-6.78, 7.70; P = .88]), and in HRQoL between baseline and 6 months. The lack of change in patient's perceptions of the disease, treatment, and supportive care information provided over the first 6 months of LAN treatment may suggest that physicians provided adequate information at the treatment initiation.

Boundary bypass activity in the abdominal-B region of the Drosophila bithorax complex is position dependent and regulated.

Expression of Abdominal-B (Abd-B) in abdominal segments A5-A8 is controlled by four regulatory domains, iab-5-iab-8. Each domain has an initiator element (which sets the activity state), elements that maintain this state and tissue-specific enhancers. To ensure their functional autonomy, each domain is bracketed by boundary elements (Mcp, Fab-7, Fab-7 and Fab-8). In addition to blocking crosstalk between adjacent regulatory domains, the Fab boundaries must also have bypass activity so the relevant regulatory domains can 'jump over' intervening boundaries and activate the Abd-B promoter. In the studies reported here we have investigated the parameters governing bypass activity. We find that the bypass elements in the Fab-7 and Fab-8 boundaries must be located in the regulatory domain that is responsible for driving Abd-B expression. We suggest that bypass activity may also be subject to regulation.

Identifying domains of health-related quality of life: the perspective of individuals with low back pain

BackgroundIdentifying the most relevant HRQOL domains for LBP from the perspective of individuals with lived experience with LBP is necessary to prioritize domains that will be most informative for evaluating the impact of pain and interventions while overcoming the burden of using long-form assessment tools. This study aimed to identify which domains of HRQOL are most important from the perspective of individuals with chronic LBP.MethodsSemi-structured interviews were conducted with 26 individuals with LBP. Participants first responded to questions related to the impact of their LBP on their HRQOL. Then, using a card sorting method, they were asked to select and indicate HRQOL domains that were most relevant to them from a list of 18 cards that represented different HRQOL domains. Participants were asked to explain the reasoning for their selection.ResultsParticipants identified physical activity restriction (50%), severity of pain (31%), social activity restriction (23%), and work performance restriction (23%) as the most important domains. The most frequently selected HRQOL domains during card sorting were social function (69%), pain intensity (62%), physical function (58%), fatigue (58%), and pain interference (42%).ConclusionThe most important domains of HRQOL perceived by participants were pain intensity, social function, physical function, fatigue, and pain interference. Identifying these domains will inform clinical decision-making and guide treatment choices for health care providers.

A Novel Integrative Design Framework Combining 4D Sketching, Geometry Reconstruction, Micromechanics Material Modelling, and Structural Analysis

State-of-the-art workflows within Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) are still caught in sequential planning processes. Digital design tools in this domain often lack proper communication between different stages of design and relevant domain knowledge. Furthermore, decisions made in the early stages of design, where sketching is used to initiate, develop, and communicate ideas, heavily impact later stages, resulting in the need for rapid feedback to the architectural designer so they can proceed with adequate knowledge about design implications. Accordingly, this paper presents research on a novel integrative design framework based on a recently developed 4D sketching interface, targeted for architectural design as a form-finding tool coupled with three modules: (1) a Geometric Modelling module, which utilises Points2Surf as a machine learning model for automatic surface mesh reconstruction from the point clouds produced by sketches, (2)a Material Modelling module, which predicts the mechanical properties of biocomposites based on multiscale micromechanics homogenisation techniques, and (3) a Structural Analysis module, which assesses the mechanical performance of the meshed structure on the basis of the predicted material properties using finite element simulations. The proposed framework is a step towards using material-informed design already in the early stages of design.

Caution! AI Bot Has Entered the Patient Chat: ChatGPT Has Limitations in Providing Accurate Urologic Healthcare Advice

To conduct the first study examining the accuracy of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, derived patient counseling responses based on clinical care guidelines in urology using a validated questionnaire. We asked ChatGPT a set of 13 urological guideline-based questions three times. Answers were evaluated for appropriateness and using Brief DISCERN (BD), a validated healthcare information assessment questionnaire. Data analysis included descriptive statistics and Student's t test (SAS Studio). 60% (115/195) of ChatGPT responses were deemed appropriate. Variability existed between responses to the same prompt, with 25% of the 13 question sets having discordant appropriateness designations. The average BD score was 16.8±3.59. Only 7 (54%) of 13 topics and 21 (54%) of 39 responses met the BD cut-off score of ≥16 to denote good-quality content. Appropriateness was associated with higher overall and Relevance domain scores (both P<.01). The lowest BD domain scores were for Source categories, since ChatGPT does not provide references by default. With prompting, 92.3% had ≥1 incorrect, misinterpreted, or nonfunctional citations. While ChatGPT provides appropriate responses to urological questions more than half of the time, it misinterprets clinical care guidelines, dismisses important contextual information, conceals its sources, and provides inappropriate references. Chatbot models hold great promise, but users should be cautious when interpreting healthcare-related advice from existing AI models. Additional training and modifications are needed before these AI models will be ready for reliable use by patients and providers.

COMPARING THE EFFICACY OF EARLY INTERVENTION AND LATE INTERVENTION FOR AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER IN CHILDREN AND ADULTS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW AND META-ANALYSIS

Objective: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by challenges in social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors. Early intervention is widely recognized as crucial for improving outcomes in individuals with ASD. However, there is ongoing debate regarding the optimal timing of intervention. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to compare the efficacy of early intervention and late intervention for individuals with ASD. The study aimed to synthesize existing evidence and provide a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of these two intervention approaches in improving outcomes for children and adults with ASD.&#x0D; Methods: A comprehensive search of electronic databases was conducted to identify relevant studies. The search terms included keywords related to ASD, early intervention, late intervention, children, adults, and outcome measures. Studies were selected based on predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria, focusing on randomized controlled trials and comparative studies with adequate sample sizes. The selected studies underwent rigorous quality assessment and data extraction. Meta-analysis was conducted using statistical software to determine the overall efficacy of early intervention and late intervention in improving outcomes related to social interaction, communication, adaptive functioning, and other relevant domains.&#x0D; Results: The distribution of cases according to expressive language and motor skills was analyzed in two groups: Group A (early intervention) and Group B (late intervention). The results showed no statistically significant differences in the distribution of cases according to expressive language and motor skills between the two groups. The findings suggested that the timing of intervention may not strongly influence the distribution of these skills in individuals with ASD.&#x0D; Conclusion: This study found no significant differences in the distribution of cases according to expressive language and motor skills between early and late intervention groups. These findings are consistent with previous research, indicating that the distribution of these skills may not be strongly influenced by the timing of intervention. However, further research with larger samples and standardized assessment methods is needed to gain a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between intervention timing and the distribution of these skills in individuals with ASD.

Choice of conceptualization of a problem situation by an intelligent agent in decision-making tasks

The research in the domain of autonomous intelligent agent is the foreground of the introduction of artificial intelligence solution in all areas of economy. The intelligent autonomous systems combine the usage of pattern recognition, reasoning, decision making, conceptual modeling techniques and methods. The important part of intelligent agent implementation is to find the conceptualization which is suitable to the current problematic situation. Despite all progress around autonomous intelligent agents, humans are much more flexible and creative in making the right conceptualizations. They seamlessly adapt to the situation at hand and filter out all irrelevant details, using multiple perspectives and representations for the same objects. This research makes assumptions that every intelligent agent dynamically creates its own ontology used to interpret local knowledge. The mappings are established with this local ontology and the ontologies of other agents when needed, in order to share and reuse knowledge. In the article a formal model of problematic situation in the context of decision-making operation is presented. Models used in decision making and their relationships are described. In the second part of the article we analyze the process of conceptualization selection and arrive to the conclusion that this selection is done on multiple levels, starting from selecting the communicating agent with relevant domain of expertise, selecting and aligning ontologies of agents, selecting patterns and patterns languages which better correspond to the situation and lastly, selecting the relevant interpretations of concepts and relationships. In the last part of article, the problem of the selection of relevant knowledge provider is solved, using modified TOPSIS method. The proposed approach and directions of research will help to add flexibility to conceptual modeling of problematic situations by intelligent agents.

HKGCL: Hierarchical graph contrastive learning for multi-domain recommendation over knowledge graph

Multi-domain recommendation (MDR) aims to improve the recommendation performance in all target domains simultaneously by leveraging rich data from relevant domains. However, conventional approaches either only rely on sparse interactions in each separate scenario, or simply combine multiple shared recommendation solutions, resulting in MDR systems still suffering from severely low recommendation accuracy. To tackle the above issues, we propose a novel recommendation model called Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for Multi-Domain Recommendation over Knowledge Graph (HKGCL). Different from previous MDR models, our HKGCL can treat each relevant domain as a hierarchy in the interaction network. Based on the LightGCN aggregation strategy, a hierarchical message passing mechanism over the knowledge graph is designed to aggregate hierarchical knowledge representations for users and items. Then, a hierarchical node dropping scheme is proposed as our data augmentation technique on different hierarchical views to obtain more self-supervised semantic signals. Subsequently, three graph contrastive learning tasks in multiple and separate domains are proposed to explore domain-shared and domain-specific preference features for target users, respectively. Additionally, a novel Multi-domain Bayesian Personalized Ranking (MBPR) approach is proposed to assist in training our multi-task learning framework. Extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the consistent superiority of our proposed HKGCL over various state-of-the-art baselines, and also verify that the HKGCL can achieve strong performance on sparse interaction scenarios.

Barriers to Implementing the Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative End-Stage Kidney Disease Life Plan Guideline

ObjectiveThe updated 2019 National Kidney Foundation Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative vascular access guidelines recommend patient-centered, multi-disciplinary construction and regular update of an individualized end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) Life-Plan (LP) for each patient, a dramatic shift from previous recommendations and policy. The objective of this study was to examine barriers and facilitators to implementing the LP among key stakeholders.MethodsSemi-structured individual interviews were analyzed using inductive and deductive coding. Codes were mapped to relevant domains in the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR).ResultsWe interviewed 34 participants: 11 patients with end-stage kidney disease, 2 care partners, and 21 clinicians who care for patients with end-stage kidney disease. In both the clinician and the patient/care partner categories, saturation (where no new themes were identified) was reached at 8 participants. We identified significant barriers and facilitators to implementation of the ESKD LP across three CFIR domains: Innovation, Outer setting, and Inner setting. Regarding the Innovation domain, patients and care partners valued the concept of shared decision-making with their care team (CFIR construct: innovation design). However, both clinicians and patients had significant concerns about the complexity of decision-making around kidney substitutes and the ability of patients to digest the overwhelming amount of information needed to effectively participate in creating the LP (innovation complexity). Clinicians expressed concerns regarding the lack of existing evidence base which limits their ability to effectively counsel patients (innovation evidence base) and the implementation costs (innovation cost). Within the Outer Setting, both clinicians and patients were concerned about performance measurement pressure under the existing “Fistula First” policies and had concerns about reimbursement (financing). In the Inner Setting, clinicians and patients stressed the lack of available resources and access to knowledge and information.ConclusionGiven the complexity of decision-making around kidney substitutes and vascular access, our findings point to the need for implementation strategies, infrastructure development, and policy change to facilitate ESKD LP development.