Project Roadmap Research Articles

Elder mistreatment: priorities for consideration by the white house conference on aging.

Elder mistreatment is recognized internationally as a prevalent and growing problem, meriting the attention of policymakers, practitioners, and the general public. Studies have demonstrated that elder mistreatment is sufficiently widespread to be a major public health concern and that it leads to a range of negative physical, psychological, and financial outcomes. This article provides an overview of key issues related to the prevention and treatment of elder mistreatment, focusing on initiatives that can be addressed by the White House Conference on Aging. We review research on the extent of mistreatment and its consequences. We then propose 3 challenges in preventing and treating elder mistreatment that relate to improving research knowledge, creating a comprehensive service system, and developing effective policy. Under each challenge, examples are provided of promising initiatives that can be taken to eliminate mistreatment. To inform the recommendations, we employed recent data from the Elder Justice Roadmap Project, in which 750 stakeholders in the field of elder mistreatment were surveyed regarding research and policy priorities.

European landscape in astrobiology, results of the AstRoMap consultation

Astrobiology is a multidisciplinary field of research, which encompasses scientists ranging from cosmology, astronomy, planetary sciences, physics, chemistry, geology, paleontology to biology. In order to map the existing astrobiological expertise in Europe a comprehensive community consultation has been performed within the AstRoMap (Astrobiology Road Mapping) project that is supported by the European Commission FP7 framework. From this information a data base of scientists (European and beyond) interested in astrobiology and planetary exploration (see: http://www.astromap.eu/database.html) has been established. It reflects the demography and research and teaching activities of the astrobiology community, as well as their professional profiles and involvement in astrobiology projects. The database provides an ideal platform for networking between scientists interested in the various fields of astrobiology. Considering future aspects of astrobiology in Europe, the need for more astrobiology-dedicated funding programs at the EU level, especially for cross-disciplinary groups, was stressed. This might eventually lead to the creation of a European laboratory of Astrobiology, or even of a European Astrobiology Institute.

Supply Chain Scenario Modeler: A Holistic Executive Decision Support Solution

McKesson is America’s oldest and largest healthcare services company. IBM Research developed an innovative scenario modeling and analysis tool, supply chain scenario modeler (SCSM), for McKesson to optimize its end-to-end pharmaceutical supply chain policies. Through integrated operations research (OR) models, SCSM optimizes the distribution network, supply flow, inventory, and transportation policies, and quantifies the impacts of changes on financial, operational, and environmental metrics. The modeling work spawned a roadmap of projects with quantified opportunities, including a new air freight supply chain path, and provided new insights that have been critical to improving McKesson’s performance as a pharmaceutical industry leader. A structured data model supporting the OR models has provided a basis for additional improvement projects. The model directly links OR modeling results to a detailed profit-and-loss statement by product category for the different supply chain paths that McKesson uses. Since this effort began in 2009, McKesson Pharmaceutical division has reduced its committed capital by more than $1 billion.

Human variome project - current overview.

The Human Variome Project (HVP) was initiated in 2006 to foster discussion around how patient outcomes could be improved by connecting and promoting the disparate work of genetic variation database curators. In the six years that have passed since that meeting, the concept of the Human Variome Project has evolved and matured. The challenges and complexities that face the field of human genetics, form a constantly changing technology landscape. The influx of raw data that those changes bring, has necessitated a shift away from the Project’s initial passive stance—a forum for the sharing of ideas and collaboration—to a more active initiative that actively engages with partners and stakeholders to establish and maintain the standards, systems and infrastructure that will enable the global collection and sharing of genetic variation information to be integrated into routine clinical practice. The Project is now well established, with over 900 HVP consortium members from 72 countries, 16 countries officially developing HVP country nodes, 6 major disease groups developing databases and over 140 databases having joined the Gene/Disease Specific Advisory Council. With the Project Roadmap 2010-2012 nearing completion, the establishment of a new committee structure to govern the scientific aspects of the Project’s activities and the incorporation of a legal entity, Human Variome Project International Limited, to act as the Project’s International Coordinating Office outlined in the Roadmap are now in place. Most importantly, the Project Roadmap 2010-2012 proposed a strategy that would ultimately ensure the collection of all genetic variation information worldwide—the One Project, Two Channels, Multiple Locations Strategy. This strategy, the next Project Roadmap 2012-2016 and progress will be outlined in the presentation.

Beyond the genomics blueprint: the 4th Human Variome Project Meeting, UNESCO, Paris, 2012

The 4th Biennial Meeting of the Human Variome Project Consortium was held at the headquarters of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris, 11-15 June 2012. The Human Variome Project, a nongovernmental organization and an official partner of UNESCO, enables the routine collection, curation, interpretation, and sharing of information on all human genetic variation. This meeting was attended by more than 180 delegates from 39 countries and continued the theme of addressing issues of implementation in this unique project. The meeting was structured around the four main themes of the Human Variome Project strategic plan, "Project Roadmap 2012-2016": setting normative function, behaving ethically, sharing knowledge, and building capacity. During the meeting, the members held extensive discussions to formulate an action plan in the key areas of the Human Variome Project. The actions agreed on were promulgated at the Project's two Advisory Council and Scientific Advisory Committee postconference meetings.

Workload management in the EMI project

The EU-funded project EMI, now at its second year, aims at providing a unified, high quality middleware distribution for e-Science communities. Several aspects about workload management over diverse distributed computing environments are being challenged by the EMI roadmap: enabling seamless access to both HTC and HPC computing services, implementing a commonly agreed framework for the execution of parallel computations and supporting interoperability models between Grids and Clouds. Besides, a rigourous requirements collection process, involving the WLCG and various NGIs across Europe, assures that the EMI stack is always committed to serving actual needs. With this background, the gLite Workload Management System (WMS), the meta-scheduler service delivered by EMI, is augmenting its functionality and scheduling models according to the aforementioned project roadmap and the numerous requirements collected over the first project year. This paper is about present and future work of the EMI WMS, reporting on design changes, implementation choices and longterm vision.

Impact of a secondary prevention intervention among HIV-positive older women

Despite the fact that older women represent a growing risk group for HIV, they have been rarely targeted by public health campaigns designed to prevent HIV/AIDS and are often excluded from many prevention studies. This unique cohort may be often overlooked due to beliefs that older women are not sexually active and do not engage in high risk sexual activity. Data suggest a need for increased attention to this unique cohort. Risk reduction interventions tailored to the special needs of people living with HIV/AIDS have begun to demonstrate promising results. In this manuscript, we report the 6 month outcomes for female participants in Project ROADMAP, a secondary prevention intervention designed to reduce high risk sexual behavior in older adults living with HIV/AIDS. Our results indicate that female participants in the intervention group were more likely to report a reduction in high risk sexual behavior than women in the control condition. Our findings also suggest that the intervention succeeded in increasing the HIV-related knowledge of the participants and decreasing their stigma vis-à-vis the HIV condition. The study findings suggest that Project ROADMAP is an effective secondary prevention intervention for sexually active older HIV positive women.

PSY41 Evaluating the Frequency and Sequence of Items Administered Using Promis Computer Adaptive Testing

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) roadmap project: Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System® (PROMIS®) has developed a series of large calibrated item banks and a computer adaptive testing (CAT) system, allowing for efficient and robust assessment of a wide range of health outcomes. This study seeks to assess the performance of PROMIS-CAT by evaluating the frequency and sequence of items administered in a clinical trial. This was a 13-week randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled drug switch study in fibromyalgia patients. PROMIS-CAT assessments were scheduled for three study visits using AssessmentCenterSM (v.1.0 item banks with standard CAT parameters) for the four following domains: Fatigue; Physical Function (PF); Satisfaction with Discretionary Social Activity (DSA); and Wake Disturbance (WD). PROMIS-CAT administers those items which are most informative to assess individual patients based on their prior responses and their latent trait score. Findings were summarized via descriptive statistics. A total of 107 randomized patients completed at least one PROMIS-CAT assessment. Each PROMIS-CAT instrument was administered 256 times. Pooled analysis of all administrations determined the following observations: 36 of 95 (38%) Fatigue items were administered (including 4-items administered >50% of the time). 30/124 (24%) PF items were administered (3-items >50% of the time). All items from the DSA (12-items) and WD (16-items) banks were administered (4-items >50% of the time each). There were 41 unique item sequences for Fatigue, 48 for PF, 20 for DSA and 21 for WD. DSA and WD each had one sequence of items that was used in over half of the assessments. PROMIS-CAT administered a subset of items from the full item banks which are most informative in assessing individual patients with fibromyalgia. Fewer than half the items from the Fatigue and Physical Function item banks were administered. DSA and WD had all items administered and fewer unique item sequences.

High-Cost Blind Spot: Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often

High-Cost Blind Spot: Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often Marie-Therese Connolly Marie-Therese Connolly Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Marie-Therese Connolly, JD, is the director of the nonprofit, Life Long Justice, and a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where she’s writing a book about elder abuse. In addition, Connolly is a 2011 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and a consulting expert on the Elder Justice Roadmap Project funded by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services. Author Notes Public Policy & Aging Report, Volume 22, Issue 1, Winter 2012, Pages 8–16, https://doi.org/10.1093/ppar/22.1.8 Published: 01 January 2012

Integrating energy efficiency performance in production management – gap analysis between industrial needs and scientific literature

For governments and for manufacturing companies, global warming, rising energy prices, and customers’ increasing ecological awareness have pushed energy efficient manufacturing to the top of the agenda. Governments and companies are both striving to identify the most effective measures to increase energy efficiency in manufacturing processes. Based on results of a recent EU-funded roadmapping project, this paper highlights the needs of industrial companies for integrating energy efficiency performance in production management. First, it analyses concepts and tools for measurement, control and improvement of energy efficiency in production management proposed in literature. Second, the paper outlines that ICT tools and standardization are important enablers for energy efficient manufacturing. Third, industrial needs in these areas are presented based on expert interviews. The industrial needs thus identified are contrasted with concepts proposed in literature to point out the implementation gaps between practice and theory. The paper demonstrates that there exists a gap between the solutions available and the actual implementation in industrial companies. It concludes by deriving requirements for energy management in production that future collaborative research projects should address.

Thirteenth AACR Special Conference on Cancer Epigenetics

The 13th American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Special Conference on Cancer Epigenetics was held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on January 20-23, 2010. This event heralded insights arising from the large sequencing efforts within the NIH Epigenetics Roadmap Project and the Cancer Genome Atlas Project, as well as important new discoveries in the basic biology of epigenetics and results of epigenetic drug clinical trials. A summary of the recent findings is presented here, with particular emphasis on the major themes of the conference.

Project Roadmap: Reeducating Older Adults in Maintaining AIDS Prevention: A Secondary Intervention for Older HIV-Positive Adults

The number of older adults living with HIV/AIDS is larger than ever. Little is known about their sexual behaviors, although contrary to stereotypes, older adults desire and engage in sexual activity. Despite increased recognition of the need for prevention interventions targeting HIV-positive individuals, no secondary HIV prevention interventions have specifically targeted the older HIV-positive adult. Efforts to target high-risk sexual behaviors may be even more critical in the older population because of sociocultural, biological, and behavioral vulnerabilities. In response, Project ROADMAP (Reeducating Older Adult in Maintaining AIDS Prevention) intervention was developed to reduce high-risk sexual behaviors among older HIV-positive patients in primary care clinics. The purpose of this article is to report the 6-month outcomes of a behavioral intervention designed to reduce sexual risk behaviors in older HIV-positive adults.

The changing concept of sustainability and economic opportunities for energy-intensive industries

In the past decades there has been a shift in the concept of sustainability from a distant, environmentally oriented ideology to an imperative factor for competitiveness. This paper first discusses this paradigm change as seen from an industry perspective. Second, motivated by energy-related improvement potentials in energy-intensive manufacturing industries (steel, cement, pulp and paper, chemicals), novel economic drivers for environmental commitment are identified. Third, based on the outcomes of a recent EU-funded roadmapping project, measures and concepts in production organization are introduced and assessed with respect to the above motivation. We conclude that the novel economic drivers call for re-evaluation of environmental strategies.

Exploiting Memory Soft Redundancy for Joint Improvement of Error Tolerance and Access Efficiency

Technology roadmap projects nanoscale multibillion- transistor integration in the coming years. However, on-chip memory becomes increasingly exposed to the dual challenges of device-level reliability degradation and architecture-level performance gap. In this paper, we propose to exploit the inherent memory soft (transient) redundancy for on-chip memory design. Due to the mismatch between fixed cache line size and runtime variations in memory spatial locality, many irrelevant data are fetched into the memory thereby wasting memory spaces. The proposed soft-redundancy allocated memory detects and utilizes these memory spaces for jointly achieving efficient memory access and effective error control. A runtime reconfiguration scheme is also proposed to further enhance the soft-redundancy allocation. Simulation results demonstrate 74.8% average error-control coverage ratio on the SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks with average of 59.5% and 41.3% reduction in memory miss rate and bandwidth usage, respectively, as compared to the existing memory techniques. Furthermore, the proposed technique is fully scalable with respect to various memory configurations.

Production and use of Hydrogen – Regional Energy Systems Analysis of Oslo, Telemark and Rogaland

The transportation sector in Norway represents approximately 30 % of the CO2-emissions. In order to significantly reduce CO2-emissions, measures towards the transportation sector have to be addressed. This includes both efficiency and new vehicle fuels. The NorWays project has been aiming at providing decision support for introduction of hydrogen as an energy carrier in the Norwegian energy system. Important objectives have been to analyze and evaluate scenarios, market segments as well as geographical regions for introduction of hydrogen. Regional MARKAL models were developed for the counties Oslo, Telemark and Rogaland. The MARKAL models have been used in order to analyze the entire energy system and compare hydrogen technologies to other possibilities, such as bio fuels, plug-in hybrids etc. The analysis focuses on how taxes, restrictions and energy prices have an impact on the production and use of hydrogen towards 2050. The main scenarios analyzed have been a scenario based on assumptions from the EU hydrogen roadmap project HyWays, a scenario with no taxes on transport energy and a scenario with 75 % reduction in CO2-emissions by 2050. In the HyWays scenario all cars in Rogaland and Telemark use hydrogen in 2050. In Oslo, there are no hydrogen cars in this scenario, due to more expensive hydrogen in Oslo than in the other regions. Plug-in hybrids are introduced in Oslo from 2020, and in 2050 all cars are plug-in hybrids.

Real time command control architecture for an ITER relevant inspection robot in operation on Tore Supra

In 2008, the Articulated Inspection Arm (AIA) performed its first deployment in Tore Supra tokamak vessel, under real vacuum and temperature conditions (10 −6 Pa and 120 °C) after a conditioning phase to avoid pollution of the chamber. This full demonstration is a turning point in the project, allowing a second phase to start toward the objective to make use of the Remote Handling Equipment as an inspection routine tool. This feasibility demonstration will also be performed on Tore Supra. At this stage, the system requires enhancements of overall technologies and also developments of the Remote Handling control system. Lessons learned in the first phase of the project and experience collected for more than 20 years by Robotics Units of CEA-LIST teams on teleoperated systems enable to identify three main fields to explore to reach the objectives: • Development of a reliable control based on a real time generic command control system. • Development of a graphical supervisor for intuitive steering. • Development of a generic flexible model for realistic computations of the robot localization in the environment. This paper is dedicated to the description of the further developments that shall be done for routine Remote Handling operations. It presents the R&D project roadmap for the next years.

Intrinsic noise in aggressively scaled field-effect transistors

According to roadmap projections, nanoscale field-effect transistors (FETs) with channellengths below 30 nm and several gates (for improving their gate control over thesource–drain conductance) will come to the market in the next few years. However, fewstudies deal with the noise performance of these aggressively scaled FETs. In this work, astudy of the effect of the intrinsic (thermal and shot) noise of such FETs on theperformance of an analog amplifier and a digital inverter is carried out by means ofnumerical simulations with a powerful Monte Carlo (quantum) simulator. The numericaldata indicate important drawbacks in the noise performance of aggressively scaledFETs that could invalidate roadmap projections as regards analog and digitalapplications.

Exploiting Memory Soft Redundancy for Joint Improvement of Error Tolerance and Access Efficiency

Technology roadmap projects nanoscale multibillion- transistor integration in the coming years. However, on-chip memory becomes increasingly exposed to the dual challenges of device-level reliability degradation and architecture-level performance gap. In this paper, we propose to exploit the inherent memory soft ( <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">transient</i> ) <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">redundancy</i> for on-chip memory design. Due to the mismatch between fixed cache line size and runtime variations in memory spatial locality, many irrelevant data are fetched into the memory thereby wasting memory spaces. The proposed soft-redundancy allocated memory detects and utilizes these memory spaces for jointly achieving efficient memory access and effective error control. A runtime reconfiguration scheme is also proposed to further enhance the soft-redundancy allocation. Simulation results demonstrate 74.8% average error-control coverage ratio on the SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks with average of 59.5% and 41.3% reduction in memory miss rate and bandwidth usage, respectively, as compared to the existing memory techniques. Furthermore, the proposed technique is fully scalable with respect to various memory configurations.

From LHC to SLHC, ILC and Beyond

A review and possible road map for future collider projects at the high energy frontier are presented. Opportunities for photon physics will be pointed out.

A roadmap for understanding and preventing necrotizing enterocolitis

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is the most common severe gastrointestinal emergency that affects newborns. Its etiology is still undetermined. Most of our knowledge of this disease stems from epidemiologic studies, clinical experience, and studies using animal models that do not directly represent the disease in premature infants. An immature intestine that is colonized by bacteria is a prerequisite for the pathogenesis of NEC. Although causative microbes have not been found, newly developed analytic techniques now allow the detection of noncultivatable microbes and the determination of their overall diversity and metabolic capabilities. The National Institutes of Health Human Microbiome Roadmap Project is likely to generate new information highly germane to understanding NEC. Newly developed proteomic and metabolomic approaches also offer exciting new potential for early diagnosis and prevention of this disease in infants at highest risk.