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Objective The aims of the study were: (1) to clarify the definitions of “migrant” used in occupational health research; (2) to summarize migrant workers’ industry sectors, occupations and employment conditions; (3) to identify the occupational health and safety services available to migrant workers; (4) to summarize work-related health problems found among migrant workers; (5) to identify the methodological challenges to research into occupational health of migrant workers; and (6) to recommend improvements in migrant occupational health research. Methods This position paper was prepared by researchers from several European countries and Australia, working within the EU COST Action OMEGA-NET. The paper drew on two recent systematic reviews on the occupational health of international migrant workers and other literature, and also identified uncertainties and gaps in the research literature. Migrants may, for example, be temporary or permanent, moving for specific jobs migrants or other reasons. Their ethnicity and language capabilities will affect their work opportunities. Results The occupational health literature seldom adequately identifies the heterogeneity or characteristics of the migrant group being studied. Migrants tend to work in more physically and mentally demanding environments with higher exposures than native workers. Migrants tend to have an increased risk of physical and mental ill health, but less access to health care services. This has been demonstrated recently by high rates of COVID-19 and less access to health care. There have been a number of cross-sectional studies of migrant health but few long-term cohort studies were identified. Other study designs, such as registry-based studies, surveys and qualitative studies may complement cross-sectional studies. Mixed-methodology studies would be valuable in research on migrants’ occupational health. Language and lack of trust are barriers to migrant research participation. Conclusion Targeted research, especially longitudinal, identifying how these economically important but often-vulnerable workers can be best assisted is needed. Researchers should identify the characteristics of the migrant workers that they are studying including visa/migration circumstances (temporary, permanent, undocumented), racial and ethnic characteristics, existing skills and language abilities.

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) make up a significant proportion of the global burden of disease in vulnerable groups and tend to substantially impair the quality of life of those affected, making timely detection of UTIs a priority for public health. However, economic and societal barriers drastically reduce accessibility of traditional lab-based testing methods for critical patient groups in low-resource areas, negatively affecting their overall healthcare outcomes. As a result, cellulose-based materials such as paper and thread have garnered significant interest among researchers as substrates for so-called frugal analytical devices which leverage the material’s portability and adaptability for facile and reproducible diagnoses of UTIs. Although the field may be only in its infancy, strategies aimed at commercial penetration can appreciably increase access to more healthcare options for at-risk people. In this review, we catalogue recent advances in devices that use cellulose-based materials as the primary housing or medium for UTI detection and chart out trends in the field. We also explore different modalities employed for detection, with particular emphasis on their ability to be ported onto discreet casings such as sanitary products. Graphical abstract

Fraudulent papers from paper mills are a serious threat to the entire scientific community. Naunyn-Schmiedeberg’s Archives of Pharmacology has become the target of a massive attack of fraudulent papers originating from paper mills. This editorial highlights 20 important features we observed with paper mills and explains how the journal is responding to this serious threat to restore the integrity of science. Hopefully, this editorial is also helpful for editors of other scientific journals.

The acute and long-lasting side effects of modern multimodal tumour therapy significantly impair quality of life and survival of patients afflicted with malignancies. The key components of this therapy include radiotherapy, conventional chemotherapy, immunotherapy and targeted therapies. In addition to established tumour therapy strategies, up to 30 new therapies are approved each year with only incompletely characterised side effects. This consensus paper discusses the risk factors that contribute to the development of a potentially adverse reaction to tumour therapy and, in addition, defines specific side effect profiles for different treatment groups. The focus is on novel therapeutics and recommendations for the surveillance and treatment of specific patient groups.

To study the relationship between exposure to airborne particles in a pulp and paper mill and markers of inflammation and coagulation in blood. Personal sampling of inhalable dust was performed for 72 subjects working in a Swedish pulp and paper mill. Stationary measurements were used to study concentrations of total dust, respirable dust, PM10 and PM2.5, the particle surface area and the particle number concentrations. Markers of inflammation, interleukins (IL-1b, IL-6, IL-8, and IL-10), C-reactive protein (CRP), serum amyloid A (SAA), and fibrinogen and markers of coagulation factor VIII, von Willebrand, plasminogen activator inhibitor, and D-dimer were measured in plasma or serum. Sampling was performed on the last day of the work free period of 5 days, before and after the shift the first day of work and after the shifts the second and third day. In a mixed model analysis, the relationship between particulate exposures and inflammatory markers was determined. Sex, age, smoking, and BMI were included as covariates. The average 8-h time-weighted average (TWA) air concentration levels of inhalable dust were 0.30 mg/m(3), range 0.005-3.3 mg/m(3). The proxies for average 8-h TWAs of respirable dust were 0.045 mg/m(3). Significant and consistent positive relations were found between several exposure metrics (PM 10, total and inhalable dust) and CRP, SAA and fibrinogen taken post-shift, suggesting a dose-effect relationship. This study supports a relationship between occupational particle exposure and established inflammatory markers, which may indicate an increased risk of cardiovascular disease. Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare [2006-0152]

This open access White Paper details the status of hip and knee arthroplasty care in Germany. Hip and knee replacements are amongst the most frequently performed procedures and usually become necessarily due to age-related wear of the joint, osteoarthritis and fractures of the femoral neck. In light of demographic change, demands with regard to standards of care and the procedures are likely to rise.

Background The main aim of emergency medical services (EMS) should be to provide universal emergency medical care which is EMS system available to all those who need it. Most of the developed countries have an integrated EMS system that is accessible by a single dial number in the whole country. Nepal does not have a proper EMS system. We conducted a literature review regarding methods of developing an integrated EMS system in Nepal. Result The fragmented system, high demand–low supply, inequity with the service, and inadequately trained responders are major problems associated with EMS in Nepal. Nepal too should develop an integrated single dial number EMS system to meet the current demand of EMS. Having a paramedic in ambulances as the first responders will prevent chaos and save critical time. Funding models have to be considered while developing an EMS considering the capital as well as operational cost. Conclusion Nepal can develop a public private partnership model of EMS where capital cost is provided by the government and operational cost by other methods. Community-based insurance system looks more feasible in a country like Nepal for generating operational cost.

Part 8: Pattern Recognition and Image Processing; International audience; Paper-based documents are important and still widely used in government agencies and private entities as some documents cannot be replaced by electronic documents. These include loan agreements, dispatch or contracts, household registrations and passports. They must be paper-based. Paper-based documents can be easily forged with a printer and a scanner, and imaging software can easily edit them. This paper presents a paper-based document authentication by applying a digital signature and HC2D barcode to verify the integrity of the text message and the sender of the document. This is useful both for a quick inspection of documents with large quantities and monitoring that may help prevent fraud and forgery which may have occurred.

Introduction In adults with a suspicion of peripheral bone infection, evidence-based guidelines in choosing the most accurate diagnostic strategy are lacking. Aim and methods To provide an evidence-based, multidisciplinary consensus document on the diagnostic management of adult patients with PBIs, we performed a systematic review of relevant infectious, microbiological, orthopedic, radiological, and nuclear medicine literature. Delegates from four European societies (European Bone and Joint Infection Society, European Society of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, European Society or Radiology, and European Association of Nuclear Medicine) defined clinical questions to be addressed, thoroughly reviewed the literature pertinent to each of the questions, and thereby evaluated the diagnostic accuracy of each diagnostic technique. Inclusion of the papers per statement was based on a PICO (Population/problem – Intervention/indicator – Comparator – Outcome) question following the strategy reported by the Oxford Centre for Evidence-based Medicine. For each statement, the level of evidence was graded according to the 2011 review of the Oxford Centre for Evidence-based Medicine. All approved statements were addressed taking into consideration the available diagnostic procedures, patient acceptance, tolerability, complications, and costs in Europe. Finally, a commonly agreed-upon diagnostic flowchart was developed. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1007/s00259-019-4262-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) are a viable technology for providing access to Electronic Medical Records at the point-of-care. However, acceptance of this technology by clinicians will depend on how easy they can make the transition from the system they normally use to a PDA-based system. Since many hospitals are still using paper-based patient record systems this study intends to provide some insight on the aspects that need to be considered in the transition from a paper-based system to a PDA-based system. The study compares the interaction of nurses with PDA-based and paper-based nursing documentation systems in terms of performance and subjective satisfaction. Twenty staff nurses from a metropolitan hospital performed twelve tasks on each system. The study supports the conclusion that a PDA-based nursing documentation system can be superior to a paper-based system in term of performance for tasks that don't required writing notes. Nurses were significantly more satisfied with the PDA-based system than with the paper-based system with every interaction and system aspect evaluated on the study. In general the results of the study provide hard evidence to predict an easy transition for nurses from a paper-based system to a PDA-based system nursing documentation system.

This paper presents a proposed approach to address risk and regulation management within the highly active and volatile financial domain by employing semantic based technologies within a collaborative networks environment. Firstly the problems and motivation are introduced, with accent on big data and high frequency trading issues that are creating major problems to the current software systems. Secondly the state of the art on Big Data, Regulation and Risk Management are presented. Next the FIORD platform architecture is detailed and the envisioned approach explained. Finally conclusions are presented where benefits for real time monitoring are emphasized so high frequency trading irregularities are detected in real time for the benefit of involved financial institutions.

Repositories are being popular as places for publication of research outputs. To make more efficient use of scholarly information on the internet, repositories are required to cooperate with other databases. One of the essential processes of the cooperation is identification of scholarly papers and their authors. The straightforward approach is string matching of the title and authors' name, however this approach cannot always solve the difficulties by basic clerical errors and same names. This paper proposes a method to compensate for the inaccuracy of the identification by connecting different databases. The main idea of the method is that different metadata of a scholarly paper is linked by the authors themselves, therefore the correspondence is guaranteed by the authors. The authors of this paper are developing a system based on the idea on the repository and the researcher database in their university.

International audience; The goal of this study is to measure the impact of electronic medical records on both time efficiency and the work process with regard to outpatient care. In this study, we focus on examining the pre-assessment ahead of the introduction of the electronic medical records procedure applying new methodology, time process study. We extracted 12 use-cases and 82 actions in relation to paper based medical records at an outpatient department at a university hospital using time process study. The results suggest that, for nurses, indirect management of patients accounted for a higher proportion of the use-cases than was the case for direct care.

Trust is a mechanism for managing the uncertainty about autonomous entities and the information they store, and so can play an important role in any decentralized system. As a result, trust has been widely studied in multiagent systems and related fields such as the semantic web. Managing information about trust involves inference with uncertain information, decision making, and dealing with commitments and the provenance of information, all areas to which systems of argumentation have been applied. Here we discuss the application of argumentation to reasoning about trust, identifying some of the components that an argumentation-based system for reasoning about trust would need to contain and sketching the work that would be required to provide such a system.

There has been considerable interest recently on developing a system to track items like pharmaceutical drugs or food products. Such a system can help prevent counterfeits, aid product recall, and improve general logistics. In this paper, we present such system based on radio frequency identity (RFID) technology. Our solution provides the means of storing the entire movement of the item from original manufacturer to final consumer on the RFID tag itself, and also makes it more difficult to introduce large numbers of counterfeits. The solution also allows the end user to easily verify the authenticity of the item.

Transfusion Ontology is a simple task-based ontology developed in the emergency health care domain Taking the assumption that ontologies are instruments for supporting exchange of information among parties, the principles governing the design of this ontology was mainly based on the identification of the interactions of messages to be exchanged among parties This paper shows how this simple design principle is able to guide a whole ontology construction.

Organic computing is an upcoming research area with strong relationships to the ideas and concepts of agent-based systems. In this paper, we therefore will have a closer look at agent systems, organic computing systems (as well as autonomic computing systems) and state commonalities and divergences between them. We then propose a common view on these technologies and show, how they can benefit from each other with regard to software engineering.

Trust management (TM) is an approach to access control in decentralized distributed systems with access control decisions based on statements made by multiple principals. Li et al. developed the RT family of Role-Based Trust-management languages, which combine the strengths of Role-Based Access Control and TM systems. We present a distributed credential chain discovery algorithm for RT1C, a language in the RT family that has parameterized roles and constraints. Our algorithm is a combination of the logic-programming style top-down query evaluation with tabling and a goal-directed version of the deductive database style bottom-up evaluation. Our algorithm uses hints provided through the storage types to determine whether to use a top-down or bottom-up strategy for a particular part of the proof; this enables the algorithm to touch only those credentials that are related to the query, which are likely to be a small fraction of all the credentials in the system.

We report our implementation of the RSA and ECC public-key cryptosystem on Berkeley Motes. We detail the implementation of 1024-bit RSA and 160-bit ECC cryptosystems on MICA mote sensors. We have achieved the performance of 0.79s for RSA public key operation and 21.5s for private operation, and 1.3s for ECC signature generation and 2.8s for verification. For comparison, we also show our new ECC implementation on TelosB motes with a signature time 1.60s and a verification time 3.30s. For the detailed description of the implementation, we refer to our technical report [13].

Two methods are described for homogentisic acid (HGA) determination in dried urine spots (DUS) on paper from Alkaptonuria (AKU) patients, devised for quick early diagnosis. AKU is a rare autosomal recessive disorder caused by deficiency of homogentisate 1,2-dioxygenase, yielding in accumulation of HGA. Its massive excretion causes urine darkening by exposure to air or alkalinization, and is a diagnostic marker. The deposition of polymers produced after HGA oxidation within the connective tissues causes ochronotic arthritis, a degenerative joint disease manifesting in adulthood and only rarely in childhood. No early diagnosis is usually accomplished, awareness following symptom development.Two methods were designed for HGA determination in DUS: (1) a rapid semi-quantitative reliable method based on colour development in alkali and quantification by comparison with dried paper spots from HGA solutions of known concentration and (2) a quantitative and sensitive HPLC-linked method, previously devised for purine and pyrimidine analysis in urine and plasma.Colour intensity developed by DUS after alkali addition was proportional to HGA concentration, and calculated amounts were in good agreement with quantitative analysis performed by RP-HPLC on DUS and on urines as such.DUS, often used for different diagnostic purpose, are easily prepared and safely delivered. The simple and quick colour method proposed provides reliable HGA assessment and is fit for large screening. HGA concentration determined in 10 AKU patient DUS by both methods 1 and 2 was in agreement with direct urine assay and in the range reported by literature.A reliable HGA quantification based on colour development in paper urine spots is validated by HPLC-linked HGA quantification, and proposed as a quick diagnostic tool for AKU patients.

Research has demonstrated that mobile and wireless applications benefit from a knowledge of their operating environment. Examples of contextaware or adaptive applications have been constructed and evaluated with the results being widely disseminated within the research community. However, the field is still sufficiently new that there are currently no standards for describing, disseminating or managing the necessary contextual information. Moreover, there are no standards (or even accepted best practices) for coordinating adaptation across multiple applications and systems. In this position paper we argue that the lack of standards in this area will inhibit the widespread deployment of many of the compelling context-aware mobile applications currently being designed.

Process and workflow technology have traditionally not allowed for the specification of, nor run-time enforcement of, real-time requirements, despite the fact that time-to-market and other real-time constraints are more stringent than ever. Without specification of timing constraints, process designers cannot effectively reason about real-time constraints on process programs and the efficacy of their process programs in satisfying those constraints. Furthermore, without executable semantics for those timing specifications, such reasoning might not be applicable to the process as actually executed. We seek to support reasoning about the real-time requirements of software processes. In this paper, we describe work in which we have added real-time specifications to a process programming language, and in which we have added deadline timers and task scheduling to enforce the real-time requirements of processes.

The ScienceWISE system is a collaborative ontology editor and paper annotation tool designed to help researchers in their discovery. In this paper, we describe the system currently deployed at sciencewise.info and the exposition of its data as Linked Data. During the “RDFization” process, we faced issues to encode the knowledge base in SKOS and find resources to link to on the LOD. We discuss these issues and the remaining open challenges to implement some target features.

The mission of theoretical cryptography is to define and construct provably secure cryptographic protocols and schemes. Without proofs of security, cryptographic constructs offer no guarantees whatsoever and no basis for evaluation and comparison. As most security proofs necessarily come in the form of a reduction between the security claim and an intractability assumption, such proofs are ultimately only as good as the assumptions they are based on. Thus, the complexity implications of every assumption we utilize should be of significant substance, and serve as the yard stick for the value of our proposals. Lately, the field of cryptography has seen a sharp increase in the number of new assumptions that are often complex to define and difficult to interpret. At times, these assumptions are hard to untangle from the constructions which utilize them. We believe that the lack of standards of what is accepted as a reasonable cryptographic assumption can be harmful to the credibility of our field. Therefore, there is a great need for measures according to which we classify and compare assumptions, as to which are safe and which are not. In this paper, we propose such a classification and review recently suggested assumptions in this light. This follows the footsteps of Naor Crypto 2003. Our governing principle is relying on hardness assumptions that are independent of the cryptographic constructions.

Business Process Management (BPM) (Dumas et al. 2013) investigates how organizations function and can be improved on the basis of their business processes. The starting point for BPM is that organizational performance is a function of process performance. Thus, BPM proposes a set of methods, techniques and tools to discover, analyze, implement, monitor and control business processes, with the ultimate goal of improving these processes. Most importantly, BPM is not just an organizational management discipline. BPM also studies how technology, and particularly information technology, can effectively support the process improvement effort. In the past two decades the field of BPM has been the focus of extensive research, which spans an increasingly growing scope and advances technology in various directions. The main international forum for state-of-the-art research in this field is the International Conference on Business Process Management, or “BPM” for short—an annual meeting of the aca ...

This paper analyzes what stylistic characteristics differentiate different styles of writing, and specifically types of different A-level computer science articles. To do so, we compared various full papers using stylistic feature sets and a supervised machine learning method. We report on the success of this approach in identifying papers from the last 6 years of the following three conferences: SIGIR, ACL, and AAMAS. This approach achieves high accuracy results of 95.86%, 97.04%, 93.22%, and 92.14% for the following four classification experiments: (1) SIGIR / ACL, (2) SIGIR / AAMAS, (3) ACL / AAMAS, and (4) SIGIR / ACL / AAMAS, respectively. The Part of Speech (PoS) and the Orthographic sets were superior to all others and have been found as key components in different types of writing.

Serie : "Lecture notes in business information processing", ISSN 1865-1348, vol. 143, Digital public displays have an enormous potential as a collaborative technology to socialize in public venues, especially when they are open to the participation of visitors. However, user-generated content is a form of control sharing that requires safeguards against the publication of content deemed inap-propriate. In this work, we study the perceptions of Café owners in regard to their acceptance of user-generated content displayed on their venue screens. Our goal is to inform the design of new media sharing services for public dis-plays by uncovering how existing practices with paper leaflets could be lever-aged as a conceptual framework for dealing with content appropriateness. Based on interviews with 10 café owners, we identify important insights into some of practices surrounding the distribution of paper leaflets and their impli-cations for the design of media sharing services for public displays.

In this paper we describe a machine vision approach to recognize the denomination classes of the Mexican paper currency by extracting their color features. A banknote's color is characterized by summing all the color vectors of the image's pixels to obtain a resultant vector, the banknote's denomination is classified by knowing the orientation of the resulting vector within the RGB space. In order to obtain a more precise characterization of paper currency, the less discriminative colors of each denomination are eliminated from the images; the color selection is applied in the RGB and HSV spaces, separately. Experimental results with the current Mexican banknotes are presented.

RC4 is (still) a very widely-used stream cipher. Previous work by AlFardan et al. (USENIX Security 2013) and Paterson et al. (FSE 2014) exploited the presence of biases in the RC4 keystreams to mount plaintext recovery attacks against TLS-RC4 and WPA/TKIP. We improve on the latter work by performing large-scale computations to obtain accurate estimates of the single-byte and double-byte distributions in the early portions of RC4 keystreams for the WPA/TKIP context and by then using these distributions in a novel variant of the previous plaintext recovery attacks. The distribution computations were conducted using the Amazon EC2 cloud computing infrastructure and involved the coordination of 213 hyper-threaded cores running in parallel over a period of several days. We report on our experiences of computing at this scale using commercial cloud services. We also study Microsoft’s Point-to-Point Encryption protocol and its use of RC4, showing that it is also vulnerable to our attack techniques.

With the increasing of the amount of the scientific papers, it is very important and difficult for paper-sharing platforms to recommend related papers accurately for users. This paper tackles the problem by proposing a method that models user historical behavior. Through collecting the operations on scientific papers of online users and carrying on the detailed analysis, we build preference model for each user. The personalized recommendation model is constructed based on content-based filtering model and statistical language model.. Experimental results show that users’ historical behavior plays an important role in user preference modeling and the proposed method improves the final predication performance in the field of technical papers recommendation.

Paper documents are still an integral component of our everyday working lives, and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, advances in electronic technology in recent years have made it possible to develop digital systems that better integrate paper and digital document management. However, as far as we are aware, none of these integrated document management systems have been evaluated to demonstrate whether the users would indeed find them valuable for managing paper documents. In this paper we present a user study of one such system, called SOPHYA, that provides a means of linking the management of real world document artefacts (e.g., folders) with their electronic counterparts, so that document management activities such as locating, retrieving, and filing documents can be better supported, especially for large collections. The study is in the form of a laboratory-based evaluation, in which participants with experience in document management used the system to perform several tasks, such as locating and retrieving folders, and provided feedback based on their own experience. The results of this study show that users are able to apply software functionality they use for storage and retrieval of electronic documents to effectively manage paper documents as well. Our study has also identified a range of other potential benefits that the users envisage for such a technology in their diverse work environments.

It has long been recognised by researchers that the affordances of paper are likely to ensure that it will continue to be in widespread use in the work place, homes and public spaces. Consequently, numerous research projects have investigated ways of integrating paper with digital media and services. In recent years, a lot of this research has revolved around the digital pen and paper technology developed by the Swedish company Anoto, since it offers a robust solution for tracking the position of a pen on paper. While the commercial sector has tended to focus on applications related to the capture of handwriting, many of these research projects have investigated the use of the pen for real-time interaction and possibilities of turning paper into an interactive medium. Researchers were also quick to realise that digital pen and paper technology could be adapted to support other forms of pen-based interaction and have developed digital whiteboards and tabletops based on the technology. In addition, some systems have combined the technology with touch devices to support bimanual pen and touch interfaces. In the case of document manipulation, this means that touch could be used to perform actions such as a moving a document or turning pages, while the pen could be used to select elements within a document or to annotate it. Further, there are projects which have integrated the work on interactive paper and pen-based interaction on digital tabletops, investigating ways of allowing users to transfer document elements back and forth between paper and digital surfaces. Despite the success of these research projects in terms of demonstrating the capabilities of digital pen and paper technology and how it could be exploited to support a wide variety of everyday tasks, there are still some technical and non-technical issues that need to addressed if there are to be major breakthroughs in terms of widespread adoption. The first part of the talk will review research in the field, while the second part will examine these issues and the way ahead.

Executable scientific papers contain not just layouted text for reading. They contain, or link to, machine-comprehensible representations of the scientific findings or experiments they describe. Client-side players can thus enable readers to "check, manipulate and explore the result space" [1]. We have realized executable papers in the STEM domain with the Planetary system. Semantic annotations associate the papers with a content commons holding the background ontology, the annotations are exposed as Linked Data, and a frontend player application hooks modular interactive services into the semantic annotations.

Lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) are a very heterogeneous group of hereditary disorders. The diagnostic process usually involves complex sampling, processing, testing, and validation procedures, performed by specialized laboratories only, which causes great limitations in reaching a diagnosis for patients affected by these diseases.There are few studies about LSDs in Colombia. The diagnostic limitations often make medical practitioners disregard the possibility of these disorders while diagnosing their patients. The current study documents the results of a 7-year screening in high-risk patients, aimed to detect LSDs using dried blood spots (DBS) collected on filter paper, with a micromethodology that facilitates diagnosis even with a large number of samples.The activities of α-galactosidase A, α glucosidase, α-L-iduronidase, arylsulfatase B, β-galactosidase, β-glucosidase, total hexosaminidase, iduronate sulfatase, and chitotriosidase were analyzed in high-risk patients for lysosomal disease. The catalytic activity was evaluated with fluorometric micromethods using artificial substrates marked with 4-methylumbelliferone.The reference values for a control population were established for the enzymes listed above, and 242 patients were found to have an enzyme deficiency, guiding to the following diagnoses: Fabry disease (n = 31), Pompe disease (n = 16), Hurler Syndrome (n = 15), Maroteaux-Lamy Syndrome (n = 34), GM1 Gangliosidosis (n = 10), Morquio B (n = 1), Gaucher disease (n = 101), Sandhoff disease (n = 1), Mucolipidosis (n = 2), and Hunter Syndrome (n = 31). In conclusion, this protocol provides a comprehensive diagnostic approach which could be carried out in Colombia and made it available to medical services spread around the country, enabling the identification of a large number of patients affected by LSDs, which could potentially benefit from the therapeutic tools already available for many of these diseases.

International audience; All modellers have come across, one day, one of these popular toy agent-based models (ABMs), like "Ants", for instance, which depicts the appearance of pheromone trails built by simulated ants. They are simple, but representative of the way "real", more complex, ABMs are designed: in addition to explicitly describe the individual entities used to represent the system, modellers make implicit references to abstractions corresponding to the emerging structures they are tracking in the simulations. Yet, these abstractions are not represented in the models themselves as first-class entities: they are either hidden in ex-post computations or only part of visualization tasks, as if an explicit representation could somehow damage the processes at work in their emergence. This clearly constitutes an obstacle to the development of multi-level models, where emergence is likely to occur at different levels of abstraction of the system: if some of these levels are not represented in the models, the emergence of higher-level structures is not likely to be observed. This paper describes a modelling language that allows a modeller to represent and specify emerging structures in agent-based models. Firstly, to ease the description, we present these structures and their properties in four toy ABMs: Schelling, Boids, Collective Sort and Ants. Then we define the operations that are needed to represent and specify them without sacrificing the properties of the original model. An implementation of these operations in the GAML modelling language (part of the GAMA agent-based platform) is then presented. Finally, two simulations of the Boids model are used to illustrate the expressivity of this language and the multiple advantages it brings in terms of analysis, visualization and modeling of multi-level ABMs.

This paper presents a digital signal processing tool developed using MatlabTM, which provides a very low-cost and effective strategy for analog-to-digital conversion of legated paper biomedical maps without requiring dedicated hardware. This software-based approach is particularly helpful for digitalizing biomedical signals acquired from analogical devices equipped with a plottingter. Albeit signals used in biomedical diagnosis are the primary concern, this imaging processing tool is suitable to modernize facilities in a non-expensive way. Legated paper ECG and EEG charts can be fast and efficiently digitalized in order to be added in existing up-to-date medical data banks, improving the follow-up of patients.

This paper reports the results of an in-depth study of Bluetooth naming practices which took place in the UK in August 2006. There is a significant culture of giving Bluetooth names to mobile phones in the UK, and this paper’s main contribution is to provide an account of those Bluetooth naming practices, putting them in their social, physical and intentional context. The paper also uncovers how users have appropriated the ways in which Bluetooth, with its relatively short range of about 10-100m, operates between their mobile phones as a partially embodied medium, making it a distinctive paradigm of socially and physically embedded communication.

We present a field study of oncology workflow, involving doctors, nurses and pharmacists at Danish hospitals and discuss the obstacles, enablers and challenges for the use of computer based clinical practice guidelines. Related to the CIGDec approach of Pesic and van der Aalst we then describe how a sub workflow can be described in a declarative workflow management system: the Resultmaker Online Consultant (ROC). The example demonstrates that declarative primitives allow to naturally extend the paper based flowchart to an executable model without introducing a complex cyclic control flow graph.

A method is proposed to analyze the preferred Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) of printing medium like paper for the image quality of printing. First, the spectral intensity distribution of printed image is simulated by changing the MTF of medium. Next, the simulated image is displayed on a high-precision LCD to reproduce the appearance of printed image. An observer rating evaluation experiment is carried out to the displayed image to discuss what the preferred MTF is. The appearance simulation of printed image was conducted on particular printing conditions: several contents, ink colors, a halftoning method and a print resolution (dpi). The experiments on different printing conditions can be conducted since our simulation method is flexible about changing conditions.

Mobile devices with small screens and minimal facilities for interaction are increasingly being used in complex human activities for accessing and processing information, while the user is moving. This paper presents a case study of the design and evaluation of a mobile system, which involved transformation of complex text and tables to digital format on a PDA. The application domain was an emergency medical ward, and the user group was junior registrars. We designed a PDA-based system for accessing information, focusing on the ward instruction, implemented a prototype and evaluated it for usability and utility. The evaluation results indicate significant problems in the interaction with the system as well as the extent to which the system is useful for junior registrars in their daily work.

In this paper we describe the design of a hybrid search that combines simple metadata search with a traditional keyword search over unstructured context data. This paradigm provides the inquirer additional options to narrow the search with some semantic aspects through the XML metadata query. We demonstrate a paper search for a case study of the hybrid search, and describe a data integration hub to integrate those data dispersed on the Net.

Office workers tend to produce paper piles of documents to read or to process sometime later. The information contained in these piles is often lost if it is not transferred to electronic format and connected to knowledge structures. Information that is not part of the knowledge worker’s electronic information space is frequently overlooked because it is not proactively provided during actual processes or tasks he is involved in. This paper presents a novel prototype for an intelligent office appliance, which results from an integration of three state-of-the-art office applications/appliances: a workflow system, a document classification system, and a multi-functional peripheral. The resulting system allows for leveraging an office worker’s papers to her personal knowledge space in order to realize a pro-active and context-sensitive information support within knowledge-intensive tasks and processes.

The Pret a Voter election scheme provides high assurance of accuracy and secrecy, due to the high degree of transparency and auditability. However, the assurance arguments are subtle and involve some understanding of the role of cryptography. As a result, establishing public understanding and trust in such systems remains a challenge. It is essential that a voting system be not only trustworthy but also widely trusted. In response to this concern, we propose to add a mechanism to Pret a Voter to generate a conventional (i.e. human readable) paper audit trail that can be invoked should the outcome of the cryptographic count be called into question. It is hoped that having such a familiar mechanism as a safety net will encourage public confidence. Care has to be taken to ensure that the mechanism does not undermine the carefully crafted integrity and privacy assurances of the original scheme. We show that, besides providing a confidence building measure, this mechanism brings with it a number of interesting technical features: it allows extra audits of mechanisms that capture and process the votes to be performed. In particular, the mechanism presented here allows direct auditing of ballots that are actually used to cast votes. This is in contrast to previous versions of Pret a Voter, and indeed other verifiable schemes, that employ a cut-and-choose mechanism. The mechanism proposed also has the benefit of providing a robust counter to the danger of voters undermining the receipt-freeness property by trying to retain the candidate list.

With the increased use of Internet and information technol- ogy all over the world, there is an increased amount of criminal activities that involve computing and digital data. These digital crimes (e-crimes) impose new challenges on prevention, detection, investigation, and pros- ecution of the corresponding offences. Computer forensics (also known as cyberforensics) is an emerging research area that applies computer in- vestigation and analysis techniques to help detection of these crimes and gathering of digital evidence suitable for presentation in courts. This new area combines the knowledge of information technology, forensics science, and law and gives rise to a number of interesting and challeng- ing problems related to computer security and cryptography that are yet to be solved. In this paper, we present and discuss some of these prob- lems together with two successful cases of computer forensics technology developed in Hong Kong that enable the law enforcement departments to detect and investigate digital crimes more efficiently and effectively. We believe that computer forensics research is an important area in ap- plying security and computer knowledge to build a better society.

The main topic of the article is to give a detailed description of the new and promising quadtree decomposition texture analysis method used for paper formation determination. Paper formation or configuration of fibers, fines and fillers in the two-dimensional spatial xy-domain of the paper is a very important property and image analysis application for the paper industry. The basis of the method is the successive quadtree decomposition process resulting in a two-dimensional block partitioning of the formation structure image analysed. In this context the blocks represents a unit of variation, and the size of a quadtree block is controlled by a set of different parameters. In addition to the primary features detected by the algorithm, characterization of a large set of secondary features is performed, including gradient analysis and spatial distribution analysis.

The Health-e-Child project aims to develop an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics. In order to achieve a comprehensive view of childrens health, a complex integration of biomedical data, information, and knowledge is necessary. Ontologies will be used to formally define this domain knowledge and will form the basis for the medical knowledge management system. This paper introduces an innovative methodology for the vertical integration of biomedical knowledge. This approach will be largely clinician-centered and will enable the definition of ontology fragments, connections between them (semantic bridges) and enriched ontology fragments (views). The strategy for the specification and capture of fragments, bridges and views is outlined with preliminary examples demonstrated in the collection of biomedical information from hospital databases, biomedical ontologies, and biomedical public databases., 6 pages; 2 figures. Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Ontology content and evaluation in Enterprise

This paper proposes a colored paper mosaic rendering technique based on image segmentation that can automatically generate a torn and tagged colored paper mosaic effect. The previous method[12] did not produce satisfactory results due to the ineffectiveness of having to use pieces of the same size. The proposed two methods for determination of paper shape and location that are based on segmentation can subdivide an image area by considering characteristics of image. The first method is to generate a Voronoi polygon after subdividing the segmented image again using a quad tree. And the second method is to apply the Voronoi diagram on each segmentation layer. Through these methods, the characteristic of the image is expressed in more detail than the previous colored paper mosaic rendering method.

ECampus is a project spanning all departments at the University of Fulda. It has been started to create a uniform learning environment at the university. The objective is to research and develop a user-friendly easy-to-use editor to generate SCORM 2004 conform E-Learning modules. This editor is based on Open Source software and new technologies such as XSL transformations and the Google web toolkit. The whole system is provided as a web application and embedded within the E-Learning environment of the university. Some E-Learning modules can be developed with the system immediately. These modules are now being used during the lessons with great success.

The industrial design cycle starts with design then simulation, prototyping, and testing. When the tests do not match the design requirements the design process is started over again. It is important for students to experience this process before they leave their academic institution. The high cost of the prototype phase, due to CNC/Rapid Prototype machine costs, makes hands on study of this process expensive for students and the academic institutions. This document shows that the commercially available LEGO NXT Robot kit is a viable low cost surrogate to the expensive industrial CNC/Rapid Prototype portion of the industrial design cycle.