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Copyright of Canadian Journal of Anaesthesia / Journal Canadien d'Anesthésie is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the 1970s, research on artificial intelligence in education emerged with the aim of acknowledging and accommodating the psychological aspects of the learning process. Since then, its applications have evolved and it is now used for student learning and assessment, teachers' pedagogical practice, management of educational institutions, and lifelong learning. Nevertheless, the ethical challenges of educational programmes using these systems have not been thoroughly studied. Anchored on the theoretical frame of dialogic ethics, this paper presents a section of a participatory futures research project. The goal of the research is to develop a toolkit that educators can use to ensure a smooth and ethical transition to artificial intelligence-based education while preserving the interests of educational development. This paper emphasises the need for an informed and participatory process that involves all stakeholders and begins with an expert consultation through the Delphi method, the results of which allowed the construction of eight hypothetical futures scenarios. These scenarios provide evidence that examining the ethics of using artificial intelligence systems presents an opportunity to reflect on the ethics of education as a whole. They highlight the challenge of balancing the benefits and drawbacks of such systems, especially concerning educational goals and the interplay between diverse educational actors and personal development in educational settings. The study outcomes are intended to encourage discussions on the integration of ethical artificial intelligence in education and facilitate the continuing professional development of teachers by equipping them with scenarios that can be used as a resource for training purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexuality and intimate relationships are topics of interest to adolescents and young adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, their situation sometimes puts them at risk of being abused or developing self-harming behaviors. The purpose of this article is to develop a toolkit to support sexuality, sexual health, and sustainable sexual practices in youth with ASD. A Multimethod study based on a co-creation approach was used. Interviews were conducted with youth with ASD over the age of 18, with practitioners in a specialized setting, and with school-based practitioners in order to gain access to the different needs and expectations that they may have. Both practitioners and youth seem to agree that the lack of knowledge of youth with ASD is what most hinders their sexual development, followed by their social difficulties. They need access to the basics of sexuality in order to prevent the development of inappropriate behaviors at an early age. The kit could be used as early as age 12. The teaching methods chosen for the toolkit seems to be an adequate way to meet the need for access to basic information about sexuality for young people with ASD. The modalities also seem to be appreciated by both youth and specialist, particularly the use of custom-made pictograms. The toolkit created is a good starting point in bridging the knowledge gap for youth with ASD about sexuality. It would also lessen the burden placed on the various practitioners to do this teaching when they may not all be comfortable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Although there is national recognition for health equity-oriented research, there is limited guidance for researchers to engage partnerships that promote health equity in cancer research. The Cancer Prevention and Control Research Network's (CPCRN) Health Equity Work Group developed a toolkit to guide researchers in equitable collaborations. Methods: The CPCRN's Health Equity Work Group collectively outlined health and racial equity principles guiding research collaborations with partners that include communities, community-based organizations, implementing partners in the clinical setting including providers and health care organizations, and policy makers. Using a network-wide survey to crowdsource information around ongoing practices, we leveraged and integrated the network's experience and collaborations. Results: Data from the survey formed the preliminary basis for the toolkit, with a focus on sharing fiscal resources with partners, training and capacity building, collaborative decision-making, community-driven research agenda setting, and sustainability. The final toolkit provides reflection considerations for researchers and collated exemplary resources, supported by the contemporary research. Conclusions: The toolkit provides a guide to researchers at all experience levels wanting to engage in equitable research collaborations. Future efforts are underway to evaluate whether and how researchers within and outside CPCRN are able to incorporate these principles in research collaborations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the process of co-design, co-production, piloting, evaluation and revision of an Integrated Digital Literacy and Language Toolkit for Vulnerable Migrant Students (VMs) in Higher Education (HE). The language element focuses on academic language skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking required for effective involvement in both the host society and HE learning; the acquisition and improvement of digital literacy skills enable VMs to successfully participate in, and contribute to, university and societal collaboration, creativity and content curation. The Toolkit resulted from the co -operation and collaboration of five EU universities and was based on the ASSURE instructional design model. The Toolkit offers a self- access, self- paced, non-linear, fully online set of ten stand-alone units which offer a range of materials and activities to develop those skills pertinent to VM academic language and digital literacy needs. Evaluation by a group of VMs resident in EU countries highlight the positive impact of the Toolkit and validates the instrument as fit for purpose. Noteworthy aspects include its usefulness in supporting student autonomy, improving digital capabilities and academic language mastery,a positive experience of a flexible learning experience along with access to open resources of international scope and dissemination under the Creative Commons licence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We perform a comparison of Matlab, Python and Julia as programming languages to be used for implementing global nonlinear solution techniques. We consider two popular applications: a neoclassical growth model and a new Keynesian model. The goal of our analysis is twofold: First, it is aimed at helping researchers in economics choose the programming language that is best suited to their applications and, if needed, help them transit from one programming language to another. Second, our collections of routines can be viewed as a toolbox with a special emphasis on techniques for dealing with high dimensional economic problems. We provide the routines in the three languages for constructing random and quasi-random grids, low-cost monomial integration, various global solution methods, routines for checking the accuracy of the solutions as well as examples of parallelization. Our global solution methods are not only accurate but also fast. Solving a new Keynesian model with eight state variables only takes a few seconds, even in the presence of an active zero lower bound on nominal interest rates. This speed is important because it allows the model to be solved repeatedly as would be required for estimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Patient engagement is a key tenet of patient-centered care and is associated with many positive health outcomes. To improve resources for patient engagement, we created a web-based, interactive patient engagement toolkit to improve patient engagement in primary care across the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). Objective: To use the knowledge translation (KT) framework to evaluate the dissemination and implementation of a patient engagement toolkit at facilities across one region in the VHA. Design: Using a mixed-methods approach, this process evaluation involved phone monitoring via semi-structured interviews and group meetings, during which we explored barriers and facilitators to KT. Outcomes were assessed using a structured rubric and existing patient satisfaction measures. Participants: We enlisted implementers at 40 VHA facilities primarily serving Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware to implement patient engagement practices at their sites. Sites were randomly assigned into a high or low coaching group to assess whether external support influenced implementation. Key Results: Sites with high rubric scores employed and possessed several elements across the KT trajectory from identification of the problem to sustainment of knowledge use. Key factors for successful implementation and dissemination included implementer engagement, organizational support, and strong collaborators. The most frequently cited barriers included short staffing, time availability, lack of buy-in, and issues with leadership. Successful implementers experienced just as many barriers, but leveraged facilitators to overcome obstacles. While sites that received more coaching did not have different outcomes, they were more likely to revisit the toolkit and indicated that they felt more accountable to local personnel. Conclusions: Because leveraging available resources is a key component of successful implementation, future toolkits should highlight the type of facilitators necessary for successful implementation of toolkit content in healthcare settings. The ability to tailor interventions to local context is critical for overcoming barriers faced in most healthcare settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual reality (VR) systems offer a powerful tool for human behavior research. The ability to create three-dimensional visual scenes and to measure responses to the visual stimuli enables the behavioral researcher to test hypotheses in a manner and scale that were previously unfeasible. For example, a researcher wanting to understand interceptive timing behavior might wish to violate Newtonian mechanics so that objects can move in novel 3-D trajectories. The same researcher might wish to collect such data with hundreds of participants outside the laboratory, and the use of a VR headset makes this a realistic proposition. The difficulty facing the researcher is that sophisticated 3-D graphics engines (e.g., Unity) have been created for game designers rather than behavioral scientists. To overcome this barrier, we have created a set of tools and programming syntaxes that allow logical encoding of the common experimental features required by the behavioral scientist. The Unity Experiment Framework (UXF) allows researchers to readily implement several forms of data collection and provides them with the ability to easily modify independent variables. UXF does not offer any stimulus presentation features, so the full power of the Unity game engine can be exploited. We use a case study experiment, measuring postural sway in response to an oscillating virtual room, to show that UXF can replicate and advance upon behavioral research paradigms. We show that UXF can simplify and speed up the development of VR experiments created in commercial gaming software and facilitate the efficient acquisition of large quantities of behavioral research data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual assistance services that people with disabilities use for help with sexual activity must be specialized and adapted to the users' different conditions. Some aspects of sexual assistance have been mentioned in the literature, but the subject is still relatively unexplored, particularly regarding adapted services for people with disabilities. The objective was to create a toolbox with items that might be required in encounters with individuals with disabilities and to think of innovative ideas to improve sexual assistants' work. This multi-method qualitative study involved two meetings: one workshop and one co-design session. The sample included six future sexual assistants studying at the Italian Institute of Sexology in Rome. The workshop presented two different scenarios so the students could think of what is needed to improve their work. At the end of the workshop, a list of items was developed. The co-design session explored possible design solutions to improve and facilitate their work as sexual assistants. The idea that interested everyone due to its practicality, usability and feasibility was an inflatable sofa/mattress that includes internal divisions so different sections of the mattress can be inflated and/or deflated. The development of projects such as this one provides different perspectives on what still needs to be done within the sexual assistance domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Including children in the design of technologies that will have an impact on their daily lives is one of the pillars of user-centered design. Educational robots are an example of such a technology where children’s involvement is important. However, the form in which this involvement should take place is still unclear. Children do not have a lot of experience with educational robots yet, while they do have some ideas of what robot could be like from popular media, such as BayMax from the Big Hero 6 movie. In this paper we describe two pilot studies to inform the development of an elicitation method focusing on form factors; a first study in which we have asked children between 8 and 15 years old to design their own classroom robot using a toolkit, the Robo2Box, and a second study where we have compared the use of the Robo2Box toolkit and clay as elicitation methods. We present the results of the two studies, and discuss the implications of the outcomes to inform further development of the Robo2Box for prototyping classroom robots by children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real-time identification and tracking of the joint positions of people can be achieved with off-the-shelf sensing technologies such as the Microsoft Kinect, or other camera-based systems with computer vision. However, tracking is constrained by the system's field of view of people. When a person is occluded from the camera view, their position can no longer be followed. Out of Sight addresses the occlusion problem in depth-sensing tracking systems. Our new tracking infrastructure provides human skeleton joint positions during occlusion, by combining the field of view of multiple Kinects using geometric calibration and affine transformation. We verified the technique's accuracy through a system evaluation consisting of 20 participants in stationary position and in motion, with two Kinects positioned parallel, $$45^{\circ }$$ , and $$90^{\circ }$$ apart. Results show that our skeleton matching is accurate to within 16.1 cm (s.d. = 5.8 cm), which is within a person's personal space. In a realistic scenario study, groups of two people quickly occlude each other, and occlusion is resolved for $$85\%$$ of the participants. A RESTful API was developed to allow distributed access of occlusion-free skeleton joint positions. As a further contribution, we provide the system as open source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: There has been huge progress in the open cheminformatics field in both methods and software development. Unfortunately, there has been little effort to unite those methods and software into one package. We here describe the Open Drug Discovery Toolkit (ODDT), which aims tofulfill the need for comprehensive and open source drug discovery software. Results: The Open Drug Discovery Toolkit was developed as a free and open source tool for both computer aided drug discovery (CADD) developers and researchers. ODDT reimplements many state-of-the-art methods, such as machine learning scoring functions (RF-Score and NNScore) and wraps other external software to ease the process of developing CADD pipelines. ODDT is an out-of-the-box solution designed to be easily customizable and extensible. Therefore, users are strongly encouraged to extend it and develop new methods. We here present three use cases for ODDT in common tasks in computer-aided drug discovery. Conclusion: Open Drug Discovery Toolkit is released on a permissive 3-clause BSD license for both academic and industrial use. ODDT's source code, additional examples and documentation are available on GitHub (https://github. com/oddt/oddt). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis and optimization of public clouds gains momentum as an important research topic, due to their widespread exploitation by individual users, researchers and companies for their daily tasks. We identify primitive algorithmic operations that should be part of a cloud analysis and optimization tool, such as resource profiling, performance spike detection and prediction, resource resizing, and others, and we investigate ways the collected monitoring information can be processed towards these purposes. The analyzed information is valuable in driving important virtual resource management decisions. We also present an open-source tool we developed, called SuMo,which contains the necessary functionalities for collecting monitoring data from Amazon Web Services (AWS), analyzing them and providing resource optimization suggestions. SuMo makes easy for anyone to analyze AWS instances behavior, incorporating a set of basic modules that provide profiling and spikef detection functionality. It can also be used as a basis for the development of new such analytic procedures for AWS. SuMo contains a Cost and Utilization Optimization (CUO) mechanism, formulated as an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) problem, for optimizing the cost and the utilization of a set of running Amazon EC2 instances. This CUO mechanism receives information on the currently used set of instances (their number, type, utilization) and proposes a new set of instances for serving the same load that minimizes cost and maximizes utilization and performance efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a computational toolkit consisting of five utility tools, for performing basic operations on a protein structure file in PDB format. The toolkit consists of five different programs which can be integrated as part of a pipeline for computational protein structure characterization or as a standalone analysis package. The programs include tools for chirality check for amino acids (ProChiral), contact map generation (CoMa), data redundancy (DaRe), hydrogen bond potential energy (HyPE) and electrostatic interaction energy (EsInE). All programs in the toolkit can be accessed and downloaded through the following link: . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The usability of mobile applications is critical for their adoption because of the relatively small screen and awkward (sometimes virtual) keyboard, despite the recent advances of smartphones. Traditional laboratory-based usability testing is often tedious, expensive, and does not reflect real use cases. In this paper, we propose a toolkit that embeds into mobile applications the ability to automatically collect user interface (UI) events as the user interacts with the applications. The events are fine-grained and useful for quantified usability analysis. We have implemented the toolkit on Android devices and we evaluated the toolkit with a real deployed Android application by comparing event analysis (state-machine based) with traditional laboratory testing (expert based). The results show that our toolkit is effective at capturing detailed UI events for accurate usability analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we will describe the design and implementation of Jane, an efficient hierarchical phrase-based (HPB) toolkit developed at RWTH Aachen University. The system has been used by RWTH at several international evaluation campaigns, including the WMT and NIST evaluations, and is now freely available for non-commercial application. We will go through the main features of Jane, which include, among others, support for different search strategies, different language model formats, support for syntax-based enhancements to the HPB machine translation paradigm, string-to-dependency translation, extended lexicon models, different methods for minimum-error-rate training and distributed operation on a computer cluster. Special attention has been paid to the efficiency of the decoder, clean code and quality assurance through unit and regression testing. Results on current machine translation tasks are reported, which show that the system is able to obtain state-of-the-art performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Self-management of cancer symptoms has the potential to decrease the suffering of cancer survivors while improving their health and quality of life. For many racial/ethnic groups, culturally appropriate self-management instruction is not readily available. This paper reports on the first symptom management toolkit developed for American Indian cancer survivors. Methods: Part of a larger research study, a three-phase project tested a cancer symptom self-management toolkit to be responsive to the unique learning and communication needs of American Indians in the Southwest USA. American Indian cancer survivors and family members participated in 13 focus groups to identify cultural concepts of cancer and illness beliefs, communication styles, barriers, and recommendations for self-management techniques. Sessions were audiotaped and transcriptions were coded using Grounded Theory. Results: Participants expressed a need for an overview of cancer, tips on management of common symptoms, resources in their communities, and suggestions for how to communicate with providers and others. The 'Weaving Balance into Life' toolkit is comprised of a self-help guide, resource directory, and video. Preferred presentation style and content for the toolkit were pilot tested. Discussion/conclusions: American Indian survivors favor educational materials that provide information on symptom management and are tailored to their culture and beliefs. Suggestions for adapting the toolkit materials for other American Indian populations are made. Implications for cancer survivors: Many cancer survivors lack effective self-management techniques for symptoms, such as pain, fatigue, and depression. The toolkit promotes self-management strategies for survivors and provides family members/caregivers tangible ways to offer support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The note summarizes the history and contents of the OECD Consumer Policy Toolkit. It shows how the elements related to behavioural economics appear in the consumer policy of OECD countries as presented in the Toolkit. In particular, I look at the methods of detecting market malfunctioning and at the tools aimed at counteracting them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

description of the future as it might be without forecasts, predictions and trend analysis can be referred to as a 'sfuture scenario'. An abundance of scenarios literature exists in which numerous pictures have been painted of changed future worlds. However, upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that virtually all of this literature refers to changes occurring above ground, ignoring the inevitable consequences (or opportunities) for sustainable use of underground space, not least in densely populated urban areas, some of which may be underlain by complex geological conditions. This paper reports on the development (to date) of an 'Urban Futures' (UF) toolkit for sub-surface environments (including infrastructure and utilities) which, through use of 'key' questions 'sustainable' indicators and a 'contextual' narrative, allows for better definition and measured performance of underground space in the UK, both today and in the future. The toolkit explores possible uses for underground space within 4 plausible and well-cited future scenarios (i.e. New Sustainability Paradigm, Fortress World, Market Forces and Policy Reform). This forms part of a much larger generic toolkit which the UF research team are developing for exploring possible future scenarios over a range of UK urban regeneration case study areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital tomosynthesis is an imaging modality that allows for tomographic reconstructions using only a fraction of the images needed for CT reconstruction. Since it offers the advantages of tomographic images with a smaller imaging dose delivered to the patient, the technique offers much promise for use in patient positioning prior to radiation delivery. This paper describes a software environment developed to help in the creation of digital tomosynthesis image sets from digital portal images using three different reconstruction algorithms. The software then allows for use of the tomograms for patient positioning or for dose recalculation if shifts are not applied, possibly as part of an adaptive radiotherapy regimen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever increasing size and complexity of volumetric data in a wide range of disciplines makes it useful to augment volume visualization tools with alternative modalities. Studies have shown that introducing haptics can significantly increase both exploration speed and precision. It is also capable of conveying material properties of data and thus has great potential to improve user performance in volume data exploration. In this paper we describe how recent advances in volume haptics can be used to build haptic modes—building blocks for haptic schemes. These modes have been used as base components of a toolkit allowing for more efficient development of haptic prototypes and applications. This toolkit allows interactive construction, configuration and fine-tuning of both visual and haptic representations of the data. The technology is also used in a pilot study to determine the most important issues and aspects in haptic volume data interaction and exploration, and how the use of haptic modes can facilitate the implementation of effective haptic schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Medical imaging research and clinical applications usually require combination and integration of various techniques ranging from image processing and analysis to realistic visualization to user-friendly interaction. Researchers with different backgrounds coming from diverse areas have been using numerous types of hardware, software, and environments to obtain their results. We also observe that students often build their tools from scratch resulting in redundant work. A generic and flexible medical imaging and visualization toolkit would be helpful in medical research and educational institutes to reduce redundant development work and hence increase research efficiency. This paper presents our experience in developing a Medical Imaging and Visualization Toolkit (BIL-kit) that is a set of comprehensive libraries as well as a number of interactive tools. The BIL-kit covers a wide range of fundamental functions from image conversion and transformation, image segmentation, and analysis to geometric model generation and manipulation, all the way up to 3D visualization and interactive simulation. The toolkit design and implementation emphasize the reusability and flexibility. BIL-kit is implemented in the Java language so that it works in hybrid and dynamic research and educational environments. This also allows the toolkit to extend its usage for the development of Web-based applications. Several BIL-kit-based tools and applications are presented including image converter, image processor, general anatomy model simulator, vascular modeling environment, and volume viewer. BIL-kit is a suitable platform for researchers and students to develop visualization and simulation prototypes, and it can also be used for the development of clinical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has placed the superiority of graphical user interfaces over traditional text-based approaches beyond dispute. In almost all contexts, users have found graphical interfaces easier to learn, faster to use, and less error-prone. However, it has been shown that the creation of powerful graphical interfaces takes up to 80% of the time required to develop an application. In our work, we seek to extend the benefits of graphical interaction to the next layer of computer user-the interface designer. Our work in this area is distinguished from other efforts by two important differences. First, while other efforts focus primarily on the design of 'standard' user interfaces, our approach emphasizes the creation of unique and innovative interfaces by supporting, among other things, arbitrary user-designed graphical representations, direct specification of animation, and digitized sound. Second, our goal is to cater to the nonprogrammer. Thus, we address a challenging trade-off: maximizing power and flexibility in an extremely simple environment. We explore the utility of the prototype object-oriented paradigm, a high-level userinterface language, and a direct-manipulation programming environment in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tactus addresses problems of synchronizing and controlling various interactive continuous-time media. The Tactus system consists of two main parts. The first is a server that synchronizes the presentation of multiple media, including audio, video, graphics, and MIDI at a workstation. The second is a set of extensions to a graphical user interface toolkit to help compute and/or control temporal streams of information and deliver them to the Tactus Server. Temporal toolkit objects schedule computation events that generate media. Computation is scheduled in advance of real time to overcome system latency, and timestamps are used to allow accurate synchronization by the server in spite of computation and transmission delays. Tactus supports precomputing branches of media streams to minimize latency in interactive applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]