ERA distribution of information systems journals

The Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative being conducted by the Australian Research Council (ARC), mandates a single journal and conference ranking scheme over every academic discipline in Australia. A universal publication outlet ranking list mandated by a government agency is unique and has attracted interest and comment both within Australia and overseas. Equally, the interest shown has come from all sectors involved in academic publishing &ndash; authors, reviewers, publishers &ndash; and from commercial and open access publishers. This paper investigates the distribution of information systems journals over the various ERA parameters and comments on a claim of bias whereby the ranking of a journal is positively influenced by the number of years it has been in existence in the areas of information systems and business journals. Clear evidence of the diversity of the information systems discipline is observed. The benefits of a multidisciplinary foundation for information systems is also noted. Longer established journals are shown to attract higher rankings and possible reasons for and implications flowing from this are discussed.<br /

FoR Codes pendulum: Publishing choices within Australian research assessment

This paper reports on an exploratory case study that considered the impacts of journal ranking and Fields of Research codes on the publishing decisions of Australian authors. The study also considered the level of alignment between authors’ allocation of Fields of Research codes and the codes assigned to the journals in which they were published. The conclusion is reached that authors are still coming to an understanding of the impact of research assessment on their publishing choices and the process of scholarly communication within their discipline. Findings point to a number of concerns about the impact of both journal ranking and discipline-specific research codes

A transdiagnostic data-driven study of children's behaviour and the functional connectome.

Behavioural difficulties are seen as hallmarks of many neurodevelopmental conditions. Differences in functional brain organisation have been observed in these conditions, but little is known about how they are related to a child's profile of behavioural difficulties. We investigated whether behavioural difficulties are associated with how the brain is functionally organised in an intentionally heterogeneous and transdiagnostic sample of 957 children aged 5-15. We used consensus community detection to derive data-driven profiles of behavioural difficulties and constructed functional connectomes from a subset of 238 children with resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data. We identified three distinct profiles of behaviour that were characterised by principal difficulties with hot executive function, cool executive function, and learning. Global organisation of the functional connectome did not differ between the groups, but multivariate patterns of connectivity at the level of Intrinsic Connectivity Networks (ICNs), nodes, and hubs significantly predicted group membership in held-out data. Fronto-parietal connector hubs were under-connected in all groups relative to a comparison sample and children with hot vs cool executive function difficulties were distinguished by connectivity in ICNs associated with cognitive control, emotion processing, and social cognition. This demonstrates both general and specific neurodevelopmental risk factors in the functional connectome

Text mining aplicado à gestão de fundos públicos

Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar documentos textuais submetidos por empresas portuguesas no momento de candidatura a programas de incentivos empresariais públicos. Com esta análise pretende-se extrair e selecionar variáveis relevantes, presentes nos textos, que possuam poder preditivo em relação a futuras ações das empresas candidatas aceites, no decorrer dos projetos. O objetivo concreto é a predição da anulação de projetos com fundos atribuídos, durante a sua duração prevista. Para realizar esta análise foi necessário criar uma cadeia de classificação de texto na qual são aplicadas variadas técnicas de processamento da língua natural, extração e seleção de variáveis, seleção e utilização de classificadores, e métricas de avaliação dos resultados. Foram utilizadas técnicas de referência de extração de variáveis como a extração de valores TF e TF-IDF e foram igualmente levadas a cabo experiências de extração de variáveis baseadas em geração de tópicos, análise de similaridade textual, análise de diversidade lexical, exploração de vocabulário específico, entre outros tipos de análise do conteúdo textual. A exploração de variáveis criadas a partir destas experiências mostra-nos características escondidas nos dados, como por exemplo, o facto de se verificar uma maior incidência de projetos com elevados níveis de similaridade em certos distritos do país. O principal objetivo foi alcançar o melhor desempenho possível nas métricas obtidas através da matriz de confusão (taxa de acerto; precisão; cobertura; F1-Score) na predição da anulação de projetos. Os melhores resultados da predição de anulação foram obtidos por um conjunto de variáveis provenientes de diversos métodos de extração e utilizando o algoritmo Classificador Naïve Bayes: 79% de taxa de acerto; 77% de precisão; 71% de cobertura; 74% de F1-Score. Neste trabalho é assim demonstrado o proveito da mistura de variáveis provenientes de diferentes métodos de extração de variáveis.This work aims to analyze the textual documents presented by Portuguese companies when applying for business incentive programs. This work intends to extract and select relevant features, present in the texts, which have predictive power in relation to future actions of the companies whose projects were accepted, during the projects. The concrete goal is the prediction of the cancellation of the projects with allocated funds, during their expected duration. It was necessary to create a text classification pipeline which applies natural language processing, various features extraction and selection techniques, classification algorithms and evaluation metrics. Many feature extraction techniques were used, such as classical techniques as TF and TF-IDF values generation, as also other experiments as topic generation, similarity analysis, lexical analysis, identification of specific vocabulary used, among other analysis of textual content that were also carried out. The feature analysis can show us hidden characteristics in the data, such as the fact that there is a preponderance of projects with high levels of similarity in certain districts of the country. The main objective, regarding the perdition of cancellation of the projects, was achieving the best possible performance, for that there were used the confusion matrix metrics (accuracy; precision; revocation; F1-Score). The best prediction results were obtained by a set of features from different extraction methods together with the use of the Naïve Bayes Classifier algorithm: 79% accuracy; 77% precision; 71% recall; 74% F1-Score. Therefore, it is shown the advantages of mixing features from different extraction methods on this text classification application

From the nosographic to the transdiagnostic approach: new perspectives in the study of neurodevelopmental disorders

openI disturbi del neurosviluppo sono una realtà con cui sempre più spesso ci si viene a scontrare. Diagnosi che spaziano da disturbi dell’apprendimento ad ADHD ed autismo sono sempre più frequenti e, di conseguenza, anche le richieste d’aiuto sono maggiori. Il sistema diagnostico attuale, quello nosografico, permette di effettuare delle diagnosi basandosi sui sintomi ma ci sono alcuni approcci data-driven che, invece, vedono come protagoniste le dimensioni. L’approccio transdiagnostico ha preso il suo posto nel mondo dei disturbi del neurosviluppo e prevede che ci siano delle dimensioni su cui si vanno poi a misurare le difficoltà del bambino: sempre più spesso sono presenti dei sintomi, laddove sono state applicate delle etichette diagnostiche, che vanno oltre ai disturbi rilevati, e in generale si ritiene che il paziente vada aiutato laddove ci siano delle aree carenti indipendentemente dalla diagnosi. L’elaborato verte a fare un excursus storico sull’approccio nosografico, attualmente utilizzato per diagnosi e cura, andando poi a focalizzarsi sull’approccio transdiagnostico e sulla presentazione di una ricerca