Perception and Language: Using the Rorschach with People with Aphasia

This study explored the use of the Rorschach with eight individuals diagnosed with mild to moderate fluent or non-fluent types of aphasia to consider the extent to which the Rorschach captured aspects of language impairment not otherwise probed by traditional neurolinguistic measures. A ninth participant, with Wernicke’s aphasia, produced non-scorable responses and was therefore left out of all analyses. Of primary interest was whether the Rorschach, historically understood as a projective psychological instrument, would allow individuals living with language impairment to recognize, retrieve and coherently express words that reflected their thoughts. At the same time, this study sought to explore how the ambiguous nature of Rorschach inkblots could be leveraged together with traditional neuropsychological and linguistic measures, to provide insight into the relationship between perception, thought, psychological process and language - a multimethod assessment approach to describe the complex phenomena surrounding aphasia. This study demonstrated that individuals with reduced language function were able to provide responses to inkblots presented in a Rorschach assessment that were sufficient in number and quality to allow scoring and interpretation. Spearman’s rank-order correlation coefficients were calculated for WAB-R AQ score, CLQT Language Functions Domain Scores, the Rorschach cognitive processing simplicity, complexity scores and, the thought and perception EII and severe cognitive scores. Correlations among neurolinguistic and Rorschach cognitive processing and thought and perception variables, indicate a clear and intuitive relationship between these different measures. Finally, participants were administered a confrontation naming task in which a series of 10 black and white line drawings representing images of the most popular responses for each of the 10 Rorschach cards were presented. Results from that task confirmed that study participants could accurately retrieve the word for the most common responses, suggesting that object naming is not a limitation in the population of individuals with mild to moderate aphasia. Although differences between small groups of individuals with fluent and non-fluent aphasia could not be validated with significance testing, descriptive analyses showed some differences in means and standard deviations of Rorschach variable scores between the two groups. Specifically, individuals in the non-fluent aphasia group, who had more impairment in language ability, provided more vague responses, were typically only able to provide one defining characteristic of the blot (i.e., blends), and produced more communicative distortions (as measured by the thought and perception variables) than compared to individuals in the fluent aphasia group. The participant group, as a whole, produced a high degree of vague responses, was found to produce more simplistic descriptions of the blot, and typically only produced one defining characteristic of the blot (i.e., blends) - as compared to the neurotypical population. This study shows that the Rorschach can be administered to a population of individuals with mild to moderate fluent or non-fluent aphasia to generate scoreable results, with named objects comparable to those in norms derived from a neurotypical population. Limited amount and quality of supporting description of those named objects provided by the participants, however, limits the utility of the Rorschach from a psychological assessment perspective. In light of the dependence of this instrument on verbal ability, future studies might consider modified application of the Rorschach with administration that allows non-verbal responses (e.g., drawing, picture taking) as a means of supplementing participant verbal responses – to develop a richer understanding of the individual’s perception, and insight into their psychological state

Enabling Resilience in Cyber-Physical-Human Water Infrastructures

Rapid urbanization and growth in urban populations have forced community-scale infrastructures (e.g., water, power and natural gas distribution systems, and transportation networks) to operate at their limits. Aging (and failing) infrastructures around the world are becoming increasingly vulnerable to operational degradation, extreme weather, natural disasters and cyber attacks/failures. These trends have wide-ranging socioeconomic consequences and raise public safety concerns. In this thesis, we introduce the notion of cyber-physical-human infrastructures (CPHIs) - smart community-scale infrastructures that bridge technologies with physical infrastructures and people. CPHIs are highly dynamic stochastic systems characterized by complex physical models that exhibit regionwide variability and uncertainty under disruptions. Failures in these distributed settings tend to be difficult to predict and estimate, and expensive to repair. Real-time fault identification is crucial to ensure continuity of lifeline services to customers at adequate levels of quality. Emerging smart community technologies have the potential to transform our failing infrastructures into robust and resilient future CPHIs.In this thesis, we explore one such CPHI - community water infrastructures. Current urban water infrastructures, that are decades (sometimes over a 100 years) old, encompass diverse geophysical regimes. Water stress concerns include the scarcity of supply and an increase in demand due to urbanization. Deterioration and damage to the infrastructure can disrupt water service; contamination events can result in economic and public health consequences. Unfortunately, little investment has gone into modernizing this key lifeline.To enhance the resilience of water systems, we propose an integrated middleware framework for quick and accurate identification of failures in complex water networks that exhibit uncertain behavior. Our proposed approach integrates IoT-based sensing, domain-specific models and simulations with machine learning methods to identify failures (pipe breaks, contamination events). The composition of techniques results in cost-accuracy-latency tradeoffs in fault identification, inherent in CPHIs due to the constraints imposed by cyber components, physical mechanics and human operators. Three key resilience problems are addressed in this thesis; isolation of multiple faults under a small number of failures, state estimation of the water systems under extreme events such as earthquakes, and contaminant source identification in water networks using human-in-the-loop based sensing. By working with real world water agencies (WSSC, DC and LADWP, LA), we first develop an understanding of operations of water CPHI systems. We design and implement a sensor-simulation-data integration framework AquaSCALE, and apply it to localize multiple concurrent pipe failures. We use a mixture of infrastructure measurements (i.e., historical and live water pressure/flow), environmental data (i.e., weather) and human inputs (i.e., twitter feeds), combined and enhanced with the domain model and supervised learning techniques to locate multiple failures at fine levels of granularity (individual pipeline level) with detection time reduced by orders of magnitude (from hours/days to minutes). We next consider the resilience of water infrastructures under extreme events (i.e., earthquakes) - the challenge here is the lack of apriori knowledge and the increased number and severity of damages to infrastructures. We present a graphical model based approach for efficient online state estimation, where the offline graph factorization partitions a given network into disjoint subgraphs, and the belief propagation based inference is executed on-the-fly in a distributed manner on those subgraphs. Our proposed approach can isolate 80% broken pipes and 99% loss-of-service to end-users during an earthquake.Finally, we address issues of water quality - today this is a human-in-the-loop process where operators need to gather water samples for lab tests. We incorporate the necessary abstractions with event processing methods into a workflow, which iteratively selects and refines the set of potential failure points via human-driven grab sampling. Our approach utilizes Hidden Markov Model based representations for event inference, along with reinforcement learning methods for further refining event locations and reducing the cost of human efforts.The proposed techniques are integrated into a middleware architecture, which enables components to communicate/collaborate with one another. We validate our approaches through a prototype implementation with multiple real-world water networks, supply-demand patterns from water utilities and policies set by the U.S. EPA. While our focus here is on water infrastructures in a community, the developed end-to-end solution is applicable to other infrastructures and community services which operate in disruptive and resource-constrained environments

The Second International Conference on Health Information Technology Advancement

TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Message from the Conference Co-Chairs B. Han and S. Falan …………………………....….……………. 5 II. Message from the Transactions Editor H. Lee …...………..………….......………….……….………….... 7 III. Referred Papers A. Emerging Health Information Technology and Applications The Role of Mobile Technology in Enhancing the Use of Personal Health Records Mohamed Abouzahra and Joseph Tan………………….……………. 9 Mobile Health Information Technology and Patient Care: Methods, Themes, and Research Gaps Bahae Samhan, Majid Dadgar, and K. D. Joshi…………..…. 18 A Balanced Perspective to Perioperative Process Management Jim Ryan, Barbara Doster, Sandra Daily, and Carmen Lewis…..….…………… 30 The Impact of Big Data on the Healthcare Information Systems Kuo Lane Chen and Huei Lee………….…………… 43 B. Health Care Communication, Literacy, and Patient Care Quality Digital Illness Narratives: A New Form of Health Communication Jofen Han and Jo Wiley…..….……..…. 47 Relationships, Caring, and Near Misses: Michael’s Story Sharie Falan and Bernard Han……………….…..…. 53 What is Your Informatics Skills Level? -- The Reliability of an Informatics Competency Measurement Tool Xiaomeng Sun and Sharie Falan.….….….….….….…. 61 C. Health Information Standardization and Interoperability Standardization Needs for Effective Interoperability Marilyn Skrocki…………………….…….………….… 76 Data Interoperability and Information Security in Healthcare Reid Berryman, Nathan Yost, Nicholas Dunn, and Christopher Edwards.…. 84 Michigan Health Information Network (MiHIN) Shared Services vs. the HIE Shared Services in Other States Devon O’Toole, Sean O’Toole, and Logan Steely…..……….…… 94 D. Health information Security and Regulation A Threat Table Based Approach to Telemedicine Security John C. Pendergrass, Karen Heart, C. Ranganathan, and V.N. Venkatakrishnan …. 104 Managing Government Regulatory Requirements for Security and Privacy Using Existing Standard Models Gregory Schymik and Dan Shoemaker…….…….….….… 112 Challenges of Mobile Healthcare Application Security Alan Rea………………………….……………. 118 E. Healthcare Management and Administration Analytical Methods for Planning and Scheduling Daily Work in Inpatient Care Settings: Opportunities for Research and Practice Laila Cure….….……………..….….….….… 121 Predictive Modeling in Post-reform Marketplace Wu-Chyuan Gau, Andrew France, Maria E. Moutinho, Carl D. Smith, and Morgan C. Wang…………...…. 131 A Study on Generic Prescription Substitution Policy as a Cost Containment Approach for Michigan’s Medicaid System Khandaker Nayeemul Islam…….…...……...………………….… 140 F. Health Information Technology Quality Assessment and Medical Service Delivery Theoretical, Methodological and Practical Challenges in Designing Formative Evaluations of Personal eHealth Tools Michael S. Dohan and Joseph Tan……………….……. 150 The Principles of Good Health Care in the U.S. in the 2010s Andrew Targowski…………………….……. 161 Health Information Technology in American Medicine: A Historical Perspective Kenneth A. Fisher………………….……. 171 G. Health Information Technology and Medical Practice Monitoring and Assisting Maternity-Infant Care in Rural Areas (MAMICare) Juan C. Lavariega, Gustavo Córdova, Lorena G Gómez, Alfonso Avila….… 175 An Empirical Study of Home Healthcare Robots Adoption Using the UTUAT Model Ahmad Alaiad, Lina Zhou, and Gunes Koru.…………………….….………. 185 HDQM2: Healthcare Data Quality Maturity Model Javier Mauricio Pinto-Valverde, Miguel Ángel Pérez-Guardado, Lorena Gomez-Martinez, Martha Corrales-Estrada, and Juan Carlos Lavariega-Jarquín.… 199 IV. A List of Reviewers …………………………..…….………………………208 V. WMU – IT Forum 2014 Call for Papers …..…….…………………20

“Sorry, It Was My Fault”: Repairing Trust in Human-Robot Interactions

Robots have been playing an increasingly important role in human life, but their performance is yet far from perfection. Based on extant literature in interpersonal, organizational, and human-machine communication, the current study develops a three-fold categorization of technical failures (i.e., logic, semantic, and syntax failures) commonly observed in human-robot interactions from the interactants’ end, investigating it together with four trust repair strategies: internal-attribution apology, external-attribution apology, denial, and no repair. The 743 observations conducted through an online experiment reveals there exist some nuances in participants’ perceived division between competence- and integrity-based trust violations, given the ontological differences between humans and machines. The findings also suggest prior propositions about trust repair from the perspective of attribution theory only explain part of the variance, in addition to some significant main effects of failure types and repair methods on HRI-based trust

The relationships between context and conceptual access.

147 p.An important question in the cognitive neuroscience of language regards the nature of the conceptual representations that make up semantic memory. Amodal accounts argue that conceptual representations of objects and their processing is functionally distinct from sensory or motor brain systems whereas sensorimotor theories maintain that they involve the same perceptual and action brain areas active in experience. In a break from current orthodoxy, this thesis seeks to explore if concepts and semantic processing are best considered as functionally grounded in sensorimotor systems and contextually sensitive. We report four studies using behavioural-psycholinguistic and neuroimaging techniques in healthy and clinical populations. In part 1 we show that online perceptual processing in the visual and olfactory modalities can interact with language comprehension, that lifetime sensory experience shapes the representational structure of object concepts, and that the outcome of semantic processing differs depending on an interaction of personal experience and people¿s immediate perceptual context. In part 2, we examine whether motor system degradation due to Parkinson's disease leads to impairments in processing manipulable objects compared to healthy controls. Counter to our predictions we do not observe behavioural differences in the way Parkinson's disease patients access the representations of manipulable objects, however, we report neuroimaging evidence suggesting that changes in people's motor capacities lead to measurable alterations in the way that they process action semantics, at the neural level. Taken together this thesis provides evidence that the content and format of the conceptual representations of objects is multimodal and grounded in sensory and motor brain systems and people's lifetime sensory and motor experience with objects shapes their representations in deeply personal ways. Therefore, contrary to amodal accounts, there is functional overlap between sensorimotor and semantic processing, such that sensory, motor and semantic processes mutually interact with context (at many levels). This suggests that exploring the relationship between concepts and context is both necessary and vital in order to properly understand the semantic representations underlying noun words.Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Languag

Going Beyond the Text: The Inferencing Processes of Skilled Readers in L1 and L2 Across Reading Tasks

This small exploratory study investigated the inferencing processes of skilled first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers for two academic tasks. The goal was to examine possible effects of language and task, or reading purpose, on the frequency and distribution of inferences. Participants (n = 10) were native speakers of German enrolled at a large university in Hessen, Germany in a B.Ed. program. Participants read two expository texts (one written in German and the other written in English) in two task conditions: summary and position-paper. Think-aloud protocols while reading and stimulated recall immediately after reading were recorded, transcribed, coded, and the results were compared quantitatively and qualitatively across tasks and languages. The statistical analyses indicated that there were task effects on inferencing processes, and that they were stronger in L2. When reading for a summary purpose, inferencing processes differed across languages which was not the case for the position-paper task. Readers inferencing processes differed significantly across tasks in L2, but not in L1. The results suggest that skilled readers strategically inference based on academic task demands, but that transfer of strategic inferencing skills from L1 to L2 is not complete even with advanced L2 readers. Findings raise questions about the explicit instruction of strategic inferencing for academic tasks in L2 reading classrooms

Going Beyond the Text: The Inferencing Processes of Skilled Readers in L1 and L2 across Reading Tasks

This small exploratory study investigated the inferencing processes of skilled first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers for two academic tasks. The goal was to examine possible effects of language and task, or reading purpose, on the frequency and distribution of inferences. Participants (n = 10) were native speakers of German enrolled at a large university in Hessen, Germany in a B.Ed. program. Participants read two expository texts (one written in German and the other written in English) in two task conditions: summary and position-paper. Think-aloud protocols while reading and stimulated recall immediately after reading were recorded, transcribed, coded, and the results were compared quantitatively and qualitatively across tasks and languages. The statistical analyses indicated that there were task effects on inferencing processes, and that they were stronger in L2. When reading for a summary purpose, inferencing processes differed across languages which was not the case for the position-paper task. Readers’ inferencing processes differed significantly across tasks in L2, but not in L1. The results suggest that skilled readers strategically inference based on academic task demands, but that transfer of strategic inferencing skills from L1 to L2 is not complete even with advanced L2 readers. Findings raise questions about the explicit instruction of strategic inferencing for academic tasks in L2 reading classrooms

La contextualisation en entreprise (mettre en avant utilisateurs et développeurs)

Les applications contextuelles doivent gérer un flux contenu de contexte selon une logique approprié. Les travaux de recherche en contextualisation se limitent à proposer des plateformes de développement proposant des mécanismes d adaptation prédéfinie. Cette thèse se propose d étende l état de l art en proposant des nouveaux concepts formant la fondation pour la création d application contextuelles en adoptant des principes de l ingénierie logicielle et une décomposition fonctionnelle. Aussi, cela permet l intégration de comportements contextualisés à des applications non initialement conçus pour cela. La thèse propose une autre manière centrée-contexte permettant de séparer la représentation du contexte de son interprétation, offrant encore plus de flexibilité à la gestion de contexte. Les propositions sont analysées aux lumières d étude de cas et de simulations. Le résultat de la thèse est l introduction de nouvelle approche de création d applications contextuelles qui met en avant le développeur mais aussi l utilisateurContext-aware applications must manage a continuous stream of context according to dedicated business logic. Research was limited on proposing frameworks and platforms that have predefined behavior toward applications. This thesis attempts to extend background works by proposing new concepts serving as foundation for a flexible approach for building context-aware applications. The thesis examines the state of the art of context-aware computing, then adopts well-established software design principles and a functional decomposition for designing a reference model for context management enabling seamless integration of context-awareness into applications. Also, the thesis studies the use of context in common applications and proposes a context-centric modeling approach which allows the creation of a graph-based representation where entities are connected to each other through links representing context. Furthermore, the context graph decouples the presentation and the semantics of context, leaving each application to manage the appropriate semantic for their context data. Case studies are conducted for the evaluation of the proposed system in terms of its support for the creation of applications enhanced with context-awareness. A simulation study is performed to analyze the performance properties of the proposed system. The result of this thesis is the introduction of a novel approach for supporting the creation of context-aware applications that supports the integration of context-awareness to existing applications. It empowers developers as well as users to participate in the creation process, thereby reducing usability issuesEVRY-INT (912282302) / SudocSudocFranceF

Operations Management

Global competition has caused fundamental changes in the competitive environment of the manufacturing and service industries. Firms should develop strategic objectives that, upon achievement, result in a competitive advantage in the market place. The forces of globalization on one hand and rapidly growing marketing opportunities overseas, especially in emerging economies on the other, have led to the expansion of operations on a global scale. The book aims to cover the main topics characterizing operations management including both strategic issues and practical applications. A global environmental business including both manufacturing and services is analyzed. The book contains original research and application chapters from different perspectives. It is enriched through the analyses of case studies