2,148 research outputs found

    Southern Adventist University Undergraduate Catalog 2023-2024

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    Southern Adventist University\u27s undergraduate catalog for the academic year 2023-2024.https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/undergrad_catalog/1123/thumbnail.jp

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    The development, feasibility, and acceptability of a breakfast group intervention for stroke rehabilitation

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    Background: There are 1.2 million stroke survivors in the UK and the number is projected to increase significantly over the next decade. Research suggests that between 50% and 80% of hospitalised stroke survivors experience difficulties with eating and drinking. Presently, rehabilitation approaches to address these difficulties involve individual rehabilitation sessions led by uni-professionals. Recent national stroke guidance recommends that stroke survivors receive three hours of daily rehabilitation and emphasises the importance of addressing the psychosocial aspects of recovery. Implementing these recommendations presents a challenge to healthcare professionals, who must explore innovative methods to provide the necessary rehabilitation intensity. This study aimed to address these challenges by codesigning a multi-disciplinary breakfast group intervention and implementation toolkit to improve psychosocial outcomes. Methods: The Hawkins 3-step framework for intervention design was used to develop a multidisciplinary breakfast group intervention and to understand if it was acceptable and feasible for patients and healthcare professionals in an acute stroke ward. The Hawkins 3- steps were 1) evidence review and consultations 2) coproduction 3) prototyping. In collaboration with fifteen stakeholders, a prototype breakfast group intervention and implementation toolkit were codesigned over four months. Experience-based Codesign was used to engage stakeholders. Results: The literature review is the first to investigate the psychosocial impact of eating and drinking difficulties post stroke. The key finding was the presence of psychological and social impacts which included, the experience of loss, fear, embarrassment shame and humiliation as well as social isolation. Stroke survivors were striving to get back to normality and this included the desire to socially dine with others. Two prototype iterations of the intervention were tested with 16 stroke survivors across three hospital sites. The multidisciplinary breakfast group intervention was designed to offer intensive rehabilitation in a social group context. The codesigned implementation toolkit guided a personalised and tailored approach. A perceived benefit of the intervention was the opportunity to address the psychosocial aspects of eating and drinking rehabilitation as well as providing physical rehabilitation. Stroke survivors highly value the opportunity to socialise and receive support from their peers. The intervention was acceptable to both patients and healthcare professionals, and the workforce model proved practical and feasible to deliver using a collaborative approach in the context of resource-limited healthcare. Conclusions: The breakfast group interventions, developed through codesign, were positively received by patients and staff and feasible to deliver. They introduce an innovative and novel approach to stroke rehabilitation, personalised to each individual's needs, and offer a comprehensive intervention which addresses both physical and psychosocial aspects which target challenges related to eating and drinking. Unique contributions of this study include a theoretical model for breakfast group interventions, a programme theory and practical tool kit for clinicians to support the translation of research findings and implement breakfast groups in clinical practice

    Low- and high-resource opinion summarization

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    Customer reviews play a vital role in the online purchasing decisions we make. The reviews express user opinions that are useful for setting realistic expectations and uncovering important details about products. However, some products receive hundreds or even thousands of reviews, making them time-consuming to read. Moreover, many reviews contain uninformative content, such as irrelevant personal experiences. Automatic summarization offers an alternative – short text summaries capturing the essential information expressed in reviews. Automatically produced summaries can reflect overall or particular opinions and be tailored to user preferences. Besides being presented on major e-commerce platforms, home assistants can also vocalize them. This approach can improve user satisfaction by assisting in making faster and better decisions. Modern summarization approaches are based on neural networks, often requiring thousands of annotated samples for training. However, human-written summaries for products are expensive to produce because annotators need to read many reviews. This has led to annotated data scarcity where only a few datasets are available. Data scarcity is the central theme of our works, and we propose a number of approaches to alleviate the problem. The thesis consists of two parts where we discuss low- and high-resource data settings. In the first part, we propose self-supervised learning methods applied to customer reviews and few-shot methods for learning from small annotated datasets. Customer reviews without summaries are available in large quantities, contain a breadth of in-domain specifics, and provide a powerful training signal. We show that reviews can be used for learning summarizers via a self-supervised objective. Further, we address two main challenges associated with learning from small annotated datasets. First, large models rapidly overfit on small datasets leading to poor generalization. Second, it is not possible to learn a wide range of in-domain specifics (e.g., product aspects and usage) from a handful of gold samples. This leads to subtle semantic mistakes in generated summaries, such as ‘great dead on arrival battery.’ We address the first challenge by explicitly modeling summary properties (e.g., content coverage and sentiment alignment). Furthermore, we leverage small modules – adapters – that are more robust to overfitting. As we show, despite their size, these modules can be used to store in-domain knowledge to reduce semantic mistakes. Lastly, we propose a simple method for learning personalized summarizers based on aspects, such as ‘price,’ ‘battery life,’ and ‘resolution.’ This task is harder to learn, and we present a few-shot method for training a query-based summarizer on small annotated datasets. In the second part, we focus on the high-resource setting and present a large dataset with summaries collected from various online resources. The dataset has more than 33,000 humanwritten summaries, where each is linked up to thousands of reviews. This, however, makes it challenging to apply an ‘expensive’ deep encoder due to memory and computational costs. To address this problem, we propose selecting small subsets of informative reviews. Only these subsets are encoded by the deep encoder and subsequently summarized. We show that the selector and summarizer can be trained end-to-end via amortized inference and policy gradient methods

    Effects of municipal smoke-free ordinances on secondhand smoke exposure in the Republic of Korea

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    ObjectiveTo reduce premature deaths due to secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among non-smokers, the Republic of Korea (ROK) adopted changes to the National Health Promotion Act, which allowed local governments to enact municipal ordinances to strengthen their authority to designate smoke-free areas and levy penalty fines. In this study, we examined national trends in SHS exposure after the introduction of these municipal ordinances at the city level in 2010.MethodsWe used interrupted time series analysis to assess whether the trends of SHS exposure in the workplace and at home, and the primary cigarette smoking rate changed following the policy adjustment in the national legislation in ROK. Population-standardized data for selected variables were retrieved from a nationally representative survey dataset and used to study the policy action’s effectiveness.ResultsFollowing the change in the legislation, SHS exposure in the workplace reversed course from an increasing (18% per year) trend prior to the introduction of these smoke-free ordinances to a decreasing (−10% per year) trend after adoption and enforcement of these laws (β2 = 0.18, p-value = 0.07; β3 = −0.10, p-value = 0.02). SHS exposure at home (β2 = 0.10, p-value = 0.09; β3 = −0.03, p-value = 0.14) and the primary cigarette smoking rate (β2 = 0.03, p-value = 0.10; β3 = 0.008, p-value = 0.15) showed no significant changes in the sampled period. Although analyses stratified by sex showed that the allowance of municipal ordinances resulted in reduced SHS exposure in the workplace for both males and females, they did not affect the primary cigarette smoking rate as much, especially among females.ConclusionStrengthening the role of local governments by giving them the authority to enact and enforce penalties on SHS exposure violation helped ROK to reduce SHS exposure in the workplace. However, smoking behaviors and related activities seemed to shift to less restrictive areas such as on the streets and in apartment hallways, negating some of the effects due to these ordinances. Future studies should investigate how smoke-free policies beyond public places can further reduce the SHS exposure in ROK

    SmartChoices: Augmenting Software with Learned Implementations

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    We are living in a golden age of machine learning. Powerful models are being trained to perform many tasks far better than is possible using traditional software engineering approaches alone. However, developing and deploying those models in existing software systems remains difficult. In this paper we present SmartChoices, a novel approach to incorporating machine learning into mature software stacks easily, safely, and effectively. We explain the overall design philosophy and present case studies using SmartChoices within large scale industrial systems

    Heterogeneous Treatment Effects of Behavioral and Environmental Risk Factors on Infants' Health at Birth: A Causal Machine Learning Approach

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    Behavioral and environmental risk factors, such as maternal smoking during pregnancy and in-utero exposure to extreme weather events are significant threats to infants’ health at birth. Effects of these risk factors on infant health have been extensively studied using traditional methods, while mostly neglecting possible heterogeneity in the effects. Causal machine learning has emerged as an effective approach for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects, but identifying the causal pathways driving heterogeneity remains challenging. This dissertation consists of three essays that apply and adapt causal machine learning techniques to study heterogeneity in the effects of different behavioral and environmental risk factors on health at birth. Chapter 2 uncovers heterogeneity in the effects of maternal smoking during pregnancy on infant health at birth by proposing a novel decomposition approach, while Chapter 3 studies how smoking during pregnancy can be regulated using smoking bans. Chapter 4 studies the effects of in-utero heat shock exposure on health at birth and possible heterogeneity in the effect found

    AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence

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    The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence

    Predicate Matrix: an interoperable lexical knowledge base for predicates

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    183 p.La Matriz de Predicados (Predicate Matrix en inglés) es un nuevo recurso léxico-semántico resultado de la integración de múltiples fuentes de conocimiento, entre las cuales se encuentran FrameNet, VerbNet, PropBank y WordNet. La Matriz de Predicados proporciona un léxico extenso y robusto que permite mejorar la interoperabilidad entre los recursos semánticos mencionados anteriormente. La creación de la Matriz de Predicados se basa en la integración de Semlink y nuevos mappings obtenidos utilizando métodos automáticos que enlazan el conocimiento semántico a nivel léxico y de roles. Asimismo, hemos ampliado la Predicate Matrix para cubrir los predicados nominales (inglés, español) y predicados en otros idiomas (castellano, catalán y vasco). Como resultado, la Matriz de predicados proporciona un léxico multilingüe que permite el análisis semántico interoperable en múltiples idiomas
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