BCAS: A Web-enabled and GIS-based Decision Support System for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Breast Cancer

For decades, geographical variations in cancer rates have been observed but the precise determinants of such geographic differences in breast cancer development are unclear. Various statistical models have been proposed. Applications of these models, however, require that the data be assembled from a variety of sources, converted into the statistical models’ parameters and delivered effectively to researchers and policy makers. A web-enabled and GIS-based system can be developed to provide the needed functionality. This article overviews the conceptual web-enabled and GIS-based system (BCAS), illustrates the system’s use in diagnosing and treating breast cancer and examines the potential benefits and implications for breast cancer research and practice

Tax Reform and Environmental Taxation

I measure the industry impacts of an environmental tax reform where a carbon tax is used to finance full or partial corporate tax integration. I find that the industry impacts of such a reform are likely to be modest (in the sense of impacts on returns on equity).

Guidelines for the analysis of student web usage in support of primary educational objectives

The Internet and World Wide Web provides huge amounts of information to individuals with access to it. Information is an important driving factor of education and higher education has experienced massive adoption rates of information and communication technologies, and accessing the Web is not an uncommon practice within a higher educational institution. The Web provides numerous benefits and many students rely on the Web for information, communication and technical support. However, the immense amount of information available on the Web has brought about some negative side effects associated with abundant information. Whether the Web is a positive influence on students’ academic well-being within higher education is a difficult question to answer. To understand how the Web is used by students within a higher education institution is not an easy task. However, there are ways to understand the Web usage behaviour of students. Using established methods for gathering useful information from data produced by an institution, Web usage behaviours of students within a higher education institution could be analysed and presented. This dissertation presents guidance for analysing Web traffic within a higher educational institution in order to gain insight into the Web usage behaviours of students. This insight can provide educators with valuable information to bolster their decision-making capacity towards achieving their educational goals

Modelling and Simulation of a Decision Support System Prototype Built on an Improved Data Warehousing Architecture for the School of Postgraduate, MAUTECH, Yola – Nigeria

A Data Warehouse (DW) is constructed with the goal of storing and providing all the relevant information that is generated along the heterogeneous databases of an organization. The development and management of precise and up-to-date information concerning academic staff, department, faculty, student’s academic record etc. is critically important in the management of a university. This study has become necessary because, data warehousing is a new field, a small number of investigations has been done regarding the features of academic data analysis and report. At present, data warehousing is among the best solution for gathering and maintaining data for decision making.  Therefore, the aim of this paper is to develop a DW prototype model for the School of Postgraduate Studies’ (SPGS) programmes of Modibbo Adama University of Technology (MAUTEC), Yola. The objective of the study is to model and simulate a decision support system that is capable of querying the prototype DW database model to generate reports as output in order to help administrative decision making of the SPGS MAUTEC, Yola. The study has provided relevant literatures in relation to the subject matter. In the methodology, a secondary, field and case study research were conducted. The software engineering development methodology considered was the “Realistic Waterfall Model”. The findings of this paper provide a DW prototype database model using a dimensional modeling technique and the graphic user interface tool for reports and analysis. The researchers have demonstrated their understanding on the subject matter and as a matter of fact, possible future work has been suggested from where we stopped. Keywords - Data Warehouse, Modeling, Simulation, Prototype and Decision Support Syste

Finding Temporal Patterns in Noisy Longitudinal Data: A Study in Diabetic Retinopathy

This paper describes an approach to temporal pattern mining using the concept of user defined temporal prototypes to define the nature of the trends of interests. The temporal patterns are defined in terms of sequences of support values associated with identified frequent patterns. The prototypes are defined mathematically so that they can be mapped onto the temporal patterns. The focus for the advocated temporal pattern mining process is a large longitudinal patient database collected as part of a diabetic retinopathy screening programme, The data set is, in itself, also of interest as it is very noisy (in common with other similar medical datasets) and does not feature a clear association between specific time stamps and subsets of the data. The diabetic retinopathy application, the data warehousing and cleaning process, and the frequent pattern mining procedure (together with the application of the prototype concept) are all described in the paper. An evaluation of the frequent pattern mining process is also presented

Developing Strategic Reports for National Co-Operative of Malaysia (Angkasa) Using Data Warehouse and Decision Tree Model

Managing an organization requires access to information in order to monitor activities and assess performance. Business Intelligence (BI) solutions provide organizations with timley, itegrated information that is crucial to the understanding of their business. Data Warehouse (DW) technology is one of the important strategic management approaches for decision making in an organizations. The BI combines architectures, tools, databases, analytical tools, and methodologies to enable the implementation of interactive information in generating analytical reports. Strategic reports, which influence the enduring way of the whole company, are typically used by top managers. These kinds of decisions are repeatedly complex and the outcomes unsure, because existing information is habitually incomplete. Managers at this point must normally depend on history experiences and their instincts when making strategic decisions. DW is a technology allows integrating and transforming enterprise data for strategic decision making. Furthermore, Decision Tree (DT) is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like graphof decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. The organization, which is, responsible to manage people activities need strategic decisions making. This paper will be focused how to design and develop Strategic Reports using DW and DT Model for National Co-operative Organization of Malaysia (ANGKASA) called DSRNCO, as a case study. This system has been evaluated through the system user feedback by using Computer System Usability Questionnaire (CSUQ), which measures system usability and user satisfaction

PABED A Tool for Big Education Data Analysis

Cloud computing and big data have risen to become the most popular technologies of the modern world. Apparently, the reason behind their immense popularity is their wide range of applicability as far as the areas of interest are concerned. Education and research remain one of the most obvious and befitting application areas. This research paper introduces a big data analytics tool, PABED Project Analyzing Big Education Data, for the education sector that makes use of cloud-based technologies. This tool is implemented using Google BigQuery and R programming language and allows comparison of undergraduate enrollment data for different academic years. Although, there are many proposed applications of big data in education, there is a lack of tools that can actualize the concept into practice. PABED is an effort in this direction. The implementation and testing details of the project have been described in this paper. This tool validates the use of cloud computing and big data technologies in education and shall head start development of more sophisticated educational intelligence tools

TLAD 2011 Proceedings:9th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the ninth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2011), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2011 - the 28th British National Conference on Databases. TLAD 2011 is held on the 11th July at Manchester University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will present eight peer reviewed papers. Of these, six will be presented as full papers and two as short papers. These papers cover a number of themes, including: the teaching of data mining and data warehousing, databases and the cloud, and novel uses of technology in teaching and assessment. It is expected that these papers will stimulate discussion at the workshop itself and beyond. This year, the focus on providing a forum for discussion is enhanced through a panel discussion on assessment in database modules, with David Nelson (of the University of Sunderland), Al Monger (of Southampton Solent University) and Charles Boisvert (of Sheffield Hallam University) as the expert panel

TLAD 2011 Proceedings:9th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the ninth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2011), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2011 - the 28th British National Conference on Databases. TLAD 2011 is held on the 11th July at Manchester University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will present eight peer reviewed papers. Of these, six will be presented as full papers and two as short papers. These papers cover a number of themes, including: the teaching of data mining and data warehousing, databases and the cloud, and novel uses of technology in teaching and assessment. It is expected that these papers will stimulate discussion at the workshop itself and beyond. This year, the focus on providing a forum for discussion is enhanced through a panel discussion on assessment in database modules, with David Nelson (of the University of Sunderland), Al Monger (of Southampton Solent University) and Charles Boisvert (of Sheffield Hallam University) as the expert panel