Information systems for medical imaging labs: the experience of the CNR Clinical Physiology Institute

In the late 1990s the CNR Clinical Physiology Institute was entrusted with the "SPERIGEST" project, granted by the Italian Health Ministry. Among the technical challenges of the project, the following issues were faced: 1) the definition of a system architecture able to conjugate a centric view, as required by data integration needs, with flexibility and modularity in order to satisfy the different healthcare environments; 2) the creation of local information systems devoted to the management of each single laboratory activity; 3) the creation of a suitable network to exchange information both inside and outside the hospital; 4) the overcoming of safety and security issues in the treatment of healthcare data; 5) the data processing for extracting knowledge from the archived data and for supporting the diagnostic/treatment process; 6) the education of healthcare personnel; 7) the adoption of standards for both storage and distribution of data. An hospital information system was developed according to a three layers mode

The ecology of organizational forms in local and regional food systems: exploring the scaling-up challenge via a species concept

Includes vita.Over the past 30 years, Western nations have developed alternative systems for exchanging agrofood products which incorporate social values into the transactional environment. These systems are comprised of many different exchange relationships, structured to transmit information about social values and attach credence attributes to the products. New organizational forms, institutions, and networks arise to achieve the values demanded by the underlying social movement. One movement centers on the social value of a commitment to place. It seeks to create relocalized and socially embedded means of exchange. Policy initiatives have responded, making investments in local and regional food systems. The primary challenge faced by these initiatives: how to increase the of scale while maintaining the value premiums associated with the movement's objectives. I view these complex networks as ecologies and seek to understand how different organizational forms interact to scale-up LRFSs. I make three crucial developments: (1) a framework to define LRFSs; (2) a model on the metaphysics of social objects and their kinds; and (3) an Organizational Species Concept to consistently identify organizational forms. Together these developments enable an ecological approach by providing a means of identifying distinct organizational populations. I apply my OSC to the case of food hubs – coordinating intermediaries identified as a key for increased scale. This yields six "species". I find that each fills a different functional role and contributes differently to scaling-up LRFSs. I highlight how this is helpful for targeted policymaking.Includes bibliographical references (pages 286-301

Bayesian nonparametric clusterings in relational and high-dimensional settings with applications in bioinformatics.

Recent advances in high throughput methodologies offer researchers the ability to understand complex systems via high dimensional and multi-relational data. One example is the realm of molecular biology where disparate data (such as gene sequence, gene expression, and interaction information) are available for various snapshots of biological systems. This type of high dimensional and multirelational data allows for unprecedented detailed analysis, but also presents challenges in accounting for all the variability. High dimensional data often has a multitude of underlying relationships, each represented by a separate clustering structure, where the number of structures is typically unknown a priori. To address the challenges faced by traditional clustering methods on high dimensional and multirelational data, we developed three feature selection and cross-clustering methods: 1) infinite relational model with feature selection (FIRM) which incorporates the rich information of multirelational data; 2) Bayesian Hierarchical Cross-Clustering (BHCC), a deterministic approximation to Cross Dirichlet Process mixture (CDPM) and to cross-clustering; and 3) randomized approximation (RBHCC), based on a truncated hierarchy. An extension of BHCC, Bayesian Congruence Measuring (BCM), is proposed to measure incongruence between genes and to identify sets of congruent loci with identical evolutionary histories. We adapt our BHCC algorithm to the inference of BCM, where the intended structure of each view (congruent loci) represents consistent evolutionary processes. We consider an application of FIRM on categorizing mRNA and microRNA. The model uses latent structures to encode the expression pattern and the gene ontology annotations. We also apply FIRM to recover the categories of ligands and proteins, and to predict unknown drug-target interactions, where latent categorization structure encodes drug-target interaction, chemical compound similarity, and amino acid sequence similarity. BHCC and RBHCC are shown to have improved predictive performance (both in terms of cluster membership and missing value prediction) compared to traditional clustering methods. Our results suggest that these novel approaches to integrating multi-relational information have a promising future in the biological sciences where incorporating data related to varying features is often regarded as a daunting task

DataWarp: Building Applications which Make Progress in an Inconsistent World

The usual approach to dealing with imperfections in data is to attempt to eliminate them. However, the nature of modern systems means this is often futile. This paper describes an approach which permits applications to operate notwithstanding inconsistent data. Instead of attempting to extract a single, correct view of the world from its data, a DataWarp application constructs a collection of interpretations. It adopts one of these and continues work. Since it acts on assumptions, the DataWarp application considers its recent work to be provisional, expecting eventually most of these actions will become definitive. Should the application decide to adopt an alternative data view, it may then need to void provisional actions before resuming work. We describe the DataWarp architecture, discuss its implementation and describe an experiment in which a DataWarp application in an environment containing inconsistent data achieves better results than its conventional counterpart

Participatory action research on climate risk management, Bangladesh

The rural populations of southern Bangladesh are some of the most vulnerable communities in the world to the future impacts of climate change. They are particularly at risk from floods, waterlogged soils, and increasing salinity of both land and water. The objective of this project was to analyze the vulnerability of people in four villages that are experiencing different levels of soil salinity. The study evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of current coping strategies and assessed the potential of an index-based insurance scheme, designed diversification and better information products to improve adaptive capacity

Embedding knowledge and value of a brand into sustainability for differentiation

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in the Journal of World Business (under the provisional title "Embedding sustainability into brand knowledge and brand value for brand differentiation"). The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.Organisations offer products to consumers, buyers often question if the product or its production process are linked to the environmental, social or economic challenges being faced by mankind. Inquisitiveness of customers in this direction points towards an opportunity for marketers to create differentiation based on the concerns of brand towards overall issue of sustainability. The authors have synthesized knowledge from various domains with a positivistic approach to understand sustainability from the perspective of branding. Using empirical knowledge this study recommends embedding sustainability into brand knowledge and brand value for creating a differentiation for the brand in a competitive market

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures