Disease surveillance and patient care in remote regions: an exploratory study of collaboration among healthcare professionals in Amazonia

The development and deployment of information technology, particularly mobile tools, to support collaboration between different groups of healthcare professionals has been viewed as a promising way to improve disease surveillance and patient care in remote regions. The effects of global climate change combined with rapid changes to land cover and use in Amazonia are believed to be contributing to the spread of vector-borne emerging and neglected diseases. This makes empowering and providing support for local healthcare providers all the more important. We investigate the use of information technology in this context to support professionals whose activities range from diagnosing diseases and monitoring their spread to developing policies to deal with outbreaks. An analysis of stakeholders, their roles and requirements, is presented which encompasses results of fieldwork and of a process of design and prototyping complemented by questionnaires and targeted interviews. Findings are analysed with respect to the tasks of diagnosis, training of local healthcare professionals, and gathering, sharing and visualisation of data for purposes of epidemiological research and disease surveillance. Methodological issues regarding the elicitation of cooperation and collaboration requirements are discussed and implications are drawn with respect to the use of technology in tackling emerging and neglected diseases

OpenKnowledge at work: exploring centralized and decentralized information gathering in emergency contexts

Real-world experience teaches us that to manage emergencies, efficient crisis response coordination is crucial; ICT infrastructures are effective in supporting the people involved in such contexts, by supporting effective ways of interaction. They also should provide innovative means of communication and information management. At present, centralized architectures are mostly used for this purpose; however, alternative infrastructures based on the use of distributed information sources, are currently being explored, studied and analyzed. This paper aims at investigating the capability of a novel approach (developed within the European project OpenKnowledge1) to support centralized as well as decentralized architectures for information gathering. For this purpose we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled and simulated. Preliminary results show the OpenKnowledge capability of supporting the two afore-mentioned architectures and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases

Uptake of inter-organizational IT systems in two Australian agricultural cooperatives: a match between business relationships and design features

In this paper we will advance a perspective that links business network analysis to interorganizational IT systems(IOS) uptake, starting with an analytic framework to characterize both different types of electronic business to business interactions (via the web) as well as the network of business relationships in which they are used. In order to see whether inter-organizational IT systems and business networks (mis)match they are compared on two dimensions: 'mode of interaction' (relational versus transactional) and 'nature of coordination' (emergent versus directive). The study analyses two Australian agricultural cooperatives 'Capgrains' and 'Bluegum'. The transactional focus and directive control of Capgrains' online ordering system did not match with the relational interaction and emergent coordination that was common in their network of business relationships, resulting in a mismatch and low level of use of the system. The Bluegum's group communication system much better matched with the business relationships in the cooperative and higher use of the IOS. Indicating a positive relation betweenmatch and uptake of the IOS

Social Capital, Institutions and Collective Action Between Firms

This work is based on the hypothesis that explanation of collective action between firms requires partly different variables from that used in explaining collective action between individuals. In order to look at the problem of what determines collective action, a model has been built using alongside social capital, the historical tradition of collective action and the activism of institutional actors as explicative variables of associationism between firms. The empirical results confirm the theoretical hypotheses put forward in the first part of the paper. First, social capital, institutional activism and experience accumulation, all together, enhance the propensity to collective action between firms. Each variable plays a significant role in explaining inter-firm co-operation. Secondly, these variables, however, affect the behaviour of small firms while the large ones appear to follow a different pattern of conduct. Thirdly, the empirical findings seem also to suggest that social capital and institutional proactive initiative produce synergic effects on collective action. The two variables reinforce each other in their effects on co-operation. Finally, the positive correlation between social capital and institutional initiative emerging from the empirical results suggests that an increase in the endowment of social capital tends to rise the level of institutional activity and the other way round.social capital, economic institutions, firms co-operation

Technical Report: Cooperative Multi-Target Localization With Noisy Sensors

This technical report is an extended version of the paper 'Cooperative Multi-Target Localization With Noisy Sensors' accepted to the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). This paper addresses the task of searching for an unknown number of static targets within a known obstacle map using a team of mobile robots equipped with noisy, limited field-of-view sensors. Such sensors may fail to detect a subset of the visible targets or return false positive detections. These measurement sets are used to localize the targets using the Probability Hypothesis Density, or PHD, filter. Robots communicate with each other on a local peer-to-peer basis and with a server or the cloud via access points, exchanging measurements and poses to update their belief about the targets and plan future actions. The server provides a mechanism to collect and synthesize information from all robots and to share the global, albeit time-delayed, belief state to robots near access points. We design a decentralized control scheme that exploits this communication architecture and the PHD representation of the belief state. Specifically, robots move to maximize mutual information between the target set and measurements, both self-collected and those available by accessing the server, balancing local exploration with sharing knowledge across the team. Furthermore, robots coordinate their actions with other robots exploring the same local region of the environment.Comment: Extended version of paper accepted to 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA

Mississippi River Water Quality and the Clean Water Act: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities

Makes recommendations for how to coordinate water quality monitoring efforts among the ten states through which the Mississippi River runs. Discusses the Clean Water Act's successes and failures in reducing pollution