The Neuroscience Information Framework: A Data and Knowledge Environment for Neuroscience

With support from the Institutes and Centers forming the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, we have designed and implemented a new initiative for integrating access to and use of Web-based neuroscience resources: the Neuroscience Information Framework. The Framework arises from the expressed need of the neuroscience community for neuroinformatic tools and resources to aid scientific inquiry, builds upon prior development of neuroinformatics by the Human Brain Project and others, and directly derives from the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroscience Database Gateway. Partnered with the Society, its Neuroinformatics Committee, and volunteer consultant-collaborators, our multi-site consortium has developed: (1) a comprehensive, dynamic, inventory of Web-accessible neuroscience resources, (2) an extended and integrated terminology describing resources and contents, and (3) a framework accepting and aiding concept-based queries. Evolving instantiations of the Framework may be viewed at http://nif.nih.gov, http://neurogateway.org, and other sites as they come on line

How do medical researchers make causal inferences?

Bradford Hill (1965) highlighted nine aspects of the complex evidential situation a medical researcher faces when determining whether a causal relation exists between a disease and various conditions associated with it. These aspects are widely cited in the literature on epidemiological inference as justifying an inference to a causal claim, but the epistemological basis of the Hill aspects is not understood. We offer an explanatory coherentist interpretation, explicated by Thagard's ECHO model of explanatory coherence. The ECHO model captures the complexity of epidemiological inference and provides a tractable model for inferring disease causation. We apply this model to three cases: the inference of a causal connection between the Zika virus and birth defects, the classic inference that smoking causes cancer, and John Snow’s inference about the cause of cholera

A Semantic IoT Early Warning System for Natural Environment Crisis Management

This work was supported in part by the European FP7 Funded Project TRIDEC under Grant 258723, the other project partners in helping to deliver the complete project Syste, in particular, GFZ, and the German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany. The work of R. Tao was supported by the Queen Mary University of London for a Ph.D. studentship

A Semantic loT Early Warning System for Natural Environment Crisis Management

An early warning system (EWS) is a core type of data driven Internet of Things (IoTs) system used for environment disaster risk and effect management. The potential benefits of using a semantic-type EWS include easier sensor and data source plug-and-play, simpler, richer, and more dynamic metadata-driven data analysis and easier service interoperability and orchestration. The challenges faced during practical deployments of semantic EWSs are the need for scalable time-sensitive data exchange and processing (especially involving heterogeneous data sources) and the need for resilience to changing ICT resource constraints in crisis zones. We present a novel IoT EWS system framework that addresses these challenges, based upon a multisemantic representation model.We use lightweight semantics for metadata to enhance rich sensor data acquisition.We use heavyweight semantics for top level W3CWeb Ontology Language ontology models describing multileveled knowledge-bases and semantically driven decision support and workflow orchestration. This approach is validated through determining both system related metrics and a case study involving an advanced prototype system of the semantic EWS, integrated with a reployed EWS infrastructure

Creating Value By Object Hyperlinking Along The Consumer Buying Decision Process In The IoT Era

Within the IoT scope, a new application named ‘object hyperlinking’ has evolved. Object hyperlinking is the pervasive presence of different things or objects identified by tags, sensors, and mobile phones that can interact with each other as well as with their neighbors through unique addressing schemes for business purpose. Enabled by Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) technologies such as QR code and NFC, object hyperlinking services make it possible link any object or location to a more comprehensive and editable information. While tagging technologies have good prospects to offer more opportunities in a company’s interaction with its consumers, how this capability can be best applied and what innovative business services be created with object hyperlinking remain to be discovered. This study surveys and examines 76 projects of object hyperlinking in Taiwan and provides a framework to figure out business value and issues of object hyperlinking along the five stages of a consumer buying decision process. Based on the functionality and purpose of object hyperlinking services, this framework is conducted in dimensions of value creation, value orientation, functionality, key factor and challenges, key activities within organization, and managerial issues concerned. Some innovative business models enabled by object hyperlinking will also be introduced. The research results found that only when the information gathered by identified objects is used, analyzed, and distributed into wide business activities in term of marketing, customer service and firm level strategy planning, the effectiveness and value of object hyperlinking services can be realized at its maximum. The integration across different consumer buying decision process is also important. The more applications of object hyperlinking in different buying decisions, the more benefits will be created for customers. Managers can use the list of dimensions proposed in the framework to develop rich IoT business from enhancing service operations with object hyperlinking

Editing Team: Markus Fiedler

and contributions of the FIA community on the important research topics that should be addressed for the Framework Programme 8 research programmes broadly grouped around three main concerns; economic and business interests; societal interests and challenges; technical disruptions and capabilities. The contents of this roadmap originate with the community of researchers working on all aspects of the Future Internet and meet to share and discuss ideas through the Future Internet Assembly through an open consultation of research projects who participate in FIA. This roadmap is primarily concerned with identifying research that can be carried out in the second half of this decade and which will have an impact in 2020 and beyond. By ‘impact ’ we mean will result in products, services, systems, capabilities, that come to market and are available and deployed in that timeframe The approach adopted in this report is to integrate contributions across the entire space of future Internet research with the aim of bringing out the vision for how and where the Internet will make a significant difference in the future and identifying the broad challenges and gaps, and identifying the solutions and research needs in the future. In this report we have summarised and grouped ideas with the aim of identifying the strong themes and consistent challenges that emerge looking acros

Community-Engaged Development of a Parent-Child Book Reading Wise Intervention

Children living in communities with high rates of poverty experience significant detriment to their academic skills and social, emotional, and behavioral health. Though a range of evidence-based interventions exist that aim to reduce these disparities, they face substantial barriers (e.g., related to financial and human resources, opportunity cost to target families, variable fit across the diverse populations in low-income households). In contrast, wise interventions use psychologically precise pathways to produce small, recursive changes that result in significant benefits. As such, they represent a resource efficient strategy with the potential for considerable impact with contextual adaptation. The current study utilized social marketing research strategies in the context of an academic-community partnership to design, iteratively refine, and examine an emotion-enhanced children’s book – or picture book infused with opportunities to label and explain character emotions – as a wise intervention based in parent-child book reading, an especially warm and nurturing form of parent-child interaction. We employed the Social Marketing Assessment and Response Tool (SMART Model) to guide intervention development and evaluation. In SMART Phases 2-4 (Formative Research), end-users (n=14) completed surveys on basic demographic information, mental health, current beliefs about joint book reading and ongoing practices, and perspectives and response styles to children’s emotions. We then engaged participants in focus groups and interviews to obtain insights regarding the perceived need and preferred characteristics of the proposed intervention. Feedback informed the design of prototype components (i.e., book characters and storylines) that we presented to both new and returning end-users (n=10) for feedback in SMART Phase 5 (Development) pre-testing. Stakeholders (i.e., end-users) again completed surveys on basic demographic information, mental health, current beliefs about joint book reading and ongoing practices, and perspectives and response styles to children’s emotions, and participated in interviews to provide additional feedback. Results from Phase 5 pre-testing informed iterative refinement, and a completed intervention was evaluated by a broad audience via an online survey (n=31) to examine acceptability, usability, and perceived effectiveness

A flexible service selection for executing virtual services

[EN] With the adoption of a service-oriented paradigm on the Web, many software services are likely to fulfil similar functional needs for end-users. We propose to aggregate functionally equivalent software services within one single virtual service, that is, to associate a functionality, a graphical user interface (GUI), and a set of selection rules. When an end user invokes such a virtual service through its GUI to answer his/her functional need, the software service that best responds to the end-user s selection policy is selected and executed and the result is then rendered to the end-user through the GUI of the virtual service. A key innovation in this paper is the flexibility of our proposed service selection policy. First, each selection policy can refer to heterogeneous parameters (e.g., service price, end-user location, and QoS). Second, additional parameters can be added to an existing or new policy with little investment. Third, the end users themselves define a selection policy to apply during the selection process, thanks to the GUI element added as part of the virtual service design. This approach was validated though the design, implementation, and testing of an end-to-end architecture, including the implementation of several virtual services and utilizing several software services available today on the Web.This work was partially supported in part by SERVERY (Service Platform for Innovative Communication Environment), a CELTIC project that aims to create a Service Marketplace that bridges the Internet and Telco worlds by merging the flexibility and openness of the former with the trustworthiness and reliability of the latter, enabling effective and profitable cooperation among actors.Laga, N.; Bertin, E.; Crespi, N.; Bedini, I.; Molina Moreno, B.; Zhao, Z. (2013). A flexible service selection for executing virtual services. 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