Global Developments in Social Prescribing

Social prescribing is an approach that aims to improve health and well-being. It connects individuals to non-clinical services and supports that address social needs, such as those related to loneliness, housing instability and mental health. At the person level, social prescribing can give individuals the knowledge, skills, motivation and confidence to manage their own health and well-being. At the society level, it can facilitate greater collaboration across health, social, and community sectors to promote integrated care and move beyond the traditional biomedical model of health. While the term social prescribing was first popularised in the UK, this practice has become more prevalent and widely publicised internationally over the last decade. This paper aims to illuminate the ways social prescribing has been conceptualised and implemented across 17 countries in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America. We draw from the ‘Beyond the Building Blocks’ framework to describe the essential inputs for adopting social prescribing into policy and practice, related to service delivery; social determinants and household production of health; workforce; leadership and governance; financing, community organisations and societal partnerships; health technology; and information, learning and accountability. Cross-cutting lessons can inform country and regional efforts to tailor social prescribing models to best support local needs

Status of research at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE)

Research conducted at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering in applied mathematics, numerical analysis and computer science is summarized

Bi-directional transition nets

Ordinary Petri nets are forward directed transition systems. Modern transition systems events and event flows are reversible. Hence modeling structures that reflect this are important. The creation of a bi-directional Petri net extends the modeling power of Petri nets. This work presents the successful implementation of a bi-directional transition net. Some toy examples in comparison to Petri nets are given showing the increased modeling power in a compacted form. The results show some interesting findings on how the expressive power of these structures has been increased.peer-reviewe

The Logic of Time: from Aristotle to Computer Science

Charla tipo conferencia-seminario dada para alumnos de un másterThis short course will explore that continuous thread which connects the discussion about time in philosophy with the modern use of temporal logic in computer science. It will go through the history of temporal logic to show how ideas developed by ancient and medieval philosophy have been rediscovered in modern times and applied to solve relevant problems in computer science. Part 1: An historical perspective on temporal logic • Synthesis: the nature of time is a central issue of classical and medieval phylosophy • Downfall: in the Renaissance the subject loses interest and is removed from the philo- sophical discussion • Rediscovery: in the 19th and 20th centory temporal logic become a central issue again Part 2: Time in Computer Science • Algorithms, states and computations • Imperative programs and Reactive programs • Temporal Logic for Computer Science: CTL and LTL • The satisfiability problem • The model checking problemUniversidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The skewness of computer science

Computer science is a relatively young discipline combining science, engineering, and mathematics. The main flavors of computer science research involve the theoretical development of conceptual models for the different aspects of computing and the more applicative building of software artifacts and assessment of their properties. In the computer science publication culture, conferences are an important vehicle to quickly move ideas, and journals often publish deeper versions of papers already presented at conferences. These peculiarities of the discipline make computer science an original research field within the sciences, and, therefore, the assessment of classical bibliometric laws is particularly important for this field. In this paper, we study the skewness of the distribution of citations to papers published in computer science publication venues (journals and conferences). We find that the skewness in the distribution of mean citedness of different venues combines with the asymmetry in citedness of articles in each venue, resulting in a highly asymmetric citation distribution with a power law tail. Furthermore, the skewness of conference publications is more pronounced than the asymmetry of journal papers. Finally, the impact of journal papers, as measured with bibliometric indicators, largely dominates that of proceeding papers.Comment: I applied the goodness-of-fit methodology proposed in: A. Clauset, C. R. Shalizi, M. E. J. Newman. Power-law distributions in empirical data. SIAM Review 51, 661-703 (2009