Proposal to Strenghern Health Information System [HIS]

\ud The HMIS Program described in this document aims at improving and strengthening the current Health Management Information System (HMIS) in Tanzania, known as MTUHA. The consortium behind the HMIS Program is headed by the Ministry of Health & Social Welfare (MOHSW) and consists of the following additional partners; Ifakara Health Research and Development Centre, University of Dar es Salaam and the University of Oslo, representing national and international capacity in HMIS. The HMIS Program is linked to the Payment for performance (P4P) funding scheme which is initiated by the Norway Tanzania Partnership Initiative. The P4P has a focus on maternal and child health and relies upon quality indicators on performance in these areas from health facilities and districts. The provision of quality data and indicators on MDG 4 & 5 is therefore a key target for the HMIS Program. The chosen approach is, however, to derive these data from the HMIS and not to establish a separate data collection structure, hence the HMIS Program. Quality information by way of essential indicators, such as for monitoring the Millennium Development Goals 4 & 5, are crucial for health services delivery and program management as well as for M&E. Currently, however, the HMIS is not providing such needed data of sufficient completeness, timeliness and quality, leading health programs and funding agencies to establish their own structures for data collection, and thus creating fragmentation and adding to the problem. The HMIS Program aims at changing this negative trend and turning the HMIS into the key source of shared essential quality information in Tanzania by; focusing on action oriented use of information for management at each level of the health services and by providing timely quality information to all stakeholders, including all health programs and funding agencies in the HMIS strengthening process – making it an all-inclusive national process, focusing on capacity development; on-site support and facilitation, short courses and continuous education, building capacity in the MOHSW and establishing a national network of HMIS support, and by building on experience, methods and tools from Africa’s “best practices” HMIS, such as South Africa – and Zanzibar Within this proposal the aim is to carry out the HMIS strengthening process in 1/3 of the districts in the country, 7 regions, during the first 3 years. The objective, however, is to cover the entire country during the 5 years duration of the NTPI. By aiming at quick and tangible results, the expectation is that other funding agencies will join forces and thereby ensuring national coverage.\ud \u

D-SPACE4Cloud: A Design Tool for Big Data Applications

The last years have seen a steep rise in data generation worldwide, with the development and widespread adoption of several software projects targeting the Big Data paradigm. Many companies currently engage in Big Data analytics as part of their core business activities, nonetheless there are no tools and techniques to support the design of the underlying hardware configuration backing such systems. In particular, the focus in this report is set on Cloud deployed clusters, which represent a cost-effective alternative to on premises installations. We propose a novel tool implementing a battery of optimization and prediction techniques integrated so as to efficiently assess several alternative resource configurations, in order to determine the minimum cost cluster deployment satisfying QoS constraints. Further, the experimental campaign conducted on real systems shows the validity and relevance of the proposed method

Community Reclamation: the Hybrid Building

Reclamation of a city involves reusing abandoned buildings in conjunction with new construction. These negative spaces of disuse generated by a changing infrastructure are often overlooked or destroyed. If they are instead viewed as positive spaces for reuse, a city’s infrastructure and its residents can adapt and grow. Recognizing these newly positive spaces produces a chance to examine what social needs of the community are not being met. Pushing the modern concept of the hybrid building creates a unique opportunity; flexibility of use derived from flexibility of space. A community building can best serve the social needs of its residents by having the ability to adapt to changes in those needs

Broadcast scheduling for mobile advertising

We describe a broadcast scheduling system developed for a precision marketing firm specialized in location-sensitive permission-based mobile advertising using SMS (Short Message Service) text messaging. Text messages containing advertisements were sent to registered customers when they were shopping in one of two shopping centers in the vicinity of London. The ads typically contained a limited-time promotional offer. The company's problem was deciding which ads to send out to which customers at what particular time, given a limited capacity of broadcast time slots, while maximizing customer response and revenues from retailers paying for each ad broadcast. We solved the problem using integer programming with an interface in Microsoft Excel. The system significantly reduced the time required to schedule the broadcasts, and resulted both in increased customer response and revenues

Ontology-based metrics computation for business process analysis

Business Process Management (BPM) aims to support the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. Crucial within the BPM lifecycle is the analysis of deployed processes. Analysing business processes requires computing metrics that can help determining the health of business activities and thus the whole enterprise. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of reactivity and adaptation demanded by businesses. In this paper we argue and show how the use of Semantic Web technologies can increase to an important extent the level of automation for analysing business processes. We present a domain-independent ontological framework for Business Process Analysis (BPA) with support for automatically computing metrics. In particular, we define a set of ontologies for specifying metrics. We describe a domain-independent metrics computation engine that can interpret and compute them. Finally we illustrate and evaluate our approach with a set of general purpose metrics

Bounded Situation Calculus Action Theories

In this paper, we investigate bounded action theories in the situation calculus. A bounded action theory is one which entails that, in every situation, the number of object tuples in the extension of fluents is bounded by a given constant, although such extensions are in general different across the infinitely many situations. We argue that such theories are common in applications, either because facts do not persist indefinitely or because the agent eventually forgets some facts, as new ones are learnt. We discuss various classes of bounded action theories. Then we show that verification of a powerful first-order variant of the mu-calculus is decidable for such theories. Notably, this variant supports a controlled form of quantification across situations. We also show that through verification, we can actually check whether an arbitrary action theory maintains boundedness.Comment: 51 page