Digital implementation of the cellular sensor-computers

Two different kinds of cellular sensor-processor architectures are used nowadays in various applications. The first is the traditional sensor-processor architecture, where the sensor and the processor arrays are mapped into each other. The second is the foveal architecture, in which a small active fovea is navigating in a large sensor array. This second architecture is introduced and compared here. Both of these architectures can be implemented with analog and digital processor arrays. The efficiency of the different implementation types, depending on the used CMOS technology, is analyzed. It turned out, that the finer the technology is, the better to use digital implementation rather than analog

Dissemination of evidence-based standards of care.

Standards of care pertain to crafting and implementing patient-centered treatment interventions. Standards of care must take into consideration the patient's gender, ethnicity, medical and dental history, insurance coverage (or socioeconomic level, if a private patient), and the timeliness of the targeted scientific evidence. This resolves into a process by which clinical decision-making about the optimal patient-centered treatment relies on the best available research evidence, and all other necessary inputs and factors to provide the best possible treatment. Standards of care must be evidence-based, and not merely based on the evidence - the dichotomy being critical in contemporary health services research and practice. Evidence-based standards of care must rest on the best available evidence that emerges from a concerted hypothesis-driven process of research synthesis and meta-analysis. Health information technology needs to become an every-day reality in health services research and practice to ensure evidence-based standards of care. Current trends indicate that user-friendly methodologies, for the dissemination of evidence-based standards of care, must be developed, tested and distributed. They should include approaches for the quantification and analysis of the textual content of systematic reviews and of their summaries in the form of critical reviews and lay-language summaries

A Guide to Distributed Digital Preservation

This volume is devoted to the broad topic of distributed digital preservation, a still-emerging field of practice for the cultural memory arena. Replication and distribution hold out the promise of indefinite preservation of materials without degradation, but establishing effective organizational and technical processes to enable this form of digital preservation is daunting. Institutions need practical examples of how this task can be accomplished in manageable, low-cost ways."--P. [4] of cove

Enhancing the environmental sustainability of IT

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring green I

ToPoliNano: Nanoarchitectures Design Made Real

Many facts about emerging nanotechnologies are yet to be assessed. There are still major concerns, for instance, about maximum achievable device density, or about which architecture is best fit for a specific application. Growing complexity requires taking into account many aspects of technology, application and architecture at the same time. Researchers face problems that are not new per se, but are now subject to very different constraints, that need to be captured by design tools. Among the emerging nanotechnologies, two-dimensional nanowire based arrays represent promising nanostructures, especially for massively parallel computing architectures. Few attempts have been done, aimed at giving the possibility to explore architectural solutions, deriving information from extensive and reliable nanoarray characterization. Moreover, in the nanotechnology arena there is still not a clear winner, so it is important to be able to target different technologies, not to miss the next big thing. We present a tool, ToPoliNano, that enables such a multi-technological characterization in terms of logic behavior, power and timing performance, area and layout constraints, on the basis of specific technological and topological descriptions. This tool can aid the design process, beside providing a comprehensive simulation framework for DC and timing simulations, and detailed power analysis. Design and simulation results will be shown for nanoarray-based circuits. ToPoliNano is the first real design tool that tackles the top down design of a circuit based on emerging technologie

Configurable 3D-integrated focal-plane sensor-processor array architecture

A mixed-signal Cellular Visual Microprocessor architecture with digital processors is described. An ASIC implementation is also demonstrated. The architecture is composed of a regular sensor readout circuit array, prepared for 3D face-to-face type integration, and one or several cascaded array of mainly identical (SIMD) processing elements. The individual array elements derived from the same general HDL description and could be of different in size, aspect ratio, and computing resources

Experimental Methods in IIR: The Tension between Rigour and Ethics in Studies Involving Users with Dyslexia

Designing user studies in the interactive information retrieval (IIR) paradigm on people with impairments may sometimes require different methodological considerations than for other users. Consequently, there may be a tension between what the community regards as being a rigorous methodology against what researchers can do ethically with their users. This paper discusses issues to consider when designing IIR studies involving people with dyslexia, such as sampling, informed consent and data collection. The conclusion is that conducting user studies on participants with dyslexia requires special considerations at all stages of the experimental design. The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness and understanding in the research community about experimental methods involving users with dyslexia, and addresses researchers, as well as editors and reviewers. Several of the issues raised do not only apply to people with dyslexia, but have implications when researching other groups, for instance elderly people and users with learning, cognitive, sensory or motor impairments

Information access tasks and evaluation for personal lifelogs

Emerging personal lifelog (PL) collections contain permanent digital records of information associated with individuals’ daily lives. This can include materials such as emails received and sent, web content and other documents with which they have interacted, photographs, videos and music experienced passively or created, logs of phone calls and text messages, and also personal and contextual data such as location (e.g. via GPS sensors), persons and objects present (e.g. via Bluetooth) and physiological state (e.g. via biometric sensors). PLs can be collected by individuals over very extended periods, potentially running to many years. Such archives have many potential applications including helping individuals recover partial forgotten information, sharing experiences with friends or family, telling the story of one’s life, clinical applications for the memory impaired, and fundamental psychological investigations of memory. The Centre for Digital Video Processing (CDVP) at Dublin City University is currently engaged in the collection and exploration of applications of large PLs. We are collecting rich archives of daily life including textual and visual materials, and contextual context data. An important part of this work is to consider how the effectiveness of our ideas can be measured in terms of metrics and experimental design. While these studies have considerable similarity with traditional evaluation activities in areas such as information retrieval and summarization, the characteristics of PLs mean that new challenges and questions emerge. We are currently exploring the issues through a series of pilot studies and questionnaires. Our initial results indicate that there are many research questions to be explored and that the relationships between personal memory, context and content for these tasks is complex and fascinating

Digital communities: context for leading learning into the future?

In 2011, a robust, on-campus, three-element Community of Practice model consisting of growing community, sharing of practice and building domain knowledge was piloted in a digital learning environment. An interim evaluation of the pilot study revealed that the three-element framework, when used in a digital environment, required a fourth element. This element, which appears to happen incidentally in the face-to-face context, is that of reflecting, reporting and revising. This paper outlines the extension of the pilot study to the national tertiary education context in order to explore the implications for the design, leadership roles, and selection of appropriate technologies to support and sustain digital communities using the four-element model