Ambulance Emergency Response Optimization in Developing Countries

The lack of emergency medical transportation is viewed as the main barrier to the access of emergency medical care in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). In this paper, we present a robust optimization approach to optimize both the location and routing of emergency response vehicles, accounting for uncertainty in travel times and spatial demand characteristic of LMICs. We traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, the sixth largest and third most densely populated city in the world, to conduct field research resulting in the collection of two unique datasets that inform our approach. This data is leveraged to develop machine learning methodologies to estimate demand for emergency medical services in a LMIC setting and to predict the travel time between any two locations in the road network for different times of day and days of the week. We combine our robust optimization and machine learning frameworks with real data to provide an in-depth investigation into three policy-related questions. First, we demonstrate that outpost locations optimized for weekday rush hour lead to good performance for all times of day and days of the week. Second, we find that significant improvements in emergency response times can be achieved by re-locating a small number of outposts and that the performance of the current system could be replicated using only 30% of the resources. Lastly, we show that a fleet of small motorcycle-based ambulances has the potential to significantly outperform traditional ambulance vans. In particular, they are able to capture three times more demand while reducing the median response time by 42% due to increased routing flexibility offered by nimble vehicles on a larger road network. Our results provide practical insights for emergency response optimization that can be leveraged by hospital-based and private ambulance providers in Dhaka and other urban centers in LMICs

Technical considerations towards mobile user QoE enhancement via Cloud interaction

This paper discusses technical considerations of a Cloud infrastructure which interacts with mobile devices in order to migrate part of the computational overhead from the mobile device to the Cloud. The aim of the interaction between the mobile device and the Cloud is the enhancement of parameters that affect the Quality of Experience (QoE) of the mobile end user through the offloading of computational aspects of demanding applications. This paper shows that mobile user’s QoE can be potentially enhanced by offloading computational tasks to the Cloud which incorporates a predictive context-aware mechanism to schedule delivery of content to the mobile end-user using a low-cost interaction model between the Cloud and the mobile user. With respect to the proposed enhancements, both the technical considerations of the cloud infrastructure are examined, as well as the interaction between the mobile device and the Cloud

From open resources to educational opportunity

Since MIT’s bold announcement of the OpenCourseWare initiative in 2001, the content of over 700 of its courses have been published on the Web and made available for free to the world. Important infrastructure initiatives have also been launched recently with a view to enabling the sustainable implementation of these educational programmes, through strengthening organizational capacity as well as through building open, standards‐based technology. Each of these initiatives point to a rich palette of transformational possibilities for education; together with the growing open source movement, they offer glimpses of a sustainable ecology of substantial and quality educational resources. This discussion piece will highlight some of the educational opportunity presented by MIT’s current information technology‐enabled educational agenda and related initiatives, along with their strategic underpinnings and implications. It will address various dimensions of their impact on the form and function of education. It will examine how these ambitious programmes achieve a vision characterized by an abundance of sustainable, transformative educational opportunities, not merely pervasive technology

Twelve Theses on Reactive Rules for the Web

Reactivity, the ability to detect and react to events, is an essential functionality in many information systems. In particular, Web systems such as online marketplaces, adaptive (e.g., recommender) systems, and Web services, react to events such as Web page updates or data posted to a server. This article investigates issues of relevance in designing high-level programming languages dedicated to reactivity on the Web. It presents twelve theses on features desirable for a language of reactive rules tuned to programming Web and Semantic Web applications

DIGITAL TEHNOLOGIES. AN OVERVIEW OF CURRENT EVOLUTIONS AND IMPACT

Various observers describe today's global economy as one in transition to aknowledge economy, as an extension of an information society. The transition requires thatthe rules and practices that determined success in the industrial economy need rewriting in aninterconnected, globalized economy where knowledge resources such as know-how andexpertise are as critical as other economic resources. According to analysts of the knowledgeeconomy, these rules need to be rewritten at the levels of firms and industries in terms ofknowledge management and at the level of public policy as knowledge policy or knowledge-related policy. The digital and ICT revolutions are twin revolutions. Information andcommunications technology (ICT) refers to a broad field encompassing computers,communications equipment and the services associated with them. It includes the telephone,cellular networks, satellite communication, broadcasting media and other forms ofcommunication.digital revolutions, communication equipment, broadcasting media

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Middleware architectures for the smart grid: A survey on the state-of-the-art, taxonomy and main open issues

The integration of small-scale renewable energy sources in the smart grid depends on several challenges that must be overcome. One of them is the presence of devices with very different characteristics present in the grid or how they can interact among them in terms of interoperability and data sharing. While this issue is usually solved by implementing a middleware layer among the available pieces of equipment in order to hide any hardware heterogeneity and offer the application layer a collection of homogenous resources to access lower levels, the variety and differences among them make the definition of what is needed in each particular case challenging. This paper offers a description of the most prominent middleware architectures for the smart grid and assesses the functionalities they have, considering the performance and features expected from them in the context of this application domain