2009 Government and Industry Pipeline R&D Forum Report

Nine government and industry organizations via a steering committee organized, planned and executed this forum. The forum brought together approximately 215 representatives from Federal, State and foreign government offices along with domestic and foreign natural gas and hazardous liquid pipeline operators. The forum’s goals included identifying key challenges facing industry and government, sharing information on current research efforts, and identifying research that can help to meet the challenges

A Biomedical Entity Extraction Pipeline for Oncology Health Records in Portuguese

Textual health records of cancer patients are usually protracted and highly unstructured, making it very time-consuming for health professionals to get a complete overview of the patient's therapeutic course. As such limitations can lead to suboptimal and/or inefficient treatment procedures, healthcare providers would greatly benefit from a system that effectively summarizes the information of those records. With the advent of deep neural models, this objective has been partially attained for English clinical texts, however, the research community still lacks an effective solution for languages with limited resources. In this paper, we present the approach we developed to extract procedures, drugs, and diseases from oncology health records written in European Portuguese. This project was conducted in collaboration with the Portuguese Institute for Oncology which, besides holding over $10$ years of duly protected medical records, also provided oncologist expertise throughout the development of the project. Since there is no annotated corpus for biomedical entity extraction in Portuguese, we also present the strategy we followed in annotating the corpus for the development of the models. The final models, which combined a neural architecture with entity linking, achieved $F_1$ scores of $88.6$, $95.0$, and $55.8$ per cent in the mention extraction of procedures, drugs, and diseases, respectively

META-NET Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020

In everyday communication, Europe’s citizens, business partners and politicians are inevitably confronted with language barriers. Language technology has the potential to overcome these barriers and to provide innovative interfaces to technologies and knowledge. This document presents a Strategic Research Agenda for Multilingual Europe 2020. The agenda was prepared by META-NET, a European Network of Excellence. META-NET consists of 60 research centres in 34 countries, who cooperate with stakeholders from economy, government agencies, research organisations, non-governmental organisations, language communities and European universities. META-NET’s vision is high-quality language technology for all European languages. “The research carried out in the area of language technology is of utmost importance for the consolidation of Portuguese as a language of global communication in the information society.” — Dr. Pedro Passos Coelho (Prime-Minister of Portugal) “It is imperative that language technologies for Slovene are developed systematically if we want Slovene to flourish also in the future digital world.” — Dr. Danilo Türk (President of the Republic of Slovenia) “For such small languages like Latvian keeping up with the ever increasing pace of time and technological development is crucial. The only way to ensure future existence of our language is to provide its users with equal opportunities as the users of larger languages enjoy. Therefore being on the forefront of modern technologies is our opportunity.” — Valdis Dombrovskis (Prime Minister of Latvia) “Europe’s inherent multilingualism and our scientific expertise are the perfect prerequisites for significantly advancing the challenge that language technology poses. META-NET opens up new opportunities for the development of ubiquitous multilingual technologies.” — Prof. Dr. Annette Schavan (German Minister of Education and Research

UNEARTHING THE PURPORTS OF TRUST IN AUTHORITIES AND POWER OF AUTHORITIES IN THE LATIN AMERICAN TAX CLIMATE

In tax behavior research field, two dimensions compiling the “slippery slope framework” are regarded as main drivers of compliance, i.e., perceived trust in authorities and perceived power of authorities. The former grasps citizens’ cognitions towards the efforts tax authorities render in benevolently supplying public goods. The latter covers general cognitions about authorities’ capacity of detecting and efficiently inflicting punishments on tax dodgers. Following interactions which involve both parties of the tax game, a society’s common good is secured through the ensued tax compliance level. Nevertheless, like any outcome depending on cooperation, compliance is frail. This happens mainly because authorities are called to mediate an ongoing clash between citizens who abide by legal prescriptions, through voluntary or enforced compliance, and citizens who eschew them if opportunities arise, through avoidance or evasion. Depending on the chosen mediation approach (trust-based or power-based), one type of compliance prevails over another. The present writing explores new insights of the framework’s chief dimensions within the perimeter of the Latin American interaction tax climate (viz. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru) by dint of economic, fiscal and psychological determinants. The proposed methodological apparatus ranges from operationalizing World Bank governance indicators (government effectiveness, rule of law, regulatory quality, control for corruption) as trust and power proxies, assessing economic growth through chain base indexes and rating ease of tax compliance based on reliable benchmarks (e.g., Paying Taxes indicators, shadow economy, corruption perceptions). The leading goal of the study is to make authorities, investors, international organizations and laypeople cognizant of the role trust in and power of authorities play for compliance levels reached in the Latin American tax climate. Grounding decision-making on comprehensive valuations of trust and power may prove cost-effective for any authority concerned with enacting the appropriate weighting of tax incentives and enforcement strategies in order to enhance compliance; it may urge taxpayers to match the actions of an equitable authority and cooperate; it may serve investors as a guide to determine the efficiency, credibility and stability of Latin American fiscal systems; it may assist financing international organizations to detect the possible risks and vulnerabilities of the relationship between authorities and taxpayers and evaluate the headway/regress registered by a particular country within this tax climate. In terms of trust, various countries in the region have implemented solid strategies to sustain competitiveness, infrastructure, innovation or health. In terms of power, several tax authorities are deemed as rather weak in mitigating noncompliance. Nevertheless, massive investments in infrastructure prove commitment in nixing evasion

What are the impacts and cost-effectiveness of strategies to improve performance of untrained and under-trained teachers in the classroom in developing countries?

What are the impacts and cost effectiveness of strategies to improve performance of untrained and under-trained teachers in the classroom in developing countries

Socialising around media. Improving the second screen experience through semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities

SAM is a social media platform that enhances the experience of watching video content in a conventional living room setting, with a service that lets the viewer use a second screen (such as a smart phone) to interact with content, context and communities related to the main video content. This article describes three key functionalities used in the SAM platform in order to create an advanced interactive and social second screen experience for users: semantic analysis, context awareness and dynamic communities. Both dataset-based and end user evaluations of system functionalities are reported in order to determine the effectiveness and efficiency of the components directly involved and the platform as a whole