De-ossifying the Internet Transport Layer : A Survey and Future Perspectives

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions and comments.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Tools and collaborative environments for bioinformatics research

Advanced research requires intensive interaction among a multitude of actors, often possessing different expertise and usually working at a distance from each other. The field of collaborative research aims to establish suitable models and technologies to properly support these interactions. In this article, we first present the reasons for an interest of Bioinformatics in this context by also suggesting some research domains that could benefit from collaborative research. We then review the principles and some of the most relevant applications of social networking, with a special attention to networks supporting scientific collaboration, by also highlighting some critical issues, such as identification of users and standardization of formats. We then introduce some systems for collaborative document creation, including wiki systems and tools for ontology development, and review some of the most interesting biological wikis. We also review the principles of Collaborative Development Environments for software and show some examples in Bioinformatics. Finally, we present the principles and some examples of Learning Management Systems. In conclusion, we try to devise some of the goals to be achieved in the short term for the exploitation of these technologies

Information Technologies for the Healthcare Delivery System

That modern healthcare requires information technology to be efficient and fully effective is evident if one spends any time observing the delivery of institutional health care. Consider the observation of a practitioner of the discipline, David M. Eddy, MD, PhD, voiced in Clinical Decision Making, JAMA 263:1265-75, 1990, . . .All confirm what would be expected from common sense: The complexity of modern medicine exceeds the inherent limitations of the unaided human mind. The goal of this thesis is to identify the technological factors that are required to enable a fully sufficient application of information technology (IT) to the modern institutional practice of medicine. Perhaps the epitome of healthcare IT is the fully integrated, fully electronic patient medical record. Although, in 1991 the Institute of Medicine called for such a record to be standard technology by 2001, it has still not materialized. The author will argue that some of the technology and standards that are pre-requisite for this achievement have now arrived, while others are still evolving to fully sufficient levels. The paper will concentrate primarily on the health care system in the United States, although much of what is contained is applicable to a large degree, around the world. The paper will illustrate certain of these pre-requisite IT factors by discussing the actual installation of a major health care computer system at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) in Rochester, New York. This system is a Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS). As the name implies, PACS is a system of capturing health care images in digital format, storing them and communicating them to users throughout the enterprise

Developing a mental health eClinic to improve access to and quality of mental health care for young people: Using participatory design as research methodologies

Background: Each year, many young Australians aged between 16 and 25 years experience a mental health disorder, yet only a small proportion access services and even fewer receive timely and evidence-based treatments. Today, with ever-increasing access to the Internet and use of technology, the potential to provide all young people with access (24 hours a day, 7 days a week) to the support they require to improve their mental health and well-being is promising. Objective: The aim of this study was to use participatory design (PD) as research methodologies with end users (young people aged between 16 and 25 years and youth health professionals) and our research team to develop the Mental Health eClinic (a Web-based mental health clinic) to improve timely access to, and better quality, mental health care for young people across Australia. Methods: A research and development (R&D) cycle for the codesign and build of the Mental Health eClinic included several iterative PD phases: PD workshops; translation of knowledge and ideas generated during workshops to produce mockups of webpages either as hand-drawn sketches or as wireframes (simple layout of a webpage before visual design and content is added); rapid prototyping; and one-on-one consultations with end users to assess the usability of the alpha build of the Mental Health eClinic. Results: Four PD workshops were held with 28 end users (young people n=18, youth health professionals n=10) and our research team (n=8). Each PD workshop was followed by a knowledge translation session. At the conclusion of this cycle, the alpha prototype was built, and one round of one-on-one end user consultation sessions was conducted (n=6; all new participants, young people n=4, youth health professionals n=2). The R&D cycle revealed the importance of five key components for the Mental Health eClinic: a home page with a visible triage system for those requiring urgent help; a comprehensive online physical and mental health assessment; a detailed dashboard of results; a booking and videoconferencing system to enable video visits; and the generation of a personalized well-being plan that includes links to evidence-based, and health professional–recommended, apps and etools. Conclusions: The Mental Health eClinic provides health promotion, triage protocols, screening, assessment, a video visit system, the development of personalized well-being plans, and self-directed mental health support for young people. It presents a technologically advanced and clinically efficient system that can be adapted to suit a variety of settings in which there is an opportunity to connect with young people. This will enable all young people, and especially those currently not able or willing to connect with face-to-face services, to receive best practice clinical services by breaking down traditional barriers to care and making health care more personalized, accessible, affordable, and available

Mining User-generated Content of Mobile Patient Portal: Dimensions of User Experience

Patient portals are positioned as a central component of patient engagement through the potential to change the physician-patient relationship and enable chronic disease self-management. The incorporation of patient portals provides the promise to deliver excellent quality, at optimized costs, while improving the health of the population. This study extends the existing literature by extracting dimensions related to the Mobile Patient Portal Use. We use a topic modeling approach to systematically analyze users’ feedback from the actual use of a common mobile patient portal, Epic’s MyChart. Comparing results of Latent Dirichlet Allocation analysis with those of human analysis validated the extracted topics. Practically, the results provide insights into adopting mobile patient portals, revealing opportunities for improvement and to enhance the design of current basic portals. Theoretically, the findings inform the social-technical systems and Task-Technology Fit theories in the healthcare field and emphasize important healthcare structural and social aspects. Further, findings inform the humanization of healthcare framework, support the results of existing studies, and introduce new important design dimensions (i.e., aspects) that influence patient satisfaction and adherence to patient portal

Web collaboration for software engineering

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Towards Trouble-Free Networks for End Users

Network applications and Internet services fail all too frequently. However, end users cannot effectively identify the root cause using traditional troubleshooting techniques due to the limited capability to distinguish failures caused by local network elements from failures caused by elements located outside the local area network. To overcome these limitations, we propose a new approach, one that leverages collaboration of user machines to assist end users in diagnosing various failures related to Internet connectivity and poor network performance. First, we present DYSWIS ("Do You See What I See?"), an automatic network fault detection and diagnosis system for end users. DYSWIS identifies the root cause(s) of network faults using diagnostic rules that consider diverse information from multiple nodes. In addition, the DYSWIS rule system is specially designed to support crowdsourced and distributed probes. We also describe the architecture of DYSWIS and compare its performance with other tools. Finally, we demonstrate that the system successfully detects and diagnoses network failures which are difficult to diagnose using a single-user probe. Failures in lower layers of the protocol stack also have the potential to disrupt Internet access; for example, slow Internet connectivity is often caused by poor Wi-Fi performance. Channel contention and non-Wi-Fi interference are the primary reasons for this performance degradation. We investigate the characteristics of non-Wi-Fi interference that can severely degrade Wi-Fi performance and present WiSlow ("Why is my Wi-Fi slow?"), a software tool that diagnoses the root causes of poor Wi-Fi performance. WiSlow employs user-level network probes and leverages peer collaboration to identify the physical location of these causes. The software includes two principal methods: packet loss analysis and 802.11 ACK number analysis. When the issue is located near Wi-Fi devices, the accuracy of WiSlow exceeds 90%. Finally, we expand our collaborative approach to the Internet of Things (IoT) and propose a platform for network-troubleshooting on home devices. This platform takes advantage of built-in technology common to modern devices --- multiple communication interfaces. For example, when a home device has a problem with an interface it sends a probe request to other devices using an alternative interface. The system then exploits cooperation of both internal devices and remote machines. We show that this approach is useful in home networks by demonstrating an application that contains actual diagnostic algorithms

The Virtual Astronomical Observatory: Re-engineering access to astronomical data

The US Virtual Astronomical Observatory was a software infrastructure and development project designed both to begin the establishment of an operational Virtual Observatory (VO) and to provide the US coordination with the international VO effort. The concept of the VO is to provide the means by which an astronomer is able to discover, access, and process data seamlessly, regardless of its physical location. This paper describes the origins of the VAO, including the predecessor efforts within the US National Virtual Observatory, and summarizes its main accomplishments. These accomplishments include the development of both scripting toolkits that allow scientists to incorporate VO data directly into their reduction and analysis environments and high-level science applications for data discovery, integration, analysis, and catalog cross-comparison. Working with the international community, and based on the experience from the software development, the VAO was a major contributor to international standards within the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. The VAO also demonstrated how an operational virtual observatory could be deployed, providing a robust operational environment in which VO services worldwide were routinely checked for aliveness and compliance with international standards. Finally, the VAO engaged in community outreach, developing a comprehensive web site with on-line tutorials, announcements, links to both US and internationally developed tools and services, and exhibits and hands-on training at annual meetings of the American Astronomical Society and through summer schools and community days. All digital products of the VAO Project, including software, documentation, and tutorials, are stored in a repository for community access. The enduring legacy of the VAO is an increasing expectation that new telescopes and facilities incorporate VO capabilities during the design of their data management systems

A Web-Based Collaborative Multimedia Presentation Document System

With the distributed and rapidly increasing volume of data and expeditious development of modern web browsers, web browsers have become a possible legitimate vehicle for remote interactive multimedia presentation and collaboration, especially for geographically dispersed teams. To our knowledge, although there are a large number of applications developed for these purposes, there are some drawbacks in prior work including the lack of interactive controls of presentation flows, general-purpose collaboration support on multimedia, and efficient and precise replay of presentations. To fill the research gaps in prior work, in this dissertation, we propose a web-based multimedia collaborative presentation document system, which models a presentation as media resources together with a stream of media events, attached to associated media objects. It represents presentation flows and collaboration actions in events, implements temporal and spatial scheduling on multimedia objects, and supports real-time interactive control of the predefined schedules. As all events are represented by simple messages with an object-prioritized approach, our platform can also support fine-grained precise replay of presentations. Hundreds of kilobytes could be enough to store the events in a collaborative presentation session for accurate replays, compared with hundreds of megabytes in screen recording tools with a pixel-based replay mechanism