Modeling, Simulation and Emulation of Intelligent Domotic Environments

Intelligent Domotic Environments are a promising approach, based on semantic models and commercially off-the-shelf domotic technologies, to realize new intelligent buildings, but such complexity requires innovative design methodologies and tools for ensuring correctness. Suitable simulation and emulation approaches and tools must be adopted to allow designers to experiment with their ideas and to incrementally verify designed policies in a scenario where the environment is partly emulated and partly composed of real devices. This paper describes a framework, which exploits UML2.0 state diagrams for automatic generation of device simulators from ontology-based descriptions of domotic environments. The DogSim simulator may simulate a complete building automation system in software, or may be integrated in the Dog Gateway, allowing partial simulation of virtual devices alongside with real devices. Experiments on a real home show that the approach is feasible and can easily address both simulation and emulation requirement

Public-Private Partnerships for Development: A Handbook for Business

CED partnered with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) on this publication, which is designed to help businesses operating in developing countries understand how to build public-private partnerships that will benefit their host country populations and the participating firms

Review and assessment of simplification measures in cohesion policy 2007-2013 : Report to policy department B: structural and cohesion policies

Simplification has been an ongoing feature of Cohesion policy reform debates since 1988, and the most recent simplification exercise responds to the economic crisis and involves measures for speeding up programme implementation. The study by John Bachtler and Carlos Mendez drew on an online survey of IQ-Net partners in May 2010 to assess their experience of individual simplification measures. The research also made extensive use of material from IQ-Net Review papers published over the past 18 months which have reported on the relevance and utility of the simplification exercise. The study found that these measures have been at least partially effective, with some programmes playing a major role in dealing with the crisis, through accelerated spending or special instruments. The longer term focus of attention is on how the current, administratively complex management and control system can be simplified while maintaining assurance on the regularity of spending

A Peer-to-Peer Middleware Framework for Resilient Persistent Programming

The persistent programming systems of the 1980s offered a programming model that integrated computation and long-term storage. In these systems, reliable applications could be engineered without requiring the programmer to write translation code to manage the transfer of data to and from non-volatile storage. More importantly, it simplified the programmer's conceptual model of an application, and avoided the many coherency problems that result from multiple cached copies of the same information. Although technically innovative, persistent languages were not widely adopted, perhaps due in part to their closed-world model. Each persistent store was located on a single host, and there were no flexible mechanisms for communication or transfer of data between separate stores. Here we re-open the work on persistence and combine it with modern peer-to-peer techniques in order to provide support for orthogonal persistence in resilient and potentially long-running distributed applications. Our vision is of an infrastructure within which an application can be developed and distributed with minimal modification, whereupon the application becomes resilient to certain failure modes. If a node, or the connection to it, fails during execution of the application, the objects are re-instantiated from distributed replicas, without their reference holders being aware of the failure. Furthermore, we believe that this can be achieved within a spectrum of application programmer intervention, ranging from minimal to totally prescriptive, as desired. The same mechanisms encompass an orthogonally persistent programming model. We outline our approach to implementing this vision, and describe current progress.Comment: Submitted to EuroSys 200

Group facilitation skills for participatory decision-making: report of a follow-up outcome evaluation

This working paper reports on an evaluation designed to assess the usefulness of the skills gained during the training course, if the skills learned have been applied and, if so, how the new facilitation tools and techniques have changed meeting processes. The evaluation also identified obstacles to the use of new skills faced by participants, additional follow-on activities that have been conducted by participants, and other related skills that are needed to complement what was learned in the ILAC facilitation course

Virtual Advice Services

The chapter looks at the issues involved with implementing and running a chat enquiry service, from choosing an appropriate product to staff training and publicity. The experiences of a number of UK Higher Education Institutions currently offering chat enquiry services are discussed at various stages. Aspects of more advanced use, such as web ‘co-browsing’ and virtual advice by appointment are also included. The chapter closes by considering what the future holds for virtual advice services and the potential impact of the growth in mobile technologies

The lender of last resort: a 21st century approach

The classical Bagehot’s conception of a Lender of Last Resort (LOLR) that lends to illiquid banks has been criticized on two grounds: on the one hand, the distinction between insolvency and illiquidity is not clear cut; on the other a fully collateralized repo market allows Central Banks to provide the adequate aggregated amount of liquidity and leave the responsibility of lending uncollateralized to the banks. The object of this paper is to analyze rigorously these issues by providing a framework where liquidity shocks cannot be distinguished from solvency ones and ask whether there is a need for a LOLR and how should it operate. Determining the optimal LOLR policy requires a careful modeling of the structure of the interbank market and of the closure policy. In our set up, the results depend upon the existence of moral hazard. If the main source of moral hazard is the banks’ lack of incentives to screen loans, then the LOLR may have to intervene to improve the e?ciency of an unsecured interbank market; if instead, the main source of moral hazard is loans monitoring, then the interbank market should be secured and the LOLR should never intervene. JEL Classification: E58, G28Interbank Market, Lender of Last Resort, Liquidity

A Primer on Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement for Interprofessional Chronic Kidney Disease Care: A Path to Joint Commission Certification.

Interprofessional care for chronic kidney disease facilitates the delivery of high quality, comprehensive care to a complex, at-risk population. Interprofessional care is resource intensive and requires a value proposition. Joint Commission certification is a voluntary process that improves patient outcomes, provides external validity to hospital administration and enhances visibility to patients and referring providers. This is a single-center, retrospective study describing quality assurance and performance improvement in chronic kidney disease, Joint Commission certification and quality outcomes. A total of 440 patients were included in the analysis. Thirteen quality indicators consisting of clinical and process of care indicators were developed and measured for a period of two years from 2009-2017. Significant improvements or at least persistently high performance were noted for key quality indicators such as blood pressure control (85%), estimation of cardiovascular risk (100%), measurement of hemoglobin A1c (98%), vaccination (93%), referrals for vascular access and transplantation (100%), placement of permanent dialysis access (61%), discussion of advanced directives (94%), online patient education (71%) and completion of office visit documentation (100%). High patient satisfaction scores (94-96%) are consistent with excellent quality of care provided