INSPIRAL: investigating portals for information resources and learning. Final project report

INSPIRAL's aims were to identify and analyse, from the perspective of the UK HE learner, the nontechnical, institutional and end-user issues with regard to linking VLEs and digital libraries, and to make recommendations for JISC strategic planning and investment. INSPIRAL's objectives -To identify key stakeholders with regard to the linkage of VLEs, MLEs and digital libraries -To identify key stakeholder forum points and dissemination routes -To identify the relevant issues, according to the stakeholders and to previous research, pertaining to the interaction (both possible and potential) between VLEs/MLEs and digital libraries -To critically analyse identified issues, based on stakeholder experience and practice; output of previous and current projects; and prior and current research -To report back to JISC and to the stakeholder communities, with results situated firmly within the context of JISC's strategic aims and objectives

Greening information management: final report

As the recent JISC report on ‘the ‘greening’ of ICT in education [1] highlights, the increasing reliance on ICT to underpin the business functions of higher education institutions has a heavy environmental impact, due mainly to the consumption of electricity to run computers and to cool data centres. While work is already under way to investigate how more energy efficient ICT can be introduced, to date there has been much less focus on the potential environmental benefits to be accrued from reducing the demand ‘at source’ through better data and information management. JISC thus commissioned the University of Strathclyde to undertake a study to gather evidence that establishes the efficacy of using information management options as components of Green ICT strategies within UK Higher Education environments, and to highlight existing practices which have the potential for wider replication

The network structure of visited locations according to geotagged social media photos

Businesses, tourism attractions, public transportation hubs and other points of interest are not isolated but part of a collaborative system. Making such collaborative network surface is not always an easy task. The existence of data-rich environments can assist in the reconstruction of collaborative networks. They shed light into how their members operate and reveal a potential for value creation via collaborative approaches. Social media data are an example of a means to accomplish this task. In this paper, we reconstruct a network of tourist locations using fine-grained data from Flickr, an online community for photo sharing. We have used a publicly available set of Flickr data provided by Yahoo! Labs. To analyse the complex structure of tourism systems, we have reconstructed a network of visited locations in Europe, resulting in around 180,000 vertices and over 32 million edges. An analysis of the resulting network properties reveals its complex structure.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure

ConfidentCare: A Clinical Decision Support System for Personalized Breast Cancer Screening

Breast cancer screening policies attempt to achieve timely diagnosis by the regular screening of apparently healthy women. Various clinical decisions are needed to manage the screening process; those include: selecting the screening tests for a woman to take, interpreting the test outcomes, and deciding whether or not a woman should be referred to a diagnostic test. Such decisions are currently guided by clinical practice guidelines (CPGs), which represent a one-size-fits-all approach that are designed to work well on average for a population, without guaranteeing that it will work well uniformly over that population. Since the risks and benefits of screening are functions of each patients features, personalized screening policies that are tailored to the features of individuals are needed in order to ensure that the right tests are recommended to the right woman. In order to address this issue, we present ConfidentCare: a computer-aided clinical decision support system that learns a personalized screening policy from the electronic health record (EHR) data. ConfidentCare operates by recognizing clusters of similar patients, and learning the best screening policy to adopt for each cluster. A cluster of patients is a set of patients with similar features (e.g. age, breast density, family history, etc.), and the screening policy is a set of guidelines on what actions to recommend for a woman given her features and screening test scores. ConfidentCare algorithm ensures that the policy adopted for every cluster of patients satisfies a predefined accuracy requirement with a high level of confidence. We show that our algorithm outperforms the current CPGs in terms of cost-efficiency and false positive rates

Evaluation of the National Parks Sustainable Development Fund

The Sustainable Development Fund (SDF) is a new pilot funding stream for English National Park Authorities and the Broads Authority (henceforth collectively NPAs or ‘Parks’), launched in July 2002 by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The aim is to provide a flexible and non-bureaucratic means of funding projects that “aid the achievement of National Park purposes by encouraging individuals, community groups and businesses to cooperate together to develop practical sustainable solutions to the management of their activities”. SDF is a novel and unique funding stream intended to support original and innovative projects. Although the funding is relatively small (some £2.6m or £325,000 per park over the 18 months to this report) the aim is ambitious; with a minimum of preconceptions or formalities, to “develop and test new ways of achieving a more sustainable way of living in the countryside”. In each Park, small SDF Panels, serviced by, but at arms length from, the NPA have been established to oversee delivery of the Fund, to foster innovative projects and to monitor their outcomes at Park level. The SDF Prospectus declares that monitoring and evaluation are to involve a “very light touch regime”.. Auditing of individual projects by the SDF panel is to be achieved mainly by maintaining close contact with the projects as they develop. Whilst responsibility may be delegated, panel members are encouraged to take a personal interest in projects. Each NPA is required to submit to the Minister of State for Rural Affairs (and to copy to the Countryside Agency) an annual report. This should summarise the performance of the fund against performance indicators which are to be developed by NPAs themselves in the light of experience of the fund. First Annual Reports must be submitted to the Minister of State for Rural Affairs (and copied to the Countryside Agency) at the end of March 2004 NPAs are encouraged to learn from the experience of delivering the Fund and to promote the results to a wider rural audience. In addition to this Park level monitoring, the Countryside Agency (CA) on behalf of Defra has commissioned the Centre for European Protected Area Research (CEPAR) to conduct an evaluation of how SDF has performed against its key objectives after the first eighteen months of its operation, to aid decisions about the future of the scheme from April 2005

Addendum to Informatics for Health 2017: Advancing both science and practice

This article presents presentation and poster abstracts that were mistakenly omitted from the original publication

Assessing collaborative learning: big data, analytics and university futures

Traditionally, assessment in higher education has focused on the performance of individual students. This focus has been a practical as well as an epistemic one: methods of assessment are constrained by the technology of the day, and in the past they required the completion by individuals under controlled conditions, of set-piece academic exercises. Recent advances in learning analytics, drawing upon vast sets of digitally-stored student activity data, open new practical and epistemic possibilities for assessment and carry the potential to transform higher education. It is becoming practicable to assess the individual and collective performance of team members working on complex projects that closely simulate the professional contexts that graduates will encounter. In addition to academic knowledge this authentic assessment can include a diverse range of personal qualities and dispositions that are key to the computer-supported cooperative working of professionals in the knowledge economy. This paper explores the implications of such opportunities for the purpose and practices of assessment in higher education, as universities adapt their institutional missions to address 21st Century needs. The paper concludes with a strong recommendation for university leaders to deploy analytics to support and evaluate the collaborative learning of students working in realistic contexts