Visions and Challenges in Managing and Preserving Data to Measure Quality of Life

Health-related data analysis plays an important role in self-knowledge, disease prevention, diagnosis, and quality of life assessment. With the advent of data-driven solutions, a myriad of apps and Internet of Things (IoT) devices (wearables, home-medical sensors, etc) facilitates data collection and provide cloud storage with a central administration. More recently, blockchain and other distributed ledgers became available as alternative storage options based on decentralised organisation systems. We bring attention to the human data bleeding problem and argue that neither centralised nor decentralised system organisations are a magic bullet for data-driven innovation if individual, community and societal values are ignored. The motivation for this position paper is to elaborate on strategies to protect privacy as well as to encourage data sharing and support open data without requiring a complex access protocol for researchers. Our main contribution is to outline the design of a self-regulated Open Health Archive (OHA) system with focus on quality of life (QoL) data.Comment: DSS 2018: Data-Driven Self-Regulating System

CRAID: Online RAID upgrades using dynamic hot data reorganization

Current algorithms used to upgrade RAID arrays typically require large amounts of data to be migrated, even those that move only the minimum amount of data required to keep a balanced data load. This paper presents CRAID, a self-optimizing RAID array that performs an online block reorganization of frequently used, long-term accessed data in order to reduce this migration even further. To achieve this objective, CRAID tracks frequently used, long-term data blocks and copies them to a dedicated partition spread across all the disks in the array. When new disks are added, CRAID only needs to extend this process to the new devices to redistribute this partition, thus greatly reducing the overhead of the upgrade process. In addition, the reorganized access patterns within this partition improve the array’s performance, amortizing the copy overhead and allowing CRAID to offer a performance competitive with traditional RAIDs. We describe CRAID’s motivation and design and we evaluate it by replaying seven real-world workloads including a file server, a web server and a user share. Our experiments show that CRAID can successfully detect hot data variations and begin using new disks as soon as they are added to the array. Also, the usage of a dedicated partition improves the sequentiality of relevant data access, which amortizes the cost of reorganizations. Finally, we prove that a full-HDD CRAID array with a small distributed partition (<1.28% per disk) can compete in performance with an ideally restriped RAID-5 and a hybrid RAID-5 with a small SSD cache.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

A review of the ecological effectiveness of subtidal marine reserves in Central California, Part I: Synopsis of scientific investigations

Marine reserves, often referred to as no-take MPAs, are defined as areas within which human activities that can result in the removal or alteration of biotic and abiotic components of an ecosystem are prohibited or greatly restricted (NRC 2001). Activities typically curtailed within a marine reserve are extraction of organisms (e.g., commercial and recreational fishing, kelp harvesting, commercial collecting), mariculture, and those activities that can alter oceanographic or geologic attributes of the habitat (e.g., mining, shore-based industrial-related intake and discharges of seawater and effluent). Usually, marine reserves are established to conserve biodiversity or enhance nearby fishery resources. Thus, goals and objectives of marine reserves can be inferred, even if they are not specifically articulated at the time of reserve formation. In this report, we review information about the effectiveness of the three marine reserves in the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary (Hopkins Marine Life Refuge, Point Lobos Ecological Reserve, Big Creek Ecological Reserve), and the one in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary (the natural area on the north side of East Anacapa Island). Our efforts to objectively evaluate reserves in Central California relative to reserve theory were greatly hampered for four primary reasons; (1) few of the existing marine reserves were created with clearly articulated goals or objectives, (2) relatively few studies of the ecological consequences of existing reserves have been conducted, (3) no studies to date encompass the spatial and temporal scope needed to identify ecosystem-wide effects of reserve protection, and (4) there are almost no studies that describe the social and economic consequences of existing reserves. To overcome these obstacles, we used several methods to evaluate the effectiveness of subtidal marine reserves in Central California. We first conducted a literature review to find out what research has been conducted in all marine reserves in Central California (Appendix 1). We then reviewed the scientific literature that relates to marine reserve theory to help define criteria to use as benchmarks for evaluation. A recent National Research Council (2001) report summarized expected reserve benefits and provided the criteria we used for evaluation of effectiveness. The next step was to identify the research projects in this region that collected information in a way that enabled us to evaluate reserve theory relative to marine reserves in Central California. Chapters 1-4 in this report provide summaries of those research projects. Contained within these chapters are evaluations of reserve effectiveness for meeting specific objectives. As few studies exist that pertain to reserve theory in Central California, we reviewed studies of marine reserves in other temperate and tropical ecosystems to determine if there were lessons to be learned from other parts of the world (Chapter 5). We also included a discussion of social and economic considerations germane to the public policy decision-making processes associated with marine reserves (Chapter 6). After reviewing all of these resources, we provided a summary of the ecological benefits that could be expected from existing reserves in Central California. The summary is presented in Part II of this report. (PDF contains 133 pages.

Planning for Density in a Driverless World

Automobile-centered, low-density development was the defining feature of population growth in the United States for decades. This development pattern displaced wildlife, destroyed habitat, and contributed to a national loss of biodiversity. It also meant, eventually, that commutes and air quality worsened, a sense of local character was lost in many places, and the negative consequences of sprawl impacted an increasing percentage of the population. Those impacts led to something of a shift in the national attitude toward sprawl. More people than ever are fluent in concepts of “smart growth,” “new urbanism,” and “green building,” and with these tools and others, municipalities across the country are working to redevelop a central core, rethink failing transit systems, and promote pockets of density. Changing technology may disrupt this trend. Self-driving vehicles are expected to be widespread within the next several decades. Those vehicles will likely reduce congestion, air pollution, and deaths, and free up huge amounts of productive time in the car. These benefits may also eliminate much of the conventional motivation and rationale behind sprawl reduction. As the time-cost of driving falls, driverless cars have the potential to incentivize human development of land that, by virtue of its distance from settled metropolitan areas, had been previously untouched. From the broader ecological perspective, each human surge into undeveloped land results in habitat destruction and fragmentation, and additional loss of biological diversity. New automobile technology may therefore usher in better air quality, increased safety, and a significant threat to ecosystem health. Our urban and suburban environments have been molded for centuries to the needs of various forms of transportation. The same result appears likely to occur in response to autonomous vehicles, if proactive steps are not taken to address their likely impacts. Currently, little planning is being done to prepare for driverless technology. Actors at multiple levels, however, have tools at their disposal to help ensure that new technology does not come at the expense of the nation’s remaining natural habitats. This Article advocates for a shift in paradigm from policies that are merely anti-car to those that are pro-density, and provides suggestions for both cities and suburban areas for how harness the positive aspects of driverless cars while trying to stem the negative. Planning for density regardless of technology will help to ensure that, for the world of the future, there is actually a world

Evaluation of the use and non-use benefits of public transport: report number 1 – development of a survey methodology

This paper reports on the development of a survey methodology to discover the value people place on the retention of local public transport services, both for their own expected use and as a standby, for the use of others or for the benefits in terms of reduced congestion, improved environment and accessibility they might bring. A survey of the literature suggested that numerous problems of potential bias would be faced. The most serious were likely to be strategic bias, starting point bias, information bias and social-norm bias. Other problems were choice of payment mechanism, how to obtain household rather than individual valuations and non-response bias. Initially a set of exploratory interviews were undertaken. These confirmed that people were able to understand the issues involved, but that they had difficulty particularly with open-ended willingness to pay questions and with assigning values to different types of benefit. They were also sensitive to the payment mechanism, being very hostile to the idea of a subscription scheme. Based on these interviews, attempts were made to design a self completion questionnaire. However, two major problems were encountered. One was the low level of response (20% or less). The second was evidence (confirmed by follow up interviews) of incomplete response, misunderstanding of questions and a failure to think through the full implications of the situations and responses postulated. This led us to develop a new technique, based on hand delivery and collection of a travel diary, which was used as a basis for a follow-up interview. This enabled the interview to be structured towards the unique circumstances of the individual, to explore the options available as alternatives to the existing mode, and to obtain use and non use values in the context of a detailed discussion of the use and importance of local bus services

An ontological approach for recovering legacy business content

Legacy Information Systems (LIS) pose a challenge for many organizations. On one hand, LIS are viewed as aging systems needing replacement; on the other hand, years of accumulated business knowledge have made these systems mission-critical. Current approaches however are often criticized for being overtly dependent on technology and ignoring the business knowledge which resides within LIS. In this light, this paper proposes a means of capturing the business knowledge in a technology agnostic manner and transforming it in a way that reaps the benefits of clear semantic expression - this transformation is achieved via the careful use of ontology. The approach called Content Sophistication (CS) aims to provide a model of the business that more closely adheres to the semantics and relationships of objects existing in the real world. The approach is illustrated via an example taken from a case study concerning the renovation of a large financial system and the outcome of the approach results in technology agnostic models that show improvements along several dimensions