TECHNOLOGY SERVES THE PEOPLE The Story⋅ of a Co-operative Telemedicine Project by NASA, The Indian Health Service and the Papago People

This monograph is a documented history of the planning and development process of a major advanced telemedicine system call Space Technology Applied to Rural Papago Advanced Health Care (STARPAHC). This history was prepared to document basic processes. Projects such as STARPAHC usually result in volumes of technical system descriptions, evaluation reports and technical performance analyses. This report provides a good description of the high degree and quality of productive functional relationships developed among the participating agencies and the private sector.The project was conceived and sponsored by both the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) and Lockheed Missile and Space Company (LMSC). STARPAHC was not the first attempt to implement a telemedicine system in the United States. Ultimately, STARPAHC would provide a full communications range, two-way television, audio and data communications between the central station at Sells, Arizona on the Papago Reservation, and a fixed satellite clinic at Santa Rosa, a regularly scheduled mobile health clinic, and a full facility hospital-based clinic at Phoenix. The program presumed that the telemetry and remote monitoring equipment developed for the space program would have eventually made its way into the open market. The study rests on the conclusion that some form of telemedicine is the invariant pattern of the future. The time periods for the research and demonstration projects were insufficient to reach definitive conclusions regarding the cost-effectiveness of telemedicine in relation to other modes of health service delivery. In an intensively technological system, the capital investment may only be recovered over an extended period of time, and services must be distributed over a large number of patients/clients. Problems with program objectives led to situations where it was not clear whether telemedicine was intended to supplement, enhance, or replace existing delivery systems. Funding was severely curtailed before many of the problems could be resolved. The STARPAHC project may prove to be the most successful model for the future of telemedical diagnostics. In terms of costs, it used the least expensive technology (audio-link and slow-scan TV). In terms of quality, it provided an opportunity to have a second option for diagnostic purposes, clinical decision making, and specialist consultation done rapidly and efficiently. In terms of acceptance, both providers and patients were happy to have the system.Reinitiate funding for telemedicine

Spatial Fuzzy clustering with simultaneous estimation of Markov random field parameters and class

Projecte final de carrera fet en col.laboració amb Medical Imaging Research Center. Illinois Institute of Technolog

Consumer attitudes toward personalization features and intention to purchase online

In this study, a model of attitude toward personalization and purchase intention is developed to investigate how consumer attitudes and intention to purchase using personalization features are influenced by privacy and security concerns and by previous online purchase experiences. The behavioral intention model (Fishbein, 197 5) has been adopted for theoretical model building. To collect data, an e-mail survey was distributed to 7,000 online consumers who had at least online shopping experience and a sample of 1140 usable responses were used for data analysis. The results indicated that 1) attitudes toward personalization features were important determinants of consumer intentions to purchase online, 2) consumer concerns about privacy and security had a significant influence on consumer attitudes toward personalization features, and 3) previous online purchase experience had no influence on consumer attitudes toward personalization features. Implications and directions for future research are discussed

Process makes perfect

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. [71]-[72]).This thesis presents a software architecture for developing art and design tools that automatically capture the artist's interaction and records the entire creative process. The software uses the artist's interaction with the digital medium as its true data-type and streams the data to a database. Over time, a large, searchable, knowledge bank of artisan technique would accrue. Querying this knowledge bank allows quick access to a wide array of user-interface interactions, artistic gestures, and annotations. Additionally, the design tools utilize annotation, search, and playback software to make viewing artistic processes richer and more useful. Using interaction with the medium as a searchable data-type and having useful means to view the data allows artists to query and review each other's artistic technique. This thesis applies this principle toward prototyping a new creative learning and tutorial software platform on the web.Marc Schwartz.S.M

Modelling the live-electronics in electroacoustic music using particle systems

Contemporary music is largely influenced by technology. Empowered by the current available tools and resources, composers have the possibility to not only compose with sounds, but also to compose the sounds themselves. Personal computers powered with intuitive and interactive audio applications and development tools allow the creation of a vast range of real-time manipulation of live instrumental input and also real-time generation of sound through synthesis techniques. Consequently, achieving a desired sonority and interaction between the electronic and acoustic sounds in real-time, deeply rely on the choice and technical implementation of the audio processes and logical structures that will perform the electronic part of the composition. Due to the artistic and technical complexity of the development and implementation of such a complex artistic work, a very common strategy historically adopted by composers is to develop the composition in collaboration with a technology expert, which in this context is known as a musical assistant. In this perspective, the work of the musical assistant can be considered as one of translating musical, artistic and aesthetic concepts into mathematical algorithms and audio processes. The work presented in this dissertation addresses the problem of choosing, combining and manipulating the audio processes and logical structures that take place on the liveelectronics (i.e the electronic part of a mixed music composition) of a contemporary electroacoustic music composition, by using particle systems to model and simulate the dynamic behaviors that reflect the conceptual and aesthetic principles envisaged by the composer for a determined musical piece. The presented research work initiates with a thorough identification and analysis of the agents, processes and structures that are present in the live-electronics system of a mixed music composition. From this analysis a logical formalization of a typical live-electronics system is proposed, and then adapted to integrate a particle-based modelling strategy. From the formalization, a theoretical and practical framework for developing and implementing live-electronics systems for mixed music compositions using particle systems is proposed. The framework is experimented and validated in the development of distinct mixed music compositions by distinct composers, in real professional context. From the analysis of the case studies and the logical formalization, and the feedback given by the composers, it is possible to conclude that the proposed particle systems modelling method proves to be effective in the task of assisting the conceptual translation of musical and aesthetic ideas into implementable audio processing software.A música contemporânea é amplamente influenciada pela tecnologia. Os recursos tecnológicos atualmente disponíveis permitem que os compositores criem com sons e ao mesmo tempo criem os sons em si próprios. Os atuais aplicativos e ferramentas de software focados no desenvolvimento, controle e manipulação de processamentos de áudio, permitem a elaboração de diversos tipos de tratamentos e sínteses de som com a capacidade de serem executados e manipulados em tempo real. Consequentemente, a escolha dos algoritmos de processamento de áudio e suas respectivas implementações técnicas em forma de software, são determinantes para que a sonoridade desejada seja atingida, e para que o resultado sonoro satisfaça os objetivos estéticos e conceituais da relação entre as fontes sonoras acústicas e os sons eletrônicos presentes em uma composição eletroacústica de caráter misto. Devido à complexidade artística e técnica do desenvolvimento e implementação do sistema de eletrônica em tempo real de uma composição eletroacústica mista, uma estratégia historicamente adotada por compositores é a de desenvolver a composição em colaboração com um especialista em tecnologia, que neste contexto é usualmente referido como assistente musical. Nesta perspectiva, o trabalho do assistente musical pode ser interpretado como o de traduzir conceitos musicais, artísticos e estéticos em algoritmos matemáticos e processamento de áudio. O trabalho apresentado nesta dissertação aborda a problemática da escolha, combinação e manipulação dos processamentos de áudio e estruturas lógicas presentes no sistema de eletrônica em tempo real de uma composição de música eletroacústica contemporânea, e propõem o uso de sistemas de partículas para modelar e simular os comportamentos dinâmicos e morfológicos que refletem os princípios conceituais e estéticos previstos pelo compositor para uma determinada composição. A parte inicial do trabalho apresentado consiste na identificação e análise detalhada dos agentes, estruturas e processos envolvidos na realização e execução do sistema de eletrônica em tempo real. A partir desta análise é proposta uma formalização lógica e genérica de um sistema de eletrônica em tempo real. Em seguida, esta formalização é modificada e adaptada para integrar uma estratégia de modelagem através de sistemas de partículas. Em sequencia da formalização lógica, um método teórico e prático para o desenvolvimento de sistemas de eletrônica em tempo real para composições de música mista é proposto. O teste e consequente validação do método se dá através de sua utilização na realização da eletrônica em tempo real para obras de diferentes compositores. A análise dos casos de estudo e da formalização lógica, e também o parecer e opinião dos compositores, permitem concluir que o método proposto é de fato eficaz na tarefa de auxiliar o processo de tradução dos conceitos musicais e estéticos propostos pelos compositores em forma de algoritmos e processamentos de som implementados em software

Aerospace Medicine and Biology. A continuing bibliography with indexes

This bibliography lists 244 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in February 1981. Aerospace medicine and aerobiology topics are included. Listings for physiological factors, astronaut performance, control theory, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics are included

On Modeling Long-Range Dependencies for Visual Perception

One of the ultimate goals of computer vision is to extract useful information from visual inputs. An example is to recognize and segment objects from natural images. Recently, deep networks enable us to do a wide range of these tasks better than ever. These are mostly achieved with convolutional neural networks that model pixel relations within a small convolution kernel. Despite such success of convolution, the local window approximation makes it challenging to capture long-range relations. This limitation results in problems, such as unsatisfactory generalization and robustness to out-of-distribution examples. In this dissertation, I aim to model long-range dependencies in the context of natural image perception. The first part of the dissertation is focused on designing neural architectures that are flexible enough to capture long-range relations. We start by improving convolutional networks with dynamic scaling policies. Then, we explore an alternative solution that completely replaces convolution with global self-attention to capture more context. The attention mechanism is further extended to modeling relations between the pixels and the objects with a transformer, enabling panoptic segmentation in an end-to-end manner. These flexible long-range models usually require a large amount of labeled data to train. In order to address this issue, we discuss self-supervised techniques that learn representation effectively without human annotation in the second part of the dissertation. We regularize the contrastive learning framework with a consistency term that refines self-supervision signals. We also study a more general pretext task, masked image modeling, and train transformers to learn better representations with an online semantic tokenizer

Advances in Grid Computing

This book approaches the grid computing with a perspective on the latest achievements in the field, providing an insight into the current research trends and advances, and presenting a large range of innovative research papers. The topics covered in this book include resource and data management, grid architectures and development, and grid-enabled applications. New ideas employing heuristic methods from swarm intelligence or genetic algorithm and quantum encryption are considered in order to explain two main aspects of grid computing: resource management and data management. The book addresses also some aspects of grid computing that regard architecture and development, and includes a diverse range of applications for grid computing, including possible human grid computing system, simulation of the fusion reaction, ubiquitous healthcare service provisioning and complex water systems

E-health and e-welfare of Finland : Check Point 2022

The report provides an overview of progressive nationwide activities towards better e-services in Finland. The information system services of social welfare and health care are monitored by systematic gathering, analysis, and use of data, which allows the tracking of the progress of operations and the realisation of goals. In 2020 and 2021, six data collections were carried out to produce data for the monitoring of the Finnish ‘Information to support well-being and service renewal, eHealth and eSocial Strategy’. Some of the results presented in the report are also openly available in database cubes