960 research outputs found

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    2017 GREAT Day Program

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    SUNY Geneseo’s Eleventh Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1011/thumbnail.jp

    Measuring the impact of COVID-19 on hospital care pathways

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    Care pathways in hospitals around the world reported significant disruption during the recent COVID-19 pandemic but measuring the actual impact is more problematic. Process mining can be useful for hospital management to measure the conformance of real-life care to what might be considered normal operations. In this study, we aim to demonstrate that process mining can be used to investigate process changes associated with complex disruptive events. We studied perturbations to accident and emergency (A &E) and maternity pathways in a UK public hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-incidentally the hospital had implemented a Command Centre approach for patient-flow management affording an opportunity to study both the planned improvement and the disruption due to the pandemic. Our study proposes and demonstrates a method for measuring and investigating the impact of such planned and unplanned disruptions affecting hospital care pathways. We found that during the pandemic, both A &E and maternity pathways had measurable reductions in the mean length of stay and a measurable drop in the percentage of pathways conforming to normative models. There were no distinctive patterns of monthly mean values of length of stay nor conformance throughout the phases of the installation of the hospital’s new Command Centre approach. Due to a deficit in the available A &E data, the findings for A &E pathways could not be interpreted

    The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000

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    The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000). This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline

    Modern data analytics in the cloud era

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    Cloud Computing ist die dominante Technologie des letzten Jahrzehnts. Die Benutzerfreundlichkeit der verwalteten Umgebung in Kombination mit einer nahezu unbegrenzten Menge an Ressourcen und einem nutzungsabhĂ€ngigen Preismodell ermöglicht eine schnelle und kosteneffiziente Projektrealisierung fĂŒr ein breites Nutzerspektrum. Cloud Computing verĂ€ndert auch die Art und Weise wie Software entwickelt, bereitgestellt und genutzt wird. Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich auf Datenbanksysteme, die in der Cloud-Umgebung eingesetzt werden. Wir identifizieren drei Hauptinteraktionspunkte der Datenbank-Engine mit der Umgebung, die verĂ€nderte Anforderungen im Vergleich zu traditionellen On-Premise-Data-Warehouse-Lösungen aufweisen. Der erste Interaktionspunkt ist die Interaktion mit elastischen Ressourcen. Systeme in der Cloud sollten ElastizitĂ€t unterstĂŒtzen, um den Lastanforderungen zu entsprechen und dabei kosteneffizient zu sein. Wir stellen einen elastischen Skalierungsmechanismus fĂŒr verteilte Datenbank-Engines vor, kombiniert mit einem Partitionsmanager, der einen Lastausgleich bietet und gleichzeitig die Neuzuweisung von Partitionen im Falle einer elastischen Skalierung minimiert. DarĂŒber hinaus fĂŒhren wir eine Strategie zum initialen BefĂŒllen von Puffern ein, die es ermöglicht, skalierte Ressourcen unmittelbar nach der Skalierung auszunutzen. Cloudbasierte Systeme sind von fast ĂŒberall aus zugĂ€nglich und verfĂŒgbar. Daten werden hĂ€ufig von zahlreichen Endpunkten aus eingespeist, was sich von ETL-Pipelines in einer herkömmlichen Data-Warehouse-Lösung unterscheidet. Viele Benutzer verzichten auf die Definition von strikten Schemaanforderungen, um TransaktionsabbrĂŒche aufgrund von Konflikten zu vermeiden oder um den Ladeprozess von Daten zu beschleunigen. Wir fĂŒhren das Konzept der PatchIndexe ein, die die Definition von unscharfen Constraints ermöglichen. PatchIndexe verwalten Ausnahmen zu diesen Constraints, machen sie fĂŒr die Optimierung und AusfĂŒhrung von Anfragen nutzbar und bieten effiziente UnterstĂŒtzung bei Datenaktualisierungen. Das Konzept kann auf beliebige Constraints angewendet werden und wir geben Beispiele fĂŒr unscharfe Eindeutigkeits- und Sortierconstraints. DarĂŒber hinaus zeigen wir, wie PatchIndexe genutzt werden können, um fortgeschrittene Constraints wie eine unscharfe Multi-Key-Partitionierung zu definieren, die eine robuste Anfrageperformance bei Workloads mit unterschiedlichen Partitionsanforderungen bietet. Der dritte Interaktionspunkt ist die Nutzerinteraktion. Datengetriebene Anwendungen haben sich in den letzten Jahren verĂ€ndert. Neben den traditionellen SQL-Anfragen fĂŒr Business Intelligence sind heute auch datenwissenschaftliche Anwendungen von großer Bedeutung. In diesen FĂ€llen fungiert das Datenbanksystem oft nur als Datenlieferant, wĂ€hrend der Rechenaufwand in dedizierten Data-Science- oder Machine-Learning-Umgebungen stattfindet. Wir verfolgen das Ziel, fortgeschrittene Analysen in Richtung der Datenbank-Engine zu verlagern und stellen das Grizzly-Framework als DataFrame-zu-SQL-Transpiler vor. Auf dieser Grundlage identifizieren wir benutzerdefinierte Funktionen (UDFs) und maschinelles Lernen (ML) als wichtige Aufgaben, die von einer tieferen Integration in die Datenbank-Engine profitieren wĂŒrden. Daher untersuchen und bewerten wir AnsĂ€tze fĂŒr die datenbankinterne AusfĂŒhrung von Python-UDFs und datenbankinterne ML-Inferenz.Cloud computing has been the groundbreaking technology of the last decade. The ease-of-use of the managed environment in combination with nearly infinite amount of resources and a pay-per-use price model enables fast and cost-efficient project realization for a broad range of users. Cloud computing also changes the way software is designed, deployed and used. This thesis focuses on database systems deployed in the cloud environment. We identify three major interaction points of the database engine with the environment that show changed requirements compared to traditional on-premise data warehouse solutions. First, software is deployed on elastic resources. Consequently, systems should support elasticity in order to match workload requirements and be cost-effective. We present an elastic scaling mechanism for distributed database engines, combined with a partition manager that provides load balancing while minimizing partition reassignments in the case of elastic scaling. Furthermore we introduce a buffer pre-heating strategy that allows to mitigate a cold start after scaling and leads to an immediate performance benefit using scaling. Second, cloud based systems are accessible and available from nearly everywhere. Consequently, data is frequently ingested from numerous endpoints, which differs from bulk loads or ETL pipelines in a traditional data warehouse solution. Many users do not define database constraints in order to avoid transaction aborts due to conflicts or to speed up data ingestion. To mitigate this issue we introduce the concept of PatchIndexes, which allow the definition of approximate constraints. PatchIndexes maintain exceptions to constraints, make them usable in query optimization and execution and offer efficient update support. The concept can be applied to arbitrary constraints and we provide examples of approximate uniqueness and approximate sorting constraints. Moreover, we show how PatchIndexes can be exploited to define advanced constraints like an approximate multi-key partitioning, which offers robust query performance over workloads with different partition key requirements. Third, data-centric workloads changed over the last decade. Besides traditional SQL workloads for business intelligence, data science workloads are of significant importance nowadays. For these cases the database system might only act as data delivery, while the computational effort takes place in data science or machine learning (ML) environments. As this workflow has several drawbacks, we follow the goal of pushing advanced analytics towards the database engine and introduce the Grizzly framework as a DataFrame-to-SQL transpiler. Based on this we identify user-defined functions (UDFs) and machine learning inference as important tasks that would benefit from a deeper engine integration and investigate approaches to push these operations towards the database engine

    Envisioning Transitions. Bodies, buildings, and boundaries

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    “Transition” is the dynamic process of changing state, going beyond, crossing over, and passing from one point to the next. The signification of the word is close to that of evolution, modification, mutation, and transformation, all of which are confined into a strictly restricted timeframe. Etymologically, “transitions” can be nothing else than temporary: they appear silently, burst, violently establish, and gradually disappear into reality. In their blinding momentariness, “transitions” bear with them the positive undertone of change and renewal, along with the hopefulness of that which is unknown.  If the term “transition” recurs regularly in the contemporary vocabulary of architecture and design cultures, this repetition reveals a period characterized by overlapping and sequential changes. The word is without a doubt overused, but not without reason. Indeed, we find ourselves in an unusually extended period of consecutive “transitions”, overwhelmingly undefined in temporality and ambitions. As we are witnessing societies go through stark demographic, political, economic, and cultural changes, the intersecting problematics (e.g., ecological, digital, pandemic, etc.) form a rather complex topography of change, negatively charged by the instability of dilated time and the uncertainty of undefined destination. The word is employed with the confidence of a natural process, as if it were a storm, and while we affirm our existence in “transition”, we nod our troubled times away. Whether positively or negatively perceived, “transitions” form bridges between histories. Yet, what does it actually mean to be in “transition”? Can we define it as an autonomous and productive period whose importance could go beyond a starting and an ending date? How are “transitions” impacting and being impacted by human spaces, the built environment, and design cultures? What are some concrete, practical case studies that demonstrate how “transitions” could affect architecture and design cultures while emphasizing the role that these disciplines play in transitional processes? It is within this backdrop that we put forward the theme of “transition”—in all its simplicity and complexity

    The Pollinating Mesh: The Ecological Thought in Indigenous Australian Speculative Fiction

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    This thesis studies how the mesh or the idea of interconnectedness among all beings, humans and nonhumans, pollinates Indigenous Australian speculative fiction and how the aesthetics of these texts warrants their reading as sites of these enmeshments. It aims to put this literature in the context of Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, ontologies, or metaphysics to establish how these underpin Indigenous literature and frame its reading. To attend to the global pertinence of both the texts under study and the ecological thought as the main conceptual framework, the thesis engages Object Oriented Ontology and adjacent theories of the ontological turn alongside trans-national Indigenous critical thought. Thus, analysing Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (2013), Ambelin Kwaymullina’s The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2010), The Disappearance of Ember Crow (2013), and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015), as well as Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart (1999) allows me to establish that the ecological thought thematically informs them in diverse but interlinked ways. The ecological thought establishes enmeshments among all beings in what I posit as the aesthetics and poetics of the uncanny to capture Alexis Wright’s writing as leading us to think ecologically about the enmeshments of all beings in irreducible ways. All beings’ enmeshments attune us to seeking and finding our kin among all beings and I explore this in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s trilogy. In Kwaymullina’s work, I argue that all beings’ enmeshments sees Indigenous survivance as aesthetically coalescing with Indigenous dreams, which are speculatively manoeuvred and explored as the interface between the real and surreal, the material and the spiritual to enact all beings’ enmeshments. The texts thus enact speculative worlds of enmeshments wherein humans, nonhumans, organic, synthetic (AI) alive, dead, undead, spiritual, and nonliving depend on and become with one another for life, survival and survivance. Kwaymullina’s trilogy ultimately enacts a community of beings mediated by thinking about interconnectedness as becoming with and part of one another. The implication of such a way of thinking brings us to rethink what it means to (not) be and the hauntings of identity from the perspective of Indigenous ecological thinking, which my intervention pursues in the reading of Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart. The core of my intervention on Benang establishes it as a wellspring of onto-epistemic affordances to understand being and identity as fluid, floating, permeable, leaking, never rigid or definitive. My reading stages how all beings’ enmeshments enhance the protagonist Harley’s regeneration of his effaced Aboriginal identity as an ontological and identity transformation through blood memory, listening to and reading about his family stories, encountering, and becoming with Country and his Aboriginal culture in its material and spiritual aspects. The thesis ends with interrogating my own speaking position as a postcolonial African reader-critic, and what it means for any African to engage with Indigenous cosmologies, epistemologies, and meeting with these literary texts and their philosophical underpinnings. I establish similarities between both worlds and argue that such African texts as Daniel Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drunkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Okri’s The Famished Road trilogy, epitomise worlds that equally register aesthetics and poetics similar to those in Indigenous Australian literature

    Complex observation processes in ecology and epidemiology: general theory and specific examples

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    Complex observation processes abound in ecology and epidemiology. In order to answer the large-scale, urgent questions that are the focus of modern research, we must rely on indirect and opportunistic observation. Relating these data to the biological processes we are interested in is challenging. Statisticians working in this area need an understanding of both state-of-the-art modelling techniques and the field-specific nuances of how the data were generated. As a result, many methods to deal with complex observation processes are highly bespoke. Bespoke models are hard to translate between contexts and, because they are often presented in field-specific language, hard to learn from. Modelling of observation processes is thus a fractured area of study, leading to duplication of research effort and limiting the rate at which we can make progress. In this thesis, I aim to provide a road-map to how we might achieve some unification in this area. I begin by establishing a conceptual framework that can be used to describe observation processes and identify methods to address them. The framework defines all observation processes as a combination of issues of latency, identifiability, effort or scaling (L.I.E.S.). I illustrate the framework using motivating examples from ecology and epidemiology. The risk with conceptual frameworks is that they can be over-fitted to existing data and may fail when faced with new, real-world problems. To address this, I also approach the problem from a bottom-up perspective by tackling a series of ecological and epidemiological case studies. Each case study requires novel statistical methods to deal with the observation process. By developing new methods, I explore the world of observation processes potentially not well-captured in the literature. I then explore whether these case studies motivate revision or reassessment of my conceptual framework. While the case studies were chosen to challenge the L.I.E.S. framework, I find that they mutually reinforce each other. The framework provides a helpful scaffolding with which to describe the problems in the case studies. The case studies provide useful examples of more complex observation processes and how the four issues encoded in L.I.E.S. interact with one another. These findings illustrate the value of a framework for unifying approaches to observation processes

    Exploring Biological Agency and Embodiment to Overcome the Limitations of Gene-Centric Perspectives and Relationalize Biological Inquiry

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    119 pagesMuch of 20th-century biology has been driven by and proceeded through a finer understanding of biological mechanisms at the level of genes and molecules. These gene-centric approaches have located medical interventions, clarified evolutionary histories, and identified molecular signaling pathways, among other invaluable contributions, by mechanistically decomposing biological systems into genetic parts to examine how their structure and functioning explain the system as a whole. However, biology and philosophy of biology scholarship reveal that studying organisms in terms of their genes is limited because it overemphasizes genetic components’ role in development, inheritance, and evolutionary innovation and, in doing so, reduces organisms to the objects of their genes’ predeterminations. Engaging biological case studies and philosophy of biology, I reveal that gene-centrism’s limitations suggest the need for a complementary approach––biological agency––capable of recognizing organisms as agents of their genes, instead of passive objects of their genes’ expression. Through this exploration, I show that a biological agency perspective realizes the ways in which gene expression is interactively shaped by organisms’ spontaneous engagement with their environments, which is further indicative of organisms’ context sensitivity and relational responsiveness. The biological agency approach overcomes gene-centrism’s limitations because it considers organisms as embedded in many intersecting and co-constitutive relationships––genetic, biological, and environmental––of which the organism responds to and accommodates into itself. Using perspectives from feminist epistemology and science studies, I question further into biological agency’s account of organismal relationality to reveal that relationality does not just apply to the organism being studied, but to scientists as well. Considering this extra dimension of relationality helps soften the boundary between subject and object and illuminates that biological scientific inquiry is performed by embodied researchers, theorizing is situated, and objectivity is subjectivity-dependent. Through this consideration, I hope to convey the viability of biological agency as a complement to gene-centrism and build appreciation for biological inquiry that not only recognizes organismal relationality, but the scientist’s relationality
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