Portinari: A Data Exploration Tool to Personalize Cervical Cancer Screening

Socio-technical systems play an important role in public health screening programs to prevent cancer. Cervical cancer incidence has significantly decreased in countries that developed systems for organized screening engaging medical practitioners, laboratories and patients. The system automatically identifies individuals at risk of developing the disease and invites them for a screening exam or a follow-up exam conducted by medical professionals. A triage algorithm in the system aims to reduce unnecessary screening exams for individuals at low-risk while detecting and treating individuals at high-risk. Despite the general success of screening, the triage algorithm is a one-size-fits all approach that is not personalized to a patient. This can easily be observed in historical data from screening exams. Often patients rely on personal factors to determine that they are either at high risk or not at risk at all and take action at their own discretion. Can exploring patient trajectories help hypothesize personal factors leading to their decisions? We present Portinari, a data exploration tool to query and visualize future trajectories of patients who have undergone a specific sequence of screening exams. The web-based tool contains (a) a visual query interface (b) a backend graph database of events in patients' lives (c) trajectory visualization using sankey diagrams. We use Portinari to explore diverse trajectories of patients following the Norwegian triage algorithm. The trajectories demonstrated variable degrees of adherence to the triage algorithm and allowed epidemiologists to hypothesize about the possible causes.Comment: Conference paper published at ICSE 2017 Buenos Aires, at the Software Engineering in Society Track. 10 pages, 5 figure

Multimodal design and the neomillenial learner

Two courses delivered in 2004 by the Faculty of Business at USQ were part of an initial trial into a new CD based hybrid model of delivery. This represented a change in the way USQ had previously supplied course materials and so it was necessary to ascertain how students responded to this change. This paper reports on findings from this research and demonstrates that higher levels of student engagement are possible, particularly in the context of nationality, age and gender differences. It investigates possible implications for academia when catering for a range of neomillennial learning approaches initially facilitated by the integration of a range of multimodal learning and teaching strategies. It is true 'one size does not fit all', but that does not preclude us from designing learning experiences that cater for a wide range of learners and particularly for those who learn in non-traditional ways whilst utilizing existing technologies

Data Visualization of Treatment Outcomes for Tuberculosis Patients

Tuberculosis is an infectious disease, and different treatments have been discovered over the years. However, patients may develop various drug resistance levels that affect the likelihood of becoming cured or dying. In this study, we sought to employ data visualization to explore the relationship between treatment trajectory, as indicated by smear and culture results in the follow-up tests and patient outcomes. A large sample of patients have been broken down by demographics including age, gender, and drug resistance status. Sankey diagrams were used to visualize the pathway progression of the patients over time split between two time periods- months 0-6 and months 6-24. It was determined that the most crucial months of treatment for all drug resistant types were during months 0-2, since there was high variability within that time frame for all demographics. It was also observed that younger patients were much more varying test results. It is thus recommended that the standards be updated to test every month for the first nine months of treatment in order to better track the pathway variety and that younger patients be more closely monitored throughout the treatment process. Future studies may investigate the possibility of creating a prediction diagram for patient pathway progression based on demographic status and past medical information

OpenTED Browser: Insights into European Public Spendings

We present the OpenTED browser, a Web application allowing to interactively browse public spending data related to public procurements in the European Union. The application relies on Open Data recently published by the European Commission and the Publications Office of the European Union, from which we imported a curated dataset of 4.2 million contract award notices spanning the period 2006-2015. The application is designed to easily filter notices and visualise relationships between public contracting authorities and private contractors. The simple design allows for example to quickly find information about who the biggest suppliers of local governments are, and the nature of the contracted goods and services. We believe the tool, which we make Open Source, is a valuable source of information for journalists, NGOs, analysts and citizens for getting information on public procurement data, from large scale trends to local municipal developments.Comment: ECML, PKDD, SoGood workshop 201

Visualizing Network Structures in the Food, Energy, and Water Nexus

abstract: In recent years, the food, energy, and water (FEW) nexus has become a topic of considerable importance and has spurred research in many scientific and technical fields. This increased interest stems from the high level, and broad area, of impact that could occur in the long term if the interactions between these complex FEW sectors are incorrectly or only partially defined. For this reason, a significant amount of interdisciplinary collaboration is needed to accurately define these interactions and produce viable solutions to help sustain and secure resources within these sectors. Providing tools that effectively promote interdisciplinary collaboration would allow for the development of a better understanding of FEW nexus interactions, support FEW policy-making under uncertainty, facilitate identification of critical design requirements for FEW visualizations, and encourage proactive FEW visualization design. The goal of this research will be the completion of 3 primary objectives: (i) specify visualization design requirements relating to the FEW nexus; (ii) develop visualization approaches for the FEW nexus; and (iii) provide a comparison of current FEW visualization approaches against the proposed visualization approach. These objectives will be accomplished by reviewing graph-based visualization, network evolution, and visual analysis of volume data tasks, discussion with domain experts, examination of currently used visualization methods in FEW research, and conduction of a user study. This will provide a more thorough and representative depiction of the FEW nexus, as well as a basis for further research in the area of FEW visualization. This research will enhance collaboration between policymakers and domain experts in an attempt to encourage in-depth nexus research that will help support informed policy-making and promote future resource security.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Engineering 201

Generating Navigable Semantic Maps from Social Sciences Corpora

It is now commonplace to observe that we are facing a deluge of online information. Researchers have of course long acknowledged the potential value of this information since digital traces make it possible to directly observe, describe and analyze social facts, and above all the co-evolution of ideas and communities over time. However, most online information is expressed through text, which means it is not directly usable by machines, since computers require structured, organized and typed information in order to be able to manipulate it. Our goal is thus twofold: 1. Provide new natural language processing techniques aiming at automatically extracting relevant information from texts, especially in the context of social sciences, and connect these pieces of information so as to obtain relevant socio-semantic networks; 2. Provide new ways of exploring these socio-semantic networks, thanks to tools allowing one to dynamically navigate these networks, de-construct and re-construct them interactively, from different points of view following the needs expressed by domain experts.Comment: in Digital Humanities 2015, Jun 2015, Sydney, Australia. Actes de la Conf{\'e}rence Digital Humanities 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1406.421