The Bionic Radiologist: avoiding blurry pictures and providing greater insights

Radiology images and reports have long been digitalized. However, the potential of the more than 3.6 billion radiology examinations performed annually worldwide has largely gone unused in the effort to digitally transform health care. The Bionic Radiologist is a concept that combines humanity and digitalization for better health care integration of radiology. At a practical level, this concept will achieve critical goals: (1) testing decisions being made scientifically on the basis of disease probabilities and patient preferences; (2) image analysis done consistently at any time and at any site; and (3) treatment suggestions that are closely linked to imaging results and are seamlessly integrated with other information. The Bionic Radiologist will thus help avoiding missed care opportunities, will provide continuous learning in the work process, and will also allow more time for radiologists’ primary roles: interacting with patients and referring physicians. To achieve that potential, one has to cope with many implementation barriers at both the individual and institutional levels. These include: reluctance to delegate decision making, a possible decrease in image interpretation knowledge and the perception that patient safety and trust are at stake. To facilitate implementation of the Bionic Radiologist the following will be helpful: uncertainty quantifications for suggestions, shared decision making, changes in organizational culture and leadership style, maintained expertise through continuous learning systems for training, and role development of the involved experts. With the support of the Bionic Radiologist, disparities are reduced and the delivery of care is provided in a humane and personalized fashion

Evorus: A Crowd-powered Conversational Assistant Built to Automate Itself Over Time

Crowd-powered conversational assistants have been shown to be more robust than automated systems, but do so at the cost of higher response latency and monetary costs. A promising direction is to combine the two approaches for high quality, low latency, and low cost solutions. In this paper, we introduce Evorus, a crowd-powered conversational assistant built to automate itself over time by (i) allowing new chatbots to be easily integrated to automate more scenarios, (ii) reusing prior crowd answers, and (iii) learning to automatically approve response candidates. Our 5-month-long deployment with 80 participants and 281 conversations shows that Evorus can automate itself without compromising conversation quality. Crowd-AI architectures have long been proposed as a way to reduce cost and latency for crowd-powered systems; Evorus demonstrates how automation can be introduced successfully in a deployed system. Its architecture allows future researchers to make further innovation on the underlying automated components in the context of a deployed open domain dialog system.Comment: 10 pages. To appear in the Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2018 (CHI'18

Carsey Perspectives: Local Owners Driving Lasting Solutions, An Innovative Model for International Development and Poverty Alleviation

In this perspectives brief, authors Ilona Drew, Fiona Wilson, Bill Maddocks discuss a case study that was examined as part of the Social Sector Franchise Initiative (SSFI), a project of the Center for Social Innovation and Enterprise at the University of New Hampshire. This case study describes Jibu, a social sector franchise seeking to simultaneously provide lasting access to affordable clean drinking water and to contribute to economic development through a network of locally-owned franchise businesses in East Africa and beyond. First-time social entrepreneurs are equipped with Jibu’s water purification and other equipment, branding, training, and the capital required to launch franchise locations selling drinking water at prices lower than the charcoal it would cost to boil it

A BEHAVIORAL APPROACH TO THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

The purpose of this paper is to reflect the behavioral biases that led to this global financial crisis. The paper presents briefly the real causes of the crisis (structural and cyclical factors) and puts a greater accent on the behavioral factors. The authors considered to structure the paper in three main pillars: behavioral factors, the collapse of ethical behavior and the role of behavioral finance in studying, regulating and assessment financial risks. The first pillar consists in a brief presentation of the behavioral factors such as: optimism and wishful thinking, overconfidence, greed, regret, pessimism, passing the responsibility, herding - groupthink, anchoring, representativeness biases, informational cascades and "this time is different" syndrome. The second pillar of the paper presents the collapse of ethical behavior that led to the global financial crisis: predatory lending practices, inappropriate compensation schemes, rating agencies behavior, corporate governance reforms and financial institutions opacity in their reporting. The third pillar presents the mismanagement of risk and regulations that led us into this global mess. The paper concludes with the need of integrating biases of human behavior into regulations in order to make them more effective and people become less financially vulnerable.behavioral finance, irrationality, regulation, crisis

Cisgenesis: an important sub-invention for traditional plant breeding companies

Modern plant breeding is highly dependent on new technologies to master future problems. More traits have to be combined, frequently originating from wild species. Traditional breeding is connected with linkage drag problems. The crop plant itself and its crossable species represent the traditional breeders gene pool. GM-breeding is a new way of improving existing varieties. Transgenes originate from non-crossable species and are representing a new gene pool. For release of GM-plants into the environment and onto the market in Europe Directive 2001/18/EC has been developed, primarily based on GM-technology and not on gene source. In society, opposition against GM crops is complicating the implementation of GM crops. In this paper, it is shown that not only transgenes, representing a new gene pool but also cisgenes and intragenes are available, representing the breeders gene pool. Cisgenes are natural genes and intragenes are composed of functional parts of natural genes from the crop plant itself or from crossable species. Cisgenesis is the combined use of only cisgenes with marker-free transformation, mimicking linkage drag free introgression breeding in one step. Therefore, cisgenesis is a new sub-invention in the traditional breeding field and indicates the need for reconsideration of GM Directives. Inventions are frequently containing not only hardware elements, but also software and orgware elements. For cisgenesis it is foreseen that the technical (hardware) and bioinformatic (software) elements will develop smoothly, but that implementation in society is highly dependent on acceptance and regulations (orgware). It could be made in a step by step approach by specific crop-gene derogations from the Directive, followed by adding cisgenesis to annex 1b of Directive 2001/18/EC for exemption. At present GM crops can only be introduced by large companies. An open innovation approach for cisgenesis by public private partnership including traditional SMEs has been discussed. Cisgenesis has been exemplified for resistance breeding of potato to Phytophthtora infestans

The failure of the global consumer: the importance of localization in the pursuit of globalization

Advancements in globalization and technology have led to the dangerous assumption that the world is becoming increasingly more homogenous. Through providing a definition of the global consumer and an explanation of this concept, evidence will be presented in this paper to support this concept’s failure. This paper will also provide a framework so as to improve upon this concept and facilitate its success within a non-static system. Lastly, this paper will reflect on this increasingly problematic identity of global consumer

Responsible Conduct: The Ethics of It All in Life and Research

The teaching and learning of ethics as applied generally to the human condition as well as specifically to ethics in research are explored in this discourse. This first section focuses on individual moral dilemmas whereas the second depicts professional ethics in a more complicated tension between the personal moral self and the professional rules, regulations, and ethical expectations of a particular institution

A short reflection on values and educational research

Value free research is a highly controversial and subjective proposition. Aspects including epistemological, ontological, and political issues make it very difficult to achieve neutral based research. Issues that cause educational research to be rated as inferior and second best include the fact that besides being criticized as being non cumulative, it is unrealistic and distant from practice. Educational researchers are also shackled by the dogma of unattainable ideality of neutrality and non-partisanship. In the attempt to imitate and fit in the deterministic and empirical ways of the natural sciences they disregard the uniqueness of their research.peer-reviewe

Financialising the State : Recent development in fiscal and monetary policy

Understanding the nature of state financialisation is crucial to ensure definancialisation efforts are successful. This paper provides a structured overview of the emerging literature on financialisation and the state. We define financialisation of the state broadly as the changed relationship between the state, understood as sovereign with duties and accountable towards its citizens, and financial markets and practices, in ways that can diminish those duties and reduce accountability. We then argue that there are four ways in which financialisation works in and through public institutions and policies: adoption of financial motives, advancing financial innovation, embracing financial accumulation strategies, and directly financialising the lives of citizens. Organising our review around the two main policy fields of fiscal and monetary policy, four definitions of financialisation in the context of public policy and institutions emerge. When dealing with public expenditure on social provisions financialisation most often refers to the transformation of public services into the basis for actively traded financial assets. In the context of public revenue, financialisation describes the process of creating and deepening secondary markets for public debt, with the state turning into a financial market player. Finally, in the realm of monetary policy financial deregulation is perceived to have paved the way for financialisation, while inflation targeting and the encouragement, or outright pursuit, of market-based short-term liquidity management among financial institutions constitute financialised policies