The Ethical Implications of Personal Health Monitoring

Personal Health Monitoring (PHM) uses electronic devices which monitor and record health-related data outside a hospital, usually within the home. This paper examines the ethical issues raised by PHM. Eight themes describing the ethical implications of PHM are identified through a review of 68 academic articles concerning PHM. The identified themes include privacy, autonomy, obtrusiveness and visibility, stigma and identity, medicalisation, social isolation, delivery of care, and safety and technological need. The issues around each of these are discussed. The system / lifeworld perspective of Habermas is applied to develop an understanding of the role of PHMs as mediators of communication between the institutional and the domestic environment. Furthermore, links are established between the ethical issues to demonstrate that the ethics of PHM involves a complex network of ethical interactions. The paper extends the discussion of the critical effect PHMs have on the patient’s identity and concludes that a holistic understanding of the ethical issues surrounding PHMs will help both researchers and practitioners in developing effective PHM implementations

Climate Change Impact Assessment for Surface Transportation in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska

WA-RD 772.

Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments

Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography, distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful privacy-preserving decentralized systems

Negative Results in Computer Vision: A Perspective

A negative result is when the outcome of an experiment or a model is not what is expected or when a hypothesis does not hold. Despite being often overlooked in the scientific community, negative results are results and they carry value. While this topic has been extensively discussed in other fields such as social sciences and biosciences, less attention has been paid to it in the computer vision community. The unique characteristics of computer vision, particularly its experimental aspect, call for a special treatment of this matter. In this paper, I will address what makes negative results important, how they should be disseminated and incentivized, and what lessons can be learned from cognitive vision research in this regard. Further, I will discuss issues such as computer vision and human vision interaction, experimental design and statistical hypothesis testing, explanatory versus predictive modeling, performance evaluation, model comparison, as well as computer vision research culture

Voices from Urban Africa: The Impact of Urban Growth on Children

Urban poverty -- and its impact on children -- is often overlooked and misunderstood. More than half of the world's population now lives in cities. Each year the number of urban residents increases by nearly 60 million.1 By 2050, it is projected that two thirds of the global population will be living in urban areas.2 It is estimated that 94 percent of urban growth will take place in less developed countries.3Africa, though it is the least urbanized continent today, is predicted to have one billion urban dwellers by 2040, with a substantial youth majority. Over the next 40 years, 75 percent of urban population growth in Africa will take place in Africa's secondary cities.4 Currently, over half of the African urban population lives in slum conditions. These figures alone demonstrate the growing importance of prioritizing the urban context in development work.Coupled with this growing urban population, the development community's reliance on aggregate data, which generally compares development indicators for urban and rural areas within a country, means that children and adults living in urban areas appear to be better off than those living in rural areas.Citywide statistics and the 'urban advantage' allow the wealth of some urban individuals to obscure the hardships faced by those living in urban poverty and the vast inequalities present within urban communities. The absence of detailed data means that the depths of urban poverty are often missed and children living in urban poverty are at risk of not being reached by development efforts

Application of new venture-capital-investing decision-making-mechanism in education

Working paper; version dated July 12, 2006We have theoretically developed New Venture Capital Investing Decision Making Mechanism (NVCIDMM) for joint evaluation of the probability of success of business plans and proposing management teams. Using the efficient market theory we prove that the proposed mechanism is better than the currently used ones. We have administered several business investment games with student in class. The results show that the developed mechanism is better than the existing venture capital decision making mechanisms. We propose a student run VC fund to be created. It would have the following positive externalities: First: The creation of the student run VC fund would allow in-depth empirical evaluation of the applicability of the proposed NVCIDMM mechanism; Second: The fund is theoretically better methodology for applicable learning by the students. We also substantiate a proposal for creation of university incubators in the same institutions. This will allow the students to participate on both sides of the investment process of venture capital as investors and as entrepreneurs