The Extraction of Social Networks from Web Using Search Engines

In this paper, our purpose is to create a large collection of related vocabularies and concepts to the user’s favorite field (articles, people, conferences, books, etc.) from the available information on the infinite and vast source of web which is expressed in the form of social network. In the other words, we introduced a way to help the researchers to be able to specify their favorite topic in a particular field and by this way, observe and extract the social network of the related concepts to that topic. In order to extract the nodes of this network, we used the sampling of web pages through the Google search engine, text processing techniques, and information retrieval. The topic of the extracted social network in this research is the scientific conferences in the field of computer sciences. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this method, the extracted network from the results of the search engine is compared with the scientific conferences available in the DBLP[1] database. The obtained results from the social network analysis showed that the extracted network is of very high accuracy.[1] Digital Bibliography and Library Projec

Initiating organizational memories using ontology network analysis

One of the important problems in organizational memories is their initial set-up. It is difficult to choose the right information to include in an organizational memory, and the right information is also a prerequisite for maximizing the uptake and relevance of the memory content. To tackle this problem, most developers adopt heavy-weight solutions and rely on a faithful continuous interaction with users to create and improve its content. In this paper, we explore the use of an automatic, light-weight solution, drawn from the underlying ingredients of an organizational memory: ontologies. We have developed an ontology-based network analysis method which we applied to tackle the problem of identifying communities of practice in an organization. We use ontology-based network analysis as a means to provide content automatically for the initial set up of an organizational memory

The Expensive Commodity of Education in Africa Versus Customer Experience

Moving into the time of the customer, the landscape of education has changed globally, including its model of leading business. The observation through the crystal of market-exchange in Africa shows students as customers and universities as service providers. For the reason that a business cannot exist without its customers, and higher education institutions are concentrating on the best way to win new business through multiple channels, customer experience arises to create value. It is within this context that this paper looks at higher education as an expensive commodity in Africa versus Customer eXperience. It also raises issues for talk and begins to express an assessment inspiration that may add to the idea of customer experience by service providers of Africa, here higher education

Categorical dilemmas: challenges for HIV prevention among men who have sex with men and transgender women in Vietnam

In Vietnam, HIV continues disproportionately to affect men who have sex with men and transgender women, and the increase in HIV prevalence in these populations may be related to a lack of tailoring of current prevention approaches, which often fail to address social diversity within these populations. To effectively respond to HIV in Vietnam, it is imperative to identify sub-populations within the broad category of ‘men who have sex with men’ (MSM), a term which in Vietnam as in many other sites frequently subsumes transgender women. In this paper, we document the different categories used to describe people who engage in same-sex sexual practices and/or non-normative gender performances drawing on data collected via in-depth interviews and focus groups with a total of 79 participants in Hanoi. We identified over 40 different categories used to describe men who have sex with men and/or transgender women. These categories could be described as behaviourally-based, identity-based, or emic, and each carried different meanings, uses (based on age and geography) and levels of stigma. The categories shine light on the complexity of identities among men who have sex with men and transgender women and have utility for future research and programming to more comprehensively address HIV in Vietnam

Improving Diagnostic Accuracy in HIV-Associated Neurocognitive Disorders

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) associated neurocognitive disorders (HAND) affect 50% of individuals with HIV. HAND is characterized by cognitive and functional impairment and is diagnosed through neuropsychological assessment. The use of performance validity tests (PVT) is recommended to determine the credibility of cognitive profiles during neuropsychological testing. However, little is known about the utility of PVTs within an HIV+ population. The objective of the present study was to compare the base rate of failure on embedded validity indicators (EVIs) between individuals diagnosed with HAND, neurocognitively normal individuals with HIV, undergraduate controls, and undergraduates asked to feign cognitive impairment. The relationship between EVI failure and neurocognitive performance, as well as self-reported depressive symptoms, was also explored. Cumulative EVI failure produced good classification accuracy within the student sample, reaffirming their utility in detecting invalid performance. As predicted, individuals with more severe HAND diagnoses (i.e., HIV-associated dementia and mild cognitive impairment) failed more EVIs than neurocognitively normal individuals. Further, as neurocognitive test performance decreased, cumulative EVI failures increased. Although directionality of this finding could not be determined (i.e., do low scores reflect non-credible responding or are EVI failures false positives in individuals with genuine impairment?), monitoring performance validity might help explain the well-known fluctuation in cognitive performance over time in the HAND population. There was no relationship between the number of EVIs failed and self-reported depressive symptoms or severity, ruling out a commonly discussed confounding variable in PVT research

ENHANCING SOCIAL INTERVENTIONS BY INFORMAL PEACE COMMITTEES IN ZIMBABWE: A DEVELOPMENTAL SOCIAL WORK PERSPECTIVE

Informal peace committees are community-based responsive and supportive mechanisms that deal with social issues such as interpersonal conflicts, small-scale violence, poverty, hunger and social injustice. As human-service-oriented structures designed and created to represent the interests of local people, informal peace committees have an often unseen correlation with developmental social work in tackling social issues in their host communities in Zimbabwe. This article, therefore, argues that developmental social workers should become involved in these peace committees and identify the contributions they can make as a profession in order to enhance these successful initiative

Integrating Embedded Multiagent Systems with Urban Simulation Tools and IoT Applications

The smart city systems development connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) has been the goal of several works in the multi-agent system field. Nevertheless, just a few projects demonstrate how to deploy and make the connection among the employed systems. This paper proposes an approach towards the integration of a MAS through the JaCaMo framework plus an Urban Simulation Tool (SUMO), IoT applications (Node-RED, InfluxDB, and Grafana), and an IoT platform (Konker). The integration presented in this paper applies in a Smart Parking scenario with real features, where is shown the integration and the connection through all layers, from agent level to artifacts, including real environment and simulation, as well as IoT applications. In future works, we intend to establish a methodology that shows how to properly integrate these different applications regardless of the scenario and the used tools

Application of Big Data to Support Evidence-Based Public Health Policy Decision-Making for Hearing

Ideally, public health policies are formulated from scientific data; however, policy-specific data are often unavailable. Big data can generate ecologically-valid, high-quality scientific evidence, and therefore has the potential to change how public health policies are formulated. Here, we discuss the use of big data for developing evidence-based hearing health policies, using data collected and analyzed with a research prototype of a data repository known as EVOTION (EVidence-based management of hearing impairments: public health pOlicy-making based on fusing big data analytics and simulaTION), to illustrate our points. Data in the repository consist of audiometric clinical data, prospective real-world data collected from hearing aids and an app, and responses to questionnaires collected for research purposes. To date, we have used the platform and a synthetic dataset to model the estimated risk of noise-induced hearing loss and have shown novel evidence of ways in which external factors influence hearing aid usage patterns. We contend that this research prototype data repository illustrates the value of using big data for policy-making by providing high-quality evidence that could be used to formulate and evaluate the impact of hearing health care policies