Sustainability of Evaluations Presented in Research Publications

This position paper discusses how research publication would benefit of an infrastructure for evaluation entities that could be used to support documenting research efforts (e.g., in papers or blogs), analysing these efforts, and building upon them. As a concrete example in the domain of semantic technologies, the paper presents the SEALS Platform and discusses how such platform can promote research publication

Evaluating Sustainable Aspects of Hazardous Waste Remediation

The main objective of the research presented herein is to be a major contributor to the current international initiative to advance sustainability assessments for remediation projects by integrating methodologies from the environmental economics and social science disciplines. More specifically, the study aims to address some of the knowledge gaps related to conducting a comprehensive sustainability assessment for a remediation project. These knowledge gaps include: (1) there are few studies that include sustainability assessments of the variety of techniques and technologies implemented during site characterization; (2) the majority of sustainable remediation publications and assessment tools focus on evaluating the environmental impact of a contaminated site’s life cycle and minimally, if at all, on related socio-economic impacts; and (3) the role of risk perception in stakeholder engagement has not been explored in existing sustainable remediation frameworks. Chapters 2 through 4 presents a societal cost analysis methodology to quantify global socio-economic impacts arising from cleanup activity by monetizing the emissions and energy consumption through the integration of the social cost of environmental metrics. The results of environmental footprint and life cycle assessment evaluations conducted at various stages throughout the project life cycle were used as the basis for the societal cost analysis. Chapter 5 presents a survey developed and implemented to identify risk perception factors that influenced residents’ level of participation in risk management activities conducted by the local health department. Based on the case study evaluations presented herein, it can be concluded that the integration of methodologies from the environmental economics and social science disciplines into existing sustainable remediation frameworks results in a more comprehensive evaluation of triple bottom line impacts, a reduction in emissions and resources consumed during site activities, efficient use of financial resources, and a maximization of benefits to stakeholders, in particular the community

Hygiene and Sanitation Software: An Overview of Approaches

A review of the state of the art in methods and techniques for sanitation and hygiene behaviour change, and other non-hardware aspects of sanitation programming. Includes introductory text and detailed entries on more than 20 approaches and techniques, with key references, summary information on effectiveness and implementation and an assessment of when different approaches should be used

Multi-level DEA Approach in Research Evaluation

It is well known that the discrimination power of DEA models will be diminishing if too many inputs or outputs are used. It is a dilemma if the decision makers want to select comprehensive indicators to present a relatively holistic evaluation using DEA. In this work we show that by utilizing hierarchical structures of input-output data DEA can handle quite large numbers of inputs and outputs. We present two approaches in a pilot evaluation of 15 institutes for basic research in Chinese Academy of Sciences using DEA models

Development and Application of a Performance and Operational Feasibility Guide to Facilitate Adoption of Soil Moisture Sensors

Soil moisture sensors can be effective and promising decision-making tools for diverse applications and audiences, including agricultural managers, irrigation practitioners, and researchers. Nevertheless, there exists immense adoption potential in the United States, with only 1.2 in 10 farms nationally using soil moisture sensors to decide when to irrigate. This number is much lower in the global scale. Increased adoption is likely hindered by lack of scientific support in need assessment, selection, suitability and use of these sensors. Here, through extensive field research, we address the operational feasibility of soil moisture sensors, an aspect which has been overlooked in the past, and integrate it with their performance accuracy, in order to develop a quantitative framework to guide users in the selection of best-suited sensors for varying applications. These evaluations were conducted for nine commercially available sensors under silt loam and loamy sand soils in irrigated cropland and rainfed grassland for two different installation orientations [sensing component parallel (horizontal) and perpendicular (vertical) to the ground surface] typically used. All the sensors were assessed for their aptness in terms of cost, ease of operation, convenience of telemetry, and performance accuracy. Best sensors under each soil condition, sensor orientation, and user applications (research versus agricultural production) were identified. The step-by-step guide presented here will serve as an unprecedented and holistic adoption-assisting resource and can be extended to other sensors as well

Ten years of MIREX: reflections, challenges and opportunities

The Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX) has been run annually since 2005, with the October 2014 plenary marking its tenth iteration. By 2013, MIREX has evaluated approximately 2000 individual music information retrieval (MIR) algorithms for a wide range of tasks over 37 different test collections. MIREX has involved researchers from over 29 different contrives with a median of 109 individual participants per year. This pater summarizes the history of MIREX form its earliest planning meeting in 2001 to the present. It reflects upon the administrative, financial, and technological challenges MIREX has faced and describes how those challenges have been surmounted. We propose new funding models, a distributed evaluation framework, and more holistic user experience evaluation tasks-some evolutionary, some revolutionary-for the continued success of MIREX. We hope that this paper will inspire MIR community members to contribute their ideas so MIREX can have many more successful years to come