Evaluating clinical variation in traumatic brain injury data

Current methods of clinical guideline development have two large challenges: 1) there is often a long time-lag between the key results and publication into recommended best practice and 2) the measurement of adherence to those guidelines is often qualitative and difficult to standardise into measurable impact. In an age of ever-increasing volumes of accurate data captured at the bedside in specialist intensive care units, this thesis explores the possibility of constructing a technology that can interpret that data and present the results as a quantitative and immediate measure of guideline adherence. Applied to the Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) domain, and specifically to the management of ICP and CPP, a framework is developed that makes use of process models to measure the adherence of clinicians to three specific TBI guidelines. By combining models constructed from physiological and treatment ICU data, and those constructed from guideline text, a distance is calculated between the two, and patterns of guideline adherence are inferred from this distance. The framework has been developed into an online application capable of producing adherence output on most standardised ICU datasets. This application has been applied to the Brain-IT and MIMIC III repositories and evaluated on the Philips ICCA bedside monitoring system. Patterns of guideline adherence are presented in a variety of ways including minute-by-minute windowing, tables of non-adherence instances, statistical distribution of instances, and a severity chart summarising the impact of non-adherence in a single number

Arbitration in merger and acquisition transactions : problem of consent in parallel proceedings and in the transfer of arbitration agreements in merger and acquisition arbitration

PhDMerger and acquisition (M&A) transactions have increased dramatically both in number and volume around the world in the last decades. Further to these increases, disputes regarding M&A transactions are often referred to arbitration as a consensual and private mechanism which is flexible, given the freedom of the parties to select arbitrators and to adjust the process according to their needs. This study undertakes to address and examine the long and complex processes in merger and acquisition transactions in light of the emerging preference for utilising arbitration in disputes arising therein. Therefore, M&A arbitration faces certain difficulties in coping with every dispute during the transaction, a number of which the author seeks to underline. In the thesis, two main problems of arbitration in M&A Transactions have been covered. Firstly, the problem of consent in consolidation of parallel proceedings during M&A transactions, and, secondly, parties consent validating arbitration agreements/clauses in “assignment” or “succession” after M&A transactions have been completed. The very approach of the thesis proposes whether academic analysis of the subject matter can be best conducted by separation along the many phases of the long and complex process of M&A and whether it is fruitful to examine these phases individually to obtain the greatest insight. Following the dissection of the different phases of M&A transactions, the nature and operation of arbitration in possible disputes arising out of different phases of M&A has been studied. It is also argued that the utilisation of arbitration will and should provide some ideas toward clarifying the content of consent of parties to a transaction. In demarcating the phases and critical stages in M&A transactions, perspective of the problems posed by parallel proceedings is enhanced. Developing on this rich background, argument develops the idea that the logic of consolidation in arbitration and can have pragmatic application to different alternative dispute resolution (ADR) clauses too. The expansive application of consent in M&A arbitration will be tested against those different ADR methods which do not have a binding effect. On the subject of consolidation in M&A transactions, it will be argued that it is necessary not only to focus on the intention of parties, but it is also unavoidable to concentrate on surrounding relevant facts arising in different phases of M&A transactions, given the recent doctrinal developments in academia and practice. Diverging views which have emerged in order to determine consent are explored alongside their respective theories of consent. The specific importance of consent in the transfer of arbitration agreements has been examined in respect of assignment and succession. The existing rules and approaches outlined in many publications will be challenged, and arguments against their automatic application in M&A transactions will be presented in favour of an expansive approach paying attention to the fluency of facts, similar to that employed in consolidation of parallel proceedings. In examining whether current regulation is suitable given the popular emergence of M&A arbitration, the author will propose how deficiencies and inconsistencies in the area can be rectified looking forward in the form of guidelines.ARKAS Holding

Journal of Education Innovation and Communication: Redefining Communication: Social Media and the Age of Innovation

The publications of the Communication Institute of Greece, such as the “Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication (JEICOM)”, are open access without any costs for the authors or the readers. JEICOM is a Fully Peer-Reviewed, Open Access journal, publishing articles from all areas of education, innovation and communication, independent of the events organized by the Communication Institute of Greece. JEICOM’s scope is to provide a free and open platform to academics, researchers, professionals, and postgraduate students to communicate and share knowledge in the form of high quality empirical and theoretical research that is of high interest not only for academic readers but also for practitioners and professionals. JEICOM welcomes theoretical, conceptual and empirical original research papers, case studies, book reviews that demonstrate the innovative and dynamic spirit for the education and communication sciences, from researchers, scholars, educators, policy-makers, and practitioners in education, communication, and related fields. Articles that show scholarly depth, breadth or richness of different aspects of social pedagogy are particularly welcome. The numerous papers presented every year during the conferences organized by the Communication Institute of Greece, enables us to have access to a plethora of papers. Following a rigorous peer- review process, only a selection of these papers submitted is published biannually. In addition, to the papers presented in the Institute’s conference, we do encourage independent submissions of papers too. Nevertheless, before you submit, please make sure to respect the guidelines and templates provided. The current special issue of the “Journal of Education, Innovation, and Communication (JEICOM)”, is our First Special Issue (December 2019). We consider that education and fruitful exchange can improve our lives with the view to nurture intercultural communication. Academics can contribute significantly to the quality of the educational experience and help educate, communicate, exchange, meet new cultures, create and collaborate! We wish you an excellent reading and for the year to come soon, 2020, Health, Love, Knowledge, Education, Prosperity, Communication and Exchange

Arbitration and third parties.

PhDModern international transactions have become extremely complicated, requiring the participation of several parties for the delivery of large-scale projects. However. multiparty commercial projects are invariably executed through several bilateral contracts providing for bilateral dispute resolution arrangements. Some of the contracts might include a jurisdiction clause, certain others might provide for arbitration, while others may not contain any dispute resolution provisions at all. This practice leads to "jurisdictional fragmentation of the multiparty commercial project" where the several parties of a single business plan will fall under the jurisdiction of different adjudicatory fora. Thus. a dispute arising between two persons bound by an arbitration agreement in connection with the multiparty project will have to be resolved exclusively by arbitration between these two parties. Other persons cannot take part in the resolution of the dispute, even if they play an active role in the actual business project. and thus have an interest in the outcome of the dispute. These persons will remain third parties, both to the arbitration agreement and the arbitral award. This study focuses on the role and the interests of the wide group of third parties exhibiting an interest in the dispute pending before a tribunal between two genuine parties. The thesis, in particular, examines whether arbitration agreements can affect persons which are not contractually bound by these agreements. In addition, the thesis explores whether arbitral awards can affect persons that have not participated in the arbitration proceedings The thesis challenges the prevailing contractual approach to the issue of arbitration, focusing exclusively on the contractual characteristics of arbitration ag eements. According to this view, the main question is whether a non-signatory can be contractually bound by an arbitration agreement. The study demonstrates that focusing exclusively on the contractual nature of arbitration agreements obscures the real issue here, which is whether arbitration agreements may have any jurisdictional implications vis-a-vis `third parties'. Accordingly, the thesis takes a jurisdictional approach, and argues that the discussion should be focused on the dispute and on any implications this may have to third parties, rather than on the requirement of consent to arbitration agreements. Regarding the effect of arbitral awards on third parties, the thesis argues for a third-party effect of arbitral awards specially designed for the needs of international arbitration. More specifically, the case is made for the application of an arbitral effect different from that of res judicata, both in terms of quality and intensity, but that is nevertheless conclusive. It is also suggested that the third party effect of an arbitral award should be analogous to the degree of substantive association between the genuine and the false third parties. This is consistent with the basic premise of the whole thesis: the relations between several parties, in terms of jurisdiction and more generally in arbitration procedure, should correspond to the extent of association between those parties, in terms of substantive rights, interests and liability

An inter-domain supervision framework for collaborative clustering of data with mixed types.

We propose an Inter-Domain Supervision (IDS) clustering framework to discover clusters within diverse data formats, mixed-type attributes and different sources of data. This approach can be used for combined clustering of diverse representations of the data, in particular where data comes from different sources, some of which may be unreliable or uncertain, or for exploiting optional external concept set labels to guide the clustering of the main data set in its original domain. We additionally take into account possible incompatibilities in the data via an automated inter-domain compatibility analysis. Our results in clustering real data sets with mixed numerical, categorical, visual and text attributes show that the proposed IDS clustering framework gives improved clustering results compared to conventional methods, over a wide range of parameters. Thus the automatically extracted knowledge, in the form of seeds or constraints, obtained from clustering one domain, can provide additional knowledge to guide the clustering in another domain. Additional empirical evaluations further show that our approach, especially when using selective mutual guidance between domains, outperforms common baselines such as clustering either domain on its own or clustering all domains converted to a single target domain. Our approach also outperforms other specialized multiple clustering methods, such as the fully independent ensemble clustering and the tightly coupled multiview clustering, after they were adapted to the task of clustering mixed data. Finally, we present a real life application of our IDS approach to the cluster-based automated image annotation problem and present evaluation results on a benchmark data set, consisting of images described with their visual content along with noisy text descriptions, generated by users on the social media sharing website, Flickr

Development of genomic resources in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan L.Millspaugh)

This study reports generation of large-scale genomic resources for pigeonpea, a so-called 'orphan crop species' of the semi-arid tropic regions. A set of 88.860 BAC (bacterial anificial chromosomes)-end sequences (BESs) were generated after constructing two BAC libraries by using Hindlll (34.560 clones) and BamHl (34.560 clones) restriction enzymes. A total of 3,072 novel SSR primer pairs were synthesized and tested for length polymorphism on two parental genotypes (ICP 28 and ICPW 94). In addition. Roche FLXl454 sequencing was carried out on a normalized cDNA pool prepared from 31 tissues and produced 494.353 shon transcript reads (STRs). Cluster analysis of these STRs. together with 10.817 Sanger ESTs, resulted in 127.754 pigeonpea transcript assemblies (CcTAs). Additionally. Illurnina 1G sequencing was performed on four parental genotypes of two mapping populations and a set of 7.453 SNPs were identified. Based on BES-SSR markers, the first SSR-based genetic map comprising of 239 loci was developed for this previously uncharacterized genome. In summary. while BAC libraries, BESs and CcTAs should be useful for genomics studies. BES-SSR. SNP markers, and the genetic map should be very useful for linking the genetic map with a future physical map as well as for molecular breeding in pigeonpea

Discourse analysis of arabic documents and application to automatic summarization

Dans un discours, les textes et les conversations ne sont pas seulement une juxtaposition de mots et de phrases. Ils sont plutôt organisés en une structure dans laquelle des unités de discours sont liées les unes aux autres de manière à assurer à la fois la cohérence et la cohésion du discours. La structure du discours a montré son utilité dans de nombreuses applications TALN, y compris la traduction automatique, la génération de texte et le résumé automatique. L'utilité du discours dans les applications TALN dépend principalement de la disponibilité d'un analyseur de discours performant. Pour aider à construire ces analyseurs et à améliorer leurs performances, plusieurs ressources ont été annotées manuellement par des informations de discours dans des différents cadres théoriques. La plupart des ressources disponibles sont en anglais. Récemment, plusieurs efforts ont été entrepris pour développer des ressources discursives pour d'autres langues telles que le chinois, l'allemand, le turc, l'espagnol et le hindi. Néanmoins, l'analyse de discours en arabe standard moderne (MSA) a reçu moins d'attention malgré le fait que MSA est une langue de plus de 422 millions de locuteurs dans 22 pays. Le sujet de thèse s'intègre dans le cadre du traitement automatique de la langue arabe, plus particulièrement, l'analyse de discours de textes arabes. Cette thèse a pour but d'étudier l'apport de l'analyse sémantique et discursive pour la génération de résumé automatique de documents en langue arabe. Pour atteindre cet objectif, nous proposons d'étudier la théorie de la représentation discursive segmentée (SDRT) qui propose un cadre logique pour la représentation sémantique de phrases ainsi qu'une représentation graphique de la structure du texte où les relations de discours sont de nature sémantique plutôt qu'intentionnelle. Cette théorie a été étudiée pour l'anglais, le français et l'allemand mais jamais pour la langue arabe. Notre objectif est alors d'adapter la SDRT à la spécificité de la langue arabe afin d'analyser sémantiquement un texte pour générer un résumé automatique. Nos principales contributions sont les suivantes : Une étude de la faisabilité de la construction d'une structure de discours récursive et complète de textes arabes. En particulier, nous proposons : Un schéma d'annotation qui couvre la totalité d'un texte arabe, dans lequel chaque constituant est lié à d'autres constituants. Un document est alors représenté par un graphe acyclique orienté qui capture les relations explicites et les relations implicites ainsi que des phénomènes de discours complexes, tels que l'attachement, la longue distance du discours pop-ups et les dépendances croisées. Une nouvelle hiérarchie des relations de discours. Nous étudions les relations rhétoriques d'un point de vue sémantique en se concentrant sur leurs effets sémantiques et non pas sur la façon dont elles sont déclenchées par des connecteurs de discours, qui sont souvent ambigües en arabe. o une analyse quantitative (en termes de connecteurs de discours, de fréquences de relations, de proportion de relations implicites, etc.) et une analyse qualitative (accord inter-annotateurs et analyse des erreurs) de la campagne d'annotation. Un outil d'analyse de discours où nous étudions à la fois la segmentation automatique de textes arabes en unités de discours minimales et l'identification automatique des relations explicites et implicites du discours. L'utilisation de notre outil pour résumer des textes arabes. Nous comparons la représentation de discours en graphes et en arbres pour la production de résumés.Within a discourse, texts and conversations are not just a juxtaposition of words and sentences. They are rather organized in a structure in which discourse units are related to each other so as to ensure both discourse coherence and cohesion. Discourse structure has shown to be useful in many NLP applications including machine translation, natural language generation and language technology in general. The usefulness of discourse in NLP applications mainly depends on the availability of powerful discourse parsers. To build such parsers and improve their performances, several resources have been manually annotated with discourse information within different theoretical frameworks. Most available resources are in English. Recently, several efforts have been undertaken to develop manually annotated discourse information for other languages such as Chinese, German, Turkish, Spanish and Hindi. Surprisingly, discourse processing in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) has received less attention despite the fact that MSA is a language with more than 422 million speakers in 22 countries. Computational processing of Arabic language has received a great attention in the literature for over twenty years. Several resources and tools have been built to deal with Arabic non concatenative morphology and Arabic syntax going from shallow to deep parsing. However, the field is still very vacant at the layer of discourse. As far as we know, the sole effort towards Arabic discourse processing was done in the Leeds Arabic Discourse Treebank that extends the Penn Discourse TreeBank model to MSA. In this thesis, we propose to go beyond the annotation of explicit relations that link adjacent units, by completely specifying the semantic scope of each discourse relation, making transparent an interpretation of the text that takes into account the semantic effects of discourse relations. In particular, we propose the first effort towards a semantically driven approach of Arabic texts following the Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT). Our main contributions are: A study of the feasibility of building a recursive and complete discourse structures of Arabic texts. In particular, we propose: An annotation scheme for the full discourse coverage of Arabic texts, in which each constituent is linked to other constituents. A document is then represented by an oriented acyclic graph, which captures explicit and implicit relations as well as complex discourse phenomena, such as long-distance attachments, long-distance discourse pop-ups and crossed dependencies. A novel discourse relation hierarchy. We study the rhetorical relations from a semantic point of view by focusing on their effect on meaning and not on how they are lexically triggered by discourse connectives that are often ambiguous, especially in Arabic. A thorough quantitative analysis (in terms of discourse connectives, relation frequencies, proportion of implicit relations, etc.) and qualitative analysis (inter-annotator agreements and error analysis) of the annotation campaign. An automatic discourse parser where we investigate both automatic segmentation of Arabic texts into elementary discourse units and automatic identification of explicit and implicit Arabic discourse relations. An application of our discourse parser to Arabic text summarization. We compare tree-based vs. graph-based discourse representations for producing indicative summaries and show that the full discourse coverage of a document is definitively a plus

Against Imperial Arbitrators: The Brilliance of Canada\u27s New Model Investment Treaty

Investment treaty arbitration has become politically “toxic” even in states that pioneered the development of investment treaties. There is consensus on the need for reform. But there is a dearth of historical research on what went wrong with investment treaties, when it happened, or how to find the way forward in light of the past. As a result, reform efforts have a stumbling quality. One can see this in multilateral fora, such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), where over four years of study and negotiations have produced little consensus. One can also see it in the investment treaty practice of individual states, such as Canada, which has recently lurched across the spectrum from investment treaty arbitration to a permanent international investment court, to the abandonment of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), and back to investment treaty arbitration. This article fills the gap in understanding by explaining what went wrong with investment treaty arbitration and when it happened. It demonstrates that the customary international law on state responsibility for injuries to aliens evolved during the 19th century to protect foreign investors against exceptional failures of the nightwatchman and rule-of-law states. As the consensus regarding customary international law standards of treatment unraveled during the 20th century due to the spread of communism, decolonization, and economic nationalism, capital-exporting states turned in bilateral investment treaties (BITs) to uphold traditional principles regarding the protection of foreign investment. Starting in the late 1990s, however, an unexpected surge of claims brought under NAFTA’s investment chapter fortuitously opened the door to the central problem of modern investment treaty practice: the rise of “imperial arbitrators” who do not merely police exceptional failures of the nightwatchman and rule-of-law states, but who choose to second-guess the normal operations of modern regulatory states without any meaningful checks or balances. Although the NAFTA Parties nipped that development in the bud, the rise of imperial arbitrators leapt to the broader universe of investment treaty arbitration, where it flourished until claims against developed states for measures such as the phaseout of nuclear power brought investment treaty arbitration to a crisis point. Seeking a way forward in light of the past, the article examines Canada’s recent experimentation with investment treaty reforms, including the development of a permanent international investment court in relations with the EU, the complete elimination of ISDS in relations with the United States, and a return to traditional investment treaty arbitration in a new model investment treaty coupled with substantive reforms that virtually eliminate opportunities to second-guess the normal operations of modern regulatory states. The article describes the last option as the most brilliant because it is the only one that substantively eliminates toeholds for imperial arbitrators while preserving arbitration as a safeguard against the exceptional failures of the nightwatchman and rule-of-law states. Seeking a way forward in light of the past, the article examines Canada’s recent experimentation with investment treaty reforms, including the development of a permanent international investment court in relations with the EU, the complete elimination of ISDS in relations with the United States, and a return to traditional investment treaty arbitration in a new model investment treaty coupled with substantive reforms that virtually eliminate opportunities to second-guess the normal operations of modern regulatory states. The article describes the last option as the most brilliant because it is the only one that substantively eliminates toeholds for imperial arbitrators while preserving arbitration as a safeguard against the exceptional failures of the nightwatchman and rule-of-law states