Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Dependability Issues in Open Source Software - DIRC Project Activity 5 Final Report

This report presents the findings of this investigation by reporting on the main activities that have been undertaken and presenting our informed final recommendation on a follow-on project activity. It is structured in the following way. Section 2 explains the obstacles encountered while trying to understand the term "open source", contacts pursued and projects observed with respect to open source. Section 3 presents insights into the sociology of open source software development, whereas section 4 describes observations drawn and main issues identified for open source software development and dependable systems engineering. Finally, section 5 explains our recommendation together with the reasons behind our decision. Further insights on the activities described in this report, as well as various papers that have been written in relation to this activity can be found in the appendices A - E

Consciosusness in Cognitive Architectures. A Principled Analysis of RCS, Soar and ACT-R

This report analyses the aplicability of the principles of consciousness developed in the ASys project to three of the most relevant cognitive architectures. This is done in relation to their aplicability to build integrated control systems and studying their support for general mechanisms of real-time consciousness.\ud To analyse these architectures the ASys Framework is employed. This is a conceptual framework based on an extension for cognitive autonomous systems of the General Systems Theory (GST).\ud A general qualitative evaluation criteria for cognitive architectures is established based upon: a) requirements for a cognitive architecture, b) the theoretical framework based on the GST and c) core design principles for integrated cognitive conscious control systems

Responsibility modelling for civil emergency planning

This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding civil emergency planning based on the notion of responsibility modelling combined with HAZOPS-style analysis of information requirements. Our goal is to represent complex contingency plans so that they can be more readily understood, so that inconsistencies can be highlighted and vulnerabilities discovered. In this paper, we outline the framework for contingency planning in the United Kingdom and introduce the notion of responsibility models as a means of representing the key features of contingency plans. Using a case study of a flooding emergency, we illustrate our approach to responsibility modelling and suggest how it adds value to current textual contingency plans

Automatic service categorisation through machine learning in emergent middleware

The modern environment of mobile, pervasive, evolving services presents a great challenge to traditional solutions for enabling interoperability. Automated solutions appear to be the only way to achieve interoperability with the needed level of flexibility and scalability. While necessary, the techniques used to determine compatibility, as a precursor to interaction, come at a substantial computational cost, especially when checks are performed between systems in unrelated domains. To overcome this, we apply machine learning to extract high-level functionality information through text categorisation of a system's interface description. This categorisation allows us to restrict the scope of compatibility checks, giving an overall performance gain when conducting matchmaking between systems. We have evaluated our approach on a corpus of web service descriptions, where even with moderate categorisation accuracy, a substantial performance benefit can be found. This in turn improves the applicability of our overall approach for achieving interoperability in the Connect project

Dagstuhl News January - December 2007

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Dagstuhl News January - December 2000

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Qualitative impact evaluation: incorporating authenticity into the assessment of rigour

Recent developments in impact evaluation recognise the need to go beyond the intense debate over experimental techniques to incorporate theory-based approaches and qualitative research methods. Motivated by an underlying concern that qualitative research in this new wave of qualitative impact evaluation research is appropriately conducted, this paper reviews practical strategies to address rigour deploying Guba and Lincoln’s principles of “trustworthiness” to do so. In particular we focus on the less discussed principle of ‘authenticity’ which responds to the demand for research orientations to be more transformative and emancipatory. In development impact evaluation, recent discussion has highlighted the frequent deficit of a transformative orientation and the problematic wider organisational contexts of aid relationships in which commissioned evaluations are conducted. We argue that embracing the authenticity principle offers commissioned researchers with a progressive orientation a rationale for making space for stakeholder interaction and negotiation within the rigour discourse. This in turn creates the scope to incorporate it into checklists of rigour so using the ‘artefacts’ of evaluation as a means to call commissioning organisations and other stakeholders to be more responsive to concerns for authenticity. Key words: qualitative research, rigour, trustworthiness, impact evaluation, evidence-based polic