Structural and parameter identification of two lung gas-exchange models

Methods for the investigation of model identifiability and for test signal design have been applied to homogeneous models of the gas exchanging processes of the lungs. The analysis has provided valuable information which is applicable to the development of practical techniques for the non-invasive estimation of cardiopulmonary quantities using system identification techniques

Time-domain system identification applied to noninvasive estimation of cardiopulmonary quantities

The paper describes an application of system identification techniques to the estimation of cardiac output and other cardiopulmonary quantities in human subjects. The method used requires continuous measurement of gas flow rates and gas concentration at the subject's mouth and involves the use of a lumped parameter model of the gas exchange processes. Particular emphasis is given to investigation of the identifiability and determinancy of the model and to important questions of the choice of input test signal. Estimation of the parameters of this model is by an extension of the maximum likelihood method of Astrom and Bohlin. This paper includes a summary of some encouraging results which have been obtained using this approach

Investigating the statistical properties of user-generated documents

The importance of the Internet as a communication medium is reflected in the large amount of documents being generated every day by users of the different services that take place online. In this work we aim at analyzing the properties of these online user-generated documents for some of the established services over the Internet (Kongregate, Twitter, Myspace and Slashdot) and comparing them with a consolidated collection of standard information retrieval documents (from the Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and Financial Times, as part of the TREC ad-hoc collection). We investigate features such as document similarity, term burstiness, emoticons and Part-Of-Speech analysis, highlighting the applicability and limits of traditional content analysis and indexing techniques used in information retrieval to the new online usergenerated documents

A Bridge Too Phare? EU Pre-Accession Aid and Capacity-Building in the Candidate Countries

The imminent large-scale EU enlargement raises important questions regarding the success of Phare as one of the Pre-Accession Funds in preparing candidate countries' institutions for Structural Funding, the need to reform EU regional policy itself, and to what extent the Commission is using Phare to build regional-level institutions and shift an enlarged EU towards multi-level governance. Despite some successes, Phare will not be able to deliver everything it was set up for, and a coherent set of post-accession transition policies will need to be set up as part of the next reform of the Structural Funds to ensure that the process of learning and adjustment leading to the adoption of the "acquis" does not stall with the new membership. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.