A framework of enriching business processes life-cycle with tagging information

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015. In this demonstration, we present a framework for enriching business processes with tags specialized into social, resource, location, and temporal. Using the framework, business-process engineers and end-users (i.e., executors) provide the tags with the necessary details which are then automatically propagated from one tag to another, when appropriate. At design time phase of a business process, the propagation of relations between tags reflects unidirectional-transfer-offinal-details, unidirectional-transfer-of-partial-details, and bidirectional transfer- of-partial-details while at run-time the propagation of relations reflects strong-trigger, weak-trigger, and meet-in-the-middle trigger. Our provides an elegant mechanism for monitoring business processes which is more user-driven than traditional approaches which heavily rely on log analysis mechanisms

Mapping geographical inequalities in access to drinking water and sanitation facilities in low-income and middle-income countries, 2000-17

Background: Universal access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities is an essential human right, recognised in the Sustainable Development Goals as crucial for preventing disease and improving human wellbeing. Comprehensive, high-resolution estimates are important to inform progress towards achieving this goal. We aimed to produce high-resolution geospatial estimates of access to drinking water and sanitation facilities. Methods: We used a Bayesian geostatistical model and data from 600 sources across more than 88 low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) to estimate access to drinking water and sanitation facilities on continuous continent-wide surfaces from 2000 to 2017, and aggregated results to policy-relevant administrative units. We estimated mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive subcategories of facilities for drinking water (piped water on or off premises, other improved facilities, unimproved, and surface water) and sanitation facilities (septic or sewer sanitation, other improved, unimproved, and open defecation) with use of ordinal regression. We also estimated the number of diarrhoeal deaths in children younger than 5 years attributed to unsafe facilities and estimated deaths that were averted by increased access to safe facilities in 2017, and analysed geographical inequality in access within LMICs. Findings: Across LMICs, access to both piped water and improved water overall increased between 2000 and 2017, with progress varying spatially. For piped water, the safest water facility type, access increased from 40·0% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 39·4–40·7) to 50·3% (50·0–50·5), but was lowest in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to piped water was mostly concentrated in urban centres. Access to both sewer or septic sanitation and improved sanitation overall also increased across all LMICs during the study period. For sewer or septic sanitation, access was 46·3% (95% UI 46·1–46·5) in 2017, compared with 28·7% (28·5–29·0) in 2000. Although some units improved access to the safest drinking water or sanitation facilities since 2000, a large absolute number of people continued to not have access in several units with high access to such facilities (>80%) in 2017. More than 253 000 people did not have access to sewer or septic sanitation facilities in the city of Harare, Zimbabwe, despite 88·6% (95% UI 87·2–89·7) access overall. Many units were able to transition from the least safe facilities in 2000 to safe facilities by 2017; for units in which populations primarily practised open defecation in 2000, 686 (95% UI 664–711) of the 1830 (1797–1863) units transitioned to the use of improved sanitation. Geographical disparities in access to improved water across units decreased in 76·1% (95% UI 71·6–80·7) of countries from 2000 to 2017, and in 53·9% (50·6–59·6) of countries for access to improved sanitation, but remained evident subnationally in most countries in 2017. Interpretation: Our estimates, combined with geospatial trends in diarrhoeal burden, identify where efforts to increase access to safe drinking water and sanitation facilities are most needed. By highlighting areas with successful approaches or in need of targeted interventions, our estimates can enable precision public health to effectively progress towards universal access to safe water and sanitation

Causes of blindness and vision impairment in 2020 and trends over 30 years, and prevalence of avoidable blindness in relation to VISION 2020: the Right to Sight: an analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study

Background: Many causes of vision impairment can be prevented or treated. With an ageing global population, the demands for eye health services are increasing. We estimated the prevalence and relative contribution of avoidable causes of blindness and vision impairment globally from 1990 to 2020. We aimed to compare the results with the World Health Assembly Global Action Plan (WHA GAP) target of a 25% global reduction from 2010 to 2019 in avoidable vision impairment, defined as cataract and undercorrected refractive error. Methods: We did a systematic review and meta-analysis of population-based surveys of eye disease from January, 1980, to October, 2018. We fitted hierarchical models to estimate prevalence (with 95% uncertainty intervals [UIs]) of moderate and severe vision impairment (MSVI; presenting visual acuity from <6/18 to 3/60) and blindness (<3/60 or less than 10° visual field around central fixation) by cause, age, region, and year. Because of data sparsity at younger ages, our analysis focused on adults aged 50 years and older. Findings: Global crude prevalence of avoidable vision impairment and blindness in adults aged 50 years and older did not change between 2010 and 2019 (percentage change −0·2% [95% UI −1·5 to 1·0]; 2019 prevalence 9·58 cases per 1000 people [95% IU 8·51 to 10·8], 2010 prevalence 96·0 cases per 1000 people [86·0 to 107·0]). Age-standardised prevalence of avoidable blindness decreased by −15·4% [–16·8 to −14·3], while avoidable MSVI showed no change (0·5% [–0·8 to 1·6]). However, the number of cases increased for both avoidable blindness (10·8% [8·9 to 12·4]) and MSVI (31·5% [30·0 to 33·1]). The leading global causes of blindness in those aged 50 years and older in 2020 were cataract (15·2 million cases [9% IU 12·7–18·0]), followed by glaucoma (3·6 million cases [2·8–4·4]), undercorrected refractive error (2·3 million cases [1·8–2·8]), age-related macular degeneration (1·8 million cases [1·3–2·4]), and diabetic retinopathy (0·86 million cases [0·59–1·23]). Leading causes of MSVI were undercorrected refractive error (86·1 million cases [74·2–101·0]) and cataract (78·8 million cases [67·2–91·4]). Interpretation: Results suggest eye care services contributed to the observed reduction of age-standardised rates of avoidable blindness but not of MSVI, and that the target in an ageing global population was not reached. Funding: Brien Holden Vision Institute, Fondation Théa, The Fred Hollows Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Lions Clubs International Foundation, Sightsavers International, and University of Heidelberg

An Analytic Approach to People Evaluation in Crowdsourcing Systems 2012-4

Worker selection is a significant and challenging issue in crowdsourcing systems. Such selection is usually based on an assessment of the reputation of the individual workers participating in such systems. However, assessing the credibility and adequacy of such calculated reputation is a real challenge. In this paper, we propose an analytic model which leverages the values of the tasks completed, the credibility of the evaluators of the results of the tasks and time of evaluation of the results of these tasks in order to calculate an accurate and credible reputation rank of participating workers and fairness rank for evaluators. The model has been implemented and experimentally validated

Detecting, Representing and Querying Collusion in Online Rating Systems 2012-3

Online rating systems are subject to malicious behaviors mainly by posting unfair rating scores. Users may try to individually or collaboratively promote or demote a product. Collaborating unfair rating \u27collusion\u27 is more damaging than individual unfair rating. Although collusion detection in general has been widely studied, identifying collusion groups in online rating systems is less studied and needs more investigation. In this paper, we study impact of collusion in online rating systems and asses their susceptibility to collusion attacks. The proposed model uses a frequent itemset mining algorithm to detect candidate collusion groups. Then, several indicators are used for identifying collusion groups and for estimating how damaging such colluding groups might be. Also, we propose an algorithm for finding possible collusive subgroup inside larger groups which are not identified as collusive. The model has been implemented and we present results of experimental evaluation of our methodology

Organizing, querying, and analyzing ad-hoc processes' data

Business processes are central to the operation of both public and private organizations. Recently, business world is getting increasingly dynamic as various technologies such as social media and Web 2.0 have made dynamic processes more prevalent. For example, outsourcing and the emphasis on customer service makes the use of complex, dynamic and often knowledge intensive activities an inevitable task.Ad-hoc processes, a special category of processes, have flexible underlying process definition where the control flow between activities cannot be modeled in advance but simply occurs during run time. In this dissertation, we investigate the problem of explorative querying, and analyzing of ad-hoc processes. Addressing this problem is challenging, as the information about process execution is scattered across several systems and data sources. Moreover, in many cases, there is no well-documented information on how this information is related to each other and to the overall business process of the enterprise. Enabling above-mentioned analysis requires a model and a query language for representing and querying process entities (e.g., events, artifacts, and actors), relationships among them, and the evolution of business artifacts over time. Moreover, the model should support multi-dimensional/-level views and analytics over ad-hoc processes data.To address these challenges, we present a framework, simple abstractions and a language for the explorative querying and understanding of ad-hoc processes data from various user perspectives. We propose novel abstractions, folder and path, for facilitating the analysis of ad-hoc processes data by enabling process analysts to group related entities or find patterns among entities. We present FPSPARQL (Folder-, Path-enabled SPARQL) as a language and a set of new methods for organizing, indexing and querying ad-hoc processes. We then extend FPSPARQL for analyzing the evolution of process artifact, and for analyzing cross-cutting aspects in ad-hoc processes. We introduce two concepts of timed-folder to represent evolution of artifacts over time, and activity-path to represent the process which led to artifacts. Finally, we propose a model, GOLAP, and extend FPSPARQL for online analytical processing on process graphs. The approaches presented in this dissertation have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on synthetic and real-world datasets

An Analytic Approach to People Evaluation in Crowdsourcing Systems

Worker selection is a significant and challenging issue in crowdsourcing systems. Such selection is usually based on an assessment of the reputation of the individual workers participating in such systems. However, assessing the credibility and adequacy of such calculated reputation is a real challenge. In this paper, we propose an analytic model which leverages the values of the tasks completed, the credibility of the evaluators of the results of the tasks and time of evaluation of the results of these tasks in order to calculate an accurate and credible reputation rank of participating workers and fairness rank for evaluators. The model has been implemented and experimentally validated

Representation and querying of unfair evaluations in social rating systems

Social rating systems are subject to unfair evaluations. Users may try to individually or collaboratively promote or demote a product. Detecting unfair evaluations, mainly massive collusive attacks as well as honest looking intelligent attacks, is still a real challenge for collusion detection systems. In this paper, we study the impact of unfair evaluations in online rating systems. First, we study the individual unfair evaluations and their impact on the reputation of people calculated by social rating systems. We then propose a method for detecting collaborative unfair evaluations, also known as collusion. The proposed model uses frequent itemset mining technique to detect the candidate collusion groups and sub-groups. We use several indicators to identify collusion groups and to estimate how destructive such colluding groups can be. The approaches presented in this paper have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on synthetic and real-world datasets