UniFlexView : a unified framework for consistent construction of BPMN and BPEL process views

Process view technologies allow organizations to create different granularity levels of abstraction of their business processes, therefore enabling a more effective business process management, analysis, interoperation, and privacy controls. Existing research proposed view construction and abstraction techniques for block-based (ie, BPEL) and graph-based (ie, BPMN) process models. However, the existing techniques treat each type of the two types of models separately. Especially, this brings in challenges for achieving a consistent process view for a BPEL model that derives from a BPMN model. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, namely UniFlexView, for supporting automatic and consistent process view construction. With our framework, process modelers can use our proposed View Definition Language to specify their view construction requirements disregarding the types of process models. Our UniFlexView's system prototype has been developed as a proof of concept and demonstration of the usability and feasibility of our framework. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Reusing artifact-centric business process models : a behavioral consistent specialization approach

Process reuse is one of the important research areas that address efficiency issues in business process modeling. Similar to software reuse, business processes should be able to be componentized and specialized in order to enable flexible process expansion and customization. Current activity/control-flow centric workflow modeling approaches face difficulty in supporting highly flexible process reuse, limited by their procedural nature. In comparison, the emerging artifact-centric workflow modeling approach well fits into these reuse requirements. Beyond the classic class level reuse in existing object-oriented approaches, process reuse faces the challenge of handling synchronization dependencies among artifact lifecycles as parts of a business process. In this article, we propose a theoretical framework for business process specialization that comprises an artifact-centric business process model, a set of methods to design and construct a specialized business process model from a base model, and a set of behavioral consistency criteria to help check the consistency between the two process models. © 2020, Springer-Verlag GmbH Austria, part of Springer Nature

An artifact-centric approach to generating web-based business process driven user interfaces

Workflow-based web applications are important in workflow management systems as they interact with users of business processes. With the Model-driven approach, user interfaces (UIs) of these applications can be partially generated based on functional and data requirements obtained from underlying process models. In traditional activity-centric modelling approaches, data models and relationships between tasks and data are not clearly defined in the process model; thus, it is left to UI modellers to manually identify data requirement in generated UIs. We observed that artifact-centric approaches can be applied to address the above problems. However, it brings in challenges to automatically generate UIs due to the declarative manner of describing the processes. In this paper, we propose a model-based automatic UI generation framework with related algorithms for deriving UIs from process models

Efficiency analysis of alternative production systems in Kosovo - an ecosystem services approach

The efficiency estimation and the interpretation of its behavior are of extreme interest for primary producer in agriculture as well as for policy makers. In Kosovo one of the main objectives of Agriculture and Rural Development Plan 2007-2013 and 2014-2020 is to improve competitiveness and the efficiency of primary agricultural producers and to attain sustainable land use. Regardless of this, there was a lack of studies on farm efficiency estimation and the productivity changes of the agriculture sector in Kosovo. Therefore, the conducted study of this thesis focuses on estimation and the analysis of efficiency at farm level. More specifically, the study aimed estimation of technical, economic, and environmental efficiency of the farms oriented on tomato, grape and apple production. In addition, identification of the factors that extensively explain the variation of the efficiency scores among farms was sought. The study was based entirely on primary data, collected in three different stages. In the first stage, a survey using structured questionnaire was conducted with 120 farms which were distributed equally for each selected production system in the study. Farm efficiency scores were obtained using a Data Envelopment Analysis, which is a linear programming optimization technique that measures relative efficiency of a set of comparable units. In general, the efficiency scores for three different production systems were high, showing that there was little space for efficiency improvement. On average, tomato farms tend to be more technical efficient, followed by scale, revenue, and cost allocative efficiency. Farmers oriented in grape production were very scale efficient, followed by technical, revenue and cost allocative efficiency. Apple farms on average were performing relatively well in terms of technical efficiency which was the highest on average, followed by revenue efficiency and scale efficiency. Factors which were proved to be statistically important in explaining the variation of the efficiency scores among the farms were household size, farm size and number of cultivated crops, number of land plots, farmer´s education and experience in farming. In terms of the position in ranking between technical and environmental efficiency estimation, three different groups of farms were found. The group of farms which showed increase in ranking at environmental efficiency when compared to the technical one. Farms with no difference in ranking, and a group of farms showing a decrease in ranking at environmental efficiency compared to the technical efficiency. Farms which displayed an increase in ranking were mostly farms that improved or maintained good quality of soil at farm land and good level of agro-biodiversity provision. The second group of farms showed no difference in ranking, as they were fully efficient in technical and environmental efficiency estimation. The third group of farms which showed a decrease in ranking were those farms performing weakly in both technical and environmental efficiency. This group of farms were also having lower soil quality at farm land and lower agro-biodiversity when compared to the averages of total sample

School-Based Programs for Prevention and Early Treatment of Obesity in School-Aged Children: A Literature Review

Giriş: Günümüzde çocuklarda şişmanlık, birçok ülkede önemli bir sağlık sorunudur ve ileri yaşlarda morbidite ve mortalite oranlarınıartırmaktadır. Amaç: Bu literatür derlemesinde amaç, çocukluk çağı şişmanlığını önlemeye yönelik okula dayalı girişim yapılanaraştırmaların incelenmesidir. Yöntem: "Medline/PubMed" veri tabanı taranarak 1999-2006 yılları arasında elde edilen 16 çalışmaincelenmiştir. Bulgular: Amerika (6), İngiltere (3), Almanya (2), İtalya (1), Norveç (1), İrlanda (1), Yunanistan (1) ve Şili (1)'de yapılmıştoplam 16 çalışmaya ulaşılmıştır. Girişimlerin yapıldığı sınıflar ilkokullar ile liseler arasında değişmekle birlikte çoğu ilköğretim düzeyindekiöğrencileri kapsamaktadır. Çocuklarda şişmanlığı önlemeye yönelik girişimlerin çoğu beslenme ve fiziksel aktivite üzerine odaklanmaktadır.Ancak televizyon seyretme ya da karbonhitratlı içeceklerin sınırlandırılması gibi bazı tek yöne odaklanmış çalışmalar da bulunmaktadır.Çalışmalardaki girişim sürelerinin 12 hafta ile 3 yıl arasında olduğu görülmüştür. Çalışmalardaki girişim sonuçlarına bakıldığında, sadece 4çalışmada vücut yağ dokusu/beden kitle indeksi (BKİ)'nde azalma ya da çok az düzeyde artış bulunmuştur. Sonuç: Çocuklarda şişmanlığıönlemeye yönelik okula dayalı girişimlerde, beslenme, fiziksel aktivite ve televizyon seyretme gibi alışkanlıkların değiştirilmesi üzerindedurulması, programların başarısını etkilemektedir. Background: Obesity in children is currently a major health problem in many countries and increases morbidity and mortality in furtherages. Objectives: The purpose of this article was to review school-based interventions for preventing childhood obesity. Methods:"Medline/PubMed" data base was searched and 16 articles relevant to the subject which were published between 1999 and 2006 wereinvestigated. Results: A total of 16 interventions were found from US (6), UK (3), Germany (2), Italy (1), Norway (1), Ireland (1), Greece(1) and Chile (1). The grade range of these interventions was changing from elementary school to high school, with the majority of thestudents from elementary schools. Most of the interventions for prevention of obesity in children targeted nutrition and physical activity.There were also some interventions that focused on only one dimension such as TV watching or restricting of carboneted drinks. Thedurations of the interventions were between 12 weeks and 3 years in the studies. According the results, reduction or less increase inadiposity/BMI was found in only 4 studies. Conclusion: Focusing on the changes of the behaviors such as nutrition, physical activity, TVwatching habits in the school-based interventions for prevention of obesity in children affect the success of the programs

Seeing What You Miss: Vision-Language Pre-training with Semantic Completion Learning

Cross-modal alignment is essential for vision-language pre-training (VLP) models to learn the correct corresponding information across different modalities. For this purpose, inspired by the success of masked language modeling (MLM) tasks in the NLP pre-training area, numerous masked modeling tasks have been proposed for VLP to further promote cross-modal interactions. The core idea of previous masked modeling tasks is to focus on reconstructing the masked tokens based on visible context for learning local-to-local alignment. However, most of them pay little attention to the global semantic features generated for the masked data, resulting in the limited cross-modal alignment ability of global representations. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Semantic Completion Learning (SCL) task, complementary to existing masked modeling tasks, to facilitate global-to-local alignment. Specifically, the SCL task complements the missing semantics of masked data by capturing the corresponding information from the other modality, promoting learning more representative global features which have a great impact on the performance of downstream tasks. Moreover, we present a flexible vision encoder, which enables our model to perform image-text and video-text multimodal tasks simultaneously. Experimental results show that our proposed method obtains state-of-the-art performance on various vision-language benchmarks, such as visual question answering, image-text retrieval, and video-text retrieval

Proteostasis by STUB1/HSP70 complex controls sensitivity to androgen receptor targeted therapy in advanced prostate cancer.

Protein homeostasis (proteostasis) is a potential mechanism that contributes to cancer cell survival and drug resistance. Constitutively active androgen receptor (AR) variants confer anti-androgen resistance in advanced prostate cancer. However, the role of proteostasis involved in next generation anti-androgen resistance and the mechanisms of AR variant regulation are poorly defined. Here we show that the ubiquitin-proteasome-system (UPS) is suppressed in enzalutamide/abiraterone resistant prostate cancer. AR/AR-V7 proteostasis requires the interaction of E3 ubiquitin ligase STUB1 and HSP70 complex. STUB1 disassociates AR/AR-V7 from HSP70, leading to AR/AR-V7 ubiquitination and degradation. Inhibition of HSP70 significantly inhibits prostate tumor growth and improves enzalutamide/abiraterone treatments through AR/AR-V7 suppression. Clinically, HSP70 expression is upregulated and correlated with AR/AR-V7 levels in high Gleason score prostate tumors. Our results reveal a novel mechanism of anti-androgen resistance via UPS alteration which could be targeted through inhibition of HSP70 to reduce AR-V7 expression and overcome resistance to AR-targeted therapies

Lensless polarimetric coded ptychography (pol-CP) for high-resolution, high-throughput birefringence imaging on a chip

Polarimetric imaging provides valuable insights into the polarization state of light interacting with a sample. It can infer crucial birefringence properties of bio-specimens without using any labels, thereby facilitating the diagnosis of diseases such as cancer and osteoarthritis. In this study, we introduce a novel polarimetric coded ptychography (pol-CP) approach that enables high-resolution, high-throughput birefringence imaging on a chip. Our platform deviates from traditional lens-based polarization systems by employing an integrated polarimetric coded sensor for lensless diffraction data acquisition. Utilizing Jones calculus, we quantitatively determine the birefringence retardance and orientation information of bio-specimens from four recovered intensity images. Our portable pol-CP prototype can resolve the 435-nm linewidth on the resolution target and the imaging field of view for a single acquisition is limited only by the detector size of 41 mm^2. The prototype allows for the acquisition of gigapixel birefringence images with a 180-mm^2 field of view in ~3.5 minutes, achieving an imaging throughput comparable to that of a conventional whole slide scanner. To demonstrate its biomedical applications, we perform high-throughput imaging of malaria-infected blood smears, locating parasites using birefringence contrast. We also generate birefringence maps of label-free thyroid smears to identify thyroid follicles. Notably, the recovered birefringence maps emphasize the same regions as autofluorescence images, indicating the potential for rapid on-site evaluation of label-free biopsies. The reported approach offers a portable, turnkey solution for high-resolution, high-throughput polarimetric analysis without using lenses, with potential applications in disease diagnosis, sample screening, and label-free chemical imaging

The incidence and risk of venous thromboembolism associated with peripherally inserted central venous catheters in hospitalized patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

BackgroundVenous thromboembolism (VTE) can be fatal if not treated promptly, and individual studies have reported wide variability in rates of VTE associated with peripherally inserted central catheters (PICC). We thus conducted this meta-analysis to investigate the overall incidence and risk of developing PICC-related VTE in hospitalized patients.MethodsWe searched PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science databases from inception until January 26, 2022. In studies with a non-comparison arm, the pooled incidence of PICC-related VTE was calculated. The pooled odds ratio (OR) was calculated to assess the risk of VTE in the studies that compared PICC to the central venous catheter (CVC). The Newcastle-Ottawa Scale was used to assess methodological quality.ResultsA total of 75 articles (58 without a comparison arm and 17 with), including 109292 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. The overall pooled incidence of symptomatic VTE was 3.7% (95% CI: 3.1–4.4) in non-comparative studies. In the subgroup meta-analysis, the incidence of VTE was highest in patients who were in a critical care setting (10.6%; 95% CI: 5.0–17.7). Meta-analysis of comparative studies revealed that PICC was associated with a statistically significant increase in the odds of VTE events compared with CVC (OR, 2.48; 95% CI, 1.83–3.37; P < 0.01). However, in subgroup analysis stratified by the study design, there was no significant difference in VTE events between the PICC and CVC in randomized controlled trials (OR, 2.28; 95% CI, 0.77–6.74; P = 0.13).ConclusionBest practice standards such as PICC tip verification and VTE prophylaxis can help reduce the incidence and risk of PICC-related VTE. The risk-benefit of inserting PICC should be carefully weighed, especially in critically ill patients. Cautious interpretation of our results is important owing to substantial heterogeneity among the studies included in this study