Quasistatic computing environments

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 55-57).by Ian S. Eslick.M.Eng

Searching for commonsense

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-101).Acquiring and representing the large body of "common sense" knowledge underlying ordinary human reasoning and communication is a long standing problem in the field of artificial intelligence. This thesis will address the question whether a significant quantity of this knowledge may be acquired by mining natural language content on the Web. Specifically, this thesis emphasizes the representation of knowledge in the form of binary semantic relationships, such as cause, effect, intent, and time, among natural language phrases. The central hypothesis is that seed knowledge collected from volunteers enables automated acquisition of this knowledge from a large, unannotated, general corpus like the Web. A text mining system, ConceptMiner, was developed to evaluate this hypothesis. ConceptMiner leverages web search engines, Information Extraction techniques and the ConceptNet toolkit to analyze Web content for textual evidence indicating common sense relationships.(cont.) Experiments are reported for three semantic relation classes: desire, effect, and capability. A Pointwise Mutual Infomation measure computed from Web hit counts is demonstrated to filter general common sense from instance knowledge true only in specific circumstances. A semantic distance metric is introduced which significantly reduces negative instances from the extracted hypotheses. The results confirm that significant relational common sense knowledge exists on the Web and provides evidence that the algorithms employed by ConceptMiner can extract this knowledge with a precision approaching that provided by human subjects.by Ian Scott Eslick.S.M

Anecdotes to aggregated self-experiments

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-315).Nearly one quarter of US adults read patient-generated health information found on blogs, forums and social media; many say they use this information to influence everyday health decisions. Topics of discussion in online forums are often poorly-addressed by existing, clinical research, so a patient's reported experiences are the only evidence. No rigorous methods exist to help patients leverage anecdotal evidence to make better decisions. This dissertation reports on multiple prototype systems that help patients augment anecdote with data to improve individual decision making, optimize healthcare delivery, and accelerate research. The web-based systems were developed through a multi-year collaboration with individuals, advocacy organizations, healthcare providers, and biomedical researchers. The result of this work is a new scientific model for crowdsourcing health insights: Aggregated Self-Experiments. The self-experiment, a type of single-subject (n-of-1) trial, formally validates the effectiveness of an intervention on a single person. Aggregated Personal Experiments enables user communities to translate anecdotal correlations into repeatable trials that can validate efficacy in the context of their daily lives. Aggregating the outcomes of multiple trials improves the efficiency of future trials and enables users to prioritize trials for a given condition. Successful outcomes from many patients provide evidence to motivate future clinical research. The model, and the design principles that support it were evaluated through a set of focused user studies, secondary data analyses, and experience with real-world deployments.by Ian Scott Eslick.Ph. D

Analysis of Outcomes in Ischemic vs Nonischemic Cardiomyopathy in Patients With Atrial Fibrillation A Report From the GARFIELD-AF Registry

IMPORTANCE Congestive heart failure (CHF) is commonly associated with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF), and their combination may affect treatment strategies and outcomes