Event Oriented Representation for Collaborative Activities in an Intensive Care Unit

We introduce in this paper a method for describing the components of medical activities during a patient management in an ICU (Intensive Care Unit) by the medical team, including physicians and nurses. This method allows both observing and representing the collective activity of patient management and should be used by the team members in order to prepare themselves to official accreditation procedures. An event-centred representation of medical activities is built during a 3-steps procedure. It successively involves an event-centred observation phase, an action extraction and coding phase, and an event and collaborative representation phase. The results allow us to characterize specific features of this complex and time-constrained situation as well as the collaborative activities between members of the team

Abstract

The capacity scaling of extended two-dimensional wireless networks is known in the high attenuation regime, i.e. when the power path loss exponent α is greater than 4. This has been accomplished by deriving information theoretic upper bounds for this regime that match the corresponding lower bounds. On the contrary, not much is known in the so-called low attenuation regime when 2 ≤ α ≤ 4. (For one-dimensional networks, the uncharacterized regime is 1 ≤ α ≤ 2.5.) The dichotomy is due to the fact that while communication is highly power-limited in the first case and power-based arguments suffice to get tight upper bounds, the study of the low attenuation regime requires a more precise analysis of the degrees of freedom involved. In this paper, we study the capacity scaling of extended wireless networks with an emphasis on the low attenuation regime and show that in the absence of small scale fading, the low attenuation regime does not behave significantly different from the high attenuation regime. I

Looking Ahead in Open Multithreaded Transactions

Abstract & Acknowledgements Complex distributed object-oriented systems often need complex concurrency features, which may go beyond the traditional concurrency control associated with separate method calls. A transaction groups together a sequence of operations, and can therefore encapsulate complex behavior and method calls. Transactions are able to hide the effects of concurrency and at the same time prevent the propagation of errors, making them appropriate building blocks for structuring reliable distributed systems. The open multithreaded transaction model, introduced by Prof. J. Kienzle, in his PhD thesis, 2001, provides features for controlling and structuring not only accesses to objects, as usual in transaction systems, but also threads taking part in transactions. The model allows several threads to enter the same transaction in order to perform a joint activity. It provides a flexible way of manipulating threads executing inside a transaction by allowing them to be forked and terminated, but it restricts their behavior in order to guarantee correctness of transaction nesting and isolation among transactions. The model also incorporates disciplined exceptio

An interface formalism for Web services

Web application development using distributed components and web services presents new software integration challenges, because solutions often cross vendor, administrative, and other boundaries across which neither binary nor source code can be shared. We present a methodology that addresses this problem through a formalism for specifying and manipulating behavioral interfaces of multithreaded open software components that communicate with each other through method calls. An interface constrains both the implementation and the user of a web service to fulfill certain assumptions that are specified by the interface. Our methodology consists of three increasingly expressive classes of interfaces. Signature interfaces specify the methods that can be invoked by the user, together with parameters. Consistency interfaces add propositional constraints, enhancing signature interfaces with the ability to specify choice and causality. Protocol interfaces specify, in addition, temporal ordering constraints on method invocations. We provide approaches to check if two or more interfaces are compatible; if a web service can be safely substituted for another one; and if a web service satisfies a specification that represents a desired behavioral property

CONTENTS

interactive techniques for motion deformation of articulated figures using prioritized constraints THÈSE N O 3459 (2006