Detectors could spot plagiarism in research proposals

Having all been involved in proposal evaluation, we believe the studies indicate that a text matching analysis of research proposals could reduce plagiarism in subsequent publications. For instance, when European Commission evaluators have met in the past to evaluate research proposals, they received printed copies which had to be returned before the panel members left, and had no computer access during deliberations. A plagiarism detector using text-mining methods could be used instead of the current security measures. Such a system could, in principle, detect similarities to previous submissions and uncited sources using advanced document segmentation. Only official agencies have access to confidential proposals and the funds to experiment with automated plagiarism-detectors. It is important that they should investigate these approaches to reducing the possibility of scientific misconduct

A Knowledge Engineering Approach to Recognizing and Extracting Sequences of Nucleic Acids from Scientific Literature

In this paper we present a knowledge engineering approach to automatically recognize and extract genetic sequences from scientific articles. To carry out this task, we use a preliminary recognizer based on a finite state machine to extract all candidate DNA/RNA sequences. The latter are then fed into a knowledge-based system that automatically discards false positives and refines noisy and incorrectly merged sequences. We created the knowledge base by manually analyzing different manuscripts containing genetic sequences. Our approach was evaluated using a test set of 211 full-text articles in PDF format containing 3134 genetic sequences. For such set, we achieved 87.76% precision and 97.70% recall respectively. This method can facilitate different research tasks. These include text mining, information extraction, and information retrieval research dealing with large collections of documents containing genetic sequences

Dialogic Argumentative Interaction Enviroments for the Development of Cultural Literacy Dispositions of Inclusion, Tolerance and Empathy

Podeu consultar el llibre complet a: http://hdl.handle.net/2445/164579[cat] DIALLS té com a objectiu l’alfabetització cultural dels joves en l’educació formal a través del diàleg i de l’argumentació com a mitjà per entendre les identitats i les cultures europees. La novetat de la proposta rau en la intersecció d’alfabetització cultural, multimodalitat, diàleg i argumentació, i mitjançant l’ús d’entorns d’aprenentatge presencials i en línia on els estudiants poden compartir les seves perspectives les seves diferents cultures a Europa. Els estudiants respondran i produiran textos multimodals que reflecteixin els patrimonis europeus que promouen la tolerància, inclusió i empatia com a disposició fonamental de l’alfabetització cultural. Portarem a terme anàlisis de les interaccions cara a cara a l’aula,i en línia entre aules de diferents escoles i de diferentd països. Les anàlisis comparatives de les aules de set països inclourran l’anàlisi de gènere, edat, ètnia, etc.. Les nostres eines innovadores d’ensenyament i avaluació orientaran els professors en el desenvolupament d’una pedagogia dialògica per a l’alfabetització cultural a Europa de demà.[eng] DIALLS aims at developing young people’s cultural literacy understanding in formal education through the teaching of dialogue and argumentation as a means to understand European identities and cultures. The novelty of our proposal lies in the intersection of cultural literacy, multimodality, dialogue and argumentation, and through the use of face-to-face and online learning environments where students can share their perspectives as they make sense of European different cultures. Students will produce multimodal texts reflecting European heritages with the promotion of tolerance, inclusion and empathy as core cultural literacy dispositions. We will conduct analyses of students’ class-based and online interactions, mapping the development of dialogue and argumentation skills. Cross-comparative analyses of classrooms in seven countries. Our innovative teaching and assessment tools will guide teachers in their development of a dialogic pedagogy for cultural literacy in tomorrow’s Europe

A Method for Indexing Biomedical Resources over the Internet

A large number of biomedical resources are publicly available over the Internet. This number grows every day. Biomedical researchers face the problem of locating, identifying and selecting the most appropriate resources according to their interests. Some resource indexes can be found in the Internet, but they only provide information and links related to resources created by the owner institution of each website. In this paper we propose a novel method for extracting information from the literature and create a Resourceome, i.e. an index of biomedical resources (databases, tools and services) in a semi-automatic way. In this approach we consider only the information provided by the abstracts of relevant papers in the area. Building a comprehensive resource index is the first step towards the development of new methodologies for the automatic or semi-automatic construction of complex biomedical workflows which allow combining several resources to obtain higher-level functionalities

Nanoinformática: retos e iniciativas para la gestión de la información generada en la investigación nanomédica

Durante la última década la investigación en nanomedicina ha generado gran cantidad de datos, heterogéneos, distribuidos en múltiples fuentes de información. El uso de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC) puede facilitar la investigación médica a escala nanométrica, proporcionando mecanismos y herramientas que permitan gestionar todos esos datos de una manera inteligente. Mientras que la informática biomédica comprende el procesamiento y gestión de la información generada desde el nivel de salud pública y aplicación clínica hasta el nivel molecular, la nanoinformática extiende este ámbito para incluir el “nivel nano”, ocupándose de gestionar y analizar los resultados generados durante la investigación en nanomedicina y desarrollar nuevas líneas de trabajo en este espacio interdisciplinar. En esta nueva área científica, la nanoinformática (que podría consolidarse como una auténtica disciplina en los próximos años), elGrupo de Informática Biomédica (GIB) de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) participa en numerosas iniciativas, que se detallan a continuación

Diseño de silo experimental para el estudio de sistemas de protección frente a las explosiones de polvo

El objetivo principal de este trabajo es el diseño de un silo experimental concebido para el ensayo de explosiones de polvo venteadas. Este equipo permitirá avanzar en el conocimiento de todas las variables que intervienen en el fenómeno de la explosión y del venteo; y también avanzar en el diseño de dispositivos de protección más eficaces. Gracias a su diseño modular se pretende disponer de una herramienta abierta a multitud de posibilidades de ensayo, pudiendo variar factores con gran influencia en el desarrollo de la explosión, como el área de venteo, el volumen del silo y su relación altura/diámetro (L/D)

An Automatic Method for Retrieving and Indexing Catalogues of Biomedical Courses

Although there is wide information about Biomedical Informatics education and courses in different Websites, information is usually not exhaustive and difficult to update. We propose a new methodology based on information retrieval techniques for extracting, indexing and retrieving automatically information about educational offers. A web application has been developed to make available such information in an inventory of courses and educational offers

The challenge of inclusive dialogic teaching in public secondary school

The challenge of creating more inclusive public schools addressing the needs of the 21st century Knowledge Society is a major one. In this paper, we focus on inclusion as a dialogical process to be adopted and developed by teachers and students alike in any classroom. The idea of inclusive dialogic teaching is explained and operationalised in an inclusive dialogic curriculum focusing on cultural literacy learning dispositions. In this study, which is part of a multi-country European project, eight Spanish and Portuguese secondary school teachers and their students participated in eight sessions performing dialogic lesson plans. Teachers attended two professional development sessions, one at the beginning of the project and another one later on. Classroom discourse data from sessions #3 and #8 were collected and analyzed using a pre-constructed coding scheme. The findings show a slight improvement in dialogicity from session #3 to session #8 with a persisting resistance from teachers to be more cumulative in their discourse. These findings confirm previous work showing that dialogic teaching is acquired gradually, and even when there are changes in teachers’ stance being more inclusive and inviting towards students, these changes do not necessarily represent a radical shift in the teaching methods towards being more student-centered

Change in Classroom Dialogicity to Promote Cultural Literacy across Educational Levels

In a highly diverse world, cultural literacy is an essential tool for living together in harmony, and dialogic teaching may be a way to promote and develop it among children and adolescents. We define cultural literacy as a set of attitudes (inclusion, tolerance, and empathy) and skills (dialogic argumentation) needed to understand others in our everyday lives. This paper focuses on the effect of a professional development programme to promote dialogue and argumentation to help children and adolescents overcome pre-existing stereotypes and prejudices and foster students' participation in discussions that contrast divergent viewpoints. This was done through debates on social responsibility issues, living together, and belonging as presented in books and short films addressing the following topics: citizenship, the celebration of diversity, democracy, globalisation, human rights, cooperation, sustainable development, and climate change. After the professional development programme was implemented, we video-recorded two of the 15 student-teacher interaction sessions during the project's implementation (session #3 and session #8). We analysed the data using a validated coding scheme across three educational levels (three preschool, four primary school, and four secondary school classrooms). We observed moderate gains in secondary education and preschool, but statistically significant gains in primary education

CDAPubMed: a browser extension to retrieve EHR-based biomedical literature

Over the last few decades, the ever-increasing output of scientific publications has led to new challenges to keep up to date with the literature. In the biomedical area, this growth has introduced new requirements for professionals, e.g., physicians, who have to locate the exact papers that they need for their clinical and research work amongst a huge number of publications. Against this backdrop, novel information retrieval methods are even more necessary. While web search engines are widespread in many areas, facilitating access to all kinds of information, additional tools are required to automatically link information retrieved from these engines to specific biomedical applications. In the case of clinical environments, this also means considering aspects such as patient data security and confidentiality or structured contents, e.g., electronic health records (EHRs). In this scenario, we have developed a new tool to facilitate query building to retrieve scientific literature related to EHRs. Results: We have developed CDAPubMed, an open-source web browser extension to integrate EHR features in biomedical literature retrieval approaches. Clinical users can use CDAPubMed to: (i) load patient clinical documents, i.e., EHRs based on the Health Level 7-Clinical Document Architecture Standard (HL7-CDA), (ii) identify relevant terms for scientific literature search in these documents, i.e., Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), automatically driven by the CDAPubMed configuration, which advanced users can optimize to adapt to each specific situation, and (iii) generate and launch literature search queries to a major search engine, i.e., PubMed, to retrieve citations related to the EHR under examination. Conclusions: CDAPubMed is a platform-independent tool designed to facilitate literature searching using keywords contained in specific EHRs. CDAPubMed is visually integrated, as an extension of a widespread web browser, within the standard PubMed interface. It has been tested on a public dataset of HL7-CDA documents, returning significantly fewer citations since queries are focused on characteristics identified within the EHR. For instance, compared with more than 200,000 citations retrieved by breast neoplasm, fewer than ten citations were retrieved when ten patient features were added using CDAPubMed. This is an open source tool that can be freely used for non-profit purposes and integrated with other existing systems