Known and unknown requirements in healthcare

We report experience in requirements elicitation of domain knowledge from experts in clinical and cognitive neurosciences. The elicitation target was a causal model for early signs of dementia indicated by changes in user behaviour and errors apparent in logs of computer activity. A Delphi-style process consisting of workshops with experts followed by a questionnaire was adopted. The paper describes how the elicitation process had to be adapted to deal with problems encountered in terminology and limited consensus among the experts. In spite of the difficulties encountered, a partial causal model of user behavioural pathologies and errors was elicited. This informed requirements for configuring data- and text-mining tools to search for the specific data patterns. Lessons learned for elicitation from experts are presented, and the implications for requirements are discussed as “unknown unknowns”, as well as configuration requirements for directing data-/text-mining tools towards refining awareness requirements in healthcare applications

Species Interactions during Diversification and Community Assembly in an Island Radiation of Shrews

Closely related, ecologically similar species often have adjacent distributions, suggesting competitive exclusion may contribute to the structure of some natural communities. In systems such as island archipelagos, where speciation is often tightly associated with dispersal over oceanic barriers, competitive exclusion may prevent population establishment following inter-island dispersal and subsequent cladogenesis.) species in the Philippines are the result of competitive exclusion preventing secondary invasion of occupied islands. We first compare ecological niche models between two widespread, allopatric species and find statistical support for their ecological similarity, implying that competition for habitat between these species is possible. We then examine dispersion patterns among sympatric species and find some signal for overdispersion of body size, but not for phylogenetic branch length. Finally, we simulate the process of inter-island colonization under a stochastic model of dispersal lacking ecological forces. Results are dependent on the geographic scope and colonization probability employed. However, some combinations suggest that the number of inter-island dispersal events necessary to populate the archipelago may be much higher than the minimum number of colonization events necessary to explain current estimates of species richness and phylogenetic relationships. If our model is appropriate, these results imply that alternative factors, such as competitive exclusion, may have influenced the process of inter-island colonization and subsequent cladogenesis.We interpret the combined results as providing tenuous evidence that similarity in body size may prevent co-occurrence in Philippine shrews and that competitive exclusion among ecologically similar species, rather than an inability to disperse among islands, may have limited diversification in this group, and, possibly other clades endemic to island archipelagos

The role of complex cues in social and reproductive plasticity

Phenotypic plasticity can be a key determinant of fitness. The degree to which the expression of plasticity is adaptive relies upon the accuracy with which information about the state of the environment is integrated. This step might be particularly beneficial when environments, e.g. the social and sexual context, change rapidly. Fluctuating temporal dynamics could increase the difficulty of determining the appropriate level of expression of a plastic response. In this review, we suggest that new insights into plastic responses to the social and sexual environment (social and reproductive plasticity) may be gained by examining the role of complex cues (those comprising multiple, distinct sensory components). Such cues can enable individuals to more accurately monitor their environment in order to respond adaptively to it across the whole life course. We briefly review the hypotheses for the evolution of complex cues and then adapt these ideas to the context of social and sexual plasticity. We propose that the ability to perceive complex cues can facilitate plasticity, increase the associated fitness benefits and decrease the risk of costly ‘mismatches’ between phenotype and environment by (i) increasing the robustness of information gained from highly variable environments, (ii) fine-tuning responses by using multiple strands of information and (iii) reducing time lags in adaptive responses. We conclude by outlining areas for future research that will help to determine the interplay between complex cues and plasticity

Ambiguity in Requirements Engineering: Towards a Unifying Framework

A long stream of research in RE has been devoted to analyzing the occurrences and consequences of ambiguity in requirements documents. Ambiguity often occurs in documents, most often in natural language (NL) ones, but occasionally also in formal specifications, be it because of abstraction, or of imprecise designation of which real-world entities are denotated by certain expressions. In many of those studies, ambiguity has been considered a defect to be avoided. In this paper, we investigate the nature of ambiguity, and advocate that the simplistic view of ambiguity as merely a defect in the document does not do justice to the complexity of this phenomenon. We offer a more extensive analysis, based on the multiple linguistic sources of ambiguity, and present a list of real-world cases, both in written matter and in oral interviews, that we analyze based on our framework. We hope that a better understanding of the phenomenon can help in the analysis of practical experiences and in the design of more effective methods to detect, mark and handle ambiguity

Analysing anaphoric ambiguity in natural language requirements

Many requirements documents are written in natural language (NL). However, with the flexibility of NL comes the risk of introducing unwanted ambiguities in the requirements and misunderstandings between stakeholders. In this paper, we describe an automated approach to identify potentially nocuous ambiguity, which occurs when text is interpreted differently by different readers. We concentrate on anaphoric ambiguity, which occurs when readers may disagree on how pronouns should be interpreted. We describe a number of heuristics, each of which captures information that may lead a reader to favour a particular interpretation of the text. We use these heuristics to build a classifier, which in turn predicts the degree to which particular interpretations are preferred. We collected multiple human judgements on the interpretation of requirements exhibiting anaphoric ambiguity, and show how the distribution of these judgements can be used to assess whether a particular instance of ambiguity is nocuous. Given a requirements document written in natural language, our approach can identify sentences which contain anaphoric ambiguity, and use the classifier to alert the requirements writer of text that runs the risk of misinterpretation. We report on a series of experiments that we conducted to evaluate the performance of the automated system we developed to support our approach. The results show that the system achieves high recall with a consistent improvement on baseline precision subject to some ambiguity tolerance levels, allowing us to explore and highlight realistic and potentially problematic ambiguities in actual requirements documents

A framework for stakeholder oriented mindfulness: Case of RFID implementation at YCH Group, Singapore

10.1057/ejis.2010.58European Journal of Information Systems202201-22

B56-containing PP2A dephosphorylate ERK and their activity is controlled by the early gene IEX-1 and ERK

The protein phosphatase 2A (PP2A) acts on several kinases in the extracellular signal-regulated kinase (ERK) signaling pathway but whether a specific holoenzyme dephosphorylates ERK and whether this activity is controlled during mitogenic stimulation is unknown. By using both RNA interference and overexpression of PP2A B regulatory subunits, we show that B56, but not B, family members of PP2A increase ERK dephosphorylation, without affecting its activation by MEK. Induction of the early gene product and ERK substrate IEX-1 (ier3) by growth factors leads to opposite effects and reverses B56-PP2A-mediated ERK dephosphorylation. IEX-1 binds to B56 subunits and pERK independently, enhances B56 phosphorylation by ERK at a conserved Ser/Pro site in this complex and triggers dissociation from the catalytic subunit. This is the first demonstration of the involvement of B56-containing PP2A in ERK dephosphorylation and of a B56-specific cellular protein inhibitor regulating its activity in an ERK-dependent fashion. In addition, our results raise a new paradigm in ERK signaling in which ERK associated to a substrate can transphosphorylate nearby proteins