Fedora Commons 3.0 Versus DSpace 1.5 : Selecting an Enterprise-Grade Repository System for FAO of the United Nations

4th International Conference on Open RepositoriesThis presentation was part of the session : Conference PostersAn extensive evaluation of the Fedora Commons 3.0 and DSpace 1.5 digital document repository systems has been conducted. The evaluation aimed at selecting an open source software package that best satisfies the FAO Open Archive and FAO organizational requirements and the requirements for the storage, dissemination and preservation of documents and bibliographic metadata. Both repository systems were evaluated against thirty-two criteria chosen from nine core categories of requirements: community, security, functionality, integration, modularity, metadata, statistics and reports, preservation, and outputs. These criteria were selected with the merger of the FAODOC and FAO Corporate Document Repository (CDR) into the FAO Open Archive in mind.Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation

Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Potential flow theory and operation guide for the panel code PMARC

The theoretical basis for PMARC, a low-order potential-flow panel code for modeling complex three-dimensional geometries, is outlined. Several of the advanced features currently included in the code, such as internal flow modeling, a simple jet model, and a time-stepping wake model, are discussed in some detail. The code is written using adjustable size arrays so that it can be easily redimensioned for the size problem being solved and the computer hardware being used. An overview of the program input is presented, with a detailed description of the input available in the appendices. Finally, PMARC results for a generic wing/body configuration are compared with experimental data to demonstrate the accuracy of the code. The input file for this test case is given in the appendices

Big Sharks in the Salish Sea: combining passive acoustics with the Salish Sea model to predict Sixgill Shark (Hexanchus griseus) presence

Examination of species-environment relationships that determine broad-scale distribution patterns is a key focus of ecological research. Characterizing animal-habitat associations in the marine environment is particularly challenging given the opacity of the ocean, and addressing this question in marine systems has consequently lagged behind terrestrial systems. In this project, we have leveraged existing data on locations of a large marine predator, the Sixgill Shark, Hexanchus griseus, and linked that with the PNNL’s Salish Sea Model over the domain of shark movement in Puget Sound, Washington state. Twenty-nine Sixgill sharks were tracked from 2005-2009 across 130 hydrophone receivers with tags that reported not only individual presence but also depth. Temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen data were sampled from those locations and depths to generate a species distribution model for Sixgill sharks in the Puget Sound ecosystem. This study generated two key findings. First, the models indicate that sharks inhabit areas with higher salinity and exhibit temperature associations within Puget Sound that suggest a narrower behavioral preference than physiological limitations. Second, despite its course resolution and presence/absence character, passive telemetry data performs well in resolving species distribution models. Such results can be used to produce large scale, 3D maps of suitable habitat for marine species. Results establish that these acoustic technologies, when paired with sufficient environmental data, can extend analytical approaches common to terrestrial systems to the management and conservation of marine organisms

Validated respiratory drug deposition predictions from 2D and 3D medical images with statistical shape models and convolutional neural networks

For the one billion sufferers of respiratory disease, managing their disease with inhalers crucially influences their quality of life. Generic treatment plans could be improved with the aid of computational models that account for patient-specific features such as breathing pattern, lung pathology and morphology. Therefore, we aim to develop and validate an automated computational framework for patient-specific deposition modelling. To that end, an image processing approach is proposed that could produce 3D patient respiratory geometries from 2D chest X-rays and 3D CT images. We evaluated the airway and lung morphology produced by our image processing framework, and assessed deposition compared to in vivo data. The 2D-to-3D image processing reproduces airway diameter to 9% median error compared to ground truth segmentations, but is sensitive to outliers of up to 33% due to lung outline noise. Predicted regional deposition gave 5% median error compared to in vivo measurements. The proposed framework is capable of providing patient-specific deposition measurements for varying treatments, to determine which treatment would best satisfy the needs imposed by each patient (such as disease and lung/airway morphology). Integration of patient-specific modelling into clinical practice as an additional decision-making tool could optimise treatment plans and lower the burden of respiratory diseases.</p

Constant-Overhead Zero-Knowledge for RAM Programs

We show a constant-overhead interactive zero-knowledge (ZK) proof system for RAM programs, that is, a ZK proof in which the communication complexity as well as the running times of the prover and verifier scale linearly in the size of the memory $N$ and the running time $T$ of the underlying RAM program. Besides yielding an asymptotic improvement of prior work, our implementation gives concrete performance improvements for RAM-based ZK proofs. In particular, our implementation supports ZK proofs of private read/write accesses to 64 MB of memory ($2^{24}$ 32-bit words) using only 34 bytes of communication per access, a more than $80\times$ improvement compared to the recent BubbleRAM protocol. We also design a lightweight RISC CPU that can efficiently emulate the MIPS-I instruction set, and for which our ZK proof communicates only $\approx$ 320 bytes per cycle, more than $10\times$ less than the BubbleRAM CPU. In a 100 Mbps network, we can perform zero-knowledge executions of our CPU (with 64 MB of main memory and 4 MB of program memory) at a clock rate of 6.6 kHz

Epidemiological, experimental and diagnostic investigations into an acute paralysis syndrome of broiler chickens in Australia

An acute paralysis syndrome (APS) of broiler chickens was first reported in 2010 in an Australian chicken meat production region. The APS was characterised by flaccid paralysis of the neck, prostration and eventually death of the affected chicken and elevated flock mortalities from 26 days of age. The purpose of the work presented in this doctoral thesis was to establish causation of the APS, risk factors for it and management strategies for controlling it

Examining Instrumented Roadways for Speed-Related Problems

DTNH22-11-D-00229 / 0002This project evaluated efforts by the Stafford County, Virginia, Sheriff\u2019s Office to reduce speeding on roadways. Researchers coordinated to implement countermeasures on corridors with safety concerns where speed was a factor. Speed and enforcement data were collected to look at the impacts of the enforcement efforts. From this, the SCSO was able to make decisions on where countermeasures would be applied and what countermeasures would be implemented, including deputy presence with on-site enforcement, decoy cars, speed trailers with digital feedback signs, and changeable message signs. The SCSO also used social media to release public service announcements about the safety campaigns. Decoy cars proved to be the most successful activity that led to drivers reducing their speeds for more than a day. Speed trailers and deputies on-site issuing citations were also effective, but seemed to be localized. The study found the number of speeders to be a statistically significant predictor of crashes and showed that traffic volumes can increase without a concurrent increase in crashes if the increased volume is made up of non-speeders