An expert system for simulating electric loads aboard Space Station Freedom

Space Station Freedom will provide an infrastructure for space experimentation. This environment will feature regulated access to any resources required by an experiment. Automated systems are being developed to manage the electric power so that researchers can have the flexibility to modify their experiment plan for contingencies or for new opportunities. To define these flexible power management characteristics for Space Station Freedom, a simulation is required that captures the dynamic nature of space experimentation; namely, an investigator is allowed to restructure his experiment and to modify its execution. This changes the energy demands for the investigator's range of options. An expert system competent in the domain of cryogenic fluid management experimentation was developed. It will be used to help design and test automated power scheduling software for Freedom's electric power system. The expert system allows experiment planning and experiment simulation. The former evaluates experimental alternatives and offers advice on the details of the experiment's design. The latter provides a real-time simulation of the experiment replete with appropriate resource consumption

Conquering the Kitchen: Cooking and Older Adult Male Caregivers

Older adult men who have taken on an unfamiliar role as a caregiver find themselves at a loss with how to conduct meal preparation and cooking (Russell, 2007). The purpose of this study was to explore the effects of a specialized cooking class on the perceptions of older adult male caregivers. Method: This mixed method, retrospective study analyzed surveys from subjects who attended a cooking class designed specifically for male caregivers. Participants were 60 years of age or older and were required to be living in one of nine participating local counties. Results: The participants reported that the course expanded their cooking skills, helped them feel more comfortable in the kitchen, and provided an enjoyable social outlet. Conclusion: Participation in a cooking class for older adult male caregivers may be an important step to meet the caregiving demands of this growing population. Additional research with a longer follow-up, is needed to determine if the results of this study are generalizable

The universality of iterated hashing over variable-length strings

Iterated hash functions process strings recursively, one character at a time. At each iteration, they compute a new hash value from the preceding hash value and the next character. We prove that iterated hashing can be pairwise independent, but never 3-wise independent. We show that it can be almost universal over strings much longer than the number of hash values; we bound the maximal string length given the collision probability

A comparison of a novel neural spell checker and standard spell checking algorithms

In this paper, we propose a simple and flexible spell checker using efficient associative matching in the AURA modular neural system. Our approach aims to provide a pre-processor for an information retrieval (IR) system allowing the user's query to be checked against a lexicon and any spelling errors corrected, to prevent wasted searching. IR searching is computationally intensive so much so that if we can prevent futile searches we can minimise computational cost. We evaluate our approach against several commonly used spell checking techniques for memory-use, retrieval speed and recall accuracy. The proposed methodology has low memory use, high speed for word presence checking, reasonable speed for spell checking and a high recall rate

User-Needs Analysis and Design Methodology for an Automated Documentation Generator

Telephone network planning engineers routinely study feeder routes within the telephone network in order to create and refine network capacity expansion (relief) plans. In doing so they make use of a powerful software tool called LEIS-PLAN™. We are developing an extension to PLAN called PLANDoc that will automatically generate natural language narratives documenting the engineers ’ use of PLAN. In this paper, we present the user-needs analysis and design methodology we have used in developing the PLANDoc system. We describe our interviews with various end users to determine if such a system would be desirable and what design factors would make it useful. We show how we model the system on a set of iteratively-revised human-generated narratives. The model narratives determine the function and architecture of the documentation system, and they inform the development of the system components

An error tolerant memory aid for reduced cognitive load in number copying tasks

Number copying tasks are still common despite increased digitalization of services. Number copying tasks are cognitively and visually demanding, errors are easily introduced and the process is often perceived as laborious. This study proposes an alternative scheme based on dictionary coding that reduces the cognitive load on the user by a factor of five. The strategy has several levels of error detection and error correction characteristics and is easy to implemen

Studying the Effect and Treatment of Misspelled Queries in Cross-Language Information Retrieval

[Abstract] The performance of Information Retrieval systems is limited by the linguistic variation present in natural language texts. Word-level Natural Language Processing techniques have been shown to be useful in reducing this variation. In this article, we summarize our work on the extension of these techniques for dealing with phrase-level variation in European languages, taking Spanish as a case in point. We propose the use of syntactic dependencies as complex index terms in an attempt to solve the problems deriving from both syntactic and morpho-syntactic variation and, in this way, to obtain more precise index terms. Such dependencies are obtained through a shallow parser based on cascades of finite-state transducers in order to reduce as far as possible the overhead due to this parsing process. The use of different sources of syntactic information, queries or documents, has been also studied, as has the restriction of the dependencies applied to those obtained from noun phrases. Our approaches have been tested using the CLEF corpus, obtaining consistent improvements with regard to classical word-level non-linguistic techniques. Results show, on the one hand, that syntactic information extracted from documents is more useful than that from queries. On the other hand, it has been demonstrated that by restricting dependencies to those corresponding to noun phrases, important reductions of storage and management costs can be achieved, albeit at the expense of a slight reduction in performance.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; FFI2014-51978-C2-1-RRede Galega de Procesamento da Linguaxe e Recuperación de Información; CN2014/034Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; BES-2015-073768Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; FFI2014-51978-C2-2-

A UMLS-based spell checker for natural language processing in vaccine safety

BACKGROUND: The Institute of Medicine has identified patient safety as a key goal for health care in the United States. Detecting vaccine adverse events is an important public health activity that contributes to patient safety. Reports about adverse events following immunization (AEFI) from surveillance systems contain free-text components that can be analyzed using natural language processing. To extract Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) concepts from free text and classify AEFI reports based on concepts they contain, we first needed to clean the text by expanding abbreviations and shortcuts and correcting spelling errors. Our objective in this paper was to create a UMLS-based spelling error correction tool as a first step in the natural language processing (NLP) pipeline for AEFI reports. METHODS: We developed spell checking algorithms using open source tools. We used de-identified AEFI surveillance reports to create free-text data sets for analysis. After expansion of abbreviated clinical terms and shortcuts, we performed spelling correction in four steps: (1) error detection, (2) word list generation, (3) word list disambiguation and (4) error correction. We then measured the performance of the resulting spell checker by comparing it to manual correction. RESULTS: We used 12,056 words to train the spell checker and tested its performance on 8,131 words. During testing, sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value (PPV) for the spell checker were 74% (95% CI: 74–75), 100% (95% CI: 100–100), and 47% (95% CI: 46%–48%), respectively. CONCLUSION: We created a prototype spell checker that can be used to process AEFI reports. We used the UMLS Specialist Lexicon as the primary source of dictionary terms and the WordNet lexicon as a secondary source. We used the UMLS as a domain-specific source of dictionary terms to compare potentially misspelled words in the corpus. The prototype sensitivity was comparable to currently available tools, but the specificity was much superior. The slow processing speed may be improved by trimming it down to the most useful component algorithms. Other investigators may find the methods we developed useful for cleaning text using lexicons specific to their area of interest