CAS-MINE: Providing personalized services in context-aware applications by means of generalized rules

Context-aware systems acquire and exploit information on the user context to tailor services to a particular user, place, time, and/or event. Hence, they allowservice providers to adapt their services to actual user needs, by offering personalized services depending on the current user context. Service providers are usually interested in profiling users both to increase client satisfaction and to broaden the set of offered services. Novel and efficient techniques are needed to tailor service supply to the user (or the user category) and to the situation inwhich he/she is involved. This paper presents the CAS-Mine framework to efficiently discover relevant relationships between user context data and currently asked services for both user and service profiling. CAS-Mine efficiently extracts generalized association rules, which provide a high-level abstraction of both user habits and service characteristics depending on the context. A lazy (analyst-provided) taxonomy evaluation performed on different attributes (e.g., a geographic hierarchy on spatial coordinates, a classification of provided services) drives the rule generalization process. Extracted rules are classified into groups according to their semantic meaning and ranked by means of quality indices, thus allowing a domain expert to focus on the most relevant patterns. Experiments performed on three context-aware datasets, obtained by logging user requests and context information for three real applications, show the effectiveness and the efficiency of the CAS-Mine framework in mining different valuable types of correlations between user habits, context information, and provided services

Categorization of the context within the medical domain

The context itself has multiple meanings may vary according to the domain of application. This contextual flexibility was behind the emergence of so such huge number of context definitions. Nevertheless, all the proposed definitions do not provide solid ground for systems developers’ expectations, especially in healthcare domain [1]. This issue prompted researchers to divide the context into a set of concepts that would facilitate organizing of contextual knowledge. The conventional taxonomies of context are always too complex, and we need to fight to make them useful in the intended application area. In this paper, we propose a new context classification which covers almost all the context aspects that we may need to develop a tele-monitoring system for chronic disease management

An interface for supporting asynchronous multi-level collaborative information retrieval

A great deal of research into Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) has assumed that search team members have the same level of unrestricted access to information. However, case studies and observations from different domains including government, healthcare and legal, have suggested that CIR sometimes involves people with unequal access to information. This type of scenario has been referred to as Multi-Level CIR (MLCIR). In addition to supporting collaboration, MLCIR systems must ensure that there is no unintended disclosure of sensitive information, this is an under investigated area of research. In this paper we present results of an evaluation of an interface we have designed for MLCIR scenarios. Pairs of participants used the interface under 3 different information access scenarios for a variety of search tasks. These scenarios included 1 CIR and 2 MLCIR scenarios, namely: full access (FA), document removal (DR) and term blacklisting (TR). Design interviews were conducted post evaluation to obtain qualitative feedback from participants. Evaluation results showed that our interface performed well for both DR and FA scenarios but for TR, team members with less access had a negative influence on their partner’s search performance, demonstrating insights into how different MLCIR scenarios should be supported. Design interview results showed that our interface helped the participants to reformulate their queries, understand their partner’s performance, reduce duplicated work and review their team’s search history without disclosing sensitive information

On the Derivation of a General Thermodynamic Expression for the Reaction Rate Constant for Cosolvent Reaction Systems

This article presents the derivation of the thermodynamic expressions for the activation free energy and reaction rate constant for cosolvent reaction systems. These expressions account for the factors that are specific to solution-phase reactions, which include isotropic electrostatic effects and close-range solvent−solute interactions. This article discusses the idea that electrostatic effects can be correlated with the isotropic relative permittivity, and solvent−solute interactions can be correlated with the cosolvent mole fraction. This article also shows that this type of thermodynamic analysis is necessary for understanding certain nuances of solution-phase reaction processes not tractable by other types of analyses

Caractérisations optiques de membranes organiques utilisées dans la filtration d’eau potable : étude du colmatage

National audienceno abstrac