The efficiency of ensuring the financial security of Armenia։ new approaches

Financial security is considered a subsystem of the economic security system. The financial security of the Republic of Armenia is one of the most urgent issues of study and analysis. Covid-19 and the 2020 war in Armenia harmed all sectors of the Armenian economy, especially economic and financial security. At this moment, the research of the chosen topic becomes more than necessary and urgent. In the current post-crisis period, financial security is more than possible in Armenia. In this article, we tried to define and analyze the elements affecting the security of the Armenian financial system and evaluate the current effectiveness of financial security. For that purpose, we have formulated the following research questions: How are countries' financial security assessed? What elements ensure financial security in Armenia? Is the current system of financial security effective in Armenia? The applied methodologies are quantitative and qualitative. In particular, we used index analysis, graphical analysis, comparison, and expert evaluation analysis to answer the research questions. The analysis results showed that the change of isolated factors significantly impacts indicators of the country's economy, particularly the financial system; moreover, the factors indirectly impact the country's social, political, and public life

Investigating Explanations in Conditional and Highly Automated Driving: The Effects of Situation Awareness and Modality

With the level of automation increases in vehicles, such as conditional and highly automated vehicles (AVs), drivers are becoming increasingly out of the control loop, especially in unexpected driving scenarios. Although it might be not necessary to require the drivers to intervene on most occasions, it is still important to improve drivers' situation awareness (SA) in unexpected driving scenarios to improve their trust in and acceptance of AVs. In this study, we conceptualized SA at the levels of perception (SA L1), comprehension (SA L2), and projection (SA L3), and proposed an SA level-based explanation framework based on explainable AI. Then, we examined the effects of these explanations and their modalities on drivers' situational trust, cognitive workload, as well as explanation satisfaction. A three (SA levels: SA L1, SA L2 and SA L3) by two (explanation modalities: visual, visual + audio) between-subjects experiment was conducted with 340 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results indicated that by designing the explanations using the proposed SA-based framework, participants could redirect their attention to the important objects in the traffic and understand their meaning for the AV system. This improved their SA and filled the gap of understanding the correspondence of AV's behavior in the particular situations which also increased their situational trust in AV. The results showed that participants reported the highest trust with SA L2 explanations, although the mental workload was assessed higher in this level. The results also provided insights into the relationship between the amount of information in explanations and modalities, showing that participants were more satisfied with visual-only explanations in the SA L1 and SA L2 conditions and were more satisfied with visual and auditory explanations in the SA L3 condition

Investigating HMIs to Foster Communications between Conventional Vehicles and Autonomous Vehicles in Intersections

In mixed traffic environments that involve conventional vehicles (CVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs), it is crucial for CV drivers to maintain an appropriate level of situation awareness to ensure safe and efficient interactions with AVs. This study investigates how AV communication through human-machine interfaces (HMIs) affects CV drivers' situation awareness (SA) in mixed traffic environments, especially at intersections. Initially, we designed eight HMI concepts through a human-centered design process. The two highest-rated concepts were selected for implementation as external and internal HMIs (eHMIs and iHMIs). Subsequently, we designed a within-subjects experiment with three conditions, a control condition without any communication HMI, and two treatment conditions utilizing eHMIs and iHMIs as communication means. We investigated the effects of these conditions on 50 participants acting as CV drivers in a virtual environment (VR) driving simulator. Self-reported assessments and eye-tracking measures were employed to evaluate participants' situation awareness, trust, acceptance, and mental workload. Results indicated that the iHMI condition resulted in superior SA among participants and improved trust in AV compared to the control and eHMI conditions. Additionally, iHMI led to a comparatively lower increase in mental workload compared to the other two conditions. Our study contributes to the development of effective AV-CV communications and has the potential to inform the design of future AV systems

Building Trust Profiles in Conditionally Automated Driving

Trust is crucial for ensuring the safety, security, and widespread adoption of automated vehicles (AVs), and if trust is lacking, drivers and the public may not be willing to use them. This research seeks to investigate trust profiles in order to create personalized experiences for drivers in AVs. This technique helps in better understanding drivers' dynamic trust from a persona's perspective. The study was conducted in a driving simulator where participants were requested to take over control from automated driving in three conditions that included a control condition, a false alarm condition, and a miss condition with eight takeover requests (TORs) in different scenarios. Drivers' dispositional trust, initial learned trust, dynamic trust, personality, and emotions were measured. We identified three trust profiles (i.e., believers, oscillators, and disbelievers) using a K-means clustering model. In order to validate this model, we built a multinomial logistic regression model based on SHAP explainer that selected the most important features to predict the trust profiles with an F1-score of 0.90 and accuracy of 0.89. We also discussed how different individual factors influenced trust profiles which helped us understand trust dynamics better from a persona's perspective. Our findings have important implications for designing a personalized in-vehicle trust monitoring and calibrating system to adjust drivers' trust levels in order to improve safety and experience in automated driving

THE EFFICIENCY OF ENSURING THE FINANCIAL SECURITY OF ARMENIA: NEW APPROACHES

Financial security is considered a subsystem of the economic security system. The financial security of the Republic of Armenia is one of the most urgent issues of study and analysis. Covid-19 and the 2020 war in Armenia harmed all sectors of the Armenian economy, especially economic and financial security. At this moment, the research of the chosen topic becomes more than necessary and urgent. In the current post-crisis period, financial security is more than possible in Armenia. In this article, we tried to define and analyze the elements affecting the security of the Armenian financial system and evaluate the current effectiveness of financial security. For that purpose, we have formulated the following research questions: How are countries’ financial security assessed? What elements ensure financial security in Armenia? Is the current system of financial security effective in Armenia? The applied methodologies are quantitative and qualitative. In particular, we used index analysis, graphical analysis, comparison, and expert evaluation analysis to answer the research questions. The analysis results showed that the change of isolated factors significantly impacts indicators of the country’s economy, particularly the financial system; moreover, the factors indirectly impact the country's social, political, and public life.

Investigating Explanations in Conditional and Highly Automated Driving: The Effects of Situation Awareness and Modality

With the level of automation increases in vehicles, such as conditional and highly automated vehicles (AVs), drivers are becoming increasingly out of the control loop, especially in unexpected driving scenarios. Although it might be not necessary to require the drivers to intervene on most occasions, it is still important to improve drivers' situation awareness (SA) in unexpected driving scenarios to improve their trust in and acceptance of AVs. In this study, we conceptualized SA at the levels of perception (SA L1), comprehension (SA L2), and projection (SA L3), and proposed an SA level-based explanation framework based on explainable AI. Then, we examined the effects of these explanations and their modalities on drivers' situational trust, cognitive workload, as well as explanation satisfaction. A three (SA levels: SA L1, SA L2 and SA L3) by two (explanation modalities: visual, visual + audio) between-subjects experiment was conducted with 340 participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results indicated that by designing the explanations using the proposed SA-based framework, participants could redirect their attention to the important objects in the traffic and understand their meaning for the AV system. This improved their SA and filled the gap of understanding the correspondence of AV’s behavior in the particular situations which also increased their situational trust in AV. The results showed that participants reported the highest trust with SA L2 explanations, although the mental workload was assessed higher in this level. The results also provided insights into the relationship between the amount of information in explanations and modalities, showing that participants were more satisfied with visual-only explanations in the SA L1 and SA L2 conditions and were more satisfied with visual and auditory explanations in the SA L3 condition. Finally, we found that the cognitive workload was also higher in SA L2, possibly because the participants were actively interpreting the results, consistent with a higher level of situational trust. These findings demonstrated that properly designed explanations, based on our proposed SA-based framework, had significant implications for explaining AV behavior in conditional and highly automated driving.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/173044/1/article-XAI_AV.pdfDescription of article-XAI_AV.pdf : Main articleSEL

Detection of brucellosis through active surveillance, Armenia, 2014

ObjectiveIn the spring of 2014, people from vulnerable households in allmarzes of Armenia were examined with the aim of active surveillance.IntroductionBrucellosis is a serious disease caused by bacteria of the Brucellagenus. It principally affects ruminants but may be transmitted tohumans. Registration of cases in cattle farms causes considerableeconomic losses and creates favorable conditions for mass infectionamong humans. In Armenia the expansion of animal industries andurbanization are the main reasons for occurrence and developmentof brucellosis.MethodsBlood was sampled from people on farms reported as havinginfected animals. Blood samples were tested by the Wright-Huddleston method. The standard case definition of brucellosis wasused for diagnosis. A questionnaire-based interview was carried outamong the population to identify the form of contact with animals andto analyze epidemiological links. During the investigation provisionswere followed in governmental decree RA 19.01.2006 N480-Nand brucellosis prevention, epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment,preventive measures.ResultsA total of 11160 people from 1054 households were enrolled in thestudy, of which 3625 (32.5%) underwent a laboratory examination.Nearly 6% (641) refused to be tested. Over 6% of those tested (226)were positive for antibodies to Brucellae. Of these, 129 (3.5%) hadchronic brucellosis. Those testing positive for brucellosis were treatedappropriately. These included 203 (90%) adults and 23 (10%) below14 years old; 147 (65%) were male and 79 (35%) were female.Of those diagnosed with brucellosis, working in animal husbandryaccounted for 46.6% (106), while those who harvested milk accountedfor 37.6% (85) and those using raw milk made up 15.4% (35).ConclusionsCases were most frequently reported among people 20-55 years ofage; the highest percentage of positives were among 41-45 year oldmales who had contact with infected animals. The main risk factor foracquiring brucellosis is animal husbandry

Detection of brucellosis through active surveillance, Armenia, 2014

ObjectiveIn the spring of 2014, people from vulnerable households in allmarzes of Armenia were examined with the aim of active surveillance.IntroductionBrucellosis is a serious disease caused by bacteria of the Brucellagenus. It principally affects ruminants but may be transmitted tohumans. Registration of cases in cattle farms causes considerableeconomic losses and creates favorable conditions for mass infectionamong humans. In Armenia the expansion of animal industries andurbanization are the main reasons for occurrence and developmentof brucellosis.MethodsBlood was sampled from people on farms reported as havinginfected animals. Blood samples were tested by the Wright-Huddleston method. The standard case definition of brucellosis wasused for diagnosis. A questionnaire-based interview was carried outamong the population to identify the form of contact with animals andto analyze epidemiological links. During the investigation provisionswere followed in governmental decree RA 19.01.2006 N480-Nand brucellosis prevention, epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment,preventive measures.ResultsA total of 11160 people from 1054 households were enrolled in thestudy, of which 3625 (32.5%) underwent a laboratory examination.Nearly 6% (641) refused to be tested. Over 6% of those tested (226)were positive for antibodies to Brucellae. Of these, 129 (3.5%) hadchronic brucellosis. Those testing positive for brucellosis were treatedappropriately. These included 203 (90%) adults and 23 (10%) below14 years old; 147 (65%) were male and 79 (35%) were female.Of those diagnosed with brucellosis, working in animal husbandryaccounted for 46.6% (106), while those who harvested milk accountedfor 37.6% (85) and those using raw milk made up 15.4% (35).ConclusionsCases were most frequently reported among people 20-55 years ofage; the highest percentage of positives were among 41-45 year oldmales who had contact with infected animals. The main risk factor foracquiring brucellosis is animal husbandry

Influenza Sentinel Surveillance System in Surb Astvatsamayr Medical Center, 2013-15

ObjectiveThe goal of this study was to identify gaps in the severe acute respiratory infection sentinel surveillance system at Surb Astvatsamayr Medical Center.IntroductionInfluenza is a priority in Armenia. There are two influenza surveillance systems in Armenia: population and sentinel. The medical center (MC) has been included in sentinel surveillance since 2012. In 2015 a study was undertaken to identify gaps in severe acute respiratory infection (SARI) sentinel surveillance system in Surb Astvatsamayr MC.MethodsMedical records and reporting forms of SARI cases were generated for individuals meeting the case definition and analyzed for age groups, risk factors, sentinel surveillance detection methods, laboratory conformation, number of days hospitalized and reporting.ResultsIn 2014, 3016 patients were admitted in the hospital with ARI, of whom 2982 were younger than 18 years. During the 2014-2015 influenza season (week 40, 2014-week 20, 2015), 77 swabs have been taken in total, of which five were influenza positive (4 B and 1 AH1N1). Also in the 2013-2014 influenza season, five samples tested positive (all influenza A). Sixty-one (48%) patients with respiratory disease met the WHO SARI case definition (2011), 84 (66%) of all reviewed patients would have met the SARI case definition. The numbers for the ICU (25 records reviewed) do not reflect the actual percentage of patients admitted with respiratory symptoms. The 33 additional cases taken from the sampling logbook were mainly hospitalized in the ICU. Influenza tests were performed on 34 patients (mainly ICU), five were positive for influenza (four B--all adults—and one AH1N1), and four tested positives for other respiratory pathogens (two RSV, one RV, one BV). All influenza positives had fever or a history of fever and 80% met the WHO SARI case definition (2011). Non-sampled cases generally have fewer reported symptoms, but still 44% of cases fits the WHO SARI case definition (2011).ConclusionsThe percentages of patients meeting the WHO SARI 2011 case definition and the WHO SARI 2014 definition shows that mainly caused by the absence of shortness of breath in the SARI 2014 definition 52% (2011) vs 66% (2014) in Surb Asvatsamayr. A large number of children from Neonatal and Children’s departments fulfil the SARI case definition and could potentially be swabbed in addition to ICU patients. There are gaps in WHO SARI case definitions. The sentinel surveillance system should be improved

Design a Sustainable Micro-mobility Future: Trends and Challenges in the US and EU

Micro-mobility is promising to contribute to sustainable cities with its efficiency and low cost. To better design such a sustainable future, it is necessary to understand the trends and challenges. Thus, we examined people's opinions on micro-mobility in the US and the EU using Tweets. We used topic modeling based on advanced natural language processing techniques and categorized the data into seven topics: promotion and service, mobility, technical features, acceptance, recreation, infrastructure and regulations. Furthermore, using sentiment analysis, we investigated people's positive and negative attitudes towards specific aspects of these topics and compared the patterns of the trends and challenges in the US and the EU. We found that 1) promotion and service included the majority of Twitter discussions in the both regions, 2) the EU had more positive opinions than the US, 3) micro-mobility devices were more widely used for utilitarian mobility and recreational purposes in the EU than in the US, and 4) compared to the EU, people in the US had many more concerns related to infrastructure and regulation issues. These findings help us design and prioritize micro-mobility to improve their safety and experience across the two areas for designing a more sustainable micro-mobility future.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/175033/1/Micromobility.pdfDescription of Micromobility.pdf : Main articleSEL