Data mining for software engineering and humans in the loop

The field of data mining for software engineering has been growing over the last decade. This field is concerned with the use of data mining to provide useful insights into how to improve software engineering processes and software itself, supporting decision-making. For that, data produced by software engineering processes and products during and after software development are used. Despite promising results, there is frequently a lack of discussion on the role of software engineering practitioners amidst the data mining approaches. This makes adoption of data mining by software engineering practitioners difficult. Moreover, the fact that experts’ knowledge is frequently ignored by data mining approaches, together with the lack of transparency of such approaches, can hinder the acceptability of data mining by software engineering practitioners. To overcome these problems, this position paper provides a discussion of the role of software engineering experts when adopting data mining approaches. It also argues that this role can be extended to increase experts’ involvement in the process of building data mining models. We believe that such extended involvement is not only likely to increase software engineers’ acceptability of the resulting models, but also improve the models themselves. We also provide some recommendations aimed at increasing the success of experts involvement and model acceptability

Managing International Student Collaborations: An Experience Report

Knowledge and experience from working in international collaborative projects prepares engineering students for their future careers in a global market. Hence this is an important element in higher education, although seldom pr ovide d in the c urr ic ulu m. O ne r e as o n f or this la c k mi g ht be uncertainty in how to manage international collaborations and to create a good learning environment for the development of skills related to international collaborations. Therefore this article describes our experiences from managing international student collaborations including theoretical underpinning for our choices when relevant. Having given the context of, and the strategies for running our tw o collaborations, we provide an analysis of our experiences. This includes observations of differences in the two collaborations, both when due to use of different strategies and when due to different contexts, as well as observations of similarities. With this in mind, we present recommendations for running international student collaborations. © 2012 IEEE

The extent of leprosy-related disabilities in Istanbul Leprosy Hospital, Turkey

This study was carried out between January and December 1992 at the Istanbul Leprosy Hospital. Seven hundred and eleven leprosy patients were evaluated according to their age, gender and type of disease and disability according to the WHO disability grading system (1980). There were 527 males (74.2%) and 184 females (25.8%) in the group. The average age was 50.0 +/- 13.5 years and the average duration of disease was 25.9 +/- 13.2 years. Six hundred and seventy-eight patients (95.4%) were in borderline (BL) and lepromatous (LL) leprosy

permanent pacemakers

Implantation of a permanent pacemaker requires a psychological effort on the patient's part for adaptation in the acute term, and chronically, it restricts activities of the patient and may cause some psychiatric disturbances. To investigate psychiatric morbidity and depressive symptomatology of the patients with permanent pacemakers, 84 pacemaker patients were diagnosed using the DSM-III-R criteria and depressive symptoms were determined by modified Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (mHDRS). Sixteen (19.1%) patients had been given a psychiatric diagnosis. The most frequent diagnoses were adjustment disorder (5.9%) and major depressive episode (4.7%). Nine patients (10.7%) were diagnosed as having clinical depression (mHDRS greater than or equal to 17). The mean score of mHDRS was 7.57 +/- 7.46, and the severity of depression was significantly higher in females. The most frequent symptoms are difficulties in work and activities (53.6%), psychic anxiety (48.8%), loss of energy (42.9%), and hypochondriasis and insomnia (39.3%). Depressed mood, psychic anxiety, loss of energy, loss of interest, insomnia, and hypochondriasis were significantly more frequent in females. Uneducated patients had a more significant loss of energy than educated patients. Depressed mood, psychic anxiety, and somatic concerns and symptoms were more frequent in patients with permanent pacemakers than in the general population. These symptoms, resembling mixed anxiety-depression disorder, were related to fears of having a permanent pacemaker, since our series were composed of uneducated patients who did not have enough knowledge about the device