Information (and library) science at City University London; 50 years of educational development

The development of education for information and library science at City University London over a 50-year period is described in this article. The development of the Masters course in Information Science, and the later equivalent courses in Library Science and in Information Management in the Cultural Sector are described in detail, together with shorter-lived Masters courses in pharmaceutical and health information. The rationale for changes to the courses, and the influence of the professional and educational contexts, are analysed. Issues emerging from this analysis are discussed in seven themes: the nature of the discipline; the library/information spectrum; the student group; the academic/professional balance; curriculum design; local and global issues; and teaching methods. The discussions of the courses are set in the wider context of changes in library/information education over the period in the UK and worldwide

Case Based Representation and Retrieval with Time Dependent Features

Abstract. The temporal dimension of the knowledge embedded in cases has often been neglected or oversimplified in Case Based Reasoning sys-tems. However, in several real world problems a case should capture the evolution of the observed phenomenon over time. To this end, we propose to represent temporal information at two levels: (1) at the case level, if some features describe parameters varying within a period of time (which corresponds to the case duration), and are therefore collected in the form of time series; (2) at the history level, if the evolution of the system can be reconstructed by retrieving temporally related cases. In this paper, we describe a framework for case representation and retrieval able to take into account the temporal dimension, and meant to be used in any time dependent domain. In particular, to support case retrieval, we provide an analysis of similarity-based time series retrieval techniques; to support history retrieval, we introduce possible ways to summarize the case content, together with the corresponding strategies for identifying similar instances in the knowledge base. A concrete ap-plication of our framework is represented by the system RHENE, which is briefly sketched here, and extensively described in [20].

Hyperfrontality and hypoconnectivity during refreshing in schizophrenia.

Anomalous activations of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and posterior cerebral areas have been reported in previous studies of working memory in schizophrenia. Several interpretations have been reported: e.g., neural inefficiency, the use of different strategies and differences in the functional organization of the cerebral cortex. To better understand these abnormal activations, we investigated the cerebral bases of a working memory component process, namely refreshing (i.e., thinking briefly of a just-activated representation). Fifteen patients with schizophrenia and 15 control subjects participated in this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Participants were told that whenever they saw a word on the screen, they had to read it silently to themselves (read and repeat conditions), and when they saw a dot, they had to think of the just-previous word (refresh condition). The refresh condition (in comparison with the read condition) was associated with significantly increased activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus and significantly decreased connectivity within the prefrontal cortex and between the prefrontal and parietal cortices in patients with schizophrenia in comparison with control subjects. These results suggest that prefrontal dysfunctions in schizophrenia might be related to a defective ability to initiate (rather than to execute) specific cognitive processes