Air Pollution Burden and Three Population Health Indicators in 58 Counties Comprising the State of California, USA

Air pollution is a major risk factor in human health causing premature death disease and ranks fifth among the top five leading causes of death worldwide. In California, air pollution attracts significant attention due to increased pollution from fossil fuel burning, industry, transportation, and the state’s drought record and fire-proneness. Data used in this analysis was obtained from the CalEnviroScreen pollution monitoring tool. There is significant variation in air pollution across counties and racial groups. Hispanic populations, followed by Caucasians, predominantly occupy areas with the highest pollution levels above 40%. Most counties had low average scores in population parameters that determine population health. Pollution burden predicted asthma and CVD prevalence but not low-birth-weight babies. Asthma was closely associated with traffic density, PM2.5, cleanup sites, and ozone levels; low-birth-weight babies were associated with traffic density and release of toxic substances; and CVD was associated with PM2.5, toxic release, and cleanup sites. Low HPI scores (<40%) were associated with incidences of asthma and CVD but not low-birth-weight babies. The increased population health compromises in California caused by the effects of air pollution call for a paradigm shift in the way population health is evaluated and effects of air pollution mitigated

Designing a Multiagent System for Course-Offering Determination

I attended a doctoral symposium of the conference. It was very good to know about how to guide PhD students to conduct high-quality research and complete PhD program. I attended all the keynote sessions of the conference. The presentation on Computational Disaster Management by Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck was very insightful and encouraging. The talk on “Agents might not be people” by Professor Nigel Gilbert was illuminating. The talk on “Satisfiability to Linear Algebra” by Professor Fangzhen Lin was revealing. I attended almost all sections of PRIMA 2013 and some presentations of AI 2013. They reflect the advancement of the field. The discussions with the people on-site were very interesting and helpful to my future research. Also, it was great to talk to active researchers in the field and exchanged ideas of our research and explored the possibility of collaboration.This paper describes the design of a multiagent system that facilitates course-offering decision making for a program in an institution. We first model course offering determination for upcoming semester as a multi-winner election with exogenous constraints which is a problem for computational social choice in multiagent systems, which has rarely been considered. Then, the paper describes the architecture and models of the multiagent system for course offering determination with Gaia role model methodology, TROPOS strategic actor diagram, Agent Unified Modeling Language (AUML) sequence diagram for a multi-agent negotiation interaction protocol, and Pseudo-code algorithms for generating fractional votes and course election protocol. A novel course selection preference model for students has been proposed and described formally. The effectiveness of the approach and the implemented system has been showed with the initial experimental results

Coded Modulation for Satellite Broadcasting

In this paper, three-level block coded 8-PSK modulations, suitable for satellite broadcasting of digital TV signals, are presented. A design principle to achieve unequal error protection is introduced. The coding scheme is designed in such a way that the information bits carrying the basic definition TV signal have a lower error rate than the high definition information bits. The large error coefficients, formally associated with standard mapping by set partitioning, are reduced by considering a nonstandard partition of an 8-PSK signal set. The bits-to-signal mapping induced by this partition allows the use of suboptimal low-complexity soft-decision decoding of binary block codes. Parallel operation of the first and second stage decoders is possible, for high data rate transmission. Furthermore, there is no error propagation from the first-stage decoder to the second-stage decoder

iTETRIS: An Integrated Wireless and Traffic Platform for Real-Time Road Traffic Management Solutions

Wireless vehicular cooperative systems have been identified as an attractive solution to improve road traffic management, thereby contributing to the European goal of safer, cleaner, and more efficient and sustainable traffic solutions. V2V-V2I communication technologies can improve traffic management through real-time exchange of data among vehicles and with road infrastructure. It is also of great importance to investigate the adequate combination of V2V and V2I technologies to ensure the continuous and costefficient operation of traffic management solutions based on wireless vehicular cooperative solutions. However, to adequately design and optimize these communication protocols and analyze the potential of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve road traffic management, adequate testbeds and field operational tests need to be conducted. Despite the potential of Field Operational Tests to get the first insights into the benefits and problems faced in the development of wireless vehicular cooperative systems, there is yet the need to evaluate in the long term and large dimension the true potential benefits of wireless vehicular cooperative systems to improve traffic efficiency. To this aim, iTETRIS is devoted to the development of advanced tools coupling traffic and wireless communication simulators

Investigating the Efficiency of ITS Cooperative Systems for a Better Use of Urban Transport Infrastructures: The iTETRIS Simulation Platform

The use of cooperative ITS communication systems, supporting driving through the dynamic exchange of Vehicle-to- Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) messages, is a potential candidate to improve the economical and societal welfare. The application of such systems for novel cooperative traffic management strategies can introduce a lot of beneficial effects not only for road safety, but also for the economy related to transportation systems and the environmental impact. Despite this apparent set of promising features, City Road Authorities, which hold a key-role in determining the final adoption of such systems, still look at cooperative systems without sharing a clear opinion. This is mainly due to the current lack of definitive and solid evidences of the effectiveness of such systems when applied in the real world. In order to fill this gap and let Road Authorities estimate the usefulness of such technologies in achieving the objectives dictated by cities’ traffic management policies, the EU consortium iTETRIS is developing a simulation platform for large scale testing of traffic management solutions making use of cooperative ITS systems. Thanks to its own distinguishing features, iTETRIS aims at becoming a good supporting tool for Road Authorities to implement preliminary tests on the effectiveness of ITS solutions prior to investing money for the physical deployment of the communication infrastructures allowing their functioning

An SMS Based Querying System for Mobile Learning

Mobile phone is the most widely used mobile device. Every mobile phone user can conveniently communicate with each other through SMS (Short Message Service) text messages at very low price. It is so commonly used that, in some countries like China, an SMS culture has emerged. Although there are some SMS based applications in m-Learning, most of them are only for administrative purposes, like delivering messages to students as reminders or alerts for some learning activities. In fact, text messages of SMS can effectively convey small pieces of materials related to learning processes, like course notes, items of glossary, small pieces of explanation and some links to detailed information etc. In this paper, we introduce a system for querying information and knowledge by the use of SMS in a mobile learning environment. The proposed system consists of a GSM Module (GSMM), a Dialogue Control Module (DCM), a Querying Processing Module (QPM) and a Knowledge Base (KB). GSMM includes a micro-controller and a GSM communication device with a SIM card in it. It processes the users' messages according to our defined protocol and acts as the interface between the mobile infrastructure and the rest of the system. DCM handles the content of the requesting messages and produces suitable querying tasks for QPM, which in turn searches and matches information from KB or Internet to produce suitable answering messages for the users according to their requesting messages. To help the system better understand the content of messages, natural language processing and theme recognition techniques are applied to message processing modules. Several scenarios about course notes and glossary querying are illustrated in this paper.School of Computing and Information Systems, Athabasca University Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410083, Chin

Integrating JADE Agents into Moodle

I gave a presentation for the paper successfully. More than 15 people attended the workshop. It seemed that the audience liked the idea in the paper. More development work of the project is expected.This paper presents an approach to integrating the JADE-based multiagent system with the Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle) -- an open source learning management system. This approach overcomes the shortcomings of Moodle that limit the benefits of Web-based distance learning, mainly from the perspectives of collaboration, and course administration. A prototype system for Automated Forum Monitoring demonstrates this approach.Academic & Professional Development Fund (A&PDF

An intelligent agent for adapting and delivering electronic course materials to mobile learners

The concept of mobile learning is often defined as learning that takes place with the help of mobile devices to access course materials; however, these devices operate in different ways and have different capabilities. To make course materials available on these mobile devices as well as on desktop systems, a software program is required to allow course material to be delivered in heterogeneous computing platforms. Because of these heterogeneous computing platforms, some course materials may not be in a format that different mobile devices would accept. This project developed an intelligent software agent capable of adapting to the heterogeneous mobile computing environment. The agent can search for a conversion tool according to the desired format and convert the course materials automatically. The agent is able to understand mobile clients’ capabilities. In order for the server to know what type of course material the client wishes to receive, the client needs to feed information on the software and hardware capabilities of the device to the server. However, devices do not normally carry any information about their capabilities. We have chosen the Resource Description Framework (RDF) represented Composite Capabilities/Preferences Profile (CC/PP) promoted by the W3C to describe the device capabilities and user preferences

On Reducing Bias in Observational Studies

Statistic