Towards Knowledge-Intensive Software Engineering

Postprin

Investigation in haemodynamic stability during intermittent haemodialysis in the critically ill

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An investigation into the effects of commencing haemodialysis in the critically ill

<b>Introduction:</b> We have aimed to describe haemodynamic changes when haemodialysis is instituted in the critically ill. 3 hypotheses are tested: 1)The initial session is associated with cardiovascular instability, 2)The initial session is associated with more cardiovascular instability compared to subsequent sessions, and 3)Looking at unstable sessions alone, there will be a greater proportion of potentially harmful changes in the initial sessions compared to subsequent ones. <b>Methods:</b> Data was collected for 209 patients, identifying 1605 dialysis sessions. Analysis was performed on hourly records, classifying sessions as stable/unstable by a cutoff of >+/-20% change in baseline physiology (HR/MAP). Data from 3 hours prior, and 4 hours after dialysis was included, and average and minimum values derived. 3 time comparisons were made (pre-HD:during, during HD:post, pre-HD:post). Initial sessions were analysed separately from subsequent sessions to derive 2 groups. If a session was identified as being unstable, then the nature of instability was examined by recording whether changes crossed defined physiological ranges. The changes seen in unstable sessions could be described as to their effects: being harmful/potentially harmful, or beneficial/potentially beneficial. <b>Results:</b> Discarding incomplete data, 181 initial and 1382 subsequent sessions were analysed. A session was deemed to be stable if there was no significant change (>+/-20%) in the time-averaged or minimum MAP/HR across time comparisons. By this definition 85/181 initial sessions were unstable (47%, 95% CI SEM 39.8-54.2). Therefore Hypothesis 1 is accepted. This compares to 44% of subsequent sessions (95% CI 41.1-46.3). Comparing these proportions and their respective CI gives a 95% CI for the standard error of the difference of -4% to 10%. Therefore Hypothesis 2 is rejected. In initial sessions there were 92/1020 harmful changes. This gives a proportion of 9.0% (95% CI SEM 7.4-10.9). In the subsequent sessions there were 712/7248 harmful changes. This gives a proportion of 9.8% (95% CI SEM 9.1-10.5). Comparing the two unpaired proportions gives a difference of -0.08% with a 95% CI of the SE of the difference of -2.5 to +1.2. Hypothesis 3 is rejected. Fisher’s exact test gives a result of p=0.68, reinforcing the lack of significant variance. <b>Conclusions:</b> Our results reject the claims that using haemodialysis is an inherently unstable choice of therapy. Although proportionally more of the initial sessions are classed as unstable, the majority of MAP and HR changes are beneficial in nature

Changing the Viewpoint: Re-Indexing by Introspective Questioning

Various cognitive and compuUtional models have addressed the use of previous experience to understand a new domain. In particular, research in case-based reasoning has explored the ideas of retrieving and adapting previous experience in the form of cases, which can only be retrieved when they are appropriately indexed. In contrast to learning new indexes, reindexing of existing cases has received little attention. The need for re-indexing a case arises when a previous situation has been incorrectly or incompletely understood. W e describe a novel approach to re-indexing which integrates results from two different areas: multiple viewpoints used in intelUgent tutoring systems and introspective questioning used in metacognitive activities. Furthermore, we apply ideas from CaseBased Reasoning to the re-indexing process itself. The revised index can be tested by active interaction with the agent's environment. An example of our implementation, JULIAN, will illustrate the re-indexing process

The influence of L2 English and immersion education on L3 French in the Netherlands

In this paper, we test the L2 Status Factor ( Bardel & Falk, 2007 ) by examining to what extent Dutch secondary school students (13–15 years) prefer L2 English over L1 Dutch in L3 French acquisition, and we study the influence of L2 education by comparing an English immersion curriculum vs. a regular Dutch curriculum. We investigate verb placement in declarative root clauses, viz. V-to-T movement, where the finite verb moves to T in French but not in English and V-to-C movement, in which the V2-rule applies in Dutch but not in French. We report data from a Grammaticality Judgement Task. The results indicate that in the immersion group there is significantly more influence from English than from Dutch. In the regular group, the L1 and the L2 are both important sources of transfer

Image annotation with Photocopain

Photo annotation is a resource-intensive task, yet is increasingly essential as image archives and personal photo collections grow in size. There is an inherent conflict in the process of describing and archiving personal experiences, because casual users are generally unwilling to expend large amounts of effort on creating the annotations which are required to organise their collections so that they can make best use of them. This paper describes the Photocopain system, a semi-automatic image annotation system which combines information about the context in which a photograph was captured with information from other readily available sources in order to generate outline annotations for that photograph that the user may further extend or amend