Audit

Audit is an application that aims to create a center of user experiences of online shopping. Through observation and personal experience, we felt there was not an adequate way of online shoppers to verify the legitimacy of a website. Online shopping has become extremely prominent over the past decade, and one of the pitfalls of this is that it is relatively easy to create a fraudulent business. The Audit application serves as a review site that is similar to Yelp, but geared towards online retailers. The application allows users to create an account and leave reviews for companies that they have had experiences shopping at. If the company does not exist within the site’s database, they are given the option to request a new company to be added

C.A.R.E (Cohort Assessment & Retrieval Environment)

The purpose of clinical trials is to explore whether a medical treatment is safe and effective for humans or to enhance preexisting methods. The identification of patients who satisfy a set of predefined criteria for the trial is instrumental. However, the process of distinguishing these patients on the basis of their clinical records is a challenging task since it can have structured (ex: precise measurements) and unstructured data (ex: physician notes). One difficulty with this is data normalization; there are many ways to describe a single concept. For example, “heart attack” and “myocardial infarction” both refer to the death of the heart muscle. The goal of this project is to develop a system that will process clinical records for the purpose of cohort discovery and make a visual framework to allow researchers to view and explore the associations between biomedical terms and their characteristics. Steps: 1) The user inputs criteria on what they want/do not want in their patients’ medical records. 2) The criteria and patient records run through a system using MetaMap and MetaMap- DataStructures that measures the association between biomedical terms and links other terms to that word or phrase. 3) The patient records are ranked based on the user input criteria. Therefore, the records that have more prevalent information regarding the input criteria receive a higher score. 4) The user is able to see the records in the order they were ranked. This makes the process of finding patients for a clinical trial more manageable.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1170/thumbnail.jp

Three-dimensional simulations of inorganic aerosol distributions in east Asia during spring 2001

In this paper, aerosol composition and size distributions in east Asia are simulated using a comprehensive chemical transport model. Three-dimensional aerosol simulations for the TRACE-P and ACE-Asia periods are performed and used to help interpret actual observations. The regional chemical transport model, STEM-2K3, which includes the on-line gas-aerosol thermodynamic module SCAPE II, and explicitly considers chemical aging of dust, is used in the analysis. The model is found to represent many of the important observed features. The Asian outflow during March and April of 2001 is heavily polluted with high aerosol loadings. Under conditions of low dust loading, SO_2 condensation and gas phase ammonia distribution determine the nitrate size and gas-aerosol distributions along air mass trajectories, a situation that is analyzed in detail for two TRACE-P flights. Dust is predicted to alter the partitioning of the semivolatile components between the gas and aerosol phases as well as the size distributions of the secondary aerosol constituents. Calcium in the dust affects the gas-aerosol equilibrium by shifting the equilibrium balance to an anion-limited status, which benefits the uptake of sulfate and nitrate, but reduces the amount of aerosol ammonium. Surface reactions on dust provide an additional mechanism to produce aerosol nitrate and sulfate. The size distribution of dust is shown to be a critical factor in determining the size distribution of secondary aerosols. As much of the dust mass is found in the supermicron mode (70–90%), appreciable amounts of sulfate and nitrate are found in the supermicron particles. For sulfate the observations and the analysis indicate that 10–30% of sulfate is in the supermicron fraction during dust events; in the case of nitrate, more than 80% is found in the supermicron fraction