BESDUI: A Benchmark for End-User Structured Data User Interfaces

The Semantic Web Community has invested significant research efforts in developing systems for Semantic Web search and exploration. But while it has been easy to assess the systems’ computational efficiency, it has been much harder to assess how well different semantic systems’ user interfaces help their users. In this article, we propose and demonstrate the use of a benchmark for evaluating such user interfaces, similar to the TREC benchmark for evaluating traditional search engines. Our benchmark includes a set of typical user tasks and a well-defined procedure for assigning a measure of performance on those tasks to a semantic system. We demonstrate its application to two such system, Virtuoso and Rhizomer. We intend for this work to initiate a community conversation that will lead to a generally accepted framework for comparing systems and for measuring, and thus encouraging, progress towards better semantic search and exploration tools

A spreadsheet-based user interface for managing plural relationships in structured data

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 57-58).A key feature of relational database applications is managing plural relationships-one-to-many and many-to-many-between entities, be they customers and invoices, parts and suppliers, or meetings and conference rooms. However, since it is often infeasible to adopt or develop a new database application for any given schema at hand, information workers instead turn to spreadsheets, a general and more familiar data management tool which, unfortunately, lends itself poorly to schemas requiring multiple related entity sets. In this thesis, we propose to reduce the cost-usability gap between spreadsheets and tailormade relational database applications by extending the spreadsheet paradigm to let the user establish relationships between rows in related worksheets as well as view and navigate the hierarchical cell structure that arises as a result. We present Related Worksheets, a spreadsheet-like prototype application, and evaluate it with a study involving 36 regular Excel users. First-time users of our software were able to solve most lookup-type query tasks without instruction, in one case 40% faster than on Excel.by Eirik Bakke.S.M

Climate adaptation of pre-Viking societies

Understanding how the Viking societies were impacted by past climate variability and how they adapted to it has hardly been investigated. Here, we have carried out a new multi-proxy investigation of lake sediments, including geochemical and palynological analyses, to reconstruct past changes in temperature and agricultural practices of pre-Viking and Viking societies in Southeastern Norway during the period between 200 and 1300 CE. The periods 200–300 and 800–1300 CE were warmer than the 300–800 CE period, which is known as the “Dark Ages Cold Period”. This cold period was punctuated by century-scale more temperate intervals, which were dominated by the cultivation of cereals and hemp (before 280 CE, 420–480 CE, 580–700 CE, and after 800 CE). In between, cold intervals were dominated by livestock farming. Our results demonstrate that the pre-Viking societies changed their agricultural strategy in response to climate variability during the Late Antiquity.publishedVersio

Patient derived colonoids as drug testing platforms - Critical importance of oxygen concentration

Treatment of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is challenging, with a series of available drugs each helping only a fraction of patients. Patients may face time-consuming drug trials while the disease is active, thus there is an unmet need for biomarkers and assays to predict drug effect. It is well known that the intestinal epithelium is an important factor in disease pathogenesis, exhibiting physical, biochemical and immunologic driven barrier dysfunctions. One promising test system to study effects of existing or emerging IBD treatments targeting intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) is intestinal organoids (“mini-guts”). However, the fact that healthy intestinal epithelium is in a physiologically hypoxic state has largely been neglected, and studies with intestinal organoids are mainly performed at oxygen concentration of 20%. We hypothesized that lowering the incubator oxygen level from 20% to 2% would recapitulate better the in vivo physiological environment of colonic epithelial cells and enhance the translational value of intestinal organoids as a drug testing platform. In the present study we examine the effects of the key IBD cytokines and drug targets TNF/IL17 on human colonic organoids (colonoids) under atmospheric (20%) or reduced (2%) O2. We show that colonoids derived from both healthy controls and IBD-patients are viable and responsive to IBD-relevant cytokines at 2% oxygen. Because chemokine release is one of the important immunoregulatory traits of the epithelium that may be fine-tuned by IBD-drugs, we also examined chemokine expression and release at different oxygen concentrations. We show that chemokine responses to TNF/IL17 in organoids display similarities to inflamed epithelium in IBD-patients. However, inflammation-associated genes induced by TNF/IL17 were attenuated at low oxygen concentration. We detected substantial oxygen-dependent differences in gene expression in untreated as well as TNF/IL17 treated colonoids in all donors. Further, for some of the IBD-relevant cytokines differences between colonoids from healthy controls and IBD patients were more pronounced in 2% O2 than 20% O2. Our results strongly indicate that an oxygen concentration similar to the in vivo epithelial cell environment is of essence in experimental pharmacology

A longitudinal follow-up of autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1

Source:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4971337/Context: Autoimmune polyendocrine syndrome type 1 (APS1) is a childhood-onset monogenic disease defined by the presence of two of the three major components: hypoparathyroidism, primary adrenocortical insuffi- ciency, and chronic mucocutaneous candidiasis (CMC). Information on longitudinal follow-up of APS1 is sparse. Objective: To describe the phenotypes of APS1 and correlate the clinical features with autoantibody profiles and autoimmune regulator ( AIRE) mutations during extended follow-up (1996–2016). Patients: All known Norwegian patients with APS1. Results: Fifty-two patients from 34 families were identified. The majority presented with one of the major disease components during childhood. Enamel hypoplasia, hypoparathyroidism, and CMC were the most frequent compo- nents.Withage,mostpatientspresentedthreetofivediseasemanifestations,althoughsomehadmilderphenotypes diagnosed in adulthood. Fifteen of the patients died during follow-up (median age at death, 34 years) or were deceasedsiblingswithahighprobabilityofundisclosedAPS1.Allexceptthreehadinterferon- )autoantibodies,and allhadorgan-specificautoantibodies.Themostcommon AIRE mutationwasc.967_979del13,foundinhomozygosity in 15 patients. A mild phenotype was associated with the splice mutation c.879 1G A. Primary adrenocortical insufficiency and type 1 diabetes were associated with protective human leucocyte antigen genotypes. Conclusions: Multiple presumable autoimmune manifestations, in particular hypoparathyroidism, CMC, and enamel hypoplasia, should prompt further diagnostic workup using autoantibody analyses (eg, interferon- ) and AIRE sequencing to reveal APS1, even in adults. Treatment is complicated, and mortality is high. Structured follow-up should be performed in a specialized center

Expressive query construction through direct manipulation of nested relational results

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2016.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 127-136).Despite extensive research on visual query systems, the standard way to interact with relational databases remains to be through SQL queries and tailored form interfaces. This makes the power of relational databases largely inaccessible to non-programmers. This thesis proposes a solution, in two parts. The first contribution of this thesis is a solution to the visual query language problem, that is, the problem of letting end users construct arbitrary database queries through a graphical user interface. We propose the first visual query language to simultaneously satisfy three requirements: (1) query specification through direct manipulation of results, (2) the ability to view and modify any part of the current query without departing from the direct manipulation interface, and (3) SQL-like expressiveness. By directly manipulating nested relational results, and using spreadsheet idioms such as formulas and filters, the user can express arbitrary SQL-92 queries while always remaining able to track and modify the state of the complete query. The second contribution of this thesis is an algorithm for automatically formatting nested relational data using the traditional visual idioms of hand-designed database UIs: tables, multi-column forms, and outline-style indented lists. The algorithm plugs directly into the output stage of our visual query language, and produces the concrete graphics that the user sees and manipulates on the screen during query construction. The algorithm eliminates the need for an application developer to specify low-level presentation details such as label placements, text field dimensions, table column widths, and list styles. Our prototype visual query system gives the user an experience of responsive, incremental query building while pushing all actual query processing to the database layer. We evaluate the query building aspects of our system with formative and controlled user studies on a total of 28 spreadsheet users. The controlled study shows our system outperforming Microsoft Access by 18 points on the System Usability Scale [17]; this corresponds to a 46 percentage point difference on a percentile scale of other studies in the Business Software category. We also evaluate the different layouts that can be produced by our automatic layout algorithm, including via an online user study on 27 subjects.by Eirik Bakke.Ph. D

Rolling Stones and rising tides : a journey through Bob Dylan's metaphors

In the course of his 44-year-long career as a recording artist, Bob Dylan has gone through numerous phases with regard to themes and language. This thesis looks at how he has used imagery in his lyrics over the years, focusing especially on conceptual metaphor, in a number of songs ranging in origin from 1962 to 2006. I have looked closely at this use of metaphor and seen it in view of political climate, Dylan's own changing convictions and personal life, and how time has influenced his choice of thematic imagery

The Schema-Independent Database UI A Proposed Holy Grail and Some Suggestions

If you have ever encountered a piece of highly domain-specific business software, you may have noticed that it was largely a graphical front-end to some relational database. You may also, in fact, have avoided using the system at all—studies show that information workers prefer to dump their data into spreadsheets, a general and more familiar tool which, unfortunately, is poorly suited for many standard database tasks. It is time that we stop streamlining the process of creating a new application for every schema, and that we instead develop the visual query languages that will let endusers access the full power of relational database management systems from a simple and unified interface. Once information workers can create, manage, and query real databases with the same ease as they routinely manipulate spreadsheets today, they will never return to their schemadependent, consultant-made, and oddly-colored Microsoft Access applications. 1. A WAR STORY In his younger days (well, before undergrad), one of the authors worked as an administrative assistant for one of Norway’s 400 public schools of music and arts. To keep track of students, teachers, lessons, and rental instruments, the school had licensed a special-purpose database application, originally developed in FileMaker Pro 1 and later rewritten in 4th Dimension 2. See Figure 1. The software was made and sold by a six-person consulting firm started by a former band director and FileMaker whiz on the other side of the country, and was constantly under development. A couple of times per year, the consultants would fly out to our individual schools to train us in the use of new features as well as collect feedback for further development. A common kind of request would be adding another field to an entity type in the database; for instance, we might ask if we could “get a checkbox in the ‘Student ’ dialog to indicate whether their parents had signed the audio recording release for

Brukartilpassbare pedagogiske agentar for gruppevaresystem

Oppgåve om utvikling og integrering av agentar i eit CSCL gruppevaresystem

Gambling Åtferd i Kryptovaluta Investeringar: Ein Korrelasjonsstudie

As the market of cryptocurrency rises, it is crucial to increase our knowledge and understanding as to why people choose to invest in this rather unknown and risk filled technology. Thus, uncovering reasons why investors engage in cryptocurrency, as well as categorizing their motives, perspectives and investment behaviour, and how external factors may affect these, is of relevance. Appropriately, this thesis combines literature on investment behaviour and gambling behaviour through a correlational analysis, to uncover linkages between the two in light of cryptocurrency investments. Accordingly, the central gambling motives defined by theory: chance of winning, intellectual challenge, mood change, social rewards and the dream of hitting the jackpot, was analysed from empirical data gathered from cryptocurrency investors. The results show that all of the central gambling motives correlated with one or more variables, indicating a presence of gambling behaviour in cryptocurrency investment behaviour. Limitations and further research: the weak dataset caused low reliability and generalisability to the findings, thus prompting the need for a larger sample size, along with analysing the relevancy of the variable age in further researc