A Case of Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome Presenting as Anxiety

Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) is a rare but potentially lethal complication of dopamine antagonist use. A 34-year-old male presented to the emergency department with a chief complaint of feeling anxious for the past several days. He presented with his family who helped provide history as he had become less communicative over the preceding two days. It was revealed that the patient had a recent psychiatric hospitalization for suspected new-onset psychosis and was discharged six days prior to his presentation. It was reported that the patient was discharged with unknown psychiatric medications but stopped taking them two days prior because he felt they were increasing his anxiety. On physical examination, the patient was found to have upper extremity rigidity and appeared tremulous. A review of records revealed that the patient was discharged from inpatient psychiatric treatment on dual antipsychotic therapy. With this information, the patient met the diagnostic criteria for NMS. He was hospitalized and his symptoms resolved following treatment. Without the knowledge of antipsychotic use, the diagnosis of a serious, life-threatening condition may have been missed. Our case highlights an important but occasionally overlooked aspect of evaluating a patient in the emergency department, namely, outside chart and documentation reviewing

Social media through the requirements lens:a case study of Google Maps

Social media serves as an extensive repository of user interaction related to software applications. Users discuss application features and express their sentiments about them in both qualitative (usually in natural language) and quantitative ways (for example, via votes). Further, many social media applications support explicit social networks of users and measures such as user reputation. Naturally, content on social media has the potential to inform requirements engineering. However, models of requirements and associated tools that enable software engineers to make sense of this information are currently lacking. In this paper, we present a preliminary study of interaction among users about Google Maps on the forum Reddit. We highlight important artifacts relevant to requirements in these interactions. We discuss goal modeling as an archetypal requirements modeling approach and use that as a basis for enhancing requirements modeling with notions that capture user interaction

Cupid:commitments in relational algebra

We propose Cupid, a language for specifying commitments that supports their information-centric aspects, and offers crucial benefits. One, Cupid is first-order, enabling a systematic treatment of commitment instances. Two, Cupid supports features needed for real-world scenarios such as deadlines, nested commitments, and complex event expressions for capturing the lifecycle of commitment instances. Three, Cupid maps to relational database queries and thus provides a set-based semantics for retrieving commitment instances in states such as being violated, discharged, and so on. We prove that Cupid queries are safe. Four, to aid commitment modelers, we propose the notion of well-identified commitments, and finitely violable and finitely expirable commitments. We give syntactic restrictions for obtaining such commitments

Generalized commitment alignment

The interoperability of interacting components means that their expectations of each other remain in agreement. A commitment captures what one agent (its creditor) may expect from another agent (its debtor). Chopra and Singh (C&S) motivate commitment alignment as a meaning-based form of interoperation and show how to ensure alignment among agents despite asynchrony. Although C&S’s approach demonstrates the key strengths of relying on commitment semantics, it suffers from key shortcomings, which limit its applicability in practice. One, C&S do not model commitments properly, causing unacceptable interference between commitments in different transactions. Two, they require that the communication infrastructure guarantee first-in first-out (FIFO) delivery of messages for every agent-agent channel. Three, C&S guarantee alignment only in quiescent states (where no messages are in transit); however, such states may never obtain in enactments of real systems. Our approach retains and enhances C&S’s key strengths and avoids their shortcomings by providing a declarative semantics-based generalized treatment of alignment. Specifically, we (1) motivate a declarative notion of alignment relevant system states termed completeness; (2) prove that it coincides with alignment; and (3) provide the computations by which a system of agents provably progresses toward alignment assuming eventual delivery of messages

Clouseau:Generating Communication Protocols from Commitments

Engineering a decentralized multiagent system (MAS) requires realizing interactions modeled as a communication protocol between autonomous agents. We contribute Clouseau, an approach that takes a commitment-based specification of an interaction and generates a communication protocol amenable to decentralized enactment. We show that the generated protocol is (1) correct—realizes all and only the computations that satisfy the input specification; (2) safe—ensures the agents' local views remain consistent; and (3) live—ensures the agents can proceed to completion