Constraining the Search Space in Temporal Pattern Mining

Agents in dynamic environments have to deal with complex situations including various temporal interrelations of actions and events. Discovering frequent patterns in such scenes can be useful in order to create prediction rules which can be used to predict future activities or situations. We present the algorithm MiTemP which learns frequent patterns based on a time intervalbased relational representation. Additionally the problem has also been transfered to a pure relational association rule mining task which can be handled by WARMR. The two approaches are compared in a number of experiments. The experiments show the advantage of avoiding the creation of impossible or redundant patterns with MiTemP. While less patterns have to be explored on average with MiTemP more frequent patterns are found at an earlier refinement level

Impact of HPV Education on Knowledge, Perception, and Cultural influence among African American Parents

Background: Infection with human papillomavirus (HPV), the sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical and penial cancer can be prevented. An effective vaccine has been approved for both boys and girls since 2006. Despite recommendation from the Center of Disease Control, vaccination initiation and completion rates among African American adolescents in the United States are lower than average in the nation. Objectives: The purpose of this descriptive survey study was to identify African-American parents’ knowledge and perceptions of sexually transmitted HPV infection and the HPV vaccination. The secondary objective was to use a single-group pre-test post-test research design to examine the effectiveness of an HPV education program developed for African-American parents on HPV knowledge, perceptions, cultural influence and comfort level in discussing HPV with health care providers. Methods: A descriptive, single-group pre-test post-test and HPV educational program research design was used. Pre-testing, post-testing and HPV educational program were administered face to face with a convenience sample of African American parents to assess their knowledge, perception and cultural influences toward HPV, the HPV vaccine and provider comfort. Paired t test and descriptive statistics were used to analyze data. Results: A total of 102 African American parents participated in this study. This study found a statistically significant relationship between African American parents, cultural influence and lack of knowledge as a barrier to healthcare and the HPV vaccine using paired t-test analysis (p = 0.001). The cultural influence questionnaire had a mean of 14.76 (SD=1.68) indicating a strong correlation between the influence culture has with African Americans in making healthcare decisions for themselves and their children. The pre-and post-knowledge questionnaire had a mean of 4.29 (SD=2.59), the pre-and post-perception questionnaire had a mean of 2.63 (SD=1.81), indicating a positive trend in improved knowledge and perception towards the HPV vaccine after implementation of the developed HPV education program. The HPV education program had a mean of 4.78 (SD=.413) to the question that the HPV program gave motivation to parents to request the HPV vaccine for their child. These responses support a need for providers to consider the impact culture has on African American parents and the need to implement educational strategies to increase African American Parents regarding knowledge of HPV and the HPV vaccine in order to increase vaccination rates in this community. Relevance to Clinical Practice: Improving the knowledge of HPV infections in African American Parents can lead to improved health outcomes. Identifying educational and cultural barriers are key to improving educational interventions needed by healthcare providers in order to reach the African American parent population. Addressing noted barriers may improve the decision of African American parents to permit their children to receive and complete the much-needed HPV vaccination series

Seeking, longing, awakening : the adolescent search for self in a boarding school.

Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1975 .L28. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-07, page: . Thesis (M.S.W.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1975

SampleMatch: Drum Sample Retrieval by Musical Context

Modern digital music production typically involves combining numerous acoustic elements to compile a piece of music. Important types of such elements are drum samples, which determine the characteristics of the percussive components of the piece. Artists must use their aesthetic judgement to assess whether a given drum sample fits the current musical context. However, selecting drum samples from a potentially large library is tedious and may interrupt the creative flow. In this work, we explore the automatic drum sample retrieval based on aesthetic principles learned from data. As a result, artists can rank the samples in their library by fit to some musical context at different stages of the production process (i.e., by fit to incomplete song mixtures). To this end, we use contrastive learning to maximize the score of drum samples originating from the same song as the mixture. We conduct a listening test to determine whether the human ratings match the automatic scoring function. We also perform objective quantitative analyses to evaluate the efficacy of our approach.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 table; Accepted at the ISMIR conference, Bengaluru, India, 202