Information system support in construction industry with semantic web technologies and/or autonomous reasoning agents

Information technology support is hard to find for the early design phases of the architectural design process. Many of the existing issues in such design decision support tools appear to be caused by a mismatch between the ways in which designers think and the ways in which information systems aim to give support. We therefore started an investigation of existing theories of design thinking, compared to the way in which design decision support systems provide information to the designer. We identify two main strategies towards information system support in the early design phase: (1) applications for making design try-outs, and (2) applications as autonomous reasoning agents. We outline preview implementations for both approaches and indicate to what extent these strategies can be used to improve information system support for the architectural designer

Moving toward a framework to compose intelligent web services

A framework for contract-based support to establish virtual collaboration is proposed using loosely coupled and heterogeneous intelligent Web services. A business process redesign scenario is also discussed for integrating shared business process between a PC manufacturer and a semiconductor manufacturer. Contracts encapsulate the control information for intelligent Web services (IWS) engaged in e-business transactions. IWS show promise as a means of supporting cross-organizational business transactions

Ambient-aware continuous care through semantic context dissemination

Background: The ultimate ambient-intelligent care room contains numerous sensors and devices to monitor the patient, sense and adjust the environment and support the staff. This sensor-based approach results in a large amount of data, which can be processed by current and future applications, e. g., task management and alerting systems. Today, nurses are responsible for coordinating all these applications and supplied information, which reduces the added value and slows down the adoption rate. The aim of the presented research is the design of a pervasive and scalable framework that is able to optimize continuous care processes by intelligently reasoning on the large amount of heterogeneous care data. Methods: The developed Ontology-based Care Platform (OCarePlatform) consists of modular components that perform a specific reasoning task. Consequently, they can easily be replicated and distributed. Complex reasoning is achieved by combining the results of different components. To ensure that the components only receive information, which is of interest to them at that time, they are able to dynamically generate and register filter rules with a Semantic Communication Bus (SCB). This SCB semantically filters all the heterogeneous care data according to the registered rules by using a continuous care ontology. The SCB can be distributed and a cache can be employed to ensure scalability. Results: A prototype implementation is presented consisting of a new-generation nurse call system supported by a localization and a home automation component. The amount of data that is filtered and the performance of the SCB are evaluated by testing the prototype in a living lab. The delay introduced by processing the filter rules is negligible when 10 or fewer rules are registered. Conclusions: The OCarePlatform allows disseminating relevant care data for the different applications and additionally supports composing complex applications from a set of smaller independent components. This way, the platform significantly reduces the amount of information that needs to be processed by the nurses. The delay resulting from processing the filter rules is linear in the amount of rules. Distributed deployment of the SCB and using a cache allows further improvement of these performance results

The International Surface Pressure Databank version 2

The International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPD) is the world's largest collection of global surface and sea-level pressure observations. It was developed by extracting observations from established international archives, through international cooperation with data recovery facilitated by the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative, and directly by contributing universities, organizations, and countries. The dataset period is currently 1768–2012 and consists of three data components: observations from land stations, marine observing systems, and tropical cyclone best track pressure reports. Version 2 of the ISPD (ISPDv2) was created to be observational input for the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project (20CR) and contains the quality control and assimilation feedback metadata from the 20CR. Since then, it has been used for various general climate and weather studies, and an updated version 3 (ISPDv3) has been used in the ERA-20C reanalysis in connection with the European Reanalysis of Global Climate Observations project (ERA-CLIM). The focus of this paper is on the ISPDv2 and the inclusion of the 20CR feedback metadata. The Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research provides data collection and access for the ISPDv2, and will provide access to future versions

Elevated neutrophil and monocyte counts in peripheral blood are associated with poor survival in patients with metastatic melanoma: a prognostic model

We aimed to create a prognostic model in metastatic melanoma based on independent prognostic factors in 321 patients receiving interleukin-2 (IL-2)-based immunotherapy with a median follow-up time for patients currently alive of 52 months (range 15–189 months). The patients were treated as part of several phase II protocols and the majority received treatment with intermediate dose subcutaneous IL-2 and interferon-α. Neutrophil and monocyte counts, lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), number of metastatic sites, location of metastases and performance status were all statistically significant prognostic factors in univariate analyses. Subsequently, a multivariate Cox's regression analysis identified elevated LDH (P<0.001, hazard ratio 2.8), elevated neutrophil counts (P=0.02, hazard ratio 1.4) and a performance status of 2 (P=0.008, hazard ratio 1.6) as independent prognostic factors for poor survival. An elevated monocyte count could replace an elevated neutrophil count. Patients were assigned to one of three risk groups according to the cumulative risk defined as the sum of simplified risk scores of the three independent prognostic factors. Low-, intermediate- and high-risk patients achieved a median survival of 12.6 months (95% confidence interval (CI), 11.4–13.8), 6.0 months (95% CI, 4.8–7.2) and 3.4 months (95% CI, 1.2–5.6), respectively. The low-risk group encompassed the majority of long-term survivors, whereas the patients in the high-risk group with a very poor prognosis should probably not be offered IL-2-based immunotherapy

Transoral resection of pharyngeal cancer: Summary of a National Cancer Institute Head and Neck Cancer Steering Committee Clinical Trials Planning Meeting, November 6–7, 2011, Arlington, Virginia

Recent advances now permit resection of many pharyngeal tumors through the open mouth, an approach that can greatly reduce the morbidity of surgical exposure. These transoral techniques are being rapidly adopted by the surgical community and hold considerable promise. On November 6–7, 2011, the National Cancer Institute sponsored a Clinical Trials Planning Meeting to address how to further investigate the use of transoral surgery, both in the good prognosis human papillomavirus (HPV)–initiated oropharyngeal cancers, and in those with HPV‐unrelated disease. The proceedings of this meeting are summarized. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Head Neck, 2012Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94490/1/23136_ftp.pd