A Semantic Safety Check System for Emergency Management

There has been an exponential growth and availability of both structured and unstructured data that can be leveraged to provide better emergency management in case of natural disasters and humanitarian crises. This paper is an extension of a semantics-based web application for safety check, which uses of semantic web technologies to extract different kinds of relevant data about a natural disaster and alerts its users. The goal of this work is to design and develop a knowledge intensive application that identifies those people that may have been affected due to natural disasters or man-made disasters at any geographical location and notify them with safety instructions. This involves extraction of data from various sources for emergency alerts, weather alerts, and contacts data. The extracted data is integrated using a semantic data model and transformed into semantic data. Semantic reasoning is done through rules and queries. This system is built using front-end web development technologies and at the back-end using semantic web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SPARQL, Apache Jena, TDB, and Apache Fuseki server. We present the details of the overall approach, process of data collection and transformation and the system built. This extended version includes a detailed discussion of the semantic reasoning module, research challenges in building this software system, related work in this area, and future research directions including the incorporation of geospatial components and standards

Prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis among the tribal populations in India

IMPORTANCE: There is no concrete evidence on the burden of TB among the tribal populations across India except for few studies mainly conducted in Central India with a pooled estimation of 703/100,000 with a high degree of heterogeneity. OBJECTIVE: To estimate the prevalence of TB among the tribal populations in India. DESIGN, PARTICIPANTS, SETTING: A survey using a multistage cluster sampling design was conducted between April 2015 and March 2020 covering 88 villages (clusters) from districts with over 70% tribal majority populations in 17 States across 6 zones of India. The sample populations included individuals ≥15 years old. MAIN OUTCOME AND MEASURES: Eligible participants who were screened through an interview for symptoms suggestive of pulmonary TB (PTB); Two sputum specimens were examined by smear and culture. Prevalence was estimated after multiple imputations for non-coverage and a correction factor of 1.31 was then applied to account for non-inclusion of X-ray screening. RESULTS: A total of 74532 (81.0%) of the 92038 eligible individuals were screened; 2675 (3.6%) were found to have TB symptoms or h/o ATT. The overall prevalence of PTB was 432 per 100,000 populations. The PTB prevalence per 100,000 populations was highest 625 [95% CI: 496–754] in the central zone and least 153 [95% CI: 24–281] in the west zone. Among the 17 states that were covered in this study, Odisha recorded the highest prevalence of 803 [95% CI: 504–1101] and Jammu and Kashmir the lowest 127 [95% CI: 0–310] per 100,000 populations. Findings from multiple logistic regression analysis reflected that those aged 35 years and above, with BMI <18.5 Kgs /m(2), h/o ATT, smoking, and/or consuming alcohol had a higher risk of bacteriologically positive PTB. Weight loss was relatively more important symptom associated with tuberculosis among this tribal populations followed by night sweats, blood in sputum, and fever. CONCLUSION AND RELEVANCE: The overall prevalence of PTB among tribal groups is higher than the general populations with a wide variation of prevalence of PTB among the tribal groups at zone and state levels. These findings call for strengthening of the TB control efforts in tribal areas to reduce TB prevalence through tribal community/site-specific intervention programs

ScrumTutor: A Web-Based Interactive Tutorial for Scrum Software Development

In a traditional software engineering class, students are typically engaged in theoretical lectures followed by homework assignments or a project. Use of hands-on training and laboratory activities using realworld projects is more likely to produce students with a higher level of achievement and more confidence in the course material. If every topic or technique introduced in the course has a corresponding hands-on activity that demonstrates an application or use of the concept in the industry, students better understand the need for the technique and the learning environment is more interactive, engaging, and interesting to students. This paper presents a project called ScrumTutor that aims at providing an engaging learning experience of Scrum Software development process through a web-based Interactive tutorial. It is designed and developed for undergraduate students in introductory Software Engineering courses. This software tool introduces its users to modern software engineering methodology used these days in the software industry known as Agile Software Development that includes the Scrum framework for managing software projects or products