Acquiring Systems Knowledge with GOOI (Graphical Object-Oriented Interfaces)

Information system development, in particular expert systems and other knowledge-based approaches, require extensive human expert knowledge. Often, acquiring such knowledge is problematic with regard to efficiently acquiring the expert’s knowledge and translating this knowledge into a system usable form. Knowledge acquisition has long been viewed as the bottleneck of knowledge-based systems and more recently is being recognized as a significant issue in general information systems analysis and design. Object-oriented techniques are presented as a uniform method for overcoming translation difficulties and implementing graphical interfaces. A graphical interface provides a modeling platform that is easily understood by experts and knowledge engineers. The object-oriented base for our tool provides an additional benefit in developing implemented systems by providing a representation independent methodology that can easily be mapped into any other object-oriented based expert system or other object-oriented information systems

Improving Clinical Care with MIDGI-A

Physicians are faced with ever increasing quantities of information. Providing easy access to relevant medical information will improve the quality of care received by patients. Current medical agent programs serve as either expert systems or simple search engines. This article proposes a new agent-based methodology for improving medical information retrieval via the world-wide-web

A Comparative Analysis of Persona Clustering Methods

Current and future information systems require a better understanding of the interactions between users and systems in order to improve system use, and ultimately, success. The use of personas as design tools is becoming more widespread as academicians and practitioners discover its benefits. This paper presents an empirical study comparing the performance of existing qualitative and quantitative clustering techniques at the task of identifying personas and grouping system users into those personas. A method based on Factor (Principal Component) Analysis outperforms two others using Latent Semantic Analysis and Multivariate Cluster Analysis

A Guide for Purposive Sampling on Twitter

In this paper, we demonstrate how to use Twitter to conduct behavioral research and to guide researchers who might benefit from using this social media platform to effectively recruit survey participants. We begin by discussing the advantages researchers gain from using Twitter to recruit subjects for surveys, such as respondent anonymity, purposive sampling (which allows researchers to find respondents who participate in a topic of interest), the ability to reach respondents quickly to investigate ephemeral events, and advantages in replicating subject populations in recruitment. We offer a guide that illustrates the mechanics of using Twitter to recruit subjects and present a successful case study that illustrates how we used this technique in the real world to recruit survey participants. We provide solutions for common issues researchers might encounter when using Twitter to recruit subjects, such as nonresponse bias due to not responding to tweets in a timely manner, initial unwillingness to participate, and the inability to find appropriate survey respondents

Childhood brain tumors: A review of strategies to translate CNS drug delivery to clinical trials

Brain tumors account for over 20% of childhood cancers and are the biggest cancer killer in children and young adults. Several initiatives over the past 40 years have tried to identify more effective drug treatments, but with very limited success. This is largely due to the bloodâ brain barrier, which restricts the entry of many drugs into the brain. In this review, we describe the main techniques that are being developed to enhance brain tumor drug delivery and explore the preclinical brain tumor models that are essential for translational development of these techniques. We also identify existing approved drugs that, if coupled with an efficient delivery method, could have potential as brain tumor treatments. Bringing this information together is part of a funded initiative to highlight drug delivery as a research strategy to overcome the current challenges for children diagnosed with brain tumors