TrailXplorer: An interactive mobile educational tool to promote safety awareness and prevent injuries from outdoor adventures.

This thesis seeks to introduce an interactive mobile prototype to promote safety awareness and a visualized guideline to assist outdoor adventurers. Nature is a place where many people go to find peace and relax. According to the “Outdoor participation report 2017” (the Coleman Company, 2017), 144.4 million Americans participated in outdoor activities in 2017. Unfortunately for a multitude of reasons, people encounter some type of unfortunate event that results in either injury or death. As the number of outdoor participants has continued increased annually, safety awareness and skills training have become increasingly crucial now more than ever. This project sought to not only educate people’s outdoor skills and reduce injuries but to also proposes new interactive methods that can support them in the future. The overall purpose of this project was to reduce injuries from outdoor activities by promoting safety awareness and educate people on outdoor activity skills. By providing users with information about environmental conditions and Augmented reality technology, users can have better insights into their surroundings in addition to knowledge of useful safe solutions when they go outdoors. Therefore, in the future outdoor enthusiasts will be able to enjoy a better and safer adventure. More importantly, this project explored how to integrate emerging technologies into people’s real- life experiences while helping them to solve problems. The deliverables of this project included three parts. Firstly, the user research. A lot of user research methods, such as user questionnaire, interviews, user personas are used to identify the target audience, their needs and pain points. Secondly, the interaction design process included planning and documenting user flow, the definition of design through wireframes and visual design iterations. To find the optimal user experience, scenarios were evaluated based on user objectives. Lastly, a demo video was created to help communicate the workflow by simulating the use cases. This project proposed to combine user experience methods, interfaces design, and augmented reality technology to deliver a better and safer outdoor experience

Disintermediation and co-opetition in platform ecosystems and modern value chains

textThis dissertation investigates partial disintermediation and co-opetition in platform-based ecosystems and modern supply chains. Disintermediation has been an intriguing puzzle for managers for the last several decades, but recent development in electronic commerce makes the management of this trade-off even more challenging. The first type of partial disintermediation I study, often referred to as platform envelopment, is widely observed in platform-based businesses. Platform owners often rely on complementary innovations from third-party providers (i.e., third-party contents), while providing their own products/services to consumers (i.e., first-party contents). The second type of partial disintermediation I study is referred to as supplier encroachment. Due to the fast development of electronic commerce, many manufacturers have established their direct-selling channels on the internet (e.g., online stores), instead of completely relying on third-party retailers to reach customers. The widespread observation of disintermediation and the resulting co-opetition behaviors in various industries has motivated me to investigate two important questions: (1) what's the impact of partial disintermediation on consumer demand and firm profits? (2) what strategies can be used to manage the co-opetition relationship? I use both analytical modeling and empirical methods to study the impact of disintermediation on consumer behaviors, firm profits, and social welfare. The findings provide managerial insights into how to manage the co-opetition dilemma due to disintermediation.Information, Risk, and Operations Management (IROM

The Impact of Inclusive Leadership on Employee Well-being: The Mediating Role of Organizational Trust

In recent years, people pay more and more attention to employees' work experience and mental health, especially employee well-being. Leadership style is one of the factors that affect employee well-being. Recently, there have been more and more researches on inclusive leadership in China. However, the research on the relationship between inclusive leadership and employee well-being in China is still in its infancy, and the mechanism between the two still needs to be further studied.This paper investigates the mediating effect of organizational trust on the relationship between inclusive leadership and employee well-being by using a questionnaire survey of Chinese workers. Based on a survey of 153 participants, the results show that organizational trust can mediate the positive impact of inclusive leadership on employee well-being. At the same time, after the addition of organizational trust as an intermediate variable, the study found that the establishment of organizational trust has a driving effect on improving employee well-being

Motivating IT-Mediated Crowds: The Effect of Goal Setting on Project Performance in Online Crowdfunding

In traditional organizations, stretch goals - difficult and seemingly unattainable goals - have been much debated for their paradoxical effects. Recently, their use as a managerial instrument in IT-mediated crowds has increased. Using online crowdfunding on Kickstarter as an example, we investigate how the use of stretch goals influences project performance. Empirical results show that the use of stretch goals is associated with better project funding performance. Such positive effect is even stronger for projects with higher levels of community engagement. However, stretch goals are less effective in project categories where stretch goals are less novel. Our empirical results also reveal that the use of stretch goals significantly increases a project’s likelihood of delivery delay. These results shed light on the potential dark side of using stretch goals in IT-mediated crowds

Patterns and determinants of community antibiotic use in Australia: observational studies using large electronic health datasets

Background: Antibiotic overuse in clinical practice is an important driver for antibiotic resistance. However, there is insufficient granularity regarding Australian community antibiotic prescribing patterns reported in the literature. Aim and design: I conducted four population-based retrospective observational studies to understand the pattern of antibiotic use and the determinants in the Australian community. Chapter 2 examined the rate of antibiotic dispensing and microbiology testing in older adults by their comorbidities. Chapter 3 examined the adherence to guidelines in urinary tract infection episodes in general practice when antibiotics were prescribed. Chapter 4 compared the likelihood of antibiotic prescribing for upper respiratory tract infections in regular and after-hours general practice consultations. Chapter 5 examined the general practice-level broad- to narrow-spectrum antibiotic ratio and its association with patients’ antibiotic treatment non-response within the practice. Methods: Chapter 2 was based on the 45 and Up Study, a large cohort study on older Australians linked to routinely collected health databases including antibiotic dispensing data. Chapter 3 to 5 used MedicineInsight, a national database of electronic health records from Australian general practices. Both descriptive analysis and multivariable modelling were used to identify determinants of antibiotic use. Findings: 1) There was a discord between the high antibiotic dispensing rate and low microbiology testing rate among older people with chronic respiratory diseases, suggesting potential antibiotic overuse among those subgroups. 2) Some patient groups who are recommended to have routine urine testing in urinary tract infection episodes, e.g., patients aged <5 years, with recurrent urinary tract infections, or living in nursing homes, had a lower likelihood of testing than comparable patient groups. 3) After-hours consultations were associated with a higher likelihood of immediate antibiotic prescribing for upper respiratory tract infections in general practice. 4) The ratio of prescribing of broad- to narrow-spectrum antibiotics at the practice-level was a predictor for patients’ antibiotic treatment non-response in respiratory tract infection episodes, even if the patients had no previous individual-level antibiotic exposure. Conclusion: These findings could provide implications for developing targeted antibiotic stewardship programs in the Australian community

Repeated Measures Mixture Modeling with Applications to Neuroscience

In some neurological postmortem brain tissue studies, repeated measures are observed. These observations are taken on the same experimental subject and are therefore correlated within the subject. Furthermore, each observation can be viewed as coming from one of a pre-specified number of populations where each population corresponds to a possible type of neurons. In this dissertation, we propose several mixture models with two components to model such repeated data. In the first model, we include subject-specific random effects in the component distributions to account for the within-subject correlation present in the data. The mixture components are generalized linear models with random effects, while the mixing proportions are governed by a logistic regression. In the second proposed model, the mixture components are generalized linear models, while the component-indicator variables are modeled by a multivariate Bernoulli distribution that depends on covariates. The within-subject observations are taken to be correlated through the latent component indicator random variables. As a special case of the second model, we focus on multivariate Bernoulli mixtures of normals, where the component-indicator variables are modeled by logistic regressions with random effects, and the mixture components are linear regressions. The third proposed model combines the first and second models, so that the within-subject correlation is built into the model not only through the component distributions, but also through the latent component indicator variables. The focus again is on a special case of the third model, where the mixture components are linear regressions with random effects while the mixing proportions are logistic regressions with another group of random effects. For each model, model fitting procedures, based on MCMC methods for sampling from the posterior distribution of the parameters, are developed. The second and third model are used to compare schizophrenic and control subjects with regard to the somal volumes of deep layer 3 pyramidal cells in the auditory association cortex. As a preliminary analysis, we start by employing classic mixture models and mixtures-of-experts to analyze such data neglecting the within-subject correlation. We also provide a discussion of the statistical and computational issues concerning estimation of classic Poisson mixtures

Increasing Coverage of Hepatitis B Vaccination in China: A Systematic Review of Interventions and Implementation Experiences.

This study used a system evaluation method to summarize China's experience on improving the coverage of hepatitis B vaccine, especially the strategies employed to improve the uptake of timely birth dosage. Identifying successful methods and strategies will provide strong evidence for policy makers and health workers in other countries with high hepatitis B prevalence.We conducted a literature review included English or Chinese literature carried out in mainland China, using PubMed, the Cochrane databases, Web of Knowledge, China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Wanfang data, and other relevant databases.Nineteen articles about the effectiveness and impact of interventions on improving the coverage of hepatitis B vaccine were included. Strong or moderate evidence showed that reinforcing health education, training and supervision, providing subsidies for facility birth, strengthening the coordination among health care providers, and using out-of-cold-chain storage for vaccines were all important to improving vaccination coverage.We found evidence that community education was the most commonly used intervention, and out-reach programs such as out-of-cold chain strategy were more effective in increasing the coverage of vaccination in remote areas where the facility birth rate was respectively low. The essential impact factors were found to be strong government commitment and the cooperation of the different government departments.Public interventions relying on basic health care systems combined with outreach care services were critical elements in improving the hepatitis B vaccination rate in China. This success could not have occurred without exceptional national commitment

The ‘responsibility’ factor in imagining the future of education in China

Design and creativity have been a considerable force for improving life conditions. A lot of effort has been invested in explaining the design process and creativity mainly through the design thinking methodology, but design accountability and responsible actions in the design process are, yet, to be fully explored. The concept of design ethics is now increasingly scrutinized on both the level of business organization and of the individual designer. A 4-day design workshop that involved creativity techniques provided the base to explore responsibility in the fuzzy front end of the design process. The future of education in 2030 was defined as the workshop's theme and fifty-six students from China were asked to create detailed alternative scenarios. A number of imagination exercises, implementation of technological innovations and macro-environment evolutions employed in the workshop are discussed. The aim was to incite moral and responsible actions among students less familiar with creative educational contexts of student-led discovery and collaborative learning. This paper reflects on the use of creativity methods to stimulate anticipation in (non)design students