26 research outputs found
Adapting workflows to intelligent environments
Intelligent environments aim at supporting the user in executing her everyday tasks, e.g. by guiding her through a maintenance or cooking procedure. This requires a machine processable representation of the tasks for which workflows have proven an efficient means. The increasing number of available sensors in intelligent environments can facilitate the execution of workflows. The sensors can help to recognize when a user has finished a step in the workflow and thus to automatically proceed to the next step. This can heavily reduce the amount of required user interaction. However, manually specifying the conditions for triggering the next step in a workflow is very cumbersome and almost impossible for environments which are not known at design time. In this paper, we present a novel approach for learning and adapting these conditions from observation. We show that the learned conditions can even outperform the quality as conditions manually specified by workflow experts. Thus, the presented approach is very well suited for automatically adapting workflows in intelligent environments and can in that way increase the efficiency of the workflow execution
Real-Life Lying, Stealing Kicks Off Book Project for Teen and Dad, Patrick and Dennis Doyle
News release announces that Patrick Doyle wrote a book with his father, Dennis Doyle, called Rumors at School: A Tale of Honesty
Pimecrolimus 1% cream for anogenital lichen sclerosus in childhood
BACKGROUND: Lichen sclerosus is a chronic inflammatory disease with a predilection of the anogenital region. Because of the potential side effects of repeated local application of potent glucocorticosteroids, equally-effective, safer therapeutic options are required, especially in the treatment of children. CASE PRESENTATIONS: We report on the efficacy of twice-daily application of pimecrolimus 1% cream in four prepubertal girls (range of age: 4 to 9 years) who suffered from anogenital lichen sclerosus. After three to four-month treatment, all patients had almost complete clinical remission including relief from itch, pain and inflammation. Only minor improvement was observed for the white sclerotic lesions. No significant side effects have been observed. CONCLUSIONS: Topical pimecrolimus appears to be an effective and safe treatment for children with anogenital lichen sclerosus. The clinical benefits observed in the four patient presented particularly include relief of pruritus, pain and inflammation. Vehicle-controlled studies on a larger number of patients are now warranted to substantiate our promising findings, and to investigate long-term efficacy and safety of topical pimecrolimus in anogenital lichen sclerosus
Massively distributed authorship of academic papers
Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research
Adapting Workflows to Intelligent Environments
Intelligent environments aim at supporting the user
in executing her everyday tasks, e.g. by guiding her through
a maintenance or cooking procedure. This requires a machine
processable representation of the tasks for which workflows have
proven an efficient means. The increasing number of available
sensors in intelligent environments can facilitate the execution of
workflows. The sensors can help to recognize when a user has
finished a step in the workflow and thus to automatically proceed
to the next step. This can heavily reduce the amount of required
user interaction. However, manually specifying the conditions
for triggering the next step in a workflow is very cumbersome
and almost impossible for environments which are not known
at design time. In this paper, we present a novel approach
for learning and adapting these conditions from observation.
We show that the learned conditions can even outperform the
quality as conditions manually specified by workflow experts.
Thus, the presented approach is very well suited for automatically
adapting workflows in intelligent environments and can in that
way increase the efficiency of the workflow execution
Towards Context-Aware User Guidance in Smart Environments
Context-aware guidance systems need to observe
and react to the user even if she does not always follow the
instructions exactly. A human guide can easily adapt to such
situations while a computer guide needs a model how to guide the
user, has to work with unreliable sensor data to observe the user,
and, in the case of multiple active processes, needs to assign the
right sensor information to the right process. In this paper, we
introduce two use cases for smart environments and use them to
motivate unsolved challenges in the field of context-aware user
guidance that we observed in a set of user experiments