An infrastructure for smart hospitals

In healthcare facilities most of the daily activities require strict coordination between clinicians, who often operate under heavy workloads and minimal workforce conditions in environments filled with increasingly complex technology. Ubiquitous Computing applications constitute a suitable solution for both reducing medical costs and improving patient safety by better supporting clinical processes. In this study we introduce an intelligent infrastructure for smart hospitals which implements basic services to optimize medical staff/patient interactions and grants ubiquitous and transparent access to clinical data stored in standard clinical databases. This infrastructure relies on the integration of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) and photosensor technologies to identify, locate and track clinicians and patients equipped with mobile devices and wearable RFID tags.     

Automatic recognition of gait-related health problems in the elderly using machine learning

This paper proposes a system for the early automatic recognition of health problems that manifest themselves in distinctive form of gait. Purpose of the system is to prolong the autonomous living of the elderly at home. When the system identifies a health problem, it automatically notifies a physician and provides an explanation of the automatic diagnosis. The gait of the elderly user is captured using a motion-capture system, which consists of body-worn tags and wall-mounted sensors. The positions of the tags are acquired by the sensors and the resulting time series of position coordinates are analyzed with machine-learning algorithms in order to recognize a specific health problem. Novel semantic features based on medical knowledge for training a machine-learning classifier are proposed in this paper. The classifier classifies the user’s gait into: 1) normal, 2) with hemiplegia, 3) with Parkinson’s disease, 4) with pain in the back and 5) with pain in the leg. The studies of 1) the feasibility of automatic recognition and 2) the impact of tag placement and noise level on the accuracy of the recognition of health problems are presented. The experimental results of the first study (12 tags, no noise) showed that the k-nearest neighbors and neural network algorithms achieved classification accuracies of 100%. The experimental results of the second study showed that classification accuracy of over 99% is achievable using several machine-learning algorithms and 8 or more tags with up to 15 mm standard deviation of noise. The results show that the proposed approach achieves high classification accuracy and can be used as a guide for further studies in the increasingly important area of Ambient Assisted Living. Since the system uses semantic features and an artificial-intelligence approach to interpret the health state, provides a natural explanation of the hypothesis and is embedded in the domestic environment of the elderly person; it is an example of the semantic ambient media for Ambient Assisted Living.     

On enabling integrated process compliance with semantic constraints in process management systems

Key to broad use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to foster and ease the implementation, execution, monitoring, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure robust and error-free process enactment. To meet these demands a variety of mechanisms has been developed to prevent errors at the structural level (e.g., deadlocks). In many application domains, however, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints) as well. Hence, to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they are able to meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled. In order to tackle the particular challenge of providing integrated compliance support over the process lifecycle, we introduce the SeaFlows framework. The framework introduces a behavioural level view on processes which serves a conceptual process representation for constraint specification approaches. Further, it provides general compliance criteria for static compliance validation but also for dealing with process changes. Altogether, the SeaFlows framework can serve as formal basis for realizing integrated support of semantic constraints in PrMS.     

Multivariability speaker recognition database in Indian scenario

In this paper we describe the collection and organization of the speaker recognition database in Indian scenario named as IITG Multivariability Speaker Recognition Database. The database contains speech from 451 speakers speaking English and other Indian languages both in conversational and read speech styles recorded using various sensors in parallel under different environmental conditions. The database is organized into four phases on the basis of different conditions employed for the recording. The results of the initial studies conducted on a speaker verification system exploring the impact of mismatch in training and test conditions using the collected data are also included. A copy of this database can be obtained from the authors by contacting them.     

A URI-based approach for addressing fragments of media resources on the Web

To make media resources a prime citizen on the Web, we have to go beyond simply replicating digital media files. The Web is based on hyperlinks between Web resources, and that includes hyperlinking out of resources (e.g., from a word or an image within a Web page) as well as hyperlinking into resources (e.g., fragment URIs into Web pages). To turn video and audio into hypervideo and hyperaudio, we need to enable hyperlinking into and out of them. The W3C Media Fragments Working Group is taking on the challenge to further embrace W3C??s mission to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing a Media Fragment protocol and guidelines that ensure the long-term growth of the Web. The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of Media Fragments as a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media resources using URIs. Moreover, we explain how the HTTP protocol can be used and extended to serve Media Fragments and what the impact is for current Web-enabled media formats.     

An exploratory study of the impact of antipatterns on class change- and fault-proneness

Antipatterns are poor design choices that are conjectured to make object-oriented systems harder to maintain. We investigate the impact of antipatterns on classes in object-oriented systems by studying the relation between the presence of antipatterns and the change- and fault-proneness of the classes. We detect 13 antipatterns in 54 releases of ArgoUML, Eclipse, Mylyn, and Rhino, and analyse (1) to what extent classes participating in antipatterns have higher odds to change or to be subject to fault-fixing than other classes, (2) to what extent these odds (if higher) are due to the sizes of the classes or to the presence of antipatterns, and (3) what kinds of changes affect classes participating in antipatterns. We show that, in almost all releases of the four systems, classes participating in antipatterns are more change-and fault-prone than others. We also show that size alone cannot explain the higher odds of classes with antipatterns to underwent a (fault-fixing) change than other classes. Finally, we show that structural changes affect more classes with antipatterns than others. We provide qualitative explanations of the increase of change- and fault-proneness in classes participating in antipatterns using release notes and bug reports. The obtained results justify a posteriori previous work on the specification and detection of antipatterns and could help to better focus quality assurance and testing activities.     

Very true operators in effect algebras

We introduce the concept of very true operator on an effect algebra. Although an effect algebra is only partial, we define it in the way which is in accordance with traditional definitions in residuated lattices or basic algebras. This is possible if we require monotonicity as an additional condition. We prove that very true operators on effect algebras can be characterized by means of certain subsets which are conditionally complete.     

How landscape ruggedness influences the performance of real-coded algorithms: a comparative study

Ruggedness has a strong influence on the performance of algorithms, but it has been barely studied in real-coded optimization, mainly because of the difficulty of isolating it from a number of involved topological properties. In this paper, we propose a framework consisting of increasing ruggedness function sets built by a mechanism which generates multiple funnels. This mechanism introduces different levels of sinusoidal distortion which can be controlled to isolate the singular influence of some related features. Some commonly used measures of ruggedness have been applied to analyze these sets of functions, and a numerical study to compare the performance of some representative algorithms has been carried out. The results confirm that ruggedness has an influence on the performance of the algorithm, proving that it depends on the multi-funnel structure and peak features, such as height and relative size of the global peak, and not on the number of peaks.     

The stable topology for residuated lattices

The spectrum of a residuated lattice L is the set Spec(L) of all prime i-filters. It is well known that Spec(L) can be endowed with the spectral topology. The main scope of this paper is to introduce and study another topology on Spec(L),?the so called stable topology, which turns out to be coarser than the spectral one. With this and in view, we introduce the notions of pure i-filter for a residuated lattice and the notion of normal residuated lattice. So, we generalize to case of residuated lattice some results relative to MV-algebras (Belluce and Sessa in Quaest Math 23:269–277, 2000; Cavaccini et?al. in Math Japonica 45(2):303–310, 1997) or BL-algebras (Eslami and Haghani in Kybernetika 45:491–506, 2009; Leustean in Central Eur J Math 1(3): 382–397, 2003; Turunen and Sessa in Mult-Valued Log 6(1–2):229–249, 2001).