Knowledge Management in Locating the Patient in an Emergency Medical Service in Italy

This study examines an Emergency Medical Service in order to analyze the composite set of activities and instruments directed at locating the patient. The good management of information about the location of the emergency is highly relevant for a reliable rescue service, but this information depends on knowledge of the territory that is socially distributed between EMS operators and callers. Accordingly, the decision-making process often has to go beyond the emergency service protocols, engaging the operator in undertaking an open negotiation in order to transform the caller’s role from layman to “co-worker”. The patient’s location turns out to be an emerging phenomenon, collaborative work based on knowledge management involving two communities—the callers and the EMS operators—that overlap partially. Drawing examples from emergency calls, the study analyzes the practice of locating a patient as a complex and multi-layered process, highlighting the role played by new and old technologies (the information system and the paper maps) in this activity. We argue that CSCW technologies enable the blended use of different kinds of instruments and support an original interconnection between the professional localization systems and the public’s way of defining a position.     

Product interface design: A participatory approach based on virtual reality

The usability of the user interface is a key aspect for the success of several industrial products. This assumption has led to the introduction of numerous design methodologies addressed to evaluate the user-friendliness of industrial products. Most of these methodologies follow the participatory design approach to involve the user in the design process. Virtual Reality is a valid tool to support Participatory Design, because it facilitates the collaboration among designers and users.The present study aims to evaluate the feasibility and the efficacy of an innovative Participatory Design approach where Virtual Reality plays a ‘double role’: a tool to evaluate the usability of the virtual product interface, and a communication channel that allows users to be directly involved in the design process as co-designers.In order to achieve these goals, we conducted three experiments: the purpose of the first experiment is to determine the influence of the virtual interface on the usability evaluation by comparing “user–real product” interaction and “user–virtual product” interaction. Subsequently, we tested the effectiveness of our approach with two experiments involving users (directly or through their participation in a focus group) in the redesign of a product user interface. The experiments were conducted with two typologies of consumer appliances: a microwave oven and a washing machine.     

A coarse-grain reconfigurable architecture for multimedia applications supporting subword and floating-point calculations

Signal processors exploiting ASIC acceleration suffer from sky-rocketing manufacturing costs and long design cycles. FPGA-based systems provide a programmable alternative for exploiting computation parallelism, but the flexibility they provide is not as high as in processor-oriented architectures: HDL or C-to-HDL flows still require specific expertise and a hardware knowledge background. On the other hand, the large size of the configuration bitstream and the inherent complexity of FPGA devices make their dynamic reconfiguration not a very viable approach. Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) are an appealing solution but they pose implementation problems and tend to be application specific. This paper presents a scalable CGRA which eases the implementation of algorithms on field programmable gate array (FPGA) platforms. This design option is based on two levels of programmability: it takes advantage of performance and reliability provided by state-of-the-art FPGA technology, and at the same time it provides the user with flexibility, performance and ease of reconfiguration typical of standard CGRAs. The basic cell template provides advanced features such as sub-word SIMD integer and floating-point computation capabilities, as well as saturating arithmetic. Multiple reconfiguration contexts and partial run-time reconfiguration capabilities are provided, tackling this way the problem of high reconfiguration overhead typical of FPGAs. Selected instances of the proposed architecture have been implemented on an Altera Stratix II EP2S180 FPGA. On this system, we mapped some common DSP, image processing, 3D graphics and audio compression algorithms in order to validate our approach and to demonstrate its effectiveness by benchmarking the benefits achieved.     

A bounded distance metric for comparing tree structure

Comparing tree-structured data for structural similarity is a recurring theme and one on which much effort has been spent. Most approaches so far are grounded, implicitly or explicitly, in algorithmic information theory, being approximations to an information distance derived from Kolmogorov complexity. In this paper we propose a novel complexity metric, also grounded in information theory, but calculated via Shannon's entropy equations. This is used to formulate a directly and efficiently computable metric for the structural difference between unordered trees. The paper explains the derivation of the metric in terms of information theory, and proves the essential property that it is a distance metric. The property of boundedness means that the metric can be used in contexts such as clustering, where second-order comparisons are required. The distance metric property means that the metric can be used in the context of similarity search and metric spaces in general, allowing trees to be indexed and stored within this domain. We are not aware of any other tree similarity metric with these properties.     

The MORPHEUS Heterogeneous Dynamically Reconfigurable Platform

Reconfigurable computing offers a wide range of low cost and efficient solutions for embedded systems. The proper choice of the reconfigurable device, the granularity of its processing elements and its memory architecture highly depend on the type of application and their data flow. Existing solutions either offer fine grain FPGAs, which rely on a hardware synthesis flow and offer the maximum degree of flexibility, or coarser grain solutions, which are usually more suitable for a particular type of data flow and applications. In this paper, we present the MORPHEUS architecture, a versatile reconfigurable heterogeneous System-on-Chip targeting streaming applications. The presented architecture exploits different reconfigurable technologies at several computation granularities that efficiently address the different applications needs. In order to efficiently exploit the presented architecture, we implemented a complete software solution to map C applications to the reconfigurable architecture. In this paper, we describe the complete toolset and provide concrete use cases of the architecture.     

A test-driven approach to code search and its application to the reuse of auxiliary functionality

Context

Software developers spend considerable effort implementing auxiliary functionality used by the main features of a system (e.g., compressing/decompressing files, encryption/decription of data, scaling/rotating images). With the increasing amount of open source code available on the Internet, time and effort can be saved by reusing these utilities through informal practices of code search and reuse. However, when this type of reuse is performed in an ad hoc manner, it can be tedious and error-prone: code results have to be manually inspected and integrated into the workspace.

Objective

In this paper we introduce and evaluate the use of test cases as an interface for automating code search and reuse. We call our approach Test-Driven Code Search (TDCS). Test cases serve two purposes: (1) they define the behavior of the desired functionality to be searched; and (2) they test the matching results for suitability in the local context. We also describe CodeGenie, an Eclipse plugin we have developed that performs TDCS using a code search engine called Sourcerer.

Method

Our evaluation consists of two studies: an applicability study with 34 different features that were searched using CodeGenie; and a performance study comparing CodeGenie, Google Code Search, and a manual approach.

Results

Both studies present evidence of the applicability and good performance of TDCS in the reuse of auxiliary functionality.

Conclusion

This paper presents an approach to source code search and its application to the reuse of auxiliary functionality. Our exploratory evaluation shows promising results, which motivates the use and further investigation of TDCS.     

Impact of orthorectification and spatial sampling on maximum NDVI composite data in mountain regions

Topography and accuracy of image geometric registration significantly affect the quality of satellite data, since pixels are displaced depending on surface elevation and viewing geometry. This effect should be corrected for through the process of accurate image navigation and orthorectification in order to meet the geolocation accuracy for systematic observations specified by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) requirements for satellite climate data records. We investigated the impact of orthorectification on the accuracy of maximum Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) composite data for a mountain region in north-western Canada at various spatial resolutions (1 km, 4 km, 5 km, and 8 km). Data from AVHRR on board NOAA-11 (1989 and 1990) and NOAA-16 (2001, 2002, and 2003) processed using a system called CAPS (Canadian AVHRR Processing System) for the month of August were considered. Results demonstrate the significant impact of orthorectification on the quality of composite NDVI data in mountainous terrain. Differences between orthorectified and non-orthorectified NDVI composites (ΔNDVI) adopted both large positive and negative values, with the 1% and 99% percentiles of ΔNDVI at 1 km resolution spanning values between − 0.16 < ΔNDVI < 0.09. Differences were generally reduced to smaller numbers for coarser resolution data, but systematic positive biases for non-orthorectified composites were obtained at all spatial resolutions, ranging from 0.02 (1 km) to 0.004 (8 km). Analyzing the power spectra of maximum NDVI composites at 1 km resolution, large differences between orthorectified and non-orthorectified AVHRR data were identified at spatial scales between 4 km and 10 km. Validation of NOAA-16 AVHRR NDVI with MODIS NDVI composites revealed higher correlation coefficients (by up to 0.1) for orthorectified composites relative to the non-orthorectified case. Uncertainties due to the AVHRR Global Area Coverage (GAC) sampling scheme introduce an average positive bias of 0.02 ± 0.03 at maximum NDVI composite level that translates into an average relative bias of 10.6% ± 19.1 for sparsely vegetated mountain regions. This can at least partially explain the systematic average positive biases we observed relative to our results in AVHRR GAC-based composites from the Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) and Polar Pathfinder (PPF) datasets (0.19 and 0.05, respectively). With regard to the generation of AVHRR long-term climate data records, results suggest that orthorectification should be an integral part of AVHRR pre-processing, since neglecting the terrain displacement effect may lead to important biases and additional noise in time series at various spatial scales.     

Using frameworks to develop a distributed conferencing system: an experience report

Application frameworks are a powerful means to reduce software development costs while improving quality. However, at the same time they are difficult to select and understand, as well as hard to learn, use, and debug effectively and efficiently. In this paper we report the story of eConference, a distributed conferencing system that was developed as part of a broader research effort. Here we discuss the lessons learned from the evolution of our conferencing tool over four generations, which have been necessary to find good frameworks and build a flexible distributed tool. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Space and time localization for the estimation of distributed parameters in a finite element model

In this paper we study the problem of estimating the possibly non-homogeneous material coefficients inside a physical system, from transient excitations and measurements made in a few points on the boundary. We assume there is available an adequate Finite Element (FEM) model of the system, whose distributed physical parameters must be estimated from the experimental data.We propose a space–time localization approach that gives a better conditioned estimation problem, without the need of an expensive regularization. Some experimental results obtained on an elastic system with random coefficients are given.