A ‘No Panacea Theorem’ for classifier combination

We introduce the ‘No Panacea Theorem’ (NPT) for multiple classifier combination, previously proved only in the case of two classifiers and two classes. In this paper, we extend the NPT to cases of multiple classifiers and multiple classes. We prove that if the combination function is continuous and diverse, there exists a situation in which the combination algorithm will give very bad performance. The proof relies on constructing ‘pathological’ probability density distributions that have high densities in particular areas such that the combination functions give incorrect classification. Thus, there is no optimal combination algorithm that is suitable in all situations. It can be seen from this theorem that the probability density functions (pdfs) play an important role in the performance of combination algorithms, so studying the pdfs becomes the first step of finding a good combination algorithm. Although devised for classifier combination, the NPT is also relevant to all supervised classification problems.     

A task based ‘design for all’ support tool

The ‘design for all’ philosophy promotes the development of products that meet the requirements of a broader section of the population, including those who are older or disabled, to minimise the need for bespoke designs and individual customisations. Such an approach begins to meet the needs of a population containing an ever increasing proportion of these excluded groups, whilst providing opportunities to manufacturers to maximise the available market for any given product.Most design activity embodies some form of task analysis that involves identifying users and the tasks they perform. Computer based human modelling systems are becoming increasingly important in this task analysis role combined with the established ergonomics technique of fitting trials, in which a product or environment is evaluated through trials using a carefully selected user group.This research addresses the lack of existing data necessary for the accurate representation of human form and capability in the older and disabled populations for use in these modelling systems. A small-scale survey is being undertaken to collect this important information. In addition, existing modelling systems in this area rely on expert ergonomics knowledge in performing task based analysis, which in addition can be a time consuming and repetitive task. Methods are being developed to streamline this process and to place the emphasis on good design and ergonomics principles as opposed to ‘driving’ the system. These methods involve the development of a simplified process for computer based task analysis and a means of determining the percentage accommodated by any given design.Further research will eventually focus on extending the data collection, refining the task model and look at a means of suggesting design solutions in response to the analysis results.     

Revealing the ‘real’ me, searching for the ‘actual’ you: Presentations of self on an internet dating site

This paper considers the presentation of self on an internet dating site. Thirty men and 30 women were interviewed about their online dating experiences. They were asked about how they constructed their profiles and how they viewed other individuals’ profiles. Which types of presentations of self led to more successful offline romantic relationships were also investigated. Additionally, gender differences were examined. In line with previous research on presentation of self online, individuals were quite strategic in their online presentations. However, important differences between initiating a relationship on an internet dating site and other spaces (online and offline) included the type of self disclosed as well as the depth of breadth of information individuals self-disclosed about themselves before any one-on-one conversations took place.     

Beyond ‘mobility’: A new understanding of moving with technology

We report a surprising experience with mobile technology: the lead author found herself seeing and acting differently while running over part of her usual running track with the exercise‐tracking application ‘Strava’ on her phone, even without focal attention to the app. We apply the method of problematization to a detailed empirical account of this experience, in conjunction with a literature analysis of taken‐for‐granted assumptions underpinning research on ‘mobile technology use’. This reveals that, while the relationship of attention, perception, movement and technology was a key element of the surprise, these themes are not well accounted for in current IS literature. In response, we employ William Gibson's ecological theory of visual perception to reinterpret the empirical account and thereby build a new understanding of the human plus mobile technology that we term moving‐with‐technology. We introduce to IS: moving‐with‐technology as a new analytical perspective; the new phenomena of digital sub‐species, digital‐niches and asynchronous co‐location; and stimulus for new ecologically oriented ‘mobile methods’. Moving‐with‐technology also has practical implications for urban planners who are using data from digital trace‐making tools such as Strava in their decision‐making, thereby generating what we call ecological feedback loops.     

A LISP implementation of the model for ‘communicating sequential processes’

To explain his abstract model of Communicating Sequential Processes, Hoare includes an implementation of the concepts being expounded as a set of LISP functions. However, the final sections are only described sketchily. This paper completes the missing details, and briefly discusses experience with the system. The usefulness of the implementation is enhanced by the addition of features to ensure that incomplete program fragments can be executed, and that no restrictions are placed on the way operators may be combined.     

A Hamiltonian, explicit algorithm with spectral accuracy for the ‘good’ Boussinesq system

We construct an explicit pseudo-spectral method for the numerical solution of the soliton-producing ‘good’ Boussinesq system w_t = u_xxx + u_x + (u²)_x, u_t = w_x. The new scheme preserves a discrete Poisson structure similar to that of the continuous system. The scheme is shown to converge with spectral spatial accuracy. A numerical illustration is given.     

‘Long return’: A technique for improving the efficiency of inter-module communication

This paper describes a concept called ‘long return’ for use in inter-module communication systems. First an implementation which implies a simplification of—rather than an extension of—traditional inter-module communication systems is outlined. This implementation allows long returns to be used as an optimization technique without violating the commonly accepted principles of system structuring. Thereafter an experiment that provides an estimate of the improvements in efficiency of a particular operating system is described. In the SIMOS operating systems (based on the Cambridge CAP operating system) about 20 per cent of all inter-process communication operations can be avoided by using long returns, and as a consequence the amount of useful work done in the system is typically increased by about 2.0 per cent.     

Formulating an approach to develop a system for the temporal analysis of clinical trial data: The POSCH AI project

The architecture and requirements of a prototypical system to help in the statistical investigation of causal relationships in a large clinical trial database are discussed. The suitability of techniques from artificial intelligence (AI), statistical analysis, and neural networks are being studied. Back-propagation experiments indicate that it works about as well as other methods but it is doubtful how useful it will be for discovering relationships in the POSCH dataset. Structure discovery techniques from artificial intelligence are being investigated.     

Response to ‘Comments on: A cohesion measure for object‐oriented classes’

Indicating that CBMC does not satisfy the monotonic property in terms of the number of interactions, Xu and Zhou proposed an augmented definition of CBMC by adopting cut set instead of glue methods. The augmented CBMC clearly satisfies the monotonic property. However, CBMC is designed to overcome the problem with respect to the number of interactions and, therefore, focuses on the interaction pattern, especially, member connectivity. Consequently, it does not make sense to mention the monotonic property of CBMC with respect to interaction number. Moreover, the notion of glue methods allows several interpretations on the design quality of a class. However, that meaningful interpretation is not possible for the augmented definition due to the removal of the notion of glue methods. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

FQUERY III+: A “human-consistent” database querying system based on fuzzy logic with linguistic quantifiers

Using a fuzzy-logic-based calculus of linguistically quantified propositions we present FQUERY III+, a new, more “human-friendly” and easier-to-use implementation of a querying scheme proposed originally by Kacprzyk and Zio kowski to handle imprecise queries including a linguistic quantifier as, e.g. find all records in which most (almost all, much more than 75%, … or any other linguistic quantifier) of the important attributes (out of a specified set) are as desired (e.g. equal to five, more than 10, large, more or less equal to 15, etc.). FQUERY III+ is an “add-on” to Ashton-Tate's dBase III Plus.     

Five-year experience with setup and implementation of an integrated database system for clinical documentation and research

In radiation oncology, where treatment concepts are elaborated in interdisciplinary collaborations, handling distributed, large heterogeneous amounts of data efficiently is very important, yet challenging, for an optimal treatment of the patient as well as for research itself. This becomes a strong focus, as we step into the era of modern personalized medicine, relying on various quantitative data information, thus involving the active contribution of multiple medical specialties. Hence, combining patient data from all involved information systems is inevitable for analyses. Therefore, we introduced a documentation and data management system integrated in the clinical environment for electronic data capture. We discuss our concept and five-year experience of a precise electronic documentation system, with special focus on the challenges we encountered. We specify how such a system can be designed and implemented to plan, tailor and conduct (multicenter) clinical trials, ultimately reaching the best clinical performance, and enhancing interdisciplinary and clinical research.     

A New Concept for the On-line Storage of Sample Plates, Integrated with Plate Preparation for High-Throughput Screening and ‘Cherry-Picking’

Recently Organon installed automated screening and plate preparation systems for its research facilities in Oss (The Netherlands) and Newhouse (UK). These robotic systems have been developed in close collaboration between Organon and Scitec Laboratory Automation (Lausanne, Switzerland), now part of the Zymark corporation.Each of the systems consists of three linear track robots, one of which performs the screening process using standard peripherals. The other two robots take care of the plate preparation and ‘cherry-picking’ procedures. To this end, copies of our total mother plate collection are stored under controlled conditions in Scitec plate stackers (AutoStack) that can be addressed by one of the two robots. The system is designed in such a way that the loading and refreshment of the on-line storage, screening-plate preparation, and ‘cherry-picking’ can be executed automatically in 24 hours operation.     

A Markovian model for the hybrid manufacturing planning and control method ‘Double Speed Single Production Line’

In this paper, the hybrid production planning & control method Double Speed Single Production Line (DSSPL) is presented, modelled and its performances evaluated and compared to classical Production Planning and Control methods (PPC). DSSPL combines JIT/kanban and Material Requirement Planning for the production of different classes of products (A- and B-items based on a market or customer oriented analysis) on one single production line. By the use of a Markovian birth–death queuing model of a single-stage, two-product production system, the performance and the behavior of the basic DSSPL concept are analyzed and compared to the classical MRP concepts. Its capability to cope with limited resources is illustrated with an industrial case study where DSSPL has been implemented to solve coordination problems between a plastic molding feeder shop and the final assembly line of a micromotor producer.     

Comments on ‘nonlinear H∞ output feedback control with integrator for polynomial discrete‐time systems’

This note points out that controllers resulting from Corollaries 3.1 and 3.2 and Theorem 3.1 in Saat and Nguang (Int. J. Robust Nonlinear Control 2013; 10.1002/rnc.3130) do not improve over the open‐loop performance. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A new digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking methodology using an external group of evaluators and multi‐criteria analysis based on ‘large‐scale data’

Digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking are challenging tasks because of multiple evaluation and conflicting criteria. A few approaches have been presented to implement digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking frameworks. However, these approaches still possess a number of limitations, such as fixing several attributes on the account of other attributes. Well‐known benchmarking approaches are limited to robust watermarking. Therefore, this paper presents a new methodology for digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking based on large‐scale data by using external evaluators and a group decision making context. Two experiments are performed. In the first experiment, a noise gate‐based digital watermarking approach is developed, and the scheme for the noise gate digital watermarking approach is enhanced. Sixty audio samples from different audio styles are tested with two algorithms. A total of 120 samples were evaluated according to three different metrics, namely, quality, payload, and complexity, to generate a set of digital watermarking samples. In the second experiment, the situation in which digital watermarking evaluators have different preferences is discussed. Weight measurement with a decision making solution is required to solve this issue. The analytic hierarchy process is used to measure evaluator preference. In the decision making solution, the technique for order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution with different contexts (e.g., individual and group) is utilized. Therefore, selecting the proper context with different aggregation operators to benchmark the results of experiment 1 (i.e., digital watermarking approaches) is recommended. The findings of this research are as follows: (1) group and individual decision making provide the same result in this case study. However, in the case of selection where the priority weights are generated from the evaluators, group decision making is the recommended solution to solve the trade‐off reflected in the benchmarking process for digital watermarking approaches. (2) Internal and external aggregations show that the enhanced watermarking approach demonstrates better performance than the original watermarking approach. © 2016 The Authors. Software: Practice and Experience published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Automated High Throughput Screening of Fluorescent Imaging Plate Reader (FLIPR) Assays Using Assay Platform™ Integrated with Activity Base for ‘on the fly’ Compound Reconfirmation

Advances in the field of automation have meant hitherto complex manual cell-based assays can now be automated. These improvements have brought significant enhancements in throughput, data fidelity and consistency, and allowed a reallocation of constrained resources.Building upon these improvements, we have linked our automated cell-based screening system, Assay Platform™, to Activity Base (IDBS), a software package designed to automate the analysis of HTS data. Customisation of this package has resulted in software that can identify ‘active’ compounds and re-pick them ‘on the fly’ from the original compound plates for triplicate re-testing without operator intervention.Based on an operator initially defining ‘normal’ parameters for assay activity in Activity Base, combined with an automated quality control software module that checks data fidelity, wells containing ‘active’ compounds can be re-picked and re-tested at the end of an automated screening run. Automating cell-based assays has significantly improved productivity, and, with the synergism of Activity Base, has given us greater power to complete each screening run and report ‘active’ compounds to Chemistry more rapidly. This article presents our approach to the automation of cell-based Fluorescent Imaging Plate Reader (FLIPR) screening together with automated active re-test confirmation using Activity Base.     

Comments on ‘A cohesion measure for object‐oriented classes’ by Heung Seok Chae,Yong Rae Kwon and Doo Hwan Bae (Softw. Pract. Exper. 2000; 30:1405–1431)

Although H. S. Chae's class cohesion measure considers not only the number of interactions, but also the patterns of the interactions among the constitute members of a class (which overcomes the limitations of previous class cohesion measures) it, however, only partly considers the patterns of interactions, and might cause the measuring results to be inconsistent with intuition in some cases. This paper discusses the demerits and proposes constructive amendments to Chae's cohesion measure. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.