Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Evaluating Technology-Mediated Collaborative Workflows For Telehealth, Christopher Bondy Ph.D., Pengcheng Shi, Pamela Grover Md, Vicki Hanson, Linlin Chen, Rui Li

Articles

Goals: This paper discusses the need for a predictable method to evaluate gains and gaps of collaborative technology-mediated workflows and introduces an evaluation framework to address this need. Methods: The Collaborative Space Analysis Framework (CS-AF), introduced in this research, is a cross-disciplinary evaluation method designed to evaluate technology-mediated collaborative workflows. The 5-step CS-AF approach includes: (1) current-state workflow definition, (2) current-state (baseline) workflow assessment, (3) technology-mediated workflow development and deployment, (4) technology-mediated workflow assessment, (5) analysis, and conclusions. For this research, a comprehensive, empirical study of hypertension exam workflow for telehealth was conducted using the CS-AF approach. Results: The CS-AF …

A Framework Of Web-Based Dark Patterns That Can Be Detected Manually Or Automatically, Ioannis Stavrakakis, Andrea Curley, Dympna O'Sullivan, Damian Gordon, Brendan Tierney

Articles

This research explores the design and development of a framework for the detection of Dark Patterns, which are a series of user interface tricks that manipulate users into actions that they do not intend to do, for example, share more data than they want to, or spend more money than they plan to. The interface does this using either deception or other psychological nudges. User Interface experts have categorized a number of these tricks that are commonly used and have called them Dark Patterns. They are typically varied in their form and what they do, and the goal of this …

On The Documentation Of Refactoring Types, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Jiaqian Liu, Kenneth Addo, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni, Zhe Yu

Articles

Commit messages are the atomic level of software documentation. They provide a natural language description of the code change and its purpose. Messages are critical for software maintenance and program comprehension. Unlike documenting feature updates and bug fixes, little is known about how developers document their refactoring activities. Specifically, developers can perform multiple refactoring operations, including moving methods, extracting classes, renaming attributes, for various reasons, such as improving software quality, managing technical debt, and removing defects. Yet, there is no systematic study that analyzes the extent to which the documentation of refactoring accurately describes the refactoring operations performed at the …

A Nanoscale Shape-Discovery Framework Supporting Systematic Investigations Of Shape-Dependent Biological Effects And Immunomodulation, Wei Zhang, Hender Lopez, Luca Boselli, Paolo Bigini, André Perez-Potti, Zengchun Xie, Valentina Castagnola, Qi Cai, Camila P. Silveira, Joao M. De Araujo, Laura Talamini, Nicolò Panini, Giuseppe Ristagno, Martina B. Violatto, Stéphanie Devineau, Marco P. Monopoli, Mario Salmona, Valeria A. Giannone, Sandra Lara, Kenneth A. Dawson, Yan Yan

Articles

Since it is now possible to make, in a controlled fashion, an almost unlimited variety of nanostructure shapes, it is of increasing interest to understand the forms of biological control that nanoscale shape allows. However, a priori rational investigation of such a vast universe of shapes appears to present intractable fundamental and practical challenges. This has limited the useful systematic investigation of their biological interactions and the development of innovative nanoscale shape-dependent therapies. Here, we introduce a concept of biologically relevant inductive nanoscale shape discovery and evaluation that is ideally suited to, and will ultimately become, a vehicle for machine …

The Circle Of Life: The Mathematics Of Predator-Prey Dynamics, John Butler, Rebecca Brady

Articles

Some animals hunt other animals to feed themselves; these animals are called predators. Animals who are hunted and eaten are known as prey. What do you think would happen if a predator were introduced to an ecosystem where the prey previously lived without fear of being hunted? Would the new predator eat all the prey animals until they go extinct? Actually, the relationship between predator and prey is far more interesting than this. In this article, we show what the predator-prey relationship looks like over time and explain how scientists can make predictions about future population levels, all using basic …

Explaining Deep Learning Models For Tabular Data Using Layer-Wise Relevance Propagation, Ihsan Ullah, Andre Rios, Vaibhov Gala, Susan Mckeever

Articles

Trust and credibility in machine learning models are bolstered by the ability of a model to explain its decisions. While explainability of deep learning models is a well-known challenge, a further challenge is clarity of the explanation itself for relevant stakeholders of the model. Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP), an established explainability technique developed for deep models in computer vision, provides intuitive human-readable heat maps of input images. We present the novel application of LRP with tabular datasets containing mixed data (categorical and numerical) using a deep neural network (1D-CNN), for Credit Card Fraud detection and Telecom Customer Churn prediction use …

Newgrange Skyscape In Stellarium, Frank Prendergast

Articles

Newgrange Skyscape in Stellarium is a new customised landscape planetarium model giving the user the unique ability to interrogate the dynamic sky above the Boyne Valley on any date of interest during the hours of daylight or darkness. Archaeological, astronomical and topographical points of interest are labelled in the model and visible even during the hours of darkness. These are summarily described in a short gazetteer appended at the end of the instruction document to encourage further exploration of the wonderful heritage found in the Boyne Valley and beyond.

Watch on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=aGPsVGBXkY4

Watch on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/493351576

On Preserving The Behavior In Software Refactoring: A Systematic Mapping Study, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni

Articles

Context: Refactoring is the art of modifying the design of a system without altering its behavior. The idea is to reorganize variables, classes and methods to facilitate their future adaptations and comprehension. As the concept of behavior preservation is fundamental for refactoring, several studies, using formal verification, language transformation and dynamic analysis, have been proposed to monitor the execution of refactoring operations and their impact on the program semantics. However, there is no existing study that examines the available behavior preservation strategies for each refactoring operation.

Objective: This paper identifies behavior preservation approaches in the research literature. Method: We conduct, …

Notions Of Explainability And Evaluation Approaches For Explainable Artificial Intelligence, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has experienced a significant growth over the last few years. This is due to the widespread application of machine learning, particularly deep learning, that has led to the development of highly accurate models that lack explainability and interpretability. A plethora of methods to tackle this problem have been proposed, developed and tested, coupled with several studies attempting to define the concept of explainability and its evaluation. This systematic review contributes to the body of knowledge by clustering all the scientific studies via a hierarchical system that classifies theories and notions related to the concept of explainability …

A Novel Parabolic Model Of Instructional Efficiency Grounded On Ideal Mental Workload And Performance, Luca Longo, Murali Rajendran

Articles

Instructional efficiency within education is a measurable concept and models have been proposed to assess it. The main assumption behind these models is that efficiency is the capacity to achieve established goals at the minimal expense of resources. This article challenges this assumption by contributing to the body of Knowledge with a novel model that is grounded on ideal mental workload and performance, namely the parabolic model of instructional efficiency. A comparative empirical investigation has been constructed to demonstrate the potential of this model for instructional design evaluation. Evidence demonstrated that this model achieved a good concurrent validity with the …

Provenance: An Intermediary-Free Solution For Digital Content Verification, Bilal Yousuf, M. Atif Qureshi, Brendan Spillane, Gary Munnelly, Oisin Carroll, Matthew Runswick, Kirsty Park, Eileen Culloty, Owen Conlan, Jane Suiter

Articles

The threat posed by misinformation and disinformation is one of the defining challenges of the 21st century. Provenance is designed to help combat this threat by warning users when the content they are looking at may be misinformation or disinformation. It is also designed to improve media literacy among its users and ultimately reduce susceptibility to the threat among vulnerable groups within society. The Provenance browser plugin checks the content that users see on the Internet and social media and provides warnings in their browser or social media feed. Unlike similar plugins, which require human experts to provide evaluations and …

Towards A Framework For Comparing Functionalities Of Multimorbidity Clinical Decision Support: A Literature-Based Feature Set And Benchmark Cases., Dympna O'Sullivan, William Van Woensel, Szymon Wilk, Samson Tu, Wojtek Michalowski, Samina Abidi, Marc Carrier, Ruth Edry, Irit Hochberg, Stephen Kingwell, Alexandra Kogan, Martin Michalowski, Hugh O'Sullivan, Mor Peleg

Articles

Multimorbidity, the coexistence of two or more health conditions, has become more prevalent as mortality rates in many countries have declined and their populations have aged. Multimorbidity presents significant difficulties for Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), particularly in cases where recommendations from relevant clinical guidelines offer conflicting advice. A number of research groups are developing computer-interpretable guideline (CIG) modeling formalisms that integrate recommendations from multiple Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) for knowledge-based multimorbidity decision support. In this paper we describe work towards the development of a framework for comparing the different approaches to multimorbidity CIG-based clinical decision support (MGCDS). We present …

A Quantitative Evaluation Of Global, Rule-Based Explanations Of Post-Hoc, Model Agnostic Methods, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Understanding the inferences of data-driven, machine-learned models can be seen as a process that discloses the relationships between their input and output. These relationships consist and can be represented as a set of inference rules. However, the models usually do not explicit these rules to their end-users who, subsequently, perceive them as black-boxes and might not trust their predictions. Therefore, scholars have proposed several methods for extracting rules from data-driven machine-learned models to explain their logic. However, limited work exists on the evaluation and comparison of these methods. This study proposes a novel comparative approach to evaluate and compare the …

Behind The Scenes: On The Relationship Between Developer Experience And Refactoring, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Anthony Peruma, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is widely recognized as one of the efficient techniques to manage technical debt and maintain a healthy software project through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that code refactoring activities are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system’s design, and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results by analyzing 800 open-source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, …

Synergistic Anticancer Response Of Curcumin And Piperine Loaded Lignin-G-P (Nipam-Co-Dmaema) Gold Nanogels Against Glioblastoma Multiforme, Xinyi Zhao, Bilal Javad, Daxing Cui, James Curtin, Furong Tian

Articles

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most aggressive and commonly diag- 11 nosed brain cancer and presents a strong resistance to routine chemotherapeutic drugs. 12 The present study involves the synthesis of Lignin-g- p (NIPAM-co-DMAEMA) gold 13 nanogel, loaded with curcumin and piperine to treat GBM. The application has three 14 functions: (1) overcome the limitations of biodistribution, (2) enhance the toxicity of an- 15 ticancer drugs against GBM, (3) identify the uptake pathway. Atom transfer radical 16 polymerization was used to synthesize the Lignin-g-PNIPAM network, crosslinked with 17 the gold nanoparticles (GNPs) to self-assemble into nanogels. The size distribution and …

Cleanpage: Fast And Clean Document And Whiteboard Capture, Jane Courtney

Articles

The move from paper to online is not only necessary for remote working, it is also significantly more sustainable. This trend has seen a rising need for the high-quality digitization of content from pages and whiteboards to sharable online material. However, capturing this information is not always easy nor are the results always satisfactory. Available scanning apps vary in their usability and do not always produce clean results, retaining surface imperfections from the page or whiteboard in their output images. CleanPage, a novel smartphone-based document and whiteboard scanning system, is presented. CleanPage requires one button-tap to capture, identify, crop, and …

The Promise And Limits Of Lawfulness: Inequality, Law, And The Techlash, Salomé Viljoen

Articles

In response to widespread skepticism about the recent rise of “tech ethics”, many critics have called for legal reform instead. In contrast with the “ethics response”, critics consider the “lawfulness response” more capable of disciplining the excesses of the technology industry. In fact, both are simultaneously vulnerable to industry capture and capable of advancing a more democratic egalitarian agenda for the information economy. Both ethics and law offer a terrain of contestation, rather than a predetermined set of commitments by which to achieve more democratic and egalitarian technological production. In advancing this argument, the essay focuses on two misunderstandings common …

Sediqa: Sound Emitting Document Image Quality Assessment In A Reading Aid For The Visually Impaired, Jane Courtney

Articles

For visually impaired people (VIPs), the ability to convert text to sound can mean a new level of independence or the simple joy of a good book. With significant advances in optical character recognition (OCR) in recent years, a number of reading aids are appearing on the market. These reading aids convert images captured by a camera to text which can then be read aloud. However, all of these reading aids suffer from a key issue—the user must be able to visually target the text and capture an image of sufficient quality for the OCR algorithm to function—no small task …

Profiling Mathematical Procedural And Problem-Solving Skills Of Undergraduate Students Following A New Mathematics Curriculum, Fiona Faulkner, Mark Prendergast, Cormac Breen, Michael Carr

Articles

In 2010 a mathematics curriculum was introduced in Irish second level schools entitled ‘Project Maths’ (PM). It aimed to refocus second level mathematics teaching and learning away from an over emphasis on procedural mathematics towards problem solving and real understanding [Department of Education and Skills (DES). (2010). Report of the Project Maths implementation support group. https://www.education.ie/en/Publications/Policy-Reports/Report-of-the-Project-Maths-Implementation-Group.pdf]. This paper aims to examine the performance of 1st year undergraduate students’ procedural and problem solving skills after the introduction of PM. A diagnostic test was developed to determine students’ skills in each area and findings demonstrated that students perform statistically significantly …

Immobilized-Enzyme Reactors Integrated Into Analytical Platforms: Recent Advances And Challenges, Bert Wouters Dr, Sinead Currivan, Noor Abdulhussain, T. Hankemeier, Peter J. Schoenmakers

Articles

Immobilized-enzyme reactors (IMERs) are flow-through devices containing enzymes that are physically confined or localized with retention of their catalytic activities. IMERs can be used repeatedly and continuously and have been applied for (bio)polymer degradation, proteomics, biomarker discovery, inhibitor screening, and detection. Online integration of IMERs with analytical instrumentation, such as high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) systems, reduces the time needed for multi-step workflows, reduces the need for sample handling, and enables automation. However, online integration can also be challenging, as reaching its full potential requires complex instrumental setups and experienced users. This review aims to provide an assessment of recent advances …

Classification Of Explainable Artificial Intelligence Methods Through Their Output Formats, Giulia Vilone, Luca Longo

Articles

Machine and deep learning have proven their utility to generate data-driven models with high accuracy and precision. However, their non-linear, complex structures are often difficult to interpret. Consequently, many scholars have developed a plethora of methods to explain their functioning and the logic of their inferences. This systematic review aimed to organise these methods into a hierarchical classification system that builds upon and extends existing taxonomies by adding a significant dimension—the output formats. The reviewed scientific papers were retrieved by conducting an initial search on Google Scholar with the keywords “explainable artificial intelligence”; “explainable machine learning”; and “interpretable machine learning”. …

A Health Elearning Ontology And Procedural Reasoning Approach For Developing Personalized Courses To Teach Patients About Their Medical Condition And Treatment, Martin Michalowski, Szymon Wilk, Wojtek Michalowski, Dympna O'Sullivan, Silvia Bonaccio, Enea Parimbelli, Marc Carrier, Grégoire Le Gal, Stephen Kingwell, Mor Peleg

Articles

We propose a methodological framework to support the development of personalized courses that improve patients’ understanding of their condition and prescribed treatment. Inspired by Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs), the framework uses an eLearning ontology to express domain and learner models and to create a course. We combine the ontology with a procedural reasoning approach and precompiled plans to operationalize a design across disease conditions. The resulting courses generated by the framework are personalized across four patient axes—condition and treatment, comprehension level, learning style based on the VARK (Visual, Aural, Read/write, Kinesthetic) presentation model, and the level of understanding of specific …

Biochemical Impact Of Solar Radiation Exposure On Human Keratinocytes Monitored By Raman Spectroscopy; Effects Of Cell Culture Environment, Ulises Lopez Gonzalez, Alan Casey, Hugh Byrne

Articles

Understanding and amelioration of the effects of solar radiation exposure are critical in preventing the occurrence of skin cancer. Towards this end, many studies have been conducted in 2D cell culture models under simplified and unrealistic conditions. 3D culture models better capture the complexity of in vivo physiology, although the effects of the 3D extracellular matrix have not been well studied. Monitoring the instantaneous and resultant cellular responses to exposure, and the influence of the 3D environment, could provide an enhanced understanding of the fundamental processes of photocarcinogenesis. This work presents an analysis of the biochemical impacts of simulated solar …

Locating Identities In Time: An Examination Of The Impact Of Temporality On Presentations Of The Self Through Location-Based Social Networks, Konstantinos Papangelis, Ioanna Lykourentzou, Vassilis-Javed Khan, Alan Chamberlain, Ting Cao, Micahel Saker, Nicolas Lalone

Articles

Studies of identity and location-based social networks (LBSN) have tended to focus on the performative aspects associated with marking one’s location. Yet, these studies often present this practice as being an a priori aspect of locative media. What is missing from this research is a more granular understanding of how this process develops over time. Accordingly, we focus on the first six weeks of 42 users beginning to use an LBSN we designed and named GeoMoments. Through our analysis of our users' activities, we contribute to understanding identity and LBSN in two distinct ways. First, we show how LBSN users …

Flying Free: A Research Overview Of Deep Learning In Drone Navigation Autonomy, Thomas Lee, Susan Mckeever, Jane Courtney

Articles

With the rise of Deep Learning approaches in computer vision applications, significant strides have been made towards vehicular autonomy. Research activity in autonomous drone navigation has increased rapidly in the past five years, and drones are moving fast towards the ultimate goal of near-complete autonomy. However, while much work in the area focuses on specific tasks in drone navigation, the contribution to the overall goal of autonomy is often not assessed, and a comprehensive overview is needed. In this work, a taxonomy of drone navigation autonomy is established by mapping the definitions of vehicular autonomy levels, as defined by the …

1d Conditional Generative Adversarial Network For Spectrum-To-Spectrum Translation Of Simulated Chemical Reflectance Signatures, Cara Murphy, John Kerekes

Articles

The classification of trace chemical residues through active spectroscopic sensing is challenging due to the lack of physics-based models that can accurately predict spectra. To overcome this challenge, we leveraged the field of domain adaptation to translate data from the simulated to the measured domain for training a classifier. We developed the first 1D conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) to perform spectrum-to-spectrum translation of reflectance signatures. We applied the 1D conditional GAN to a library of simulated spectra and quantified the improvement in classification accuracy on real data using the translated spectra for training the classifier. Using the GAN-translated library, …

Adapting An Agent-Based Model Of Infectious Disease Spread In An Irish County To Covid-19, Elizabeth Hunter, John D. Kelleher

Articles

The dynamics that lead to the spread of an infectious disease through a population can be characterized as a complex system. One way to model such a system, in order to improve preparedness, and learn more about how an infectious disease, such as COVID-19, might spread through a population, is agent-based epidemiological modelling. When a pandemic is caused by an emerging disease, it takes time to develop a completely new model that captures the complexity of the system. In this paper, we discuss adapting an existing agent-based model for the spread of measles in Ireland to simulate the spread of …

Pivot Points In Bivariate Linear Regression, David L. Farnsworth, Carl V. Lutzer

Articles

There are little-noticed points in the plane, which are artifacts of linear regression. The points, which are called pivot points, are the intersections of sets of regression lines. We derive the coordinates of the pivot point and explain its sources. We show how a pivot point arises in a certain notable data set, which has been analyzed often for points of high leverage. We obtain the application of pivot points that shortens calculations when updating a set of bivariate observations by adding a new point.

A Geometric Approach To Conditioning And The Search For Minimum Variance Unbiased Estimators, David L. Farnsworth, James E. Marengo

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Our purpose is twofold: to present a prototypical example of the conditioning technique to obtain the best estimator of a parameter and to show that this technique resides in the structure of an inner product space. The technique uses conditioning of an unbiased estimator on a sufficient statistic. This procedure is founded upon the conditional variance formula, which leads to an inner product space and a geometric interpretation. The example clearly illustrates the dependence on the sampling methodology. These advantages show the power and centrality of this process.

Internet Of Medical Things (Iomt): Overview, Emerging Technologies, And Case Studies, Sahshanu Razdan, Sachin Sharma

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No abstract provided.