Digital Commons Network^™

Disaster Management In Public Sector University Libraries In Karachi, Sameem Kardar, Muhammad Waseem Zia

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The purpose of this study was to examine the level of staff preparedness towards disaster management in public sector university libraries situated in Karachi. Survey research method was adopted for the study. The data collection tool consisted of questionnaires and interviews. This paper is based on the preliminary findings of M.Phil. research “Preservation and Conservation Techniques Adopted by Public Sector University Libraries”. For the interview, a face-to-face interactive session was held between the researcher and the university librarian on issues of Disaster Prevention Management Plan in the Library. There are 9 public sector universities in Karachi, libraries of all 9 …

Benchmarking Library And Information Science Journals: A Comparative Study Of Sjr Rankings In The Asiatic Region, Debalina Bhattacharyya, Sailendra Malik, Sukumar Mandal

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Purpose

The paper represents the country-wise distribution and ranking of LIS journals which are published in Asiatic Region through the medium of the Scimago Journal & Country Rank. The work can give idea about the current position and scenario of the Asian LIS journals. The paper can help the researchers and Library professionals to choose the journal of their choice, to publish the article on the journals and to know about the quality and prestige of the journal.

Methodology

This study was based on Scopus’s SJR database. The relevant data of 15 LIS journals in Asiatic Region was analysed and …

Examining The Influence Of Capital Investments On Library Enhancements, Faculty Development, And Sponsored Projects In A Top 20 Nirf Ranked University: An Investigation, Debdas Mondal

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study delves into the 2017-2019 NIRF rankings of India's top 20 universities, examining factors such as library spending, faculty quality, and sponsored projects. Despite varying expenditures, some universities displayed unexpected performances in rankings. The study suggests strategies for universities to enhance performance and rankings, aiming to uncover correlations between NIRF ranks and factors like library expenditure, research student count, faculty numbers, and sponsored projects. Data for the study were collected through web content analysis, primarily sourced from the official websites of NIRF. Among the top 20 universities, only IISc, Bengaluru consistently excelled across these factors. Manipal Academy of Higher …

Privobfnet: A Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation Model For Data Protection, Chiat Pin Tay, Vigneshwaran Subbaraju, Thivya Kandappu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The use of social media has made it easy to communicate and share information over the internet. However, it also brings issues such as data privacy leakage, which can be exploited by recipients with malicious intentions to harm the sender. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network that analyzes user’s image for privacy sensitive content and automatically locates sensitive regions for obfuscation. Our approach relies solely on image level annotations and learns to (a) predict an overall privacy score, (b) detect sensitive attributes and (c) demarcate the sensitive regions for obfuscation, in a given input image. We validated …

A Secure And Robust Knowledge Transfer Framework Via Stratified-Causality Distribution Adjustment In Intelligent Collaborative Services, Ju Jia, Siqi Ma, Lina Wang, Yang Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The rapid development of device-edge-cloud collaborative computing techniques has actively contributed to the popularization and application of intelligent service models. The intensity of knowledge transfer plays a vital role in enhancing the performance of intelligent services. However, the existing knowledge transfer methods are mainly implemented through data fine-tuning and model distillation, which may cause the leakage of data privacy or model copyright in intelligent collaborative systems. To address this issue, we propose a secure and robust knowledge transfer framework through stratified-causality distribution adjustment (SCDA) for device-edge-cloud collaborative services. Specifically, a simple yet effective density-based estimation is first employed to obtain …

Causal Disentangled Recommendation Against User Preference Shifts, Wenjie Wang, Xinyu Lin, Liuhui Wang, Fuli Feng, Yunshan Ma, Tat‑Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recommender systems easily face the issue of user preference shifts. User representations will become outof-date and lead to inappropriate recommendations if user preference has shifted over time. To solve theissue, existing work focuses on learning robust representations or predicting the shifting pattern. Therelacks a comprehensive view to discover the underlying reasons for user preference shifts. To understand thepreference shift, we abstract a causal graph to describe the generation procedure of user interaction sequences.Assuming user preference is stable within a short period, we abstract the interaction sequence as a set ofchronological environments. From the causal graph, we find that the changes …

Glance To Count: Learning To Rank With Anchors For Weakly-Supervised Crowd Counting, Zheng Xiong, Liangyu Chai, Wenxi Liu, Yongtuo Liu, Sucheng Ren, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Crowd image is arguably one of the most laborious data to annotate. In this paper, we devote to reduce the massive demand of densely labeled crowd data, and propose a novel weakly-supervised setting, in which we leverage the binary ranking of two images with highcontrast crowd counts as training guidance. To enable training under this new setting, we convert the crowd count regression problem to a ranking potential prediction problem. In particular, we tailor a Siamese Ranking Network that predicts the potential scores of two images indicating the ordering of the counts. Hence, the ultimate goal is to assign appropriate …

Cooperative Trucks And Drones For Rural Last-Mile Delivery With Steep Roads, Jiuhong Xiao, Ying Li, Zhiguang Cao, Jianhua Xiao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The cooperative delivery of trucks and drones promises considerable advantages in delivery efficiency and environmental friendliness over pure fossil fuel fleets. As the prosperity of rural B2C e-commerce grows, this study intends to explore the prospect of this cooperation mode for rural last-mile delivery by developing a green vehicle routing problem with drones that considers the presence of steep roads (GVRPD-SR). Realistic energy consumption calculations for trucks and drones that both consider the impacts of general factors and steep roads are incorporated into the GVRPD-SR model, and the objective is to minimize the total energy consumption. To solve the proposed …

Affinity Uncertainty-Based Hard Negative Mining In Graph Contrastive Learning, Chaoxi Niu, Guansong Pang, Ling Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Hard negative mining has shown effective in enhancing self-supervised contrastive learning (CL) on diverse data types, including graph CL (GCL). The existing hardness-aware CL methods typically treat negative instances that are most similar to the anchor instance as hard negatives, which helps improve the CL performance, especially on image data. However, this approach often fails to identify the hard negatives but leads to many false negatives on graph data. This is mainly due to that the learned graph representations are not sufficiently discriminative due to oversmooth representations and/or non-independent and identically distributed (non-i.i.d.) issues in graph data. To tackle this …

Remote Multi-Person Heart Rate Monitoring With Smart Speakers: Overcoming Separation Constraint, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran, Dong Ma, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Heart rate is a key vital sign that can be used to understand an individual’s health condition. Recently, remote sensing techniques, especially acoustic-based sensing, have received increasing attention for their ability to non-invasively detect heart rate via commercial mobile devices such as smartphones and smart speakers. However, due to signal interference, existing methods have primarily focused on monitoring a single user and required a large separation between them when monitoring multiple people. These limitations hinder many common use cases such as couples sharing the same bed or two or more people located in close proximity. In this paper, we present …

Provably Secure Decisions Based On Potentially Malicious Information, Dongxia Wang, Tim Muller, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There are various security-critical decisions routinely made, on the basis of information provided by peers: routing messages, user reports, sensor data, navigational information, blockchain updates, etc. Jury theorems were proposed in sociology to make decisions based on information from peers, which assume peers may be mistaken with some probability. We focus on attackers in a system, which manifest as peers that strategically report fake information to manipulate decision making. We define the property of robustness: a lower bound probability of deciding correctly, regardless of what information attackers provide. When peers are independently selected, we propose an optimal, robust decision mechanism …

Active Code Learning: Benchmarking Sample-Efficient Training Of Code Models, Qiang Hu, Yuejun Guo, Xiaofei Xie, Maxime Cordy, Lei Ma, Mike Papadakis, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The costly human effort required to prepare the training data of machine learning (ML) models hinders their practical development and usage in software engineering (ML4Code), especially for those with limited budgets. Therefore, efficiently training models of code with less human effort has become an emergent problem. Active learning is such a technique to address this issue that allows developers to train a model with reduced data while producing models with desired performance, which has been well studied in computer vision and natural language processing domains. Unfortunately, there is no such work that explores the effectiveness of active learning for code …

Dynamic Meta-Path Guided Temporal Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks, Yugang Ji, Chuan Shi, Yuan Fang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become the de facto standard for representation learning on topological graphs, which usually derive effective node representations via message passing from neighborhoods. Although GNNs have achieved great success, previous models are mostly confined to static and homogeneous graphs. However, there are multiple dynamic interactions between different-typed nodes in real-world scenarios like academic networks and e-commerce platforms, forming temporal heterogeneous graphs (THGs). Limited work has been done for representation learning on THGs and the challenges are in two aspects. First, there are abundant dynamic semantics between nodes while traditional techniques like meta-paths can only capture static …

Enabling Ai And Robotic Coaches For Physical Rehabilitation Therapy: Iterative Design And Evaluation With Therapists And Post-Stroke Survivors, Min Hun Lee, Daniel Siewiorek, Asim Smailagic, Alexandre Bernardino, Sergi Bermúdez I Badia

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic coaches promise the improved engagement of patients on rehabilitation exercises through social interaction. While previous work explored the potential of automatically monitoring exercises for AI and robotic coaches, the deployment of these systems remains a challenge. Previous work described the lack of involving stakeholders to design such functionalities as one of the major causes. In this paper, we present our efforts on eliciting the detailed design specifications on how AI and robotic coaches could interact with and guide patient’s exercises in an effective and acceptable way with four therapists and five post-stroke survivors. Through iterative …

Teachers’ Perspectives And Practices For Ameliorating Dysregulation In School-Aged Children Through Trauma-Informed Education Practice, Linda Lane

Theses

The research investigates Western Australian (WA) teachers’ understanding of the impact of trauma-informed education practice. The main research question, which forms the basis of the study, is How do the trauma-informed education practices, currently being used in Western Australian public schools, impact the capacity of children to self-regulate their behaviour? The literature examines the impact of unresolved trauma on the developing child and reviews the trauma-informed education practices that are designed to ameliorate the negative effects of trauma. The research also investigates the trauma-informed practices that are currently being used in WA public school classrooms, as described by teachers, and …

Predictors Of Outcomes In Acute Myocardial Infarction Complicated By Cardiogenic Shock In A Regional Hospital, Wong Chun Kit

Journal of the Hong Kong College of Cardiology

Background

Cardiogenic shock complicating acute myocardial infarction (AMI-CS) carries high inhospital mortality across decades of advancement in modern revascularization strategies, intensive care management, and mechanical circulatory support devices. The predictors of outcomes in AMI-CS patients have not been fully elucidated in this region.

Methods

This retrospective single-center observational study examined all patients who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention for acute myocardial infarction complicated by cardiogenic shock at Princess Margaret Hospital between March 1, 2012 to March 1, 2020. Baseline characteristics including demographics, medical comorbidities, laboratory data, interventional procedures, and patient outcomes were tabulated. The primary outcome measured was 30-day mortality; secondary …

The National Culture As A Determinant Of Governance Efficiency: An Empirical Study On Country Level, Marwa Said Anis Dr.

Business Administration

The present study examines the impact of the national culture on the country-level governance effi ciency index. The dimensions of culture as an independent variable is measured using three different cultural frameworks: Hofstede, Globe and Trompenaar. Based on a secondary data collection, the governance efficien cy is the dependent variable adopted in the analysis. As the current study is examining whether the national culture has an impact on the governance efficiency index, it is an attempt to understand the determinants of governance. An empirical study was conducted on data involving 177 different countries with different level of incomes. The analysis …

A Computerized Mastitis Classification Aid Using A Dairy Herd-Based Records: Multi-Layer Perceptron (Mlp) Neural Network With Backpropagation Approach, Ahmed M. Gad Prof, Dina Faris De, Sherif Ramadan Prof, Ghada Afifi Dr, Eman Manaa Prof, Mahmoud El-Tarabany Prof

Business Administration

The main objective of this study is to develop an efficient machine learning-based model for the early prediction of clinical mastitis in Holstein Friesian dairy cattle where automatic milking system (AMS) data is used. The model aims to offer a costless opportunity for mastitis control and reduce its negative impact on livestock production. Different forward multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural networks with backpropagation (BP) learning algorithms using various numbers of hidden neurons and epochs have been introduced. The results of the established models are evaluated based on different metrics such as the accuracy, the F1 core, the precision, the recall, and …

Response Rate To The First Line Chemotherapy And Progression Free Survival In Iraqi Women With Advanced Epithelial Ovarian Cancer, Salma S.Yasseen, Ahmed Mubarak

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

Background: Ovarian cancer is the most lethal malignancy of female genital tract. Epithelial ovarian cancer comprises the majority of malignant ovarian neoplasms, response rate to platinum, taxan and bevacizumab is excellent in advance stages of disease, despite that recurrence can occur.Aims: To estimated response rate to first line chemotherapy (platinum and taxane with bevacizumab) and progression free survival (PFS) in patients with advanced epithelial ovarian cancer (OC).Patients and Methods: A total of 50 patients with OC were enrolled in this cross-sectional study whom received chemotherapy protocols (carboplatin ,paclitaxel and antiangiogenesis { bevacizumab} /Carboplatin) cycle and each cycle repeated every 3 …

The Effect Of Intravenous Glucose Solutions On Neonatal And Mother Blood Glucose Levels After Cesarean Delivery, Mustafa Shihab, Ali Saadoon

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

BACKGROUND: Intravenous glucose fluids may be given to patients undergoing caesarean delivery to provide energy  to the mother and fetus while maintain hemodynamics. Different intravenous solution loads before operation, however, may cause maternal and fetal  hyperglycemia or hypoglycemia .OBJECTIVE: To compare the blood glucose level of the mother and the fetal after giving ringer lactate have (0, 1, and 5%) glucose to the mother before induction and completed after delivery to minimize the effect of both fasting and to mark the optimal glucose concentration for both mother and fetus.PATIENTS AND METHODS: Sixty pregnant women aged 18-35 years underwent elective cesarean …

Value Of Coraco-Humeral Ligament Thickness In Early Detection Of Adhesive Capsulitis In Diabetic Patients Using Mri., Yusur Said Thabit, Mohammed Kadhim

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Adhesive capsulitis is a common illness-causing scapula-humeral pain with decrease in range of movement in the shoulder joint. MRI gives clear images about the joint capsule, the coraco-humeral ligament (CHL), and any associated pathology.OBJECTIVE: To study value of MRI for early diagnosis of adhesive capsulitis in diabetic patients through recognition of increased thickness of CHL.PATIENTS AND METHODS:Fifty-four adult participants were included in this study, 33 were females and 21 were males, their mean age 45.5 (age range 22-67 years), divided into 2 groups. The patient group included 34 diabetic patients (24 female and 10 male) with a mean …

Evaluation Of Patients With Acute Pancreatitis By Using The Modified Computed Tomography Severity Index, Raya Ghazal, Raad Abed Alkhayat

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

ABSTRACT:BACKGROUND:Pancreatitis is inflammation of the pancreas. Pancreatitis can appear in its acute form, that is,                       it appears suddenly and lasts a few days. Some people may develop chronic pancreatitis, which lasts for many years. Mild cases of pancreatitis get better with treatment, but severe cases can cause                 life-threatening complications.OBJECTIVE:To assess the modified Baltazar score Computed tomography severity index of acute pancreatitisPATIENTS AND METHOD: A cross sectional analytic study was performed at Al-Yarmouk Teaching Hospital in Department of Radiology in the period from 1st of January 2021 to the end of November 2021. The current study involved 50 patients (male and …

Characteristics Of Pneumothorax In A Neonatal Unit At Al Yarmouk Teaching Hospital, Farah Flayyih, Saja Adil, Sawsan Hussein, Tala Al-Awqati

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

BACKGROUND:Pneumothorax is the most common air-leak syndrome in neonatal period. It can be defined as accumulation of air between the parietal and visceral pleura.OBJECTIVE:To study the general characteristics, risk factors, causes, management details, and the outcomes of neonatal pneumothorax.PATIENTS AND METHODS:It is a prospective observational study included thirty infants at neonatal intensive care unit at Al-Yarmouk teaching hospital from 1st of October 2018 to the 30th of September 2019 and Patients were evaluated for: gender, gestational age, birth weight, Apgar score at 1&5 minutes, mode of delivery, time of pneumothorax development, localization, and the presence of lung pathology.RESULTS:During the study …

Effectiveness Of Nebulized Budesonide In The Treatment Of Acute Asthma: A Double-Blind Placebo-Controlled Trial, Muhi Al-Janabi, Mustafa Al-Anbaki, Maamun Mohmmed, Nadia Nasir

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

ABSTRACT:BACKGROUND:Inhaled corticosteroids administered in high and repeated doses which effect simultaneously with bronchodilators is a way to maintain the effect throughout the time. The acute effects of nebulized budesonide as an emergency treatment of acute asthma in children have been evaluated in few clinical studies.OBJECTIVE:The analysis of the early clinical impact of adding repeated doses of nebulized budesonide in the treatment of acute asthma in the emergency setting on clinical respiratory score, Peak expiratory flow rates and hospital admission after 4 hours of treatment.PATIENTS AND METHODS:The study was a double-blind and placebo-controlled trial from April 2017 to January 2018 in …

A Study In Clinicopathological Characteristics Of Pancreatic Cancer Related Diabetes In Iraqi Patients, Abdullah Sabri, Ahmed Mubarak

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Globally, pancreatic cancer is the 11th most common cancer in women and the 12th most common in men. Many studies have been done to reveal the relationship and the mechanism between diabetes and pancreatic cancer. Some revealed the relationship between diabetes and increased risks of pancreatic cancer in both males and females. Another revealed that new onset diabetes could potentially indicate early stage pancreatic cancer.OBJECTIVE:To determine the association between diabetes and clinic-pathological features of pancreatic carcinoma.PATIENTS AND METHODS:A case control study conducted in Baghdad Oncology Teaching Hospital and in Al-Amal National Hospital for the treatment of cancerous tumors during …

The Impact Of Gamma Knife Radiosurgery On Survival Period Of Patients With Brain Gliomas, Ahmed A Al Atraqchi

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

BACKGROUND:Brain Glioma is one of the most common brain tumors that starts in the Glial cells of the brain which are the supportive tissue of the brain. Gliomas compromise about thirty percent of all brain tumors.OBJECTIVE:Evaluate the outcome of gamma knife radiosurgery as an effective treatment modality in the management of brain glioma.PATIENTS AND METHODS:A clinical retrospective study performed and conducted at Neurosciences hospital between January 2017 and November 2018. The cases conducted were 40 cases, 33 patients were undergone craniotomy prior     to radiosurgery and the remaining 7 patients had radiosurgery with gamma knife as the first modality               of treatment.RESULTS:Gamma …

Evaluation Of Diffusion-Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging In The Diagnosis Of Perianal Fistula, Ali Al-Dharob, Mohammed Kadhim

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

 BACKGROUND:and other inflammatory diseases of the anusand perianal soft tissues area cause perianal fistulas substantial morbidity.Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays a great role in the evaluation of anal fistulae.OBJECTIVE:To evaluate the value of DWI in the examination of perianal fistula.PATIENTS AND METHODS:The study included 38 patients (30 males and 8 females) with clinical suspicion of perianal fistula. It was done in MRI department (3.0T) of AL-Imamain AL-Kadhimyianmedical city, Baghdad/ Iraq during the period from November 2020 to January 2021. MRI images were assessed for the presence of visible fistulas, internal openings, secondary extension, horse shoe and abscess.RESULTS:68.4% of the …

Clinicopathological Assessment Of Postmenopausal Bleeding In A Sample Of Iraqi Patients, Maha Flayah, Alaa Hussein

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

ABSTRACT:BACKGROUND:Bleeding that occurs 12 months or more following the last menstrual period is known as postmenopausal bleeding.OBJECTIVE:Is to assess the frequency and pattern of uterine lesions in women with post-menopausal bleeding and to correlate the histopathological changes with clinical variable i.e. the age, associated illness, parity and ultrasonography finding.MATERIALS AND METHODS:A retrospective study, which include analysis of 110 cases of women presented with post-menopausal bleeding, the samples were collected from the Teaching Laboratories of Al-Imamain Al-Kadhumain, and Baghdad Medical City from January 2020 to June 2021. For each case  the histopathological reports, slides  and  Paraffin block (if needed)  were collected, …

Analysis Of Neurological Diseases Seen In The Pediatric Neurological Outpatient Clinic In The Central Teaching Hospital Of Pediatrics. A Tertiary Center From Baghdad, Iraq, Basma Ibrahim

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND:Around 20% of the global disease burden is attributed to neurological disorders. In developing countries, neurological disorders are the leading cause of disability among children. Unfortunately many children with these conditions also face the additional burdens of poverty, ignorance, and inadequate healthcare facilities. Most of the time, these children are not able to receive the proper care and support they need.  OBJECTIVE: To observe the pattern of childhood neurological diseases that are encountered in the neurology outpatient clinics at a tertiary care hospital in Baghdad, Iraq. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This is a prospective descriptive study carried out in the …

Validity Of Transition Zone In Contrast Enema To Detect The Level Of Aganglionic Segment In Patients With Hirschsprung’S Disease, Huda Hameedy, Shatha Alkawaz

Iraqi Postgraduate Medical Journal

BACKGROUND:Flexor tendons repair outcome depends on meticulous surgery built upon a thorough  knowledge  of  the  anatomy  and  biomechanics  of  the  flexor  tendon system.  Direct tendon repair is the standard method with most rewarding outcome. Still at times where direct repair is impossible because of  large defect or sever adhesions, extra synovial tendon graft is considered. Attachment of the distal end of the graft at the insertion of the flexor digitorum profundus into the distal phalanx has been a matter of controversy.OBJECTIVE:Compare between the traditional way of attaching the distal end of the graft to the  stump  of  the  flexor  digitorum …