Digital Commons Network^™

Research Attitudes, Practice And Literacy Among Kenyan Palliative Care Healthcare Professionals: An Observational, Crosssectional Online Survey, Ra Powell, Z Ali, Nancy Gikaara, Qanungo S, Es Melikam, Kb Cartmell

Internal Medicine, East Africa

Background: While research is needed to advocate for implementation of global agendas to strengthen palliative care, healthcare professionals’ research literacy must improve to bridge the gap between evidence and practice. A resurgent focus on North-South power disparities, means attention should also focus on understanding low- and middle-income countries’ local agency to implement palliative care research agendas.

Methods: An observational, cross-sectional online survey among Kenyan palliative healthcare professionals currently working at any of the palliative and hospice care organizations operational during January – December 2019, using descriptive statistics.

Results: Among the 93 survey respondents, participants were mainly nurses (50.54%; n=47). Regarding …

Understanding Terrorism: An Alternative View And The Painful Truth: How Powerful Nations Legitimize Terrorism, Kwame B. Antwi-Boasiako, Cindy P. Davis

Journal of Terrorism Studies

Despite human beings’ noble achievements on this planet including medicine, technology, physics, and chemistry, there is one characteristic of humans, which is disturbing and that act is “committing extreme cruelty and violence against its own species” (Smith 2007:41). This cruelty by human beings against themselves stems from many factors including power, ideology, religion, and terrorism. These categorizations, as Smith (2011) noted, are unfortunately used to dehumanize the other through societal definitions where one group, the powerful, sees itself as the paragons of civilization against the other, the weak, as barbarians. Terrorism, racism, ideology, and religion are but some of the …

Subverting Patriarchal Interpretation Of The Ramayan Through A Feminist Lens: A Critical Study Of Sita's Ramayana, Shruti Chakraborti

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

“Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival”, writes Adrienne Rich in her seminal essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision”. Rich firmly advocates that women authors should create spaces for subversion of patriarchal values and ideals through their literary works. Revisionist mythmaking, from a feminist literary perspective, evolves through challenging a preceding text which predominantly manifests androcentric ideas. The present paper aims to examine a female reinterpretation …

Haploinsufficiency Of Cyp8b1 Associates With Increased Insulin Sensitivity In Humans, Shiqi Zhong, Raphael Chèvre, David Castaño Mayan, Maria Corlianò, Blake J Cochran, Kai Ping Sem, Theo H Van Dijk, Jianhe Peng, Liang Juin Tan, Siddesh V Hartimath, Boominathan Ramasamy, Peter Cheng, Albert K Groen, Folkert Kuipers, Julian L Goggi, Chester Drum, Rob M Van Dam, Ru San Tan, Kerry-Anne Rye, Michael R Hayden, Ching-Yu Cheng, Shaji Chacko, Jason Flannick, Xueling Sim, Hong Chang Tan, Roshni R Singaraja

Children’s Nutrition Research Center Staff Publications

BACKGROUND

Cytochrome P450 family 8 subfamily B member 1 (CYP8B1) generates 12α-hydroxylated bile acids (BAs) that are associated with insulin resistance in humans.

METHODS

To determine whether reduced CYP8B1 activity improves insulin sensitivity, we sequenced CYP8B1 in individuals without diabetes and identified carriers of complete loss-of-function (CLOF) mutations utilizing functional assays.

RESULTS

Mutation carriers had lower plasma 12α-hydroxylated/non–12α-hydroxylated BA and cholic acid (CA)/chenodeoxycholic acid (CDCA) ratios compared with age-, sex-, and BMI-matched controls. During insulin clamps, hepatic glucose production was suppressed to a similar magnitude by insulin, but glucose infusion rates to maintain euglycemia were higher in mutation carriers, indicating …

The Constitutional Problem Of Nondebtor Releases In Bankruptcy, Adam J. Levitin

Fordham Law Review

In recent years, nondebtor releases have become a common feature of big-case Chapter 11 bankruptcy practice. Nondebtor releases involve the release of creditor claims against third-party nondebtors pursuant to a bankruptcy plan confirmation order. Some nondebtor releases are consensual, meaning that they are done with the assent of the releasing creditor, but some are not.

This Essay argues that all nonconsensual nondebtor releases in bankruptcy are unconstitutional. The constitutional infirmities of nondebtor releases are layered: all non debtor releases—consensual or nonconsensual—are outside the scope of Congress’s authority under an original understanding of the Bankruptcy Clause; all nonconsensual nondebtor releases are …

Unfair, Abusive, And Unlawful: Protecting Debtors And Society From Unrestrained Bank Account Garnishment, Kevin Green

Fordham Law Review

In the span of a generation, consumer credit has reshaped the financial lives of millions of Americans. Today, some seventy million Americans have a debt in collections, and creditors file millions of actions annually to secure repayment of these loans. Despite the rapid expansion of consumer debt, the Consumer Credit Protection Act, the only federal law limiting garnishment, has not been updated since its enactment in 1968. Moreover, courts have narrowly construed its provisions to permit creditors to empty a debtor’s bank account to repay a delinquent debt.

To afford debtors the basic protections of the Consumer Credit Protection Act, …

Delving Deep Into Pixelized Face Recovery And Defense, Zhixuan Zhong, Yong Du, Yang Zhou, Jiangzhong Cao, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Pixelization is arguably one of the most well-adopted deterministic obfuscation techniques for privacy preservation purposes. Although the recovery of pixelized faces is underexplored, the powerful deep neural networks might combat this problem in a data-driven manner. As a consequence, an unbreakable pixelization approach is desired. To achieve this goal, in this paper, we delve into two contradictory problems of unrecoverable pixelization and its counterpart, depixelization, by leveraging the best recovery to strengthen the robustness of the unrecoverable pixelized patterns. In particular, on the offensive end of recovery, we combat the large and continuous nature of pixelized regions by proposing two …

Daot: Domain-Agnostically Aligned Optimal Transport For Domain-Adaptive Crowd Counting, Huilin Zhu, Jingling Yuan, Xian Zhong, Zhengwei Yang, Zheng Wang, Shengfeng He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Domain adaptation is commonly employed in crowd counting to bridge the domain gaps between different datasets. However, existing domain adaptation methods tend to focus on inter-dataset differences while overlooking the intra-differences within the same dataset, leading to additional learning ambiguities. These domain-agnostic factors,e.g., density, surveillance perspective, and scale, can cause significant in-domain variations, and the misalignment of these factors across domains can lead to a drop in performance in cross-domain crowd counting. To address this issue, we propose a Domain-agnostically Aligned Optimal Transport (DAOT) strategy that aligns domain-agnostic factors between domains. The DAOT consists of three steps. First, individual-level differences …

Adaptive Fairness Improvement Based Causality Analysis, Mengdi Zhang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given a discriminating neural network, the problem of fairness improvement is to systematically reduce discrimination without significantly scarifies its performance (i.e., accuracy). Multiple categories of fairness improving methods have been proposed for neural networks, including pre-processing, in-processing and postprocessing. Our empirical study however shows that these methods are not always effective (e.g., they may improve fairness by paying the price of huge accuracy drop) or even not helpful (e.g., they may even worsen both fairness and accuracy). In this work, we propose an approach which adaptively chooses the fairness improving method based on causality analysis. That is, we choose the …

Large-Scale Analysis Of Non-Termination Bugs In Real-World Oss Projects, Xiuhan Shi, Xiaofei Xie, Yi Li, Yao Zhang, Sen Chen, Xiaohong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Termination is a crucial program property. Non-termination bugs can be subtle to detect and may remain hidden for long before they take effect. Many real-world programs still suffer from vast consequences (e.g., no response) caused by non-termination bugs. As a classic problem, termination proving has been studied for many years. Many termination checking tools and techniques have been developed and demonstrated effectiveness on existing wellestablished benchmarks. However, the capability of these tools in finding practical non-termination bugs has yet to be tested on real-world projects. To fill in this gap, in this paper, we conducted the first large-scale empirical study …

Photovoltaic Cells For Energy Harvesting And Indoor Positioning, Hamada Rizk, Dong Ma, Mahbub Hassan, Moustafa Youssef

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose SoLoc, a lightweight probabilistic fingerprinting-based technique for energy-free device-free indoor localization. The system harnesses photovoltaic currents harvested by the photovoltaic cells in smart environments for simultaneously powering digital devices and user positioning. The basic principle is that the location of the human interferes with the lighting received by the photovoltaic cells, thus producing a location fingerprint on the generated photocurrents. To ensure resilience to noisy measurements, SoLoc constructs probability distributions as a photovoltaic fingerprint at each location. Then, we employ a probabilistic graphical model for estimating the user location in the continuous space. Results show that SoLoc can …

Meta-Complementing The Semantics Of Short Texts In Neural Topic Models, Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Topic models infer latent topic distributions based on observed word co-occurrences in a text corpus. While typically a corpus contains documents of variable lengths, most previous topic models treat documents of different lengths uniformly, assuming that each document is sufficiently informative. However, shorter documents may have only a few word co-occurrences, resulting in inferior topic quality. Some other previous works assume that all documents are short, and leverage external auxiliary data, e.g., pretrained word embeddings and document connectivity. Orthogonal to existing works, we remedy this problem within the corpus itself by proposing a Meta-Complement Topic Model, which improves topic quality …

Mando-Guru: Vulnerability Detection For Smart Contract Source Code By Heterogeneous Graph Embeddings, Huu Hoang Nguyen, Nhat Minh Nguyen, Hong-Phuc Doan, Zahrai Ahmadi, Thanh Nam Doan, Lingxiao Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Smart contracts are increasingly used with blockchain systems for high-value applications. It is highly desired to ensure the quality of smart contract source code before they are deployed. This paper proposes a new deep learning-based tool, MANDO-GURU, that aims to accurately detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts at both coarse-grained contract-level and fine-grained line-level. Using a combination of control-flow graphs and call graphs of Solidity code, we design new heterogeneous graph attention neural networks to encode more structural and potentially semantic relations among different types of nodes and edges of such graphs and use the encoded embeddings of the graphs and …

What Motivates Software Practitioners To Contribute To Inner Source?, Zhiyuan Wan, Xin Xia, Yun Zhang, David Lo, Daibing Zhou, Qiuyuan Chen, Ahmed E. Hassan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Software development organizations have adopted open source development practices to support or augment their software development processes, a phenomenon referred to as inner source. Given the rapid adoption of inner source, we wonder what motivates software practitioners to contribute to inner source projects. We followed a mixed-methods approach--a qualitative phase of interviews with 20 interviewees, followed by a quantitative phase of an exploratory survey with 124 respondents from 13 countries across four continents. Our study uncovers practitioners' motivation to contribute to inner source projects, as well as how the motivation differs from what motivates practitioners to participate in open source …

Fastklee: Faster Symbolic Execution Via Reducing Redundant Bound Checking Of Type-Safe Pointers, Haoxin Tu, Lingxiao Jiang, Xuhua Ding, He Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Symbolic execution (SE) has been widely adopted for automatic program analysis and software testing. Many SE engines (e.g., KLEE or Angr) need to interpret certain Intermediate Representations (IR) of code during execution, which may be slow and costly. Although a plurality of studies proposed to accelerate SE, few of them consider optimizing the internal interpretation operations. In this paper, we propose FastKLEE, a faster SE engine that aims to speed up execution via reducing redundant bound checking of type-safe pointers during IR code interpretation. Specifically, in FastKLEE, a type inference system is first leveraged to classify pointer types (i.e., safe …

Codematcher: A Tool For Large-Scale Code Search Based On Query Semantics Matching, Chao Liu, Xuanlin Bao, Xin Xia, Meng Yan, David Lo, Ting Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to the emergence of large-scale codebases, such as GitHub and Gitee, searching and reusing existing code can help developers substantially improve software development productivity. Over the years, many code search tools have been developed. Early tools leveraged the information retrieval (IR) technique to perform an efficient code search for a frequently changed large-scale codebase. However, the search accuracy was low due to the semantic mismatch between query and code. In the recent years, many tools leveraged Deep Learning (DL) technique to address this issue. But the DL-based tools are slow and the search accuracy is unstable.In this paper, we …

A Quality Metric For K-Means Clustering Based On Centroid Locations, Manoj Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

K-Means clustering algorithm does not offer a clear methodology to determine the appropriate number of clusters; it does not have a built-in mechanism for K selection. In this paper, we present a new metric for clustering quality and describe its use for K selection. The proposed metric, based on the locations of the centroids, as well as the desired properties of the clusters, is developed in two stages. In the initial stage, we take into account the full covariance matrix of the clustering variables, thereby making it mathematically similar to a reduced chi2. We then extend it to account for …

Artificial Intelligence For Natural Disaster Management, Guansong Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Artificial intelligence (AI) can leverage massive amount of diverse types of data, such as geospatial data, social media data, and wireless network sensor data, to enhance our understanding of natural disasters, their forecasting and detection, and humanitarian assistance in natural disaster management (NDM). Due to this potential, different communities have been dedicating enormous efforts to the development and/or adoption of AI technologies for NDM. This article provides an overview of these efforts and discusses major challenges and opportunities in this topic.

Fully Deformable Network For Multiview Face Image Synthesis, Cheng Xu, Keke Li, Xuandi Luo, Xuemiao Xu, Shengfeng He, Kun Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Photorealistic multiview face synthesis from a single image is a challenging problem. Existing works mainly learn a texture mapping model from the source to the target faces. However, they rarely consider the geometric constraints on the internal deformation arising from pose variations, which causes a high level of uncertainty in face pose modeling, and hence, produces inferior results for large pose variations. Moreover, current methods typically suffer from undesired facial details loss due to the adoption of the de-facto standard encoder-decoder architecture without any skip connections (SCs). In this article, we directly learn and exploit geometric constraints and propose a …

Tourgether360: Collaborative Exploration Of 360° Videos Using Pseudo-Spatial Navigation, Kartikaeya Kumar, Lev Poretski, Jianan Li, Anthony Tang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaborative exploration of 360 videos with contemporary interfaces is challenging because collaborators do not have awareness of one another's viewing activities. Tourgether360 enhances social exploration of 360° tour videos using a pseudo-spatial navigation technique that provides both an overhead "context" view of the environment as a minimap, as well as a shared pseudo-3D environment for exploring the video. Collaborators are embodied as avatars along a track depending on their position in the video timeline and can point and synchronize their playback. We evaluated the Tourgether360 concept through two studies: first, a comparative study with a simplified version of Tourgether360 with …

Impact Of Dietary Walnuts, A Nutraceutical Option, On Circulating Markers Of Metabolic Dysregulation In A Rodent Cachectic Tumor Model, Lauri O. Byerley, Hsiao Man Chang, Brittany Lorenzen, Jessie Guidry, W. Elaine Hardman

School of Medicine Faculty Publications

Background: Nutraceutical foods, like walnuts which are rich in immunonutrients, can have medicinal benefits. Dietary walnuts have been shown to slow or prevent tumor growth in mice genetically programmed to grow breast or prostate tumors. This study investigated whether walnuts could exert the same preventable effect in a transplantable carcinoma rat model. Methods: Eighteen rats were randomly fed a diet containing walnuts (10% of food by weight), and 36 were fed a diet without walnuts (control) for 21 days. On day 22, 18 control diet rats were switched to the walnut diet. All other animals remained on their same diet. …

Politically Speaking: Ethnic Language And Audience Opinion In Southeast Asia, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Language is one of the quintessential markers of ethnicity. It allows co-ethnics to easily identify one another and underscores in-group and out-group boundaries. Recognizing this, politicians frequently employ ethnic tongues to enhance their political appeal. To what extent does this shape the opinions of their audiences? Utilizing a survey experiment, I test the impact of an ethnic tongue against that of the common political language among the Javanese in Indonesia, the Tagalog in the Philippines, and the Isan people in Thailand. The experiment demonstrates that the ethnic language has a significant impact in both Thailand and Indonesia, but there appears …

Epic-Kitchens Visor Benchmark: Video Segmentations And Object Relations, Ahmad Ak Dar Khalil, Dandan Shan, Bin Zhu, Jian Ma, Amlan Kar, Richard Higgins, David Fouhey, Sanja Fidler, Dima Damen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce VISOR, a new dataset of pixel annotations and a benchmark suite for segmenting hands and active objects in egocentric video. VISOR annotates videos from EPIC-KITCHENS, which comes with a new set of challenges not encountered in current video segmentation datasets. Specifically, we need to ensure both short- and long-term consistency of pixel-level annotations as objects undergo transformative interactions, e.g. an onion is peeled, diced and cooked - where we aim to obtain accurate pixel-level annotations of the peel, onion pieces, chopping board, knife, pan, as well as the acting hands. VISOR introduces an annotation pipeline, AI-powered in parts, …

Vfirm: Verifiable Fine-Grained Encrypted Image Retrieval In Multi-Owner Multi-User Settings, Qiuyun Tong, Yinbin Miao, Lei Chen, Jian Weng, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To ensure the security of images outsourced to the malicious cloud without affecting searchability on such outsourced (typically encrypted) images, one could use privacy-preserving Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) primitive. However, conventional privacy-preserving CBIR schemes based on Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) are not capable of supporting efficient fine-grained access control and result verification simultaneously. Therefore, in this article, we propose a Verifiable Fine-grained encrypted Image Retrieval scheme in the Multi-owner multi-user settings (VFIRM). VFIRM first utilizes a novel polynomial-based access strategy to provide efficient fine-grained access control. Then, it employs the dual secure kk-nearest neighbor technique to distribute distinct keys to …

Untouchable Once Revoking: A Practical And Secure Dynamic Ehr Sharing System Via Cloud, Shengmin Xu, Jianting Ning, Xinyi Huang, Yingjiu Li, Guowen Xu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Healthcare Internet-of-Things (IoT) enables lightweight devices to observe patients’ vital signals and outsource them to a remote cloud to enjoy flexible data sharing. However, it faces many security threats as the outsourced data is no longer physically controlled by data owners, and the cloud that hosts the outsourced data is not fully trusted. Many privacy protection technologies have been adopted to solve this problem, among which cryptographic mechanisms have become one of the most promising tools. Unfortunately, current cryptographic mechanisms in healthcare IoT mainly suffer from the following challenges: 1) dynamic user groups for managing users’ accessibility; 2) efficient revocation …

Reliable Policy Updating Under Efficient Policy Hidden Fine-Grained Access Control Framework For Cloud Data Sharing, Zuobin Ying, Wenjie Jiang, Ximeng Liu, Shengmin Xu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) is one of the potent encryption paradigms in protecting data confidentiality in the cloud data sharing scenario. However, the access policy of the traditional CP-ABE is in plaintext form that reveals significant sensitive information of data owners and data visitors. To mitigate this problem, two approaches have been proposed in the literature. One is partially hidden, where the attributes in the access policy are divided into two parts: the plaintext attribute names and the hidden attribute values. The other approach fully hides the attributes in the access policy which, unfortunately, hinders efficient and correct decryption as …

Improving Experience Of Medical Abortion At Home In A Changing Therapeutic, Technological And Regulatory Landscape: A Realist Review, P Baraitser, C Free, Wv Norman, M Lewandowska, R Meiksin, Mj Palmer, R Scott, R French, K Wellings, A Ivory, G Wong

More Faculty of Health Research

Objective. To inform UK service development to support medical abortion at home, appropriate for person and context. Design. Realist review Setting/participants Peer-reviewed literature from 1 January 2000 to 9 December 2021, describing interventions or models of home abortion care. Participants included people seeking or having had an abortion. Interventions. Interventions and new models of abortion care relevant to the UK. Outcome measures. Causal explanations, in the form of context-mechanism-outcome configurations, to test and develop our realist programme theory. Results. We identified 12 401 abstracts, selecting 944 for full text assessment. Our final review included 50 papers. Medical abortion at home …

Are Training And Experience Adapting Evidence-Based Interventions Associated With Self-Efficacy And Attitudes? A Cross-Sectional Survey Of Students And Practitioners With Varying Levels Of Adaptation Experience, Cam Escoffery, Maya Foster, María E Fernández, Regine Haardörfer, Patricia Dolan Mullen

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Increasing use of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) in local settings will help reduce the research-practice gap and improve health equity. Because adaptation to new settings and populations is essential to effective EBI use, frameworks to guide practice are receiving more attention; most, however, only provide broad guidelines without instructions for making adaptations in practice. Therefore, practitioners may need additional training or technical assistance (TA) to implement and adapt EBIs. This study explores whether practitioners' and students' general EBI training or TA and level of adaptation experience are associated with self-efficacy in adapting EBIs and with attitudes toward EBI use. We analyzed …

Prevalent Multimorbidity Combinations Among Middle-Aged And Older Adults Seen In Community Health Centers, Ana R Quiñones, Steele H Valenzuela, Nathalie Huguet, Maria Ukhanova, Miguel Marino, Jennifer A Lucas, Jean O'Malley, Teresa D Schmidt, Robert Voss, Katherine Peak, Nathaniel T Warren, John Heintzman

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Multimorbidity (≥ 2 chronic diseases) is associated with greater disability and higher treatment burden, as well as difficulty coordinating self-management tasks for adults with complex multimorbidity patterns. Comparatively little work has focused on assessing multimorbidity patterns among patients seeking care in community health centers (CHCs).

OBJECTIVE: To identify and characterize prevalent multimorbidity patterns in a multi-state network of CHCs over a 5-year period.

DESIGN: A cohort study of the 2014-2019 ADVANCE multi-state CHC clinical data network. We identified the most prevalent multimorbidity combination patterns and assessed the frequency of patterns throughout a 5-year period as well as the demographic …

Tdap-Hpv Vaccination Bundling In The Usa: Trends, Predictors, And Implications For Vaccine Series Completion, Yenan Zhu, Chi-Fang Wu, Anna R Giuliano, Maria E Fernandez, Ana P Ortiz, Cecilia Ganduglia Cazaban, Ruosha Li, Ashish A Deshmukh, Kalyani Sonawane

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) promotes taking a 'bundling approach' (i.e., administering Tetanus, diphtheria toxoids, and acellular pertussis [Tdap] and human papillomavirus [HPV] vaccines in the same way and on the same day) for adolescent vaccinations. Recent trends and patterns in Tdap-HPV vaccination bundling in the USA remain undocumented. In addition, the implications of bundling Tdap-HPV vaccination for HPV vaccine series completion remain unknown. to address these critical knowledge gaps, we performed a retrospective study using a nationwide sample of privately insured adolescents (Optum's de-identified Clinformatics® Data Mart Database). Tdap-HPV vaccination bundling (per 100 Tdap vaccination encounters) …