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In clinical settings, significant resources are spent on data collection and monitoring patients' health parameters to improve decision-making and provide better care. With increased digitization, the healthcare sector is shifting towards implementing digital technologies for data management and in administration. New technologies offer better treatment opportunities and streamline clinical workflow, but the complexity can cause ineffectiveness, frustration, and errors. To address this, we believe digital solutions alone are not sufficient. Therefore, we take a human-centred design approach for AI development, and apply systems engineering methods to identify system leverage points. We demonstrate how automation enables monitoring clinical parameters, using existing non-intrusive sensor technology, resulting in more resources toward patient care. Furthermore, we provide a framework on digitization of clinical data for integration with data management.
Background:
Childhood and adolescence are critical stages of life for mental health and well-being. Schools are a key setting for mental health promotion and illness prevention. One in five children and adolescents have a mental disorder, about half of mental disorders beginning before the age of 14. Beneficial and explainable artificial intelligence can replace current paper- based and online approaches to school mental health surveys. This can enhance data acquisition, interoperability, data driven analysis, trust and compliance. This paper presents a model for using chatbots for non-obtrusive data collection and supervised machine learning models for data analysis; and discusses ethical considerations pertaining to the use of these models.
Methods:
For data acquisition, the proposed model uses chatbots which interact with students. The conversation log acts as the source of raw data for the machine learning. Pre-processing of the data is automated by filtering for keywords and phrases.
Existing survey results, obtained through current paper-based data collection methods, are evaluated by domain experts (health professionals). These can be used to create a test dataset to validate the machine learning models. Supervised learning
can then be deployed to classify specific behaviour and mental health patterns.
Results:
We present a model that can be used to improve upon current paper-based data collection and manual data analysis methods. An open-source GitHub repository contains necessary tools and components of this model. Privacy is respected through
rigorous observance of confidentiality and data protection requirements. Critical reflection on these ethics and law aspects is included in the project.
Conclusions:
This model strengthens mental health surveillance in schools. The same tools and components could be applied to other public health data. Future extensions of this model could also incorporate unsupervised learning to find clusters and patterns
of unknown effects.
In order to achieve their business goals, organizations heavily rely on the operational excellence of their business processes. In traditional scenarios, business processes are usually well-structured, clearly specifying when and how certain tasks have to be executed. Flexible and knowledge-intensive processes are gathering momentum, where a knowledge worker drives the execution of a process case and determines the exact process path at runtime. In the case of an exception, the knowledge worker decides on an appropriate handling. While there is initial work on exception handling in well-structured business processes, exceptions in case management have not been sufficiently researched. This paper proposes an exception handling framework for stage-oriented case management languages, namely Guard Stage Milestone Model, Case Management Model and Notation, and Fragment-based Case Management. The effectiveness of the framework is evaluated with two real-world use cases showing that it covers all relevant exceptions and proposed handling strategies.
A business process is a set of steps designed to be executed in a certain order to achieve a business value. Such processes are often driven by and documented using process models. Nowadays, process models are also applied to drive process execution. Thus, correctness of business process models is a must. Much of the work has been devoted to check general, domain-independent correctness criteria, such as soundness. However, business processes must also adhere to and show compliance with various regulations and constraints, the so-called compliance requirements. These are domain-dependent requirements.
In many situations, verifying compliance on a model level is of great value, since violations can be resolved in an early stage prior to execution. However, this calls for using formal verification techniques, e.g., model checking, that are too complex for business experts to apply. In this paper, we utilize a visual language. BPMN-Q to express compliance requirements visually in a way similar to that used by business experts to build process models. Still, using a pattern based approach, each BPMN-Qgraph has a formal temporal logic expression in computational tree logic (CTL). Moreover, the user is able to express constraints, i.e., compliance rules, regarding control flow and data flow aspects. In order to provide valuable feedback to a user in case of violations, we depend on temporal logic querying approaches as well as BPMN-Q to visually highlight paths in a process model whose execution causes violations.
Network Topology Discovery and Inventory Listing are two of the primary features of modern network monitoring systems (NMS). Current NMSs rely heavily on active scanning techniques for discovering and mapping network information. Although this approach works, it introduces some major drawbacks such as the performance impact it can exact, specially in larger network environments. As a consequence, scans are often run less frequently which can result in stale information being presented and used by the network monitoring system. Alternatively, some NMSs rely on their agents being deployed on the hosts they monitor. In this article, we present a new approach to Network Topology Discovery and Network Inventory Listing using only passive monitoring and scanning techniques. The proposed techniques rely solely on the event logs produced by the hosts and network devices present within a network. Finally, we discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of our approach.
The engineering of digital twins and their user interaction parts with explicated processes, namely processaware digital twin cockpits (PADTCs), is challenging due to the complexity of the systems and the need for information from different disciplines within the engineering process. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate how to facilitate their engineering by using already existing data, namely event logs, and reducing the number of manual steps for their engineering. Current research lacks systematic, automated approaches to derive process-aware digital twin cockpits even though some helpful techniques already exist in the areas of process mining and software engineering. Within this paper, we present a low-code development approach that reduces the amount of hand-written code needed and uses process mining techniques to derive PADTCs. We describe what models could be derived from event log data, which generative steps are needed for the engineering of PADTCs, and how process mining could be incorporated into the resulting application. This process is evaluated using the MIMIC III dataset for the creation of a PADTC prototype for an automated hospital transportation system. This approach can be used for early prototyping of PADTCs as it needs no hand-written code in the first place, but it still allows for the iterative evolvement of the application. This empowers domain experts to create their PADTC prototypes.
In recent years, the increased interest in application areas such as social networks has resulted in a rising popularity of graph-based approaches for storing and processing large amounts of interconnected data. To extract useful information from the growing network structures, efficient querying techniques are required.
In this paper, we propose an approach for graph pattern matching that allows a uniform handling of arbitrary constraints over the query vertices. Our technique builds on a previously introduced matching algorithm, which takes concrete host graph information into account to dynamically adapt the employed search plan during query execution. The dynamic algorithm is combined with an existing static approach for search plan generation, resulting in a hybrid technique which we further extend by a more sophisticated handling of filtering effects caused by constraint checks. We evaluate the presented concepts empirically based on an implementation for our graph pattern matching tool, the Story Diagram Interpreter, with queries and data provided by the LDBC Social Network Benchmark. Our results suggest that the hybrid technique may improve search efficiency in several cases, and rarely reduces efficiency.
Kyub
(2019)
We present an interactive editing system for laser cutting called kyub. Kyub allows users to create models efficiently in 3D, which it then unfolds into the 2D plates laser cutters expect. Unlike earlier systems, such as FlatFitFab, kyub affords construction based on closed box structures, which allows users to turn very thin material, such as 4mm plywood, into objects capable of withstanding large forces, such as chairs users can actually sit on. To afford such sturdy construction, every kyub project begins with a simple finger-joint "boxel"-a structure we found to be capable of withstanding over 500kg of load. Users then extend their model by attaching additional boxels. Boxels merge automatically, resulting in larger, yet equally strong structures. While the concept of stacking boxels allows kyub to offer the strong affordance and ease of use of a voxel-based editor, boxels are not confined to a grid and readily combine with kuyb's various geometry deformation tools. In our technical evaluation, objects built with kyub withstood hundreds of kilograms of loads. In our user study, non-engineers rated the learnability of kyub 6.1/7.
We present Pycket, a high-performance tracing JIT compiler for Racket. Pycket supports a wide variety of the sophisticated features in Racket such as contracts, continuations, classes, structures, dynamic binding, and more. On average, over a standard suite of benchmarks, Pycket outperforms existing compilers, both Racket's JIT and other highly-optimizing Scheme compilers. Further, Pycket provides much better performance for Racket proxies than existing systems, dramatically reducing the overhead of contracts and gradual typing. We validate this claim with performance evaluation on multiple existing benchmark suites.
The Pycket implementation is of independent interest as an application of the RPython meta-tracing framework (originally created for PyPy), which automatically generates tracing JIT compilers from interpreters. Prior work on meta-tracing focuses on bytecode interpreters, whereas Pycket is a high-level interpreter based on the CEK abstract machine and operates directly on abstract syntax trees. Pycket supports proper tail calls and first-class continuations. In the setting of a functional language, where recursion and higher-order functions are more prevalent than explicit loops, the most significant performance challenge for a tracing JIT is identifying which control flows constitute a loop-we discuss two strategies for identifying loops and measure their impact.
Selfish Network Creation focuses on modeling real world networks from a game-theoretic point of view. One of the classic models by Fabrikant et al. (2003) is the network creation game, where agents correspond to nodes in a network which buy incident edges for the price of alpha per edge to minimize their total distance to all other nodes. The model is well-studied but still has intriguing open problems. The most famous conjectures state that the price of anarchy is constant for all alpha and that for alpha >= n all equilibrium networks are trees. We introduce a novel technique for analyzing stable networks for high edge-price alpha and employ it to improve on the best known bound for the latter conjecture. In particular we show that for alpha > 4n - 13 all equilibrium networks must be trees, which implies a constant price of anarchy for this range of alpha. Moreover, we also improve the constant upper bound on the price of anarchy for equilibrium trees.
Unique column combinations (UCCs) are a fundamental concept in relational databases. They identify entities in the data and support various data management activities. Still, UCCs are usually not explicitly defined and need to be discovered. State-of-the-art data profiling algorithms are able to efficiently discover UCCs in moderately sized datasets, but they tend to fail on large and, in particular, on wide datasets due to run time and memory limitations. <br /> In this paper, we introduce HPIValid, a novel UCC discovery algorithm that implements a faster and more resource-saving search strategy. HPIValid models the metadata discovery as a hitting set enumeration problem in hypergraphs. In this way, it combines efficient discovery techniques from data profiling research with the most recent theoretical insights into enumeration algorithms. Our evaluation shows that HPIValid is not only orders of magnitude faster than related work, it also has a much smaller memory footprint.
Multi-column dependencies in relational databases come associated with two different computational tasks. The detection problem is to decide whether a dependency of a certain type and size holds in a given database, the discovery problem asks to enumerate all valid dependencies of that type. We settle the complexity of both of these problems for unique column combinations (UCCs), functional dependencies (FDs), and inclusion dependencies (INDs). We show that the detection of UCCs and FDs is W[2]-complete when parameterized by the solution size. The discovery of inclusion-wise minimal UCCs is proven to be equivalent under parsimonious reductions to the transversal hypergraph problem of enumerating the minimal hitting sets of a hypergraph. The discovery of FDs is equivalent to the simultaneous enumeration of the hitting sets of multiple input hypergraphs. We further identify the detection of INDs as one of the first natural W[3]-complete problems. The discovery of maximal INDs is shown to be equivalent to enumerating the maximal satisfying assignments of antimonotone, 3-normalized Boolean formulas.
A standard approach to accelerating shortest path algorithms on networks is the bidirectional search, which explores the graph from the start and the destination, simultaneously. In practice this strategy performs particularly well on scale-free real-world networks. Such networks typically have a heterogeneous degree distribution (e.g., a power-law distribution) and high clustering (i.e., vertices with a common neighbor are likely to be connected themselves). These two properties can be obtained by assuming an underlying hyperbolic geometry. <br /> To explain the observed behavior of the bidirectional search, we analyze its running time on hyperbolic random graphs and prove that it is (O) over tilde (n(2-1/alpha) + n(1/(2 alpha)) + delta(max)) with high probability, where alpha is an element of (1/2, 1) controls the power-law exponent of the degree distribution, and dmax is the maximum degree. This bound is sublinear, improving the obvious worst-case linear bound. Although our analysis depends on the underlying geometry, the algorithm itself is oblivious to it.
The importance of reporting is ever increasing in today's fast-paced market environments and the availability of up-to-date information for reporting has become indispensable. Current reporting systems are separated from the online transaction processing systems (OLTP) with periodic updates pushed in. A pre-defined and aggregated subset of the OLTP data, however, does not provide the flexibility, detail, and timeliness needed for today's operational reporting. As technology advances, this separation has to be re-evaluated and means to study and evaluate new trends in data storage management have to be provided. This article proposes a benchmark for combined OLTP and operational reporting, providing means to evaluate the performance of enterprise data management systems for mixed workloads of OLTP and operational reporting queries. Such systems offer up-to-date information and the flexibility of the entire data set for reporting. We describe how the benchmark provokes the conflicts that are the reason for separating the two workloads on different systems. In this article, we introduce the concepts, logical data schema, transactions and queries of the benchmark, which are entirely based on the original data sets and real workloads of existing, globally operating enterprises.
Technology pivots were designed to help digital startups make adjustments to the technology underpinning their products and services. While academia and the media make liberal use of the term "technology pivot," they rarely align themselves to Ries' foundational conceptualization. Recent research suggests that a more granulated conceptualization of technology pivots is required. To scientifically derive a comprehensive conceptualization, we conduct a Delphi study with a panel of 38 experts drawn from academia and practice to explore their understanding of "technology pivots." Our study thus makes an important contribution to advance the seminal work by Ries on technology pivots.
Data encoding has been applied to database systems for decades as it mitigates bandwidth bottlenecks and reduces storage requirements. But even in the presence of these advantages, most in-memory database systems use data encoding only conservatively as the negative impact on runtime performance can be severe. Real-world systems with large parts being infrequently accessed and cost efficiency constraints in cloud environments require solutions that automatically and efficiently select encoding techniques, including heavy-weight compression. In this paper, we introduce workload-driven approaches to automaticaly determine memory budget-constrained encoding configurations using greedy heuristics and linear programming. We show for TPC-H, TPC-DS, and the Join Order Benchmark that optimized encoding configurations can reduce the main memory footprint significantly without a loss in runtime performance over state-of-the-art dictionary encoding. To yield robust selections, we extend the linear programming-based approach to incorporate query runtime constraints and mitigate unexpected performance regressions.
How inclusive are we?
(2022)
ACM SIGMOD, VLDB and other database organizations have committed to fostering an inclusive and diverse community, as do many other scientific organizations. Recently, different measures have been taken to advance these goals, especially for underrepresented groups. One possible measure is double-blind reviewing, which aims to hide gender, ethnicity, and other properties of the authors. <br /> We report the preliminary results of a gender diversity analysis of publications of the database community across several peer-reviewed venues, and also compare women's authorship percentages in both single-blind and double-blind venues along the years. We also obtained a cross comparison of the obtained results in data management with other relevant areas in Computer Science.
Precision oncology is a rapidly evolving interdisciplinary medical specialty. Comprehensive cancer panels are becoming increasingly available at pathology departments worldwide, creating the urgent need for scalable cancer variant annotation and molecularly informed treatment recommendations. A wealth of mainly academia-driven knowledge bases calls for software tools supporting the multi-step diagnostic process. We derive a comprehensive list of knowledge bases relevant for variant interpretation by a review of existing literature followed by a survey among medical experts from university hospitals in Germany. In addition, we review cancer variant interpretation tools, which integrate multiple knowledge bases. We categorize the knowledge bases along the diagnostic process in precision oncology and analyze programmatic access options as well as the integration of knowledge bases into software tools. The most commonly used knowledge bases provide good programmatic access options and have been integrated into a range of software tools. For the wider set of knowledge bases, access options vary across different parts of the diagnostic process. Programmatic access is limited for information regarding clinical classifications of variants and for therapy recommendations. The main issue for databases used for biological classification of pathogenic variants and pathway context information is the lack of standardized interfaces. There is no single cancer variant interpretation tool that integrates all identified knowledge bases. Specialized tools are available and need to be further developed for different steps in the diagnostic process.
Correction to: Knowledge bases and software support for variant interpretation in precision oncology
(2021)
Model transformation is one of the key tasks in model-driven engineering and relies on the efficient matching and modification of graph-based data structures; its sibling graph rewriting has been used to successfully model problems in a variety of domains. Over the last years, a wide range of graph and model transformation tools have been developed all of them with their own particular strengths and typical application domains. In this paper, we give a survey and a comparison of the model and graph transformation tools that participated at the Transformation Tool Contest 2011. The reader gains an overview of the field and its tools, based on the illustrative solutions submitted to a Hello World task, and a comparison alongside a detailed taxonomy. The article is of interest to researchers in the field of model and graph transformation, as well as to software engineers with a transformation task at hand who have to choose a tool fitting to their needs. All solutions referenced in this article provide a SHARE demo. It supported the peer-review process for the contest, and now allows the reader to test the tools online.
In this paper, we introduce an alternative approach to Temporal Answer Set Programming that relies on a variation of Temporal Equilibrium Logic (TEL) for finite traces. This approach allows us to even out the expressiveness of TEL over infinite traces with the computational capacity of (incremental) Answer Set Programming (ASP). Also, we argue that finite traces are more natural when reasoning about action and change. As a result, our approach is readily implementable via multi-shot ASP systems and benefits from an extension of ASP's full-fledged input language with temporal operators. This includes future as well as past operators whose combination offers a rich temporal modeling language. For computation, we identify the class of temporal logic programs and prove that it constitutes a normal form for our approach. Finally, we outline two implementations, a generic one and an extension of the ASP system clingo.
Under consideration for publication in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)
With the advent of big data and data lakes, data are often integrated from multiple sources. Such integrated data are often of poor quality, due to inconsistencies, errors, and so forth. One way to check the quality of data is to infer functional dependencies (fds). However, in many modern applications it might be necessary to extract properties and relationships that are not captured through fds, due to the necessity to admit exceptions, or to consider similarity rather than equality of data values. Relaxed fds (rfds) have been introduced to meet these needs, but their discovery from data adds further complexity to an already complex problem, also due to the necessity of specifying similarity and validity thresholds. We propose Domino, a new discovery algorithm for rfds that exploits the concept of dominance in order to derive similarity thresholds of attribute values while inferring rfds. An experimental evaluation on real datasets demonstrates the discovery performance and the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.
In the smallest grammar problem, we are given a word w and we want to compute a preferably small context-free grammar G for the singleton language {w} (where the size of a grammar is the sum of the sizes of its rules, and the size of a rule is measured by the length of its right side). It is known that, for unbounded alphabets, the decision variant of this problem is NP-hard and the optimisation variant does not allow a polynomial-time approximation scheme, unless P = NP. We settle the long-standing open problem whether these hardness results also hold for the more realistic case of a constant-size alphabet. More precisely, it is shown that the smallest grammar problem remains NP-complete (and its optimisation version is APX-hard), even if the alphabet is fixed and has size of at least 17. The corresponding reduction is robust in the sense that it also works for an alternative size-measure of grammars that is commonly used in the literature (i. e., a size measure also taking the number of rules into account), and it also allows to conclude that even computing the number of rules required by a smallest grammar is a hard problem. On the other hand, if the number of nonterminals (or, equivalently, the number of rules) is bounded by a constant, then the smallest grammar problem can be solved in polynomial time, which is shown by encoding it as a problem on graphs with interval structure. However, treating the number of rules as a parameter (in terms of parameterised complexity) yields W[1]-hardness. Furthermore, we present an O(3(vertical bar w vertical bar)) exact exponential-time algorithm, based on dynamic programming. These three main questions are also investigated for 1-level grammars, i. e., grammars for which only the start rule contains nonterminals on the right side; thus, investigating the impact of the "hierarchical depth" of grammars on the complexity of the smallest grammar problem. In this regard, we obtain for 1-level grammars similar, but slightly stronger results.
Background:
Early reports indicate that AKI is common among patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and associatedwith worse outcomes. However, AKI among hospitalized patients with COVID19 in the United States is not well described.
Methods:
This retrospective, observational study involved a review of data from electronic health records of patients aged >= 18 years with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 admitted to the Mount Sinai Health System from February 27 to May 30, 2020. We describe the frequency of AKI and dialysis requirement, AKI recovery, and adjusted odds ratios (aORs) with mortality.
Results:
Of 3993 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, AKI occurred in 1835 (46%) patients; 347 (19%) of the patientswith AKI required dialysis. The proportionswith stages 1, 2, or 3 AKIwere 39%, 19%, and 42%, respectively. A total of 976 (24%) patients were admitted to intensive care, and 745 (76%) experienced AKI. Of the 435 patients with AKI and urine studies, 84% had proteinuria, 81% had hematuria, and 60% had leukocyturia. Independent predictors of severe AKI were CKD, men, and higher serum potassium at admission. In-hospital mortality was 50% among patients with AKI versus 8% among those without AKI (aOR, 9.2; 95% confidence interval, 7.5 to 11.3). Of survivors with AKI who were discharged, 35% had not recovered to baseline kidney function by the time of discharge. An additional 28 of 77 (36%) patients who had not recovered kidney function at discharge did so on posthospital follow-up.
Conclusions:
AKI is common among patients hospitalized with COVID-19 and is associated with high mortality. Of all patients with AKI, only 30% survived with recovery of kidney function by the time of discharge.
Large real-world networks typically follow a power-law degree distribution. To study such networks, numerous random graph models have been proposed. However, real-world networks are not drawn at random. Therefore, Brach et al. (27th symposium on discrete algorithms (SODA), pp 1306-1325, 2016) introduced two natural deterministic conditions: (1) a power-law upper bound on the degree distribution (PLB-U) and (2) power-law neighborhoods, that is, the degree distribution of neighbors of each vertex is also upper bounded by a power law (PLB-N). They showed that many real-world networks satisfy both properties and exploit them to design faster algorithms for a number of classical graph problems. We complement their work by showing that some well-studied random graph models exhibit both of the mentioned PLB properties. PLB-U and PLB-N hold with high probability for Chung-Lu Random Graphs and Geometric Inhomogeneous Random Graphs and almost surely for Hyperbolic Random Graphs. As a consequence, all results of Brach et al. also hold with high probability or almost surely for those random graph classes. In the second part we study three classical NP-hard optimization problems on PLB networks. It is known that on general graphs with maximum degree Delta, a greedy algorithm, which chooses nodes in the order of their degree, only achieves a Omega (ln Delta)-approximation forMinimum Vertex Cover and Minimum Dominating Set, and a Omega(Delta)-approximation forMaximum Independent Set. We prove that the PLB-U property with beta>2 suffices for the greedy approach to achieve a constant-factor approximation for all three problems. We also show that these problems are APX-hard even if PLB-U, PLB-N, and an additional power-law lower bound on the degree distribution hold. Hence, a PTAS cannot be expected unless P = NP. Furthermore, we prove that all three problems are in MAX SNP if the PLB-U property holds.
SensorHub
(2022)
Observational studies are an important tool for determining whether the findings from controlled experiments can be transferred into scenarios that are closer to subjects' real-life circumstances. A rigorous approach to observational studies involves collecting data from different sensors to comprehensively capture the situation of the subject. However, this leads to technical difficulties especially if the sensors are from different manufacturers, as multiple data collection tools have to run simultaneously. We present SensorHub, a system that can collect data from various wearable devices from different manufacturers, such as inertial measurement units, portable electrocardiographs, portable electroencephalographs, portable photoplethysmographs, and sensors for electrodermal activity. Additionally, our tool offers the possibility to include ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) in studies. Hence, SensorHub enables multimodal sensor data collection under real-world conditions and allows direct user feedback to be collected through questionnaires, enabling studies at home. In a first study with 11 participants, we successfully used SensorHub to record multiple signals with different devices and collected additional information with the help of EMAs. In addition, we evaluated SensorHub's technical capabilities in several trials with up to 21 participants recording simultaneously using multiple sensors with sampling frequencies as high as 1000 Hz. We could show that although there is a theoretical limitation to the transmissible data rate, in practice this limitation is not an issue and data loss is rare. We conclude that with modern communication protocols and with the increasingly powerful smartphones and wearables, a system like our SensorHub establishes an interoperability framework to adequately combine consumer-grade sensing hardware which enables observational studies in real life.
Detection of the QRS complex is a long-standing topic in the context of electrocardiography and many algorithms build upon the knowledge of the QRS positions. Although the first solutions to this problem were proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, there is still potential for improvements. Advancements in neural network technology made in recent years also lead to the emergence of enhanced QRS detectors based on artificial neural networks. In this work, we propose a method for assessing the certainty that is in each of the detected QRS complexes, i.e. how confident the QRS detector is that there is, in fact, a QRS complex in the position where it was detected. We further show how this metric can be utilised to distinguish correctly detected QRS complexes from false detections.
Creation, collection and retention of knowledge in digital communities is an activity that currently requires being explicitly targeted as a secure method of keeping intellectual capital growing in the digital era. In particular, we consider it relevant to analyze and evaluate the empathetic cognitive personalities and behaviors that individuals now have with the change from face-to-face communication (F2F) to computer-mediated communication (CMC) online. This document proposes a cyber-humanistic approach to enhance the traditional SECI knowledge management model. A cognitive perception is added to its cyclical process following design thinking interaction, exemplary for improvement of the method in which knowledge is continuously created, converted and shared. In building a cognitive-centered model, we specifically focus on the effective identification and response to cognitive stimulation of individuals, as they are the intellectual generators and multiplicators of knowledge in the online environment. Our target is to identify how geographically distributed-digital-organizations should align the individual's cognitive abilities to promote iteration and improve interaction as a reliable stimulant of collective intelligence. The new model focuses on analyzing the four different stages of knowledge processing, where individuals with sympathetic cognitive personalities can significantly boost knowledge creation in a virtual social system. For organizations, this means that multidisciplinary individuals can maximize their extensive potential, by externalizing their knowledge in the correct stage of the knowledge creation process, and by collaborating with their appropriate sympathetically cognitive remote peers.
Polygenic risk scores (PRS) aggregating results from genome-wide association studies are the state of the art in the prediction of susceptibility to complex traits or diseases, yet their predictive performance is limited for various reasons, not least of which is their failure to incorporate the effects of gene-gene interactions. Novel machine learning algorithms that use large amounts of data promise to find gene-gene interactions in order to build models with better predictive performance than PRS. Here, we present a data preprocessing step by using data-mining of contextual information to reduce the number of features, enabling machine learning algorithms to identify gene-gene interactions. We applied our approach to the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) dataset, an observational clinical study of 471 genotyped subjects (368 cases and 152 controls). With an AUC of 0.85 (95% CI = [0.72; 0.96]), the interaction-based prediction model outperforms the PRS (AUC of 0.58 (95% CI = [0.42; 0.81])). Furthermore, feature importance analysis of the model provided insights into the mechanism of Parkinson's disease. For instance, the model revealed an interaction of previously described drug target candidate genes TMEM175 and GAPDHP25. These results demonstrate that interaction-based machine learning models can improve genetic prediction models and might provide an answer to the missing heritability problem.
An unceasing problem of our prevailing society is the fair division of goods. The problem of proportional cake cutting focuses on dividing a heterogeneous and divisible resource, the cake, among n players who value pieces according to their own measure function. The goal is to assign each player a not necessarily connected part of the cake that the player evaluates at least as much as her proportional share. <br /> In this article, we investigate the problem of proportional division with unequal shares, where each player is entitled to receive a predetermined portion of the cake. Our main contribution is threefold. First we present a protocol for integer demands, which delivers a proportional solution in fewer queries than all known protocols. By giving a matching lower bound, we then show that our protocol is asymptotically the fastest possible. Finally, we turn to irrational demands and solve the proportional cake cutting problem by reducing it to the same problem with integer demands only. All results remain valid in a highly general cake cutting model, which can be of independent interest.
In the stable marriage problem, a set of men and a set of women are given, each of whom has a strictly ordered preference list over the acceptable agents in the opposite class. A matching is called stable if it is not blocked by any pair of agents, who mutually prefer each other to their respective partner. Ties in the preferences allow for three different definitions for a stable matching: weak, strong and super-stability. Besides this, acceptable pairs in the instance can be restricted in their ability of blocking a matching or being part of it, which again generates three categories of restrictions on acceptable pairs. Forced pairs must be in a stable matching, forbidden pairs must not appear in it, and lastly, free pairs cannot block any matching.
Our computational complexity study targets the existence of a stable solution for each of the three stability definitions, in the presence of each of the three types of restricted pairs. We solve all cases that were still open. As a byproduct, we also derive that the maximum size weakly stable matching problem is hard even in very dense graphs, which may be of independent interest.
FIBER
(2021)
Objectives:
The development of clinical predictive models hinges upon the availability of comprehensive clinical data. Tapping into such resources requires considerable effort from clinicians, data scientists, and engineers. Specifically, these efforts are focused on data extraction and preprocessing steps required prior to modeling, including complex database queries. A handful of software libraries exist that can reduce this complexity by building upon data standards. However, a gap remains concerning electronic health records (EHRs) stored in star schema clinical data warehouses, an approach often adopted in practice. In this article, we introduce the FlexIBle EHR Retrieval (FIBER) tool: a Python library built on top of a star schema (i2b2) clinical data warehouse that enables flexible generation of modeling-ready cohorts as data frames.
Materials and Methods:
FIBER was developed on top of a large-scale star schema EHR database which contains data from 8 million patients and over 120 million encounters. To illustrate FIBER's capabilities, we present its application by building a heart surgery patient cohort with subsequent prediction of acute kidney injury (AKI) with various machine learning models.
Results:
Using FIBER, we were able to build the heart surgery cohort (n = 12 061), identify the patients that developed AKI (n = 1005), and automatically extract relevant features (n = 774). Finally, we trained machine learning models that achieved area under the curve values of up to 0.77 for this exemplary use case.
Conclusion:
FIBER is an open-source Python library developed for extracting information from star schema clinical data warehouses and reduces time-to-modeling, helping to streamline the clinical modeling process.
Phe2vec
(2021)
Robust phenotyping of patients from electronic health records (EHRs) at scale is a challenge in clinical informatics. Here, we introduce Phe2vec, an automated framework for disease phenotyping from EHRs based on unsupervised learning and assess its effectiveness against standard rule-based algorithms from Phenotype KnowledgeBase (PheKB). Phe2vec is based on pre-computing embeddings of medical concepts and patients' clinical history. Disease phenotypes are then derived from a seed concept and its neighbors in the embedding space. Patients are linked to a disease if their embedded representation is close to the disease phenotype. Comparing Phe2vec and PheKB cohorts head-to-head using chart review, Phe2vec performed on par or better in nine out of ten diseases. Differently from other approaches, it can scale to any condition and was validated against widely adopted expert-based standards. Phe2vec aims to optimize clinical informatics research by augmenting current frameworks to characterize patients by condition and derive reliable disease cohorts.
Interacting services play a key role to realize business process integration among different business partners by means of electronic message exchange. In order to provide seamless integration of these services, the messages exchanged as well as their dependencies must be well-defined. Service choreographies are a means to describe the allowed conversations. This article presents a requirements framework for service choreography languages, along which existing choreography languages are assessed. The requirements framework provides the basis for introducing the language BPEL4Chor, which extends the industry standard WS-BPEL with choreography-specific concepts. A validation is provided and integration with executable service orchestrations is discussed.
Process instantiation
(2009)
Although several process modeling languages allow one to specify processes with multiple start elements, the precise semantics of such models are often unclear, both from a pragmatic and from a theoretical point of view. This paper addresses the lack of research on this problem and introduces the CASU framework (from Creation, Activation, subscription, Unsubscription). The contribution of this framework is a systematic description of design alternatives for the specification of instantiation semantics of process modeling languages. We classify six prominent languages by the help of this framework. We validate the relevance of the CASU framework through empirical investigations involving a large set of process models from practice. Our work provides the basis for the design of new correctness criteria as well as for the formalization of Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) and extension of the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). It complements research such as the workflow patterns.
With the rise of electronic integration between organizations, the need for a precise specification of interaction behavior increases. Information systems, replacing interaction previously carried out by humans via phone, faxes and emails, require a precise specification for handling all possible situations. Such interaction behavior is described in process choreographies. While many proposals for choreography languages have already been made, most of them fall into the category of interconnection models, where the observable behavior of the different partners is described and then related via message flow. As this article will show, this modeling approach fails to support fundamental design principles of choreographies and typically leads to modeling errors. This motivates an alternative modeling style, namely interaction modeling, for overcoming these limitations. While the main concepts are independent of a concrete modeling language, iBPMN is introduced as novel interaction modeling language. Formal execution semantics are provided and a comprehensive toolset implementing the approach is presented.
3D point cloud technology facilitates the automated and highly detailed acquisition of real-world environments such as assets, sites, and countries. We present a web-based system for the interactive exploration and inspection of arbitrary large 3D point clouds. Our approach is able to render 3D point clouds with billions of points using spatial data structures and level-of-detail representations. Point-based rendering techniques and post-processing effects are provided to enable task-specific and data-specific filtering, e.g., based on semantics. A set of interaction techniques allows users to collaboratively work with the data (e.g., measuring distances and annotating). Additional value is provided by the system’s ability to display additional, context-providing geodata alongside 3D point clouds and to integrate processing and analysis operations. We have evaluated the presented techniques and in case studies and with different data sets from aerial, mobile, and terrestrial acquisition with up to 120 billion points to show their practicality and feasibility.
3D point clouds are a digital representation of our world and used in a variety of applications. They are captured with LiDAR or derived by image-matching approaches to get surface information of objects, e.g., indoor scenes, buildings, infrastructures, cities, and landscapes. We present novel interaction and visualization techniques for heterogeneous, time variant, and semantically rich 3D point clouds. Interactive and view-dependent see-through lenses are introduced as exploration tools to enhance recognition of objects, semantics, and temporal changes within 3D point cloud depictions. We also develop filtering and highlighting techniques that are used to dissolve occlusion to give context-specific insights. All techniques can be combined with an out-of-core real-time rendering system for massive 3D point clouds. We have evaluated the presented approach with 3D point clouds from different application domains. The results show the usability and how different visualization and exploration tasks can be improved for a variety of domain-specific applications.
Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are randomized search heuristics that create a probabilistic model of the solution space, which is updated iteratively, based on the quality of the solutions sampled according to the model. As previous works show, this iteration-based perspective can lead to erratic updates of the model, in particular, to bit-frequencies approaching a random boundary value. In order to overcome this problem, we propose a new EDA based on the classic compact genetic algorithm (cGA) that takes into account a longer history of samples and updates its model only with respect to information which it classifies as statistically significant. We prove that this significance-based cGA (sig-cGA) optimizes the commonly regarded benchmark functions OneMax (OM), LeadingOnes, and BinVal all in quasilinear time, a result shown for no other EDA or evolutionary algorithm so far. For the recently proposed stable compact genetic algorithm-an EDA that tries to prevent erratic model updates by imposing a bias to the uniformly distributed model-we prove that it optimizes OM only in a time exponential in its hypothetical population size. Similarly, we show that the convex search algorithm cannot optimize OM in polynomial time.
A simplified run time analysis of the univariate marginal distribution algorithm on LeadingOnes
(2021)
With elementary means, we prove a stronger run time guarantee for the univariate marginal distribution algorithm (UMDA) optimizing the LEADINGONES benchmark function in the desirable regime with low genetic drift. If the population size is at least quasilinear, then, with high probability, the UMDA samples the optimum in a number of iterations that is linear in the problem size divided by the logarithm of the UMDA's selection rate. This improves over the previous guarantee, obtained by Dang and Lehre (2015) via the deep level-based population method, both in terms of the run time and by demonstrating further run time gains from small selection rates. Under similar assumptions, we prove a lower bound that matches our upper bound up to constant factors.
One of the first and easy to use techniques for proving run time bounds for evolutionary algorithms is the so-called method of fitness levels by Wegener. It uses a partition of the search space into a sequence of levels which are traversed by the algorithm in increasing order, possibly skipping levels. An easy, but often strong upper bound for the run time can then be derived by adding the reciprocals of the probabilities to leave the levels (or upper bounds for these). Unfortunately, a similarly effective method for proving lower bounds has not yet been established. The strongest such method, proposed by Sudholt (2013), requires a careful choice of the viscosity parameters gamma(i), j, 0 <= i < j <= n. In this paper we present two new variants of the method, one for upper and one for lower bounds. Besides the level leaving probabilities, they only rely on the probabilities that levels are visited at all. We show that these can be computed or estimated without greater difficulties and apply our method to reprove the following known results in an easy and natural way. (i) The precise run time of the (1+1) EA on LEADINGONES. (ii) A lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on ONEMAX, tight apart from an O(n) term. (iii) A lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on long k-paths (which differs slightly from the previous result due to a small error in the latter). We also prove a tighter lower bound for the run time of the (1+1) EA on jump functions by showing that, regardless of the jump size, only with probability O(2(-n)) the algorithm can avoid to jump over the valley of low fitness.
While many optimization problems work with a fixed number of decision variables and thus a fixed-length representation of possible solutions, genetic programming (GP) works on variable-length representations. A naturally occurring problem is that of bloat, that is, the unnecessary growth of solution lengths, which may slow down the optimization process. So far, the mathematical runtime analysis could not deal well with bloat and required explicit assumptions limiting bloat.
In this paper, we provide the first mathematical runtime analysis of a GP algorithm that does not require any assumptions on the bloat. Previous performance guarantees were only proven conditionally for runs in which no strong bloat occurs. Together with improved analyses for the case with bloat restrictions our results show that such assumptions on the bloat are not necessary and that the algorithm is efficient without explicit bloat control mechanism.
More specifically, we analyzed the performance of the (1 + 1) GP on the two benchmark functions ORDER and MAJORITY. When using lexicographic parsimony pressure as bloat control, we show a tight runtime estimate of O(T-init + nlogn) iterations both for ORDER and MAJORITY. For the case without bloat control, the bounds O(T-init logT(i)(nit) + n(logn)(3)) and Omega(T-init + nlogn) (and Omega(T-init log T-init) for n = 1) hold for MAJORITY(1).
We contribute to the theoretical understanding of randomized search heuristics by investigating their optimization behavior on satisfiable random k-satisfiability instances both in the planted solution model and the uniform model conditional on satisfiability. Denoting the number of variables by n, our main technical result is that the simple () evolutionary algorithm with high probability finds a satisfying assignment in time when the clause-variable density is at least logarithmic. For low density instances, evolutionary algorithms seem to be less effective, and all we can show is a subexponential upper bound on the runtime for densities below . We complement these mathematical results with numerical experiments on a broader density spectrum. They indicate that, indeed, the () EA is less efficient on lower densities. Our experiments also suggest that the implicit constants hidden in our main runtime guarantee are low. Our main result extends and considerably improves the result obtained by Sutton and Neumann (Lect Notes Comput Sci 8672:942-951, 2014) in terms of runtime, minimum density, and clause length. These improvements are made possible by establishing a close fitness-distance correlation in certain parts of the search space. This approach might be of independent interest and could be useful for other average-case analyses of randomized search heuristics. While the notion of a fitness-distance correlation has been around for a long time, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that fitness-distance correlation is explicitly used to rigorously prove a performance statement for an evolutionary algorithm.
Duplicate detection algorithms produce clusters of database records, each cluster representing a single real-world entity. As most of these algorithms use pairwise comparisons, the resulting (transitive) clusters can be inconsistent: Not all records within a cluster are sufficiently similar to be classified as duplicate. Thus, one of many subsequent clustering algorithms can further improve the result. <br /> We explain in detail, compare, and evaluate many of these algorithms and introduce three new clustering algorithms in the specific context of duplicate detection. Two of our three new algorithms use the structure of the input graph to create consistent clusters. Our third algorithm, and many other clustering algorithms, focus on the edge weights, instead. For evaluation, in contrast to related work, we experiment on true real-world datasets, and in addition examine in great detail various pair-selection strategies used in practice. While no overall winner emerges, we are able to identify best approaches for different situations. In scenarios with larger clusters, our proposed algorithm, Extended Maximum Clique Clustering (EMCC), and Markov Clustering show the best results. EMCC especially outperforms Markov Clustering regarding the precision of the results and additionally has the advantage that it can also be used in scenarios where edge weights are not available.
TPC-H continues to be the most widely used benchmark for relational OLAP systems. It poses a number of challenges, also known as "choke points", which database systems have to solve in order to achieve good benchmark results. Examples include joins across multiple tables, correlated subqueries, and correlations within the TPC-H data set. Knowing the impact of such optimizations helps in developing optimizers as well as in interpreting TPC-H results across database systems.
This paper provides a systematic analysis of choke points and their optimizations. It complements previous work on TPC-H choke points by providing a quantitative discussion of their relevance. It focuses on eleven choke points where the optimizations are beneficial independently of the database system. Of these, the flattening of subqueries and the placement of predicates have the biggest impact. Three queries (Q2, Q17, and Q21) are strongly ifluenced by the choice of an efficient query plan; three others (Q1, Q13, and Q18) are less influenced by plan optimizations and more dependent on an efficient execution engine.
From face to face
(2019)
Despite advances in the conceptualisation of facial mimicry, its role in the processing of social information is a matter of debate. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between mimicry and cognitive and emotional empathy. To assess mimicry, facial electromyography was recorded for 70 participants while they completed the Multifaceted Empathy Test, which presents complex context-embedded emotional expressions. As predicted, inter-individual differences in emotional and cognitive empathy were associated with the level of facial mimicry. For positive emotions, the intensity of the mimicry response scaled with the level of state emotional empathy. Mimicry was stronger for the emotional empathy task compared to the cognitive empathy task. The specific empathy condition could be successfully detected from facial muscle activity at the level of single individuals using machine learning techniques. These results support the view that mimicry occurs depending on the social context as a tool to affiliate and it is involved in cognitive as well as emotional empathy.