bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Supporting Elderly Homecare with Smartwatches: Advantages and Drawbacks
Authors: Ehrler Frederic  , Lovis Christian
Published: February 2025

The demographic transition in industrialized countries leads to a growth of elderly population. This population is more prone to chronic diseases and puts an increasing pressure on the healthcare system. One way to reduce the cost associated to the support of this population is to improve its autonomy to keep it independent as long as possible. Many assistive technologies and environmental interventions can be implemented to achieve this goal. In this paper, we are looking at the advantages and drawbacks of smartwatches as a platform to support elderly at home. By doing a literature search and by performing expert interview, we have identified the advantages of this technology to insure the success of promising applications as well as the obstacles that should be gone beyond. Among the advantages, the ubiquity of smartwatches makes possible a continuous medical surveillance, harder to achieve with other devices. Moreover, the versatility of smartwatches provides an appropriate ground to implement a centralized platform providing multiples services facilitating elderly homecare. However, the physical constraints of the watches such as the tiny screen size, the small connectors and the limited power autonomy can be significant barriers to the adoption of these tools. In conclusion, beside the actual homecare system, improving the autonomy and the independence of elderly at home can be leveraged by a combination of environmental and assistive technologies. Smartwatches have definitively the potential to become close assistants to help elderly in their daily life. However, this will not be achieved without dedicating a significant effort in designing appropriate user interfaces and certainly dedicated hardware to respond to the constraints associated with potential physical and cognitive impairments.
Online Information Seeking for Cardiovascular Diseases: A Case Study from Mayo Clinic
Authors: Jadhav Ashutosh  , Wu Stephen  , Sheth Amit  , Pathak Jyotishman
Published: February 2025

The objective of this study is to understand the types of health information (health topics) that users search online for Cardiovascular Diseases, by performing categorization of health search queries (from Mayoclinic.com) using UMLS Metamap based on UMLS concepts and semantic types.
Virtual Patients in a Real Clinical Context using Augmented Reality: Impact on Antibiotics Prescription Behaviors
Authors: Nifakos Sokratis  , Zary Nabil
Published: February 2025

The research community has called for the development of effective educational interventions for addressing prescription behaviour since antimicrobial resistance remains a global health issue. Examining the potential to displace the educational process from Personal Computers to Mobile devices, in this paper we investigated a new method of integration of Virtual Patients into Mobile devices with augmented reality technology, enriching the practitioner's education in prescription behavior. Moreover, we also explored which information are critical during the prescription behavior education and we visualized these information on real context with augmented reality technology, simultaneously with a running Virtual Patient's scenario. Following this process, we set the educational frame of experiential knowledge to a mixed (virtual and real) environment.
Can Physicians Recognize Their Own Patients in De-identified Notes?
Authors: Meystre Stéphane  , Shen Shuying  , Hofmann Deborah  , Gundlapalli Adi
Published: February 2025

The adoption of Electronic Health Records is growing at a fast pace, and this growth results in very large quantities of patient clinical information becoming available in electronic format, with tremendous potentials, but also equally growing concern for patient confidentiality breaches. De-identification of patient information has been proposed as a solution to both facilitate secondary uses of clinical information, and protect patient information confidentiality. Automated approaches based on Natural Language Processing have been implemented and evaluated, allowing for much faster text de-identification than manual approaches. A U.S. Veterans Affairs clinical text de-identification project focused on investigating the current state of the art of automatic clinical text de-identification, on developing a best-of-breed de-identification application for clinical documents, and on evaluating its impact on subsequent text uses and the risk for re-identification. To evaluate this risk, we de-identified discharge summaries from 86 patients using our ‘best-of-breed’ text de-identification application with resynthesis of the identifiers detected. We then asked physicians working in the ward the patients were hospitalized in if they could recognize these patients when reading the de-identified documents. Each document was examined by at least one resident and one attending physician, and with 4.65% of the documents, physicians thought they recognized the patient because of specific clinical information, but after verification, none was correctly re-identified.
Ontology-based Diagnostic Decision Support in Radiology
Authors: Kahn Jr. Charles E.
Published: February 2025

The Radiology Gamuts Ontology (RGO) is a knowledge model of diseases, interventions, and imaging manifestations. RGO incorporates 16,822 terms with their synonyms and abbreviations and 55,393 relationships between terms. Subsumption defines the relationship between more general and more specific terms; causality relates disorders and their imaging manifestations. We explored the application of the RGO to build an interactive decision support system for radiological diagnosis. The Gamuts DDx system was created to apply the RGO's knowledge: it identifies a list of potential diagnoses in response to one or more user-specified imaging observations. The system also identifies a set of observations that allow one to narrow the diagnosis, and dynamically narrows or expands the list of diagnoses as imaging findings are selected or deselected. The functionality has been implemented as a web-based user interface and as a web service. The current work demonstrates the feasibility of exploiting the RGO's causal knowledge to provide interactive decision support for diagnosis of imaging findings. Ongoing efforts include the further development of the system's knowledge base and evaluation of the system in clinical use.
Context Mediated Usability Testing
Authors: Kuziemsky Craig E.  , Kushniruk Andre
Published: February 2025

Usability testing is an important part of health information technology HIT design. However, usability issues will vary by the contexts where a system is used. To date there are few studies that have described contextual factors of usability testing. This paper uses a case study of a surgical information system to develop a model of four contextual categories that impact usability testing. We discuss each of the contexts in detail and then suggest how they can be used to develop a general framework to enable better understanding of the role of context in usability testing and evaluation of HIT.
Evaluation of system quality of hospital information system: A case study on nurses' experiences
Authors: Sheikhtaheri Abbas  , Kimiafar Khalil  , Sarbaz Masoumeh
Published: February 2025

In this study, we aimed at measuring the nurses' experiences on the system quality of the hospital information system (HIS). This applied, cross-sectional study was conducted in a case hospital in Iran. We developed a three part questionnaire including demographic information, nurses' experiences and satisfaction about different factors of system quality of a HIS. We asked the participants to rate their responses using five-point Likert scale. A total of 120 questionnaires were sent out for all 120 eligible nurses, with 80 completed copies returned. The data was finally analyzed using descriptive statistics. Regarding the interface quality, the most of nurses (37.5%) stated that data entry through input devices was somewhat quick. We found that HIS developers should pay more attention to the technical aspects of HIS and their correspondence with the nurses' needs, especially in terms of documentation, online assistance, response time, system reliability and flexibility, integration with current and new duties, as well as ability of the system to prevent data lose and handle bugs.
Ontology for Autonomous Mobile Robot System
Authors: Zeshan Furkh  , Mohamad Radziah  , Ahmad Mohammad Nazir  , Hussain Syed Asad
Published: February 2025

In the dynamic environment of robots, the information of devices mounted on the robot may have alternative representations. Particularly, if the devices of the robot use different programming languages, operating platform and data management standards may restricts the ability of devices to interact with each other flawlessly. In order to handle such situations, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be used which can handle the complexity (different programming languages, operating platform and data standards) with the help of ontologies. Although the researchers working in the area of robots have achieved a big milestone in producing small, easily pluggable and energy-efficient sensors but still the research on the requirements like extensibility, correctness, modularity, relationship and activity monitoring is need to be researched in-order to achieve dynamicity and flexibility while managing heterogeneity complexity which restricts the ability of devices to interact with each other flawlessly. Therefore, for correct interaction among robot sensors and sharing of data between them, we have developed an robot ontology (OntAPIbot) for defining the formal specification of concepts in-order to reduce the heterogeneity and to facilitate the reasoning tools for correct knowledge interpretation and reuse.
A Probabilistic Logic to Reason about the Interaction between Knowledge and Social Commitments in MASs
Authors: Sultan Khalid  , Bentahar Jamal  , Marey Omar
Published: February 2025

In this paper, we develop a probabilistic approach to formally represent and reason about the interaction between knowledge and social commitments in Multi-Agent Systems (MASs). Unlike existent approaches that address social commitments within the scope of agent to agent, our approach considers commitments among multiple agents as well. In particular, we introduce a new logic called the probabilistic logic of knowledge and commitment (PCTLkc+). The logic we introduce combines a logic of knowledge and commitment (CTLKC+) with a probabilistic branching-time logic (PCTL). We then extend the resulting logic by adding further operators for the group knowledge and group commitment so that different flavors of the interaction between the two concepts can be nicely captured and reasoned about. A major contribution of this paper is the semantics of group social commitment, which has not been considered in the literature. Target systems are modeled using a new extended version of interpreted systems, a popular formal framework that models the communication between interacting agents and accounts for the uncertainty in MASs. The advancement of the proposed logic over existing logics lies in its expressiveness power that allows one to not only express knowledge and social commitments independently, but also express combinations between them in the presence of uncertainty when the scope of interacting agents goes beyond two.
A Framework for Improvement a Decision Tree Learning Algorithm Using K-NN
Authors: Kurematsu Masaki  , Hakura Jun  , Fujita Hamido
Published: February 2025

In this paper, we proposed a modified decision tree learning algorithm. In order to improve the traditional decision tree learning algorithm, we modified a predict phase though exists approached modified a learning phase. Our proposed approach makes a decision tree by a traditional decision tree learning algorithm and predicts new data items' class label by K-NN. The traditional decision tree learning algorithm predicts a class label based on the ratio of class labels in a leaf node. When it is not easy to classify data set according to class labels, leaf nodes includes a lot of data items and class labels. It causes to decrease the accuracy rate. However, it is difficult to prepare good training data set. So we used K-NN to predict a class label from data items in a leaf node. In order to evaluate our approach, we did an experiment using a part of open data sets from UCL learning repository. We compared our approach to ID3 which is one of traditional decision tree learning algorithms and K-NN in this experiment. Experimental result shows our approach is better than ID3 when the leaf nodes include a lot of data items. When the leaf nodes include some data items, our approach can perform like as ID3. So we can say that our approach is useful to modify a decision tree learning algorithm. We don't change a learning process so that our approach doesn't change the readability of a decision tree. In addition to, our approach is better than K-NN. We think that a decision tree works for K-NN as data cleaning. It says that our approach is useful for K-NN. Though we can show the advantage of our approach according to the experiment, there are some data items we can not predict correctly. In future, we have to evaluate experimental results and process in detail. We have to ascertain the cause of error. And we consider how to modify our approach to correct errors. It is likely that normalization is one of useful method. In addition to, we have to evaluate our new approach using some open data sets.
A Bi-metric and Fuzzy c-means Based Intelligent Stakeholder Quantification System for Value-based Software
Authors: Babar Muhammad Imran  , Ghazali Masitah  , Jawawi Dayang N.A.
Published: February 2025

Requirements engineering (RE) deals with the software requirements elicitation, validation and verification processes and implementation of elicited requirements. The RE process, for value-based software (VBS) development, is one of the highly complex and non-linear processes which mainly depends on the key stakeholders. VBS systems are extremely different from traditional systems due to their association with financial streams. There is a need of value-based RE practices. Stakeholders' analysis plays a vital role in the selection of critical stakeholders for RE phase in VBS development. Different stakeholders' identification and quantification (SIQ) approaches are presented by researchers in order to identify and quantify the stakeholders. The existing approaches are not uniform in terms of process activities and different stakeholders' attributes. Non-uniformity results in higher time consumption and higher complexity. The existing SIQ approaches are not suitable for current value-based RE practices. Hence, this research presents an intelligent decision support system for the VBS SIQP using stakeholder metrics and fuzzy logic. The data is finally divided into three clusters in order to select the highly prioritized stakeholders for VBS systems.
Ontology COKB for Designing Knowledge-based Systems
Authors: Do Nhon V.
Published: February 2025

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning is at the heart of the great challenge of Artificial Intelligence, especially knowledge-based systems, expert systems and intelligent problem solvers. There have been many models for knowledge such as logics, semantic networks, conceptual graphs, frames and classes. These models are useful tools to design the above systems. However, they are not suitable to represent knowledge in the domains of reality applications. Designing of the knowledge bases and the inference engines of those systems in practice requires representations in the form of ontologies. Ontologies are getting widespread attention as vehicles for sharing concepts within a distributed community, and for modeling domain knowledge. For applications such as the intelligent problem solver in plane geometry, the knowledge contains a complicated system of concepts, relations, operators, functions, and rules. This situation motivates an ontology-based solution with such components. In this article, an ontology, which is called Ontology of Computational Object Knowledge Base (COKB), will be presented in details. We also present a model for representing problems together reasoning algorithms for solving them, and design methods to construct applications. The above methodology has been used in designing some systems for solving problems such as systems for solving analytic geometry problems, solving problems in plane geometry, and the expert system for diabetic micro vascular complication diagnosis.
Bellmark Identification using SIFT Features
Authors: Daiki Yoshinaga  , Michihiro Kobayakawa  , Takeru Yokoi  , Mitsuru Iwata
Published: February 2025

Bellmark is well-known mark to recieve several educational supports in Japan. This paper shows performance of bellmark identification based on SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) features [1,2] using k-Nearest Neighbor Search (k-NNS) and random forests [12]. Experimental results of both using k-NNS and random forests show good performance for bellmark identification.
Managing Information and Knowledge in Malaysia's Flood Management: Towards a New Framework
Authors: Ahmad Mohammad Nazir  , Othman Marini  , Zakaria Nor Hidayati  , Mohd Rodzi Mohd Zuhaili
Published: February 2025

The management of knowledge is crucially influenced by how information is governed, managed and shared. In an emergency situation such as a disaster event, any proposed information and knowledge management solution – whether it be a technological-based solution or non-technological solution – should be based on a clear framework. Such a framework can range from a high-level conceptual model to a low-level conceptual model that governs the development of any technological solutions. With a focus on flood management in the Malaysian context, this paper attempts to develop a new framework for flood management that is derived from current problems in Malaysia's flood management and places an emphasis on information and knowledge management. Although the framework is still conceptual, it is sufficient to provide the foundation as a metamodel to ensure interoperability, information and knowledge sharing and also to assist the development and integration of IS/IT systems in supporting flood management. The framework also serves as a foundation for future quantitative and qualitative research that might confirm or disprove the patterns identified here.
Gradient Histogram Feature Based Ear Recognition Using Neural Network Classifier
Authors: Ifeanyi Ugbaga Nkole  , Sulong Ghazali  , Muhammed Shamsuddeen Sani
Published: February 2025

Owning to the rumpled nature of the human ear, creating wonderful hills and valleys biometric authors have shifted to ear biometric in the quest of establishing it to the likes of fingerprint, iris, and face based biometric system. This paper avail a little summary view of ear biometric till date and proposes the use of gradient histogram features for recognizing the ear. The ridges-like structure of human ear provides vital information which can aid for its recognition with or without any much enhancement processes. After the image is comfortably cropped to reduce background noise from the hair, the image is further enhancement to remove some spike of noise that could cause the failure of the proposed method since allowing undesired information going into for processing will be erroneously expensive. Furthermore, the gradient of the enhanced image is computed and subsequently its Gradient Histogram (GH) is built. A dimensional reduction technique Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to reduce the feature vector space presented by the gradient histogram. Using Multilayer Feed Forward (MLFF) Neural Network classifier, the experimental result showed 100% recognition accuracy on USTB ear database.
Redefining Game Engine Architecture through Concurrency
Authors: Mohebali Ali  , Chiew Thiam Kian
Published: February 2025

Over the past 30 years, software developers have been conveniently taking advantage of hardware performance increase, giving little consideration to internal architecture changes of the hardware like central processing unit. In the years to come, these hardware architectural changes will affect software architectures and can no longer be ignored. This is especially true for real-time applications, which tend to push the limits of hardware and take the most advantage of available resources. As a result, computer game applications which are inherently real-time and known for pushing computer hardware boundaries will not be immune. By studying the concepts of concurrency, multithreading and multi-core CPU technology, this paper redefines the existing linear architecture of game engines as a generic concurrent and multi-core friendly architecture. Major game engine modules and their inter-dependencies are identified in order to design the new architecture. A sample game was developed to evaluate the performance of the proposed architecture. The comparison of the test results provided in this paper indicates noticeable improvements in the concurrent architecture over the conventional linear approach.
Applying *AIDA programs as educational materials
Authors: Watanobe Yutaka  , Mirenkov Nikolay  , Watanabe Mirai
Published: February 2025

*AIDA is a language supporting programming in pictures. Programming in pictures is an approach whereby pictures and animation are used as super-characters for representing features of computational algorithms and data structures, as well as for explaining models and application methods involved. In this paper, some features of *AIDA programs are discussed and how these features can be applied for educational goals oriented to users with little programming experience. Special attention is paid to algorithmic dynamics explanations based on animations and to template programs supporting the implementation of this dynamics.
Resolution-Based Grounded Semantics Revisited
Authors: Dvořák Wolfgang  , Linsbichler Thomas  , Oikarinen Emilia  , Woltran Stefan
Published: February 2025

The resolution-based grounded semantics constitutes one of the most interesting approaches for the evaluation of abstract argumentation frameworks. This particular semantics satisfies a large number of desired properties, among them all properties proposed by Baroni and Giacomin. In recent years, the analysis of argumentation semantics has been extended by further topics, among them characterizations for equivalence notions, intertranslatability issues, and expressibility in terms of signatures (all possible sets of extensions a semantics is capable to express). In this line of research, resolution-based grounded semantics has been neglected so far. We close this gap here, compare the expressibility of resolution-based grounded semantics with other prominent semantics, provide a characterization for strong equivalence and complement existing complexity results.
A self-correcting iteration schema for argumentation networks
Authors: Gabbay D.M.  , Rodrigues O.
Published: February 2025

Given an argumentation network with initial values to the arguments, we look for a numerical algorithm yielding extensions compatible with such initial values. We offer an iteration schema that takes the initial values of the nodes and follows the attack relation producing a sequence of intermediate values that eventually becomes stable leading to an extension in the limit. The schema can be used in abstract as well as in abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs).
Counterfactual Reasoning in Argumentation Frameworks
Authors: Sakama Chiaki
Published: February 2025

In a formal argumentation framework, one is interested in whether a particular argument is accepted or not under argumentation semantics. When an argument A is accepted, on the other hand, one may ask a question “what if A were rejected?” We formulate such counterfactual reasoning in abstract argumentation frameworks. Based on Lewis's logic, we define two counterfactual conditionals in AF and investigate formal properties. We also argue counterfactual dependencies in AF and modal interpretation of AF in terms of counterfactual conditionals.
An ASPIC-based legal argumentation framework for deontic reasoning
Authors: van der Torre Leendert  , Villata Serena
Published: February 2025

In the last years, argumentation theory has been exploited to reason about norms, argue about enforced obligations and permissions, and establish the validity of norms seen as argumentative claims. In this paper, we start from the dynamic legal argumentation framework recently proposed by Prakken and Sartor, and we extend their ASPIC-based system by introducing deontic modalities, to include also normative concepts like factual and deontic detachment, and normative dynamics. Properties of the original and proposed legal argumentation system are presented and discussed, and related to deontic logic and logics of normative systems.
Aspect-Oriented Ontologies: Dynamic Modularization Using Ontological Metamodeling
Authors: Schäfermeier Ralph  , Paschke Adrian
Published: February 2025

In this paper, we propose a dynamic and flexible approach to ontology modularization inspired by the aspect-oriented programming paradigm in software development. Aspect-oriented programming provides formalisms for encapsulating a software system's functionality in self-contained modules, where each module represents a single requirement, along with meta-information on how to recombine the modules at runtime. The recombination requires second-order reasoning, but it can be shown that it is sufficient to interpret the second-order constructs under a Henkin semantics, reducing the problem to first-order logic. We demonstrate the applicability of the approach to the problem of modular ontologies by presenting a proof-of concept implementation for aspect-oriented OWL 2 ontologies. Furthermore, we show that the approach can be used as a substitute for metamodeling and may be helpful in preventing expensive refactoring operations in certain ontology integration scenarios.
The unique Predication of Knowledge Elements and their Visualization and Factorization in Ontology Engineering
Authors: Bense Hermann
Published: February 2025

In knowledge representation nowadays there exists no common notation which is used to attach designations and meanings to knowledge elements. E.g. the name painting can stand either for the class painting or for the object property (relation) painting which assigns paintings to their painters. For a clear distinction typically syntactical overhead is needed. In OWL/XML-Syntax this would be  . Therefore a set of special characters is introduced, which in combination with a name allows to uniquely designate different types of knowledge elements with the same name like ˆPainting (class) or <>Painting (relation). The character combination >> is used to designate n-ary relationships like >>Nikolaus_Kopernikus-Belief. Using this designation conventions, we propose the notation of an Ontological Graph (OG), which is powerful enough to visualize data models, semantic networks, conceptual roles, formulas, process models, situations, taxonomies etc. Based on the type of knowledge elements, nodes have specific colors and shapes and can be enriched by graphical elements, images and hypertext links. OGs allow for a kind of visual thinking and support to develop, debug, document and visualize knowledge faster, easier and more consistently. Finally we present an approach for a predication system (LPS), which allows to attach unique predicators to knowledge elements based on Leibniz characteristic numbers (LCN). This allows to construct, designate and retrieve knowledge elements from primitive ones by means of factorization e.g. creature = living#body, which means, that we can support search by meaning.
Bootstrapping of a Multilingual Transliteration Dictionary for European Languages
Authors: Pinnis Mārcis
Published: February 2025

Transliteration dictionaries are an important resource for the development of machine transliteration systems. The paper describes and analyses a large multilingual transliteration dictionary extracted from probabilistic dictionaries for 24 European languages containing approximately 1.25 million transliterated word pairs. The transliteration dictionary is evaluated: 1) manually for the Latvian-English language pair and 2) automatically within a statistical machine translation based transliteration task for all 23 language pairs.
Development of the Corpus of Estonian Adolescent Speech
Authors: Meister Lya  , Meister Einar
Published: February 2025

The paper presents the work in progress on the development of the Corpus of Estonian Adolescent Speech. The corpus comprises speech recordings of native subjects between 9 and 18 years of age recorded in several public schools in different dialect regions of Estonia. It will include samples from 300 subjects balanced by gender and age. Preliminary analysis of F0 provides new information on voice development of adolescent subjects.
Understanding color trends by means of non-monotone utility functions
Authors: Ghaderi Mohammad  , Ruiz Francisco J.  , Agell Núria
Published: February 2025

In this paper we explore the possibility of capturing color trends and understanding the rationale behind the popularity of a color. To this end, we propose using a preference disaggregation approach from the field of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. The main objective is to identify the criteria aggregation model that underlies the global preference of a color. We introduce a new disaggregation method based on the well-known UTASTAR algorithm able to represent preferences by means of non-monotonic utility functions. The method is applied to a large database of ranked colors, from three different years, based on the information published on the webpage of an international creative community. Non-monotone marginal utility functions from each of the coordinates are obtained for each year. These functions contain the color preference information captured, in an understandable way.
Analysis of Gabor-Based Texture Features for the Identification of Breast Tumor Regions in Mammograms
Authors: Torrents-Barrena Jordina  , Puig Domenec  , Ferre Maria  , Melendez Jaime  , Marti Joan  , Valls Aida
Published: February 2025

Breast cancer is one of the most common neoplasms in women and it is a leading cause of worldwide death. However, it is also among the most curable cancer types if it can be diagnosed early through a proper mammographic screening procedure. So, suitable computer aided detection systems can help the radiologists to detect many subtle signs, normally missed during the first visual examination. This study proposes a Gabor filtering method for the extraction of textural features by multi-sized evaluation windows applied to the four probabilistic distribution moments. Then, an adaptive strategy for data selection is used to eliminate the most irrelevant pixels. Finally, a pixel-based classification step is applied by using Support Vector Machines in order to identify the tumor pixels. During this part we also estimate the appropriate kernel parameters to obtain an accurate configuration for the four existing kernels. Experiments have been conducted on different training-test partitions of mini-MIAS database, which is commonly used among researchers who apply machine learning methods for breast cancer diagnosis. The improved performance of our framework is evaluated using several measures: classification accuracy, positive and negative predictive values, receiver operating characteristic curves and confusion matrix.
About model-based distances
Authors: Mattioli Gabriel
Published: February 2025

The literature of any scientifical field is full of models. In this work it will be shown how every model defines a distance function in a natural way. This distance is much more suitable for specific problems than the ones usually used (generally Euclidean or Manhattan), because its directly related with the particular problem and does not has to be chosen arbitrarily.
Defining Dimensions in Expertise Recommender Systems for Enhancing Open Collaborative Innovation
Authors: Nguyen J.  , Pereda A.  , Sánchez-Hernández G.  , Angulo C.
Published: February 2025

In open innovation a firm's R&D crosses not only internal boundaries but disciplines. It is an interactive process of knowledge generation and transfer between internal and external firms. Despite the assistance of open innovation marketplaces, the process of matching seekers and solvers remains a challenge. Expertise recommender systems in an open innovation marketplace can facilitate finding the “right partner”. With this aim, a list of appropriated dimensions to be considered for the expertise recommender system are defined. An illustrative example is also provided.
Learning by demonstration applied to underwater intervention
Authors: Carrera Arnau  , Palomeras Narcís  , Hurtós Natàlia  , Kormushev Petar  , Carreras Marc
Published: February 2025

Performing subsea intervention tasks is a challenge due to the complexities of the underwater domain. We propose to use a learning by demonstraition algorithm to intuitively teach an intervention autonomous underwater vehicle (I-AUV) how to perform a given task. Taking as an input few operator demonstrations, the algorithm generalizes the task into a model and simultaneously controls the vehicle and the manipulator (using 8 degrees of freedom) to reproduce the task. A complete framework has been implemented in order to integrate the LbD algorithm with the different onboard sensors and actuators. A valve turning intervention task is used to validate the full framework through real experiments conducted in a water tank.
Assessing user engagement in a health promotion website using social networking
Authors: Tague Rhys  , Maeder Anthony J.  , Vandelanotte Corneel  , Kolt Gregory S.  , Caperchione Cristina M.  , Rosenkranz Richard R.  , Savage Trevor N.  , Van Itallie Anetta
Published: February 2025

Remote provision of supportive mechanisms for preventive health is a fast-growing area in eHealth. Web-based interventions have been suggested as an effective way to increase adoption and maintenance of healthy lifestyle behaviours. This paper describes results obtained in the “Walk 2.0” trial to promote physical activity through a self-managed walking programme, using a social networking website that provided an online collaborative environment. Engagement of participants with the website was assessed by monitoring usage of the individual social networking functions (e.g. status post). The results demonstrate that users generally preferred contributing non-interactive public posts of information concerned with their individual physical activity levels, and more occasionally communicating privately to friends. Further analysis of topics within posts was done by classifying word usage frequencies. Results indicated that the dominant topics are well aligned with the social environment within which physical activity takes place. Topics centred around four main areas: description of the activity, timing of the activity, affective response to the activity, and context within which the activity occurs. These findings suggest that strong levels of user awareness and communication occur in the social networking setting, indicative of beneficial self-image and self-actualisation effects.
Data Marketplaces: An Emerging Species
Authors: Stahl Florian  , Schomm Fabian  , Vossen Gottfried
Published: February 2025

Trading data as a commodity has become increasingly popular. To obtain a better understanding of the emerging area of data marketplaces, we have conducted two surveys to systematically gather and evaluate their characteristics. This paper essentially continues and enhances a survey we conducted in 2012; it describes our findings from a second round done in 2013. Our study shows that the market is vivid with numerous exits and changes in its core business. We try to identify trends in this young field and explain them. Most notably, there is a definite trend towards high quality data.
A Survey on Selectivity Estimation for Preference Database Queries
Authors: Endres Markus
Published: February 2025

Skyline query processing and the more general preference queries become reality in current database systems. Preference queries select those tuples from a database that are optimal with respect to a set of designated preference attributes. In a Skyline query these preferences only refer to minimum and maximum, whereas the more general approach of preference queries allow a more granular specification of user wishes as well as the specification of the relative importance of individual preferences. The incorporation of preferences into practical relational database engines necessitates an efficient and effective selectivity estimation module: A better understanding of the preference selectivity is useful for better design of algorithms and necessary to extend a database query optimizer's cost model to accommodate preference queries. This paper presents a survey on selectivity and cardinality estimation for arbitrary preference queries. The paper presents current approaches and discusses their advantages and disadvantages, such that one could decide which model should be used in a database engine to estimate optimization costs.
New investigations of butt-jointed precast and in-situ concrete columns
Authors: Wolff Daniel  , Koob Manuel  , Blatt Markus  , Minnert Jens
Published: February 2025

The butt joint of the longitudinal reinforcement is the common way of joint for precast and in-situ concrete columns. The stresses, which occur in the joint area of butt-jointed columns out of normal strength up to high strength concrete and steel plate or end-face reinforcement, can be described very exactly nowadays. Design concepts as well as proposals for detailing are also available. However, still cases occur in practice for which the present design concept and engineering model is not applicable. At the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen experimental investigations were carried out in order to determine the load-bearing capacity of butt-jointed columns with change of cross-section and misalignment of longitudinal reinforcement bars. The test specimens with change of cross-section reached at least 90 % of the load-bearing capacity of a column with continuous longitudinal reinforcement. Specimens with additional misalignment of the reinforcement bars reached clearly smaller failure loads. Further investigations are necessary to specify the stresses in the joint area of such columns.
Embedded LCA information in BIM models
Authors: Díaz Joaquín  , Álvarez Antón Laura  , Anis Kareem Tarek
Published: February 2025

Construction industry, as it is well known, is one of the industries with the highest negative impacts on the environment concerning the amount of emissions generation and resources consumption. A major percentage of these generated emissions are a result of the massive amounts of different materials utilized and consumed during the different phases of construction processes. Targeting sustainable performance achievement, construction industry has to improve its behavior towards the environment, following the footsteps of other industries. Advanced technological solutions such as BIM and LCA can drive the construction industry towards achieving sustainability. These tools can improve the process of materials selection, alternatives comparison, etc, in order to follow sustainability principles. The creation of a link between LCA and BIM, as it is going to be explained, provides an easy and direct access to the information regarding environmental impacts of the different elements included in the proposed design. Therefore, this information can be considered during decision-making in the early project phases.
Experimental research on mechanical properties of engineered cementitious composites
Authors: Li Guoyou  , Huo Liang  , Zhang Tao  , Yao Hang
Published: February 2025

Engineered cementitious composites (ECC) with the excellent tensile strain capacity was made of domestic raw materials except PVA-fiber. The effect of water-binder ratio, fiber content and silica fume content on the mechanical properties was investigated in this paper. While the ECC microstructure was also investigated by Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The results showed that high water-binder ratio and larger amount of PVA-fiber will help to improve tensile property of ECC with adding a moderate amount of silica fume. While the compressive strength of ECC was 35.4 MPa to 57.6 MPa, the tensile strain capacity attended to 2.59% to 4.77%. SEM analysis showed that large amount of spherical non-hydrated fly ash could improve the matrix and fiber interface structure. The water-binder ratio has a great effect on the structure compactness of the hydration products and fiber abrasion degrees.
Use of crushed brick aggregate in structural concrete: properties and performance
Authors: Paul Sunanda  , Dey Gopinandan
Published: February 2025

A comprehensive test program was conducted to investigate upon the use of crushed brick aggregate in structural concrete. In Tripura, a tiny state in the North-eastern India and some places of West Bengal, India and in Bangladesh where there is a scarcity of natural stone aggregates, burnt clay bricks are used as a potential source of coarse aggregate and performance of concrete made with broken brick as coarse aggregate has been found quite extensive and satisfactory (M.A. Rashid et al.). But the current designs for brick aggregate concrete are based on existing nominal mix concrete codes for natural stone aggregates and experience. The presented paper depicts an effort to establish a proper mix design procedure which would satisfy the requirements of using such aggregate whereas the Indian Standard code of recommended guidelines for concrete mix design suggests only the use of naturally occurring crushed or uncrushed aggregates. Based on physical standard and strength criteria, a comparative study was conducted among concrete properties made with brick aggregate in different saturation conditions as well as with natural stone aggregate. Test results were satisfactory for strength criteria and suggestions are proposed to promote the suitability of using crushed brick aggregate in concrete for structural use.
Cementless concrete using ceramic waste powder
Authors: El-Dieb Amr S.  , Shehab Ehab E.
Published: February 2025

Concrete is the main construction material worldwide. The cement production is well known to significantly contribute to the world carbon dioxide emission, around 7% of the global green-house gas produced annually. Worldwide the replacement of cement by supplementary cementing materials has been used as a step to reduce the consumption of cement quantities in concrete mixtures. Geopolymer concrete represents a new alternative in making concrete by utilizing materials mainly composed of silica and alumina which could be alkali-activated to form a CaO-free alumino-silicate binder. Different materials were used in producing geopolymer concrete such as fly ash, metakaolin and slag. The ceramic industry produces significant amount of ceramic waste powder. The ceramic waste powder is characterized by its high percentage of silica (SiO2) and alumina (Al2O3), which is more than 70%. It represents a potential material to be utilized in making geopolymer concrete. In this study, ceramic waste powder was used in a preliminary investigation to produce geopolymer concrete. The study investigated the effect of using sodium hydroxide as alkali activation solution, the pH concentration of the alkali solution (i.e. 8M, 10M, 12M, 14M and 16M) and applying curing temperature of 60oC. Compressive strength, water absorption, electrical resistivity and microstructure of the produced geopolymer were investigated. Preliminary results showed that ceramic waste powder represents a very good potential to be used in producing cementless concrete.
Influence of curing time and compaction on black cotton soil stabilized with fly ash, ground-granulated blast furnace slag and lime
Authors: Maneli A.  , Kupolati W.K.  , Ndambuki J.M.  , Abiola O.S.
Published: February 2025

The influence of curing time and compaction efforts on black cotton soil stabilized with optimum percentages of two industrial wastes activated with lime were evaluated in this paper. Fly ash (FA), ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS) and lime at 12%, 8% and 1-9% respectively were used to stabilize black cotton soil in accordance to South Africa standards. Atterberg's limit, compaction and California bearing ratio (CBR) tests were conducted on the specimens. All the mixtures were compacted at optimum moisture content to different degrees of compaction and cured for 7, 28, 60 and 90 days before testing. The result showed that stabilized soil with 12% FA, 8% GGBFS and 6% lime improved the soil to be used as subgrade material. Both maximum dry density and optimum density increases as lime increased up to 6% and then decreased. It was observed that for all the curing days, there is an increase in CBR values as the compaction increased. The 60thday of curing at 100% modified AASHTO compaction effort produced the highest CBR value while the lowest CBR was recorded at 28 days at 90% compaction.
Infrared thermography as a diagnostic tool for subsurface assessments of concrete structures
Authors: Scott Matthew  , Kruger Deon
Published: February 2025

This paper presents on-going research into the application of infrared (IR) thermography as a means of diagnosing the presence of delaminations in concrete structures. Infrared thermography, as a diagnostic tool, has demonstrated the potential to detect and visually display areas of delamination in concrete structures, offering a feasible supplement to the traditional techniques used for delamination surveys. However, the thermal gradients that develop in the concrete, and that are essential for the detection of the delaminations, are the result of the prevailing ambient conditions that surround the structure. Depending on the nature of these conditions, certain delaminations may be more visible than others while some may not be visible at all. Solar radiation has a significant effect on these thermal gradients and consequently, the temperature contrasts that develop between the areas of delaminated and intact concrete. This paper addresses the effect that solar radiation has on the ability of infrared thermography to detect and reveal areas of delamination in concrete structures. This effect has been studied by quantifying the temperature contrasts that developed at the surface of a concrete panel into which delamination type defects were intentionally embedded at different depths.
Fighting Organized Crime Through Open Source Intelligence: Regulatory Strategies of the CAPER Project
Authors: Casanovas Pompeu  , Arraiza Juan  , Melero Felipe  , González-Conejero Jorge  , Molcho Gila  , Cuadros Montse
Published: February 2025

OSINT stands for Open Source Intelligence. The CAPER project has built an OSINT solution oriented to the prevention of organised crime. We offer in this paper an overall view of some results, embedding into the system legal and ethical issues raised by the General Data Reform Package (GDRP) in Europe. We briefly describe CAPER architecture, workflow, functionalities, modules and ontologies (European LEAs Interoperability ELIO, and Multi-Lingual Crime Ontology MCO). This paper is focused on the indirect strategy to flesh out Privacy by Design principles (PbD) through the Caper Regulatory Model (CRM).
Two Faces of Strategic Argumentation in the Law
Authors: Governatori Guido  , Olivieri Francesco  , Rotolo Antonino  , Scannapieco Simone  , Sartor Giovanni
Published: February 2025

In strategic argumentation players exchange arguments to prove or reject a claim. This paper discusses and reports on research about two basic issues regarding the game-theoretic understanding of strategic argumentation games in the law: whether such games can be reasonably modelled as zero-sum games and as games with complete information.