Search results for "REM"
showing 10 items of 11264 documents
Genetic Factors as Promising Biomarkers of Sporadic Ascending Aortic Aneurysm
2014
Thoracic aorta shows various changes with advancing age and a progressive deterioration in structure and function. As a result, vascular remodeling (VR) and medial degeneration (MD) occur. VR and MD are typical entities of sporadic thoracic aortic aneurysm (TAA), actually considered a common and serious health risk and a pathology by unclear mechanisms. Increased activity of the coagulation system, inflammation, activation of extracellular matrix remodeling and endothelial dysfunction pathways have been recently evidenced to have a key role in its onset. Thus, polymorphisms of the coagulation system [fibrinogen (rs1800790); Factor II ( rs1799963); Factor V (rs6025); Factor VII (rs121964926)…
How many longitudinal covariate measurements are needed for risk prediction?
2014
Abstract Objective In epidemiologic follow-up studies, many key covariates, such as smoking, use of medication, blood pressure, and cholesterol, are time varying. Because of practical and financial limitations, time-varying covariates cannot be measured continuously, but only at certain prespecified time points. We study how the number of these longitudinal measurements can be chosen cost-efficiently by evaluating the usefulness of the measurements for risk prediction. Study Design and Setting The usefulness is addressed by measuring the improvement in model discrimination between models using different amounts of longitudinal information. We use simulated follow-up data and the data from t…
Seeking Technical Debt in Critical Software Development Projects : An Exploratory Field Study
2016
In recent years, the metaphor of technical debt has received considerable attention, especially from the agile community. Still, despite the fact that agile practices are increasingly used in critical domains, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies investigating the occurrence of technical debt in critical software development projects. The results of an exploratory field study conducted across several projects reveal that a variety of business and environmental factors cause the occurrence of technical debt in critical domains. Using Grounded Theory method, these factors are categorized as ambiguity of requirement, diversity of projects, inadequate knowledge management, and res…
Remote Attestation of Software and Execution-Environment in Modern Machines
2015
The research on network security concentrates mainly on securing the communication channels between two endpoints, which is insufficient if the authenticity of one of the endpoints cannot be determined with certainty. Previously presented methods that allow one endpoint, the authentication authority, to authenticate another remote machine. These methods are inadequate for modern machines that have multiple processors, introduce virtualization extensions, have a greater variety of side effects, and suffer from nondeterminism. This paper addresses the advances of modern machines with respect to the method presented by Kennell. The authors describe how a remote attestation procedure, involving…
Design principles for collaboration platforms for open education
2015
Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings. We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect insights from potential users of such…
Biomass estimator for NIR image with a few additional spectral band images taken from light UAS
2012
A novel way to produce biomass estimation will offer possibilities for precision farming. Fertilizer prediction maps can be made based on accurate biomass estimation generated by a novel biomass estimator. By using this knowledge, a variable rate amount of fertilizers can be applied during the growing season. The innovation consists of light UAS, a high spatial resolution camera, and VTT's novel spectral camera. A few properly selected spectral wavelengths with NIR images and point clouds extracted by automatic image matching have been used in the estimation. The spectral wavelengths were chosen from green, red, and NIR channels.
Collaborative EA Information Elicitation Method : The IEM for Business Architecture
2015
This study contributes to the enterprise architecture (EA) methodologies by suggesting a method for eliciting architecture requirements: gathering both the current architecture information, and the development needs and requirements for the business architecture (BA) dimension in EA planning. Most of all EA dimensions, the developing of the BA requires collaboration with various non-IT stakeholders. It presents thus challenges to the IT department, or the consultancy involved in EA related efforts. The contribution of the various stakeholder groups as informants is, however, crucial to well founded EA design decisions. The suggested method takes related IS development fields as starting poi…
User experience targets as design drivers:A case study on the development of a remote crane operator station
2013
In recent years, the notion of user experience, or UX, as an essential aspect to be addressed in the design and development of technologies has been increasingly discussed. In this paper, we present a case study in which we have used UX targets as the main design drivers and focus areas in developing a new remote operator station user interface for container cranes. UX targets describe the experiential qualities to which the product design should aim at. However, taking UX targets into consideration during product design is challenging, because only little is known about how they would be best operationalized to serve the different phases of the design process. Through our case study, we de…
Super-fit and population size reduction in compact Differential Evolution
2011
Although Differential Evolution is an efficient and versatile optimizer, it has a wide margin of improvement. During the latest years much effort of computer scientists studying Differential Evolution has been oriented towards the improvement of the algorithmic paradigm by adding and modifying components. In particular, two modifications lead to important improvements to the original algorithmic performance. The first is the super-fit mechanism, that is the injection at the beginning of the optimization process of a solution previously improved by another algorithm. The second is the progressive reduction of the population size during the evolution of the population. Recently, the algorithm…
Quality Management in Service Desk : How Does Service Desk Managers Define and Measure Quality
2018
Many public and private sector organisations are depending on IT services provided by external service providers. The quality of the service affects the customer satisfaction and consequently the customer behaviour. The concept of quality has many meanings in the literature. In this paper, we study how service desk managers perceive the concept of quality and how to manage it in an organisation which has adopted ITIL. Our findings indicate that the quality is seen only in terms of how the agreed service levels are achieved. This view excludes the quality of the processes used to deliver IT services. Quality measurements are reflecting the perception of the concept of quality. peerReviewed