Search results for "artificial intelligence"
showing 10 items of 6122 documents
Hospital performance: Efficiency or quality? Can we have both with IT?
2015
This paper explores influence of IT investment on hospital efficiency and quality.There is a direct effect of IT investment on service quality in hospitals.There is a moderating effect of quality on operational efficiency in hospitals.There is a U-shaped relationship between IT investments and operational efficiency.IT investments have diminishing returns beyond a certain point. The influence of IT investment on hospital efficiency and quality are of great interest to healthcare executives as well as insurers. Few studies have examined how IT investments influence both efficiency and quality or whether there is an optimal IT investment level that influences both in the desired direction. De…
Fuzzy-neural Web switch supporting differentiated service
2006
New designs of the Web switches must incorporate a client-and-server-aware adaptive dispatching algorithm to be able to optimize multiple static and dynamic services providing quality of service and service differentiation. This paper presents such an algorithm called FNRD (Fuzzy-Neural Request Distribution) which operates at layer-7 of the OSI protocol stack. This algorithm assigns each incoming request to the server with the least expected response time estimated using the fuzzy approach. FNRD has ability for learning and adaptation by means of a neural network feedback loop. We demonstrate through the simulations that our dispatching policy is more effective than state-of-the-art layer-7…
A Proposal for Agent Simulation of Peer Review
2010
Peer review lies at the core of current scientific research. It is composed of a set of social norms, practices and processes that connect the abstract scientific method with the society of people that apply the method. As a social construct, peer review should be understood by building theory-informed models and comparing them with data collection. Both these activities are evolving in the era of automated computation and communication: new modeling tools and large bodies of data become available to the interested researcher. In this paper, starting from abstract principles, we develop and present a model of the peer review process. We also propose a working implementation of a subset of t…
Solution Using Clustering Methods
1987
The main aim of this analysis is to find out typical morphologies from the multivariate and longitudinal data set on growing children and to describe the morphological evolution of the found groups of girls. The finding out of typical morphologies is, in our opinion, strictly linked to the search of structures in the individuals and in the variables.
PROTEIN SECONDARY STRUCTURE PREDICTION: HOW TO IMPROVE ACCURACY BY INTEGRATION
2006
In this paper a technique to improve protein secondary structure prediction is proposed. The approach is based on the idea of combining the results of a set of prediction tools, choosing the most correct parts of each prediction. The correctness of the resulting prediction is measured referring to accuracy parameters used in several editions of CASP. Experimental evaluations validating the proposed approach are also reported.
Algorithms for transforming an integral photography into a plenoptic picture
2013
We report a simple algorithm for transforming the set of elemental images captured with an integral-photography set up, into the set of micro-images ready to be projected into an integral-imaging monitor. The method is based in the transposing relation between an integral photography and a plenoptic picture. The reported technique permits to adapt the integral images to the resolution and size of the monitor.
3D Reconstruction of rough terrain for USARSim using a height-map method
2008
In this paper, a process for a simplified reconstruction of rough terrains from point clouds acquired using laser scanners is presented. The main idea of this work is to build height-maps which are level gray-scale images representing the ground elevation. These height-maps are generated from step-fields which can be represented by a set of side-by-side pillars. Although height-maps are a practical means for rough terrain reconstruction, it is not possible to represent two different elevations for a given location with one height-map. This is an important drawback as terrain point clouds can show different zones representing surfaces above other surfaces.In this paper, a methodology to crea…
Quantifying Mean Shape and Variability of Footprints Using Mean Sets
2005
This paper1 presents an application of several definitions of a mean set for use in footwear design. For a given size, footprint pressure images corresponding to different individuals constitute our raw data. Appropriate footwear design needs to have knowledge of some kind of typical footprint. Former methods based on contour relevant points are highly sensitive to contour noise; moreover, they lack repeatability because of the need for the intervention of human designers. The method proposed in this paper is based on using mean sets on the thresholded images of the pressure footprints. Three definitions are used, two of them from Vorob’ev and Baddeley-Molchanov and one morphological mean p…
Fully programmable display parameters in integral imaging by smart pseudoscopic-to-orthoscopic conversion
2011
Previously, we reported a digital technique for formation of real, non-distorted, orthoscopic integral images by direct pickup. However the technique was constrained to the case of symmetric image capture and display systems. Here, we report a more general algorithm which allows the pseudoscopic to orthoscopic transformation with full control over the display parameters so that one can generates a set of synthetic elemental images that suits the characteristics of the Integral-Imaging monitor and permits control over the depth and size of the reconstructed 3D scene.
Volumetric Reconstruction of Unorganized Set of Points with Implicit Surfaces
2005
Many solutions exist to rebuild a three-dimensional object represented by a set of points. The purpose of our work is to provide an automatic reconstruction from an unorganized cloud, describing an unknown shape, in the aim to compute its volume. The approach employed in this paper consists in filling the object's interior with isosurfaces of potential fields and to use their fusion property in order to find the full volume and the continuous shape of the sampled object. Thus, the first step of our reconstruction is to search a correct interior for the object described by the set of points. Then, comes the positioning of implicit primitives into the cloud, deep inside of it and close to the…