Numeracy in healthcare domain is a measure of the ability of patients to understand and digest numerically presented information so as to make appropriate health decisions and understand the underlying risk factors. The existing methods of numeracy testing do not take confidence as a parameter in consideration for adaptive assessment. Numeracy assessment without confidence is prone to guess work. A better result in measurement is achieved when confidence in the knowledge is also appraised. More importantly, patients may act up on their knowledge when they have confidence in it. Thus we aim to develop a new model and based on it a Patient Numeracy Assessment (PNA) tool.

Indexing techniques are crucial for efficiency and scalability of processing queries over big data. Hive is a batch-oriented big data management engine that is well suited for data OLAP and data analysis applications. For very “selective” queries whose output sizes are a small fraction of the contributing data, the brute-force approach suffers from poor performance due to redundant disk I/O's or initiations of extra map operations. We make a first attempt and propose an index-based join technique to speed up the process and integrate it in Hive by mapping our design to the conceptual optimization flow. To evaluate the performance, we create and evaluate test queries on datasets generated using TPC-H benchmark. Our results indicate significant performance gain over relatively large data and/or highly selective queries having a two-way join and a single join condition.

This paper proposes a new quality-in-use model for measuring user interface design quality, and is intended specifically for mobile devices. The proposed model is based on the international standard ISO 9126-4 [ISO/IEC TR 9126-4:2004] and can be adapted to various applications. The quality-in-use factors of effectiveness, productivity, efficiency, safety, and satisfaction are redefined to reflect the ways in which mobile devices are used, and the contexts in which they are used. A new factor, task navigation, is proposed to measure the cognitive load on the user when he or she interacting with the interface across different platforms. Our objectives include theoretical and empirical validation of the proposed measurement model.

First we explain the term 'inclusive technology' that was coined in the context of software projects intended for bridging the digital divide. Such projects have come to be known under the umbrella term "ICT4D projects" orInformationandCommunicationTechnologyforDevelopmentprojects. Then we argue that traditional software engineering processes are lacking in certain respects when used for ICT4D. To overcome their shortcomings, we propose augmenting traditional software processes to make them suitable for the development of software projects undertaken with a view of bridging the digital divide in a society.

Visualization tools are helpful in the analysis of large and complex information such as genomics data and biological phenomena. However, there exists a conceptual gap between how the tools actually work and the user experiences, tasks and behaviors. To design more human-centered tools that fully support the biologist's experiences, we have defined a framework, called UX-P (user experiences to patterns). The framework leverages the complicity of personas, a technique to capture user experiences, and design patterns - allowing us to narrow the gap between user experiences and the tool's design and features. First, HCI experts need to capture the user's needs, interaction behavior and task flow. This information can then be used to derive design patterns which are composed to create a conceptual design. To test and further improve this framework, we carried out an empirical study with users of a bioinformatics visualization tool called protein explorer. Results of our empirical study will be presented.

Resolving disparate viewpoints via planning is an important aspect of the distributed problem solving performed by the agents in Cooperative Intelligent Information Systems. We propose a distributed planning protocol called Consensus. Consensus specifies a methodology by which agents exchange information indicating their preferred actions, integrate these different sets of actions, resolve any conflicts that exist, and choose a joint set of actions. Within the framework of the Consensus protocol, two different heuristics are proposed for resolving conflicts which overcome the computational complexity of an exhaustive search. An implementation of the Consensus protocol is analyzed experimentally to assess its performance in resolving conflicts. The experimental results indicate the trade-off between the cost of planning and the quality of the plan produced with respect to the heuristics used for resolving conflicts.

The paper briefly illustrates an object-oriented-formal modeling of a real-time robotic assembly system. The approach provides a means to structure the system model into independent, modular, and reusable components, thereby making it to be beneficial for system design and maintenance. The underlying formal basis of the approach facilitates validation and formal verification of system requirements.

A new thinning algorithm based on the well known concept of the force of attraction or repulsion between charged particles is presented. This algorithm generates connected skeletons which preserve the shape and end-points of the original patterns. Its performance is experimentally compared with four other known algorithms published in the literature. For the sake of comparison, a reasoned set of test data is introduced. The results of our comparison reveal that the proposed CPM (Charge Particle Method) algorithm is almost as fast as the fastest of those compared. For thin images obtainable from low resolution scanners or coarse scanned images, the CPM algorithm is the fastest.

A tool to aid the designer of cooperative distributed problem solving (CDPS) systems will determine whether a proposed CDPS system violates any of the constraints for CDPS systems, and will display a prediction of the performance that can be expected from that CDPS system. This tool will rely on a predictive model for the performance of the expert systems in the CDPS system. Using the Blackbox Expert (a DAI testbed), an experiment was conducted to test the performance of expert systems in a CDPS system. Statistically significant differences in the Blackbox Expert's performance were found when the CDPS system was changed. The results of the experiment are being using to create a predictive model for the performance of the Blackbox Expert when it is a member of the CDPS system.>

Abstract In an earlier paper by Gupta and Ravindran a network model was proposed to determine the optimum number of shelves to minimize the shelving cost of a given collection of books. In this paper, it is shown that the above method does not always yield the optimal value. Further, some underlying assumptions in the earlier model that may not be practical are pointed out. Also a brute‐force algorithm is presented for the same problem which gives a better solution.

Abstract The use of a space optimal storage scheme for compiler diagnostic messages is described. The space reduction achievable through word coding may be predicted in terms of text length, vocabulary size and average word length. A method of word or phrase selection is discussed. Illustration is made by application to the FORTRAN FTN and COBOL compilers under the operating system KRONOS for the CDC 6400 computer.