BACKGROUND: Identifying associations among biological variables is a major challenge in modern quantitative biological research, particularly given the systemic and statistical noise endemic to biological systems. Drug sensitivity data has proven to be a particularly challenging field for identifying associations to inform patient treatment. RESULTS: To address this, we introduce two semi-parametric variations on the commonly used concordance index: the robust concordance index and the kernelized concordance index (rCI, kCI), which incorporate measurements about the noise distribution from the data. We demonstrate that common statistical tests applied to the concordance index and its variations fail to control for false positives, and introduce efficient implementations to compute p-values using adaptive permutation testing. We then evaluate the statistical power of these coefficients under simulation and compare with Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients. Finally, we evaluate the various statistics in matching drugs across pharmacogenomic datasets. CONCLUSIONS: We observe that the rCI and kCI are better powered than the concordance index in simulation and show some improvement on real data. Surprisingly, we observe that the Pearson correlation was the most robust to measurement noise among the different metrics.

This special session constructs an alternate-reality FIE session where participants can experience what engineering education research might look like if Deaf culture had been a primary influence on engineering education culture.

Abstract Cell-site simulators, also known as IMSI-catchers and stingrays, are used around the world by governments and criminals to track and eavesdrop on cell phones. Despite extensive public debate surrounding their use, few hard facts about them are available. For example, the richest sources of information on U.S. government cell-site simulator usage are from anonymous leaks, public records requests, and court proceedings. This lack of concrete information and the difficulty of independently obtaining such information hampers the public discussion. To address this deficiency, we build, deploy, and evaluate SeaGlass, a city-wide cellsite simulator detection network. SeaGlass consists of sensors that measure and upload data on the cellular environment to find the signatures of portable cell-site simulators. SeaGlass sensors are designed to be robust, low-maintenance, and deployable in vehicles for long durations. The data they generate is used to learn a city’s network properties to find anomalies consistent with cell-site simulators. We installed SeaGlass sensors into 15 ridesharing vehicles across two cities, collecting two months of data in each city. Using this data, we evaluate the system and show how SeaGlass can be used to detect signatures of portable cell-site simulators. Finally, we evaluate our signature detection methods and discuss anomalies discovered in the data.

In order to realize the employment ambitions of graduates we can work with students to facilitate the construction of their identity as members of a global engineering profession. Of particular interest is whether (and, if so, how) students reconstruct their identity through the delivery of modules specifically designed to increase students' employability attributes and widen their horizons. In preparing students for life beyond university, a new module has been developed, Professional Identity through Portfolio Development, designed for final year creative computing students to support the transition from university to employment. Findings suggest that while only 61% of students strongly identified themselves with their chosen profession before undertaking the module, this increased to 73% of participants at the end of the module. The module, in its examination of identity and next steps, appears to have also impacted on the strength of student identity with 65% expressing a strong student identity before the course, increasing to 88% after the course. This paper explores the findings of the research and considers the possibility of generalisability.

Flash X-ray radiography has undergone a transformation in recent years with the resurgence of interest in compact, high-intensity pulsed power-driven electron beam sources. The radiographic requirements and the choice of consistent X-ray sources determine the driver requirements, which can be met by demonstrated induction voltage adder technologies. This paper reviews the state of the art, the critical technologies, and the recent advances which have improved performance by over an order of magnitude in beam brightness and radiographic utility.

Email has come to play a central role in task management, yet email tool features have remained relatively static in recent years, lagging behind users? evolving practices. The Taskmaster system narrows this gap by recasting email as task management and embedding task-centric resources directly in the client. In this paper, we describe the field research that inspired Taskmaster and the principles behind its design. We then describe how user studies conducted with ?live? email data over a two-week period revealed the value of a task-centric approach to email system design and its potential benefits for overloaded users.

In this paper, we describe FLANNEL, an architecture for adding computational capabilities to email. FLANNEL allows email to be modified by an application while in transit between sender and receiver. This modification is done without modification to the endpoints---mail clients---at either end. This paper also describes interaction techniques that we have developed to allow senders of email to quickly and easily select computations to be performed by FLANNEL. Through, our experience, we explain the properties that applications must have in order to be successful in the context of FLANNEL.