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This white paper explores the considerations of standards-based interoperability of medical images between organizations, patients, and providers. In this paper, we will look at three different standards-based image exchange implementations that have been deployed to facilitate exchange of images between provider organizations. The paper will describe how each implementation uses applicable technology and standards; the image types that are included; and the governance policies that define participation, access, and trust. Limitations of the solution or non-standard approaches to solve challenges will also be identified. Much can be learned from successes elsewhere, and those learnings will point to recommendations of best practices to facilitate the adoption of image exchange.

University faculty members, librarians, and support staff developed hands-on, consumable, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) curricular materials that could be inexpensively provided to large audiences. Goals included fostering STEM interest, teaching STEM principles, and encouraging continued exploration in home and school settings. This case describes design processes to realize these goals through basic circuits with paper airplanes and simple origami. Following several design implementations, kits costing ~$0.33 each were created and distributed to learners. Within these kits, learners created a back-lit paper airplane as they explored concepts regarding circuit definitions; open, closed, series, and parallel circuits; shorts; polarity; and current. Additional activities included LED bracelets, cubes, and greeting cards. Within this paper, we document successive design decisions, failures, reflections, and iterations that moved goals to reality. We also describe new design challenges, including waste management, sustained exploration, and advanced concept introductions.

Background Display signage is ubiquitous and essential in hospitals to serve several clerical, operational, and clinical functions, including displaying notices, providing directions, and presenting clinical information. These functions improve efficiency and patient engagement, reduce errors, and enhance the continuity of care. Over time, signage has evolved from analog approaches such as whiteboards and handwritten notices to digital displays such as liquid crystal displays, light emitting diodes, and, now, electronic ink displays. Electronic ink displays are paper-like displays that are not backlit and show content by aligning microencapsulated color beads in response to an applied electric current. Power is only required to generate content and not to retain it. These displays are very readable, with low eye strain; minimize the emission of blue light; require minimal power; and can be driven by several data sources, ranging from virtual servers to electronic health record systems. These attributes make adapting electronic ink displays to hospitals an ideal use case. Objective In this paper, we aimed to outline the use of signage and displays in hospitals with a focus on electronic ink displays. We aimed to assess the advantages and limitations of using these displays in hospitals and outline the various public-facing and patient-facing applications of electronic ink displays. Finally, we aimed to discuss the technological considerations and an implementation framework that must be followed when adopting and deploying electronic ink displays. Methods The public-facing applications of electronic ink displays include signage and way-finders, timetables for shared workspaces, and noticeboards and bulletin boards. The clinical display applications may be smaller form factors such as door signs or bedside cards. The larger, ≥40-inch form factors may be used within patient rooms or at clinical command centers as a digital whiteboard to display general information, patient and clinician information, and care plans. In all these applications, such displays could replace analog whiteboards, noticeboards, and even other digital screens. Results We are conducting pilot research projects to delineate best use cases and practices in adopting electronic ink displays in clinical settings. This will entail liaising with key stakeholders, gathering objective logistical and feasibility data, and, ultimately, quantifying and describing the effect on clinical care and patient satisfaction. Conclusions There are several use cases in a clinical setting that may lend themselves perfectly to electronic ink display use. The main considerations to be studied in this adoption are network connectivity, content management, privacy and security robustness, and detailed comparison with existing modalities. Electronic ink displays offer a superior opportunity to future-proof existing practices. There is a need for theoretical considerations and real-world testing to determine if the advantages outweigh the limitations of electronic ink displays.

We believe the switch to a digital pathology (DP) workflow is imminent and it is essential to understand the economic implications of conversion. Many aspects of the adoption of DP will be disruptive and have a direct financial impact, both in short term costs, such as investment in equipment and personnel, and long term revenue potential, such as improved productivity and novel tests. The focus of this whitepaper is to educate pathologists, laboratorians and other stakeholders about the business and monetary considerations of converting to a digital pathology workflow. The components of a DP business plan will be thoroughly summarized, and guidance will be provided on how to build a case for adoption and implementation as well as a roadmap for transitioning from an analog to a digital pathology workflow in various laboratory settings. It is important to clarify that this publication is not intended to list prices although some financials will be mentioned as examples. The authors encourage readers who are evaluating conversion to a DP workflow to use this paper as a foundational guide for conducting a thorough and complete assessment while incorporating in current market pricing. Contributors to this paper analyzed peer-reviewed literature and data collected from various institutions, some of which are mentioned. Digital pathology will change the way we practice through facilitating patient access to expert pathology services and enabling image analysis tools and assays to aid in diagnosis, prognosis, risk stratification and therapeutic selection. Together, they will result in the delivery of valuable information from which to make better decisions and improve the health of patients.

Purpose To give an overview of the multicenter Prostate Cancer Outcomes (PCO) study, involving paper-based and web-based collection of patient-reported outcome measures (PROM) in patients undergoing local treatment for prostate cancer in certified centers in Germany. The PCO study is part of the larger Movember-funded TrueNTH Global Registry. The article reports on the study’s design and provides a brief progress report after the first 2 years of data collection. Methods Prostate cancer centers (PCCs) certified according to German Cancer Society requirements were invited to participate in collecting patient-reported information on symptoms and function before and at least once (at 12 months) after treatment. The data were matched with disease and treatment information. This report describes progress in patient inclusion, response rate, and variations between centers relative to online/paper use, and also data quality, including recruitment variations relative to treatment in the first participating PCCs. Results PCC participation increased over time; 44 centers had transferred data for 3094 patients at the time of this report. Patient recruitment varied widely across centers. Recruitment was highest among patients undergoing radical prostatectomy. The completeness of the data was good, except for comorbidity information. Conclusions The PCO study benefits from a quality improvement system first established over 10 years ago, requiring collection and harmonization of a predefined clinical dataset across centers. Nevertheless, establishing a PROM routine requires substantial effort on the part of providers and constant monitoring in order to achieve high-quality data. The findings reported here may be useful for guiding implementation in similar initiatives.

This "success story" panel illustrates how next generation video applications are enabled on PCs today using consumer integrated and discrete GPUs launched in 2020. Intel's XeLP graphics technology with dedicated media hardware powers the integrated graphics in Intel's latest client processor, Tiger Lake, and Intel's first entry-level mainstream discrete graphics card, DG1. XeLP graphics in Tiger Lake and DG1 has democratized access to high performance implementations of the latest emerging video codec standards. Three topics will be covered: (i) 8K HEVC/AV1 Playback with Content Adaptive Power Optimization; (ii) Ludicrous Speed HEVC Encoding with Integrated + Discrete GPU; and (iii) MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) Playback on DG1.

Background and objective: To present a structured approach for assessing stakeholder perceptions and implementing the approach in guideline development. Methods: This work was carried out by the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) Equity and Stakeholder Engagement Project Groups through brainstorming and iterative frameworks, stakeholder engagement, pilot testing, refinement of ideas, using input from workshops, and discussions at GRADE Working Group meetings to produce this document, which constitutes a GRADE conceptual article on implementation. Results: We introduce the FACE implementation criteria, feasibility, acceptability, cost, and equity; priority; and "intent to implement" criterion. We outline the implementation importance of networks and approaches to patient and other stakeholder engagement. Implementation is often highly contextual and can benefit from stakeholder engagement and other assessments. Our FACE approach provides stakeholder questions and language to inform guideline implementation and tools. Conclusion: The FACE criteria propose a series of knowledge translation questions to guide the assessment of implementation for evidence-based guidelines. It is desirable for guideline developers to use a conceptual approach, such as FACE, to tailor implementation and inform end of guideline dissemination and knowledge translation activities. (C) 2020 Published by Elsevier Inc.

Value Prediction was proposed to speculatively break true data dependencies, thereby allowing Out of Order (OOO) processors to achieve higher instruction level parallelism (ILP) and gain performance. State-of-the-art value predictors try to maximize the number of instructions that can be value predicted, with the belief that a higher coverage will unlock more ILP and increase performance. Unfortunately, this comes at increased complexity with implementations that require multiple different types of value predictors working in tandem, incurring substantial area and power cost. In this paper we motivate towards lower coverage, but focused, value prediction. Instead of aggressively increasing the coverage of value prediction, at the cost of higher area and power, we motivate refocusing value prediction as a mechanism to achieve an early execution of instructions that frequently create performance bottlenecks in the OOO processor. Since we do not aim for high coverage, our implementation is light-weight, needing just 1.2 KB of storage. Simulation results on 60 diverse workloads show that we deliver 3.3% performance gain over a baseline similar to the Intel Skylake processor. This performance gain increases substantially to 8.6% when we simulate a futuristic up-scaled version of Skylake. In contrast, for the same storage, state-of-the-art value predictors deliver a much lower speedup of 1.7% and 4.7% respectively. Notably, our proposal is similar to these predictors in performance, even when they are given nearly eight times the storage and have 60% more prediction coverage than our solution.

Multiplying long integers is one of the basic mathematical operations used mostly in cryptography. The topic of this paper is experimental testing of different implementations of the Karatsuba algorithm for multiplying long integers using shared memory parallel programming. Different ways of using OpenMP were considered for optimizing implementations of the algorithm and the experiment results were analysed and compared. The parallel implementation has achieved a significant speedup compared to the sequential code, with the maximum achieved speedup of 9 on a 12 core CPU.

Emerging technologies such as plasmonics and pho-tonics are promising alternatives to CMOS for high throughput applications, thanks to their waveguide’s low power consumption and high speed of computation. Besides these qualities, these novel technologies also implement logic functionalities uncommon to traditional technologies that can be beneficial to existing CMOS architectures. In this work, we study how plasmonic-based devices can complement CMOS technology to achieve a more efficient implementation of multiplier architectures, which are the core of state-of-the-art data- and signal-processing circuits. A critical part of modern multipliers is the partial-product reduction step, used to reduce the partial product tree into a 2-input addition. In CMOS technology, this step is achieved by using compact and fast counters. On the other hand, the proposed plasmonic cells naturally implement counters of 3-, 9- and 27-inputs within a few logic levels at ultra-high speed. Thus, we present novel multiplier architectures, which take advantage of large plasmonic-based counters to reduce the number of cells and logic levels in the partial product reduction step of the multiplication. Our experimental results show that 3 levels and 30 counters are needed when 27-input cells are used. On the other side, 6 levels and 72 counters are employed with 9-input cells. Finally, we present various 16 × 16 multiplier implementations mixing 9- and 27-input cells, focusing on the trade-off in the number of counters, levels, and area of each architecture.

We study blockchain-based integrity-protected smart contracts as an implementation mechanism for municipal government processes. To this end, we attempted a prototype implementation of such a process in collaboration with a Danish Municipality. We find that such an implementation is possible, despite the obvious confidentiality requirements, and that it does provide benefits: integrity guarantees, verifiability, direct collaboration and payments between the parties. These benefits come at the cost of latency, pr. transactions charges, immutability of errors, and a very concerning single point of failure the municipal government: losing blockchain private keys means losing control over municipal government casework, with no recourse. Our municipal government partner felt that altogether no immediately pressing problem was solved by the implementation, and that the latter risk clearly outweighed any benefits. We note that smart contract implementations of government processes needs to be immutable and outside of the government’s control when running; however, they also need to be updatable when laws change, and provide an “out” for the rare case when errors in the contract implementation result in unlawful behaviour. We propose these conflicting requirements as a foundational research challenge for blockchain to be applicable to governmental processes.

The pulp and paper industry offers a wide spectrum of research challenges to the control systems community. Implementations of control technology, production planning, scheduling, and operations can lead to tangible improvements in terms of increased capital returns and reduced environmental impact. This paper presents an overview of operations in an integrated pulp and paper mill and reviews the control challenges for important process units. It also summarizes current and future research areas in the pulp and paper industry

Bedside handover is the delivery of the nurse-to-nurse handover at the patient’s bedside. Although increasingly used in nursing, nurses report many barriers for delivering the bedside handover. Among these barriers is the possibility of breaching the patient’s privacy. By referring to this concept, nurses add a legal and ethical dimension to the delivery of the bedside handover, making implementation of the method difficult or even impossible. In this discussion article, the concept of privacy during handovers is being discussed by use of observations, interviews with nurses, and interviews with patients. These findings are combined with international literature from a narrative review on the topic. We provide a practice-oriented answer in which two mutually exclusive possibilities are discussed. If bedside handover does pose problems concerning privacy, this situation is not unique in healthcare and measures can be taken during the bedside handover to safeguard the patient. If bedside handover does not pose problems concerning privacy, privacy is misused by nurses to hide professional uncertainties and/or a reluctance toward patient participation. Therefore, a possible breach of privacy—whether a justified argument or not—is not a reason for not delivering the bedside handover.

Objectives: This article provides reviewers with guidance on methods for identifying and processing evidence to understand intervention implementation. Study Design and Setting: Strategies, tools, and methods are applied to the systematic review process to illustrate how process and implementation can be addressed using quantitative, qualitative, and other sources of evidence (i.e., descriptive textual and nonempirical). Results: Reviewers can take steps to navigate the heterogeneity and level of uncertainty present in the concepts, measures, and methods used to assess implementation. Activities can be undertaken in advance of a Cochrane quantitative review to develop program theory and logic models that situate implementation in the causal chain. Four search strategies are offered to retrieve process and implementation evidence. Recommendations are made for addressing rigor or risk of bias in process evaluation or implementation evidence. Strategies are recommended for locating and extracting data from primary studies. The basic logic is presented to assist reviewers to make initial review-level judgments about implementation failure and theory failure. Conclusion: Although strategies, tools, and methods can assist reviewers to address process and implementation using quantitative, qualitative, and other forms of evidence, few exemplar reviews exist. There is a need for further methodological development and trialing of proposed approaches. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Challenges in implementing electronic health records (EHRs) have received some attention, but less is known about the process of transitioning from legacy EHRs to newer systems.To determine how ambulatory leaders differentiate implementation approaches between practices that are currently paper-based and those with a legacy EHR system (EHR-based).Qualitative study.Eleven practice managers and 12 medical directors all part of an academic ambulatory care network of a large teaching hospital in New York City in January to May of 2006.Qualitative approach comparing and contrasting perceived benefits and challenges in implementing an ambulatory EHR between practice leaders from paper- and EHR-based practices. Content analysis was performed using grounded theory and ATLAS.ti 5.0.We found that paper-based leaders prioritized the following: sufficient workstations and printers, a physician information technology (IT) champion at the practice, workflow education to ensure a successful transition to a paperless medical practice, and a high existing comfort level of practitioners and support staff with IT. In contrast, EHR-based leaders prioritized: improved technical training and ongoing technical support, sufficient protection of patient privacy, and open recognition of physician resistance, especially for those who were loyal to a legacy EHR. Unlike paper-based practices, EHR-based leadership believed that comfort level with IT and adjustments to workflow changes would not be difficult challenges to overcome.Leadership at paper- and EHR-based practices in 1 academic network has different priorities for implementing a new EHR. Ambulatory practices upgrading their legacy EHR have unique challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about many challenges and alterations to long-standing procedures within rehabilitation facilities. These updates of the processes undertaken by staff in such settings have been radical and ongoing. COVID-19 impact on the healthcare system should never be underestimated nor under appreciated. The impact that this pandemic has had on rehabilitation care is unique. This has been the catalyst to identifying significant challenges and subsequent changes within rehabilitation and mental health practices. Social measures that have been implemented in the community have had exaggerated and magnified effects both on the physical and mental wellbeing of rehabilitation and mental health patients. Over the course of these adaptations and implementations, impacts on communication, mental health, workload and care efficiencies were identified and explored. This paper is unique because different disciplines have shared their experiences of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and how they provide rehabilitation. The paper will focus on the communication challenges using masks, not being able to engage families and carers, restriction of group therapies, social isolation of patients and healthcare workers while adhering to guidelines set by NSW Health (Sydney, Australia).

Domain-specific languages (DSL) are more expressive and thus tackle complexity better, making software development easier and more efficient. DSL can automate the production of quality code that based on the proper abstraction of the system. This paper proposes a type-base approach to requirement modelling, called CosRDL, to Implementing a trusted real-time embedded system. A set of rules and formal methods are defined to build CosRDL models for embedded systems, from which the model may be verified apart the specification. CosRDL is described as abstract of event-driven behaviors that support communication between active objects (processes) to support concurrency and collaborative computing. The control processing and properties can be described by CosRDL syntax as an model extension and to make system implementation model. Meanwhile, a case study is presented to figure out how to apply the approach of CosRDL modelling for control systems.

This paper summarizes the results from interviews with CCR&R and the Utah Office of Child Care (OCC) about the implementation of Care About Child Care (CAC) relative to implementation drivers. As was discussed in the first white paper, implementation drivers describe groups of behaviors that build and maintain the program. Drivers are split into three categories including competency drivers that support the capability of staff; organization drivers that support the infrastructure necessary to implement a program; and leadership drivers, or characteristics of those who successfully manage the program implementation.

In today's open source era, developers look forsimilar software applications in source code repositories for anumber of reasons, including, exploring alternative implementations, reusing source code, or looking for a better application. However, while there are a great many studies for finding similarapplications written in the same programming language, there isa marked lack of studies for finding similar software applicationswritten in different languages. In this paper, we fill the gapby proposing a novel modelCroLSimwhich is able to detectsimilar software applications across different programming lan-guages. In our approach, we use the API documentation tofind relationships among the API calls used by the differentprogramming languages. We adopt a deep learning based word-vector learning method to identify semantic relationships amongthe API documentation which we then use to detect cross-language similar software applications. For evaluating CroLSim, we formed a repository consisting of 8,956 Java, 7,658 C#, and 10,232 Python applications collected from GitHub. Weobserved thatCroLSimcan successfully detect similar softwareapplications across different programming languages with a meanaverage precision rate of 0.65, an average confidence rate of3.6 (out of 5) with 75% high rated successful queries, whichoutperforms all related existing approaches with a significantperformance improvement.

Medication administration is one pathway by which Adverse Drug Events (ADE) can occur. While Electronic Medical Administration Record (eMAR) systems help reduce the number of ADEs, current eMAR implementations suffer from workarounds that defeat safety and verification mechanisms meant to limit the number of potential ADEs that occur during medication administration. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Element ChipLess (MECL) RFID tags which enable real-time event notifications through event signatures. Event signatures correspond to the physical configuration of different RFID elements in a chipless RFID tag. Augmenting physical objects, such as a pill container, with MECL-RFID can allow caregivers to detect the moment a particular pill container is opened or closed. We present the fundamentals behind real-time event detection using MECL-RFID and propose a cyber-physical intervention system that can be used to reduce ADEs through realtime event monitoring and notifications sent to clinicians administering medication. We also present a prototype MECL-RFID to demonstrate potential future improvements to eMAR systems that minimize ADEs., Comment: Proceedings of the Wireless Health 2014 on National Institutes of Health

Quantitative engineering analysis of parachutes and inflatables has been part of the routine design process since the days of World War II. But in most cases, the shear complexity in which their flexible structure interact both externally and internally with the surrounding air demands that empirical data be used to either validate or supplement such analysis. Advanced modeling embodied in the techniques of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Computational Structure Dynamics (CSD) and Fluid-Structure Interactions (FSI) has great potential for diminishing such reliance. But even though its application to aerodynamic decelerator systems (ADS) has been under consideration for the past four decades, progress has been painfully slow and the results rarely integrated into today's engineering design practice. This report aims at discussing why advanced modeling has not reached the level of practical use that has occurred in other aerospace fields. Such lack of progress origins partly from advanced modeling requiring substantial human resources that are not usually associated with parachute programs (expertise in computational methods in particular). Moreover, the extensive experimental database for Verification and Validation needed to support advanced modeling development is missing. This white paper begins with a pedagogical review of the most current implementations of CFD, CSD and/or FSI in the context of ADS applications. This is followed by a discussion of both non-ADS and ADS examples in which advanced modeling has been shown to yield interesting and relevant results. The report also identifies the type of data and measurement techniques that are needed for V&V, as well as the most pressing challenges - both theoretical and empirical - that are impeding progress. The paper ends with a series of recommendations for action items to be considered in the near and long terms.

Zerocoin (Miers et. al, IEEE S&P'13), designed as an extension to Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies, was the first anonymous cryptocurrency proposal which supports large anonymity sets. We identify a cryptographic denial-of-spending attack on the original Zerocoin protocol and a second Zerocoin protocol (Groth and Kohlweiss, EUROCRYPT'15), which enables a network attacker to destroy money of honest users. The attack leads to real-world vulnerabilities in multiple cryptocurrencies, which rely on implementations of the original Zerocoin protocol. The existence of the attack does not contradict the formal security analyses of the two Zerocoin protocols but exposes the lack of an important missing property in the security model of Zerocoin. While the security definitions model that the attacker should not be able to create money out of thin air or steal money from honest users, they do not model that the attacker cannot destroy money of honest users. Fortunately, there are simple fixes for the security model and for both protocols.

This is the first in a series of papers reporting Sustainability in Health care by Allocating Resources Effectively (SHARE). The SHARE Program is an investigation of concepts, opportunities, methods and implications for evidence-based investment and disinvestment in health technologies and clinical practices in a local healthcare setting. The papers in this series are targeted at clinicians, managers, policy makers, health service researchers and implementation scientists working in this context. This paper presents an overview of the organisation-wide, systematic, integrated, evidence-based approach taken by one Australian healthcare network and provides an introduction and guide to the suite of papers reporting the experiences and outcomes.

Modern, forensics laboratories need Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) implementations that allow the lab to track evidentiary items through their examination lifecycle and also serve all pertinent laboratory personnel. The research presented here presents LIMS core requirements as viewed by respondents serving in different forensic laboratory capacities as well as different forensic laboratory environments. A product-development methodology was employed to evaluate the relative value of the key features that constitute a LIMS, in order to develop a set of relative values for these features and the specifics of their implementation. In addition to the results of the product development analysis, this paper also provides an extensive review of LIMS and provides an overview of the preparation and planning process for the successful upgrade or implementation of a LIMS. Analysis of the data indicate that the relative value of LIMS components are viewed differently depending upon respondents' job roles (i.e., evidence technicians, scientists, and lab management), as well as by laboratory size. Specifically, the data show that: (1) Evidence technicians place the most value on chain of evidence capabilities and on chain of custody tracking; (2) Scientists generally place greatest value on report writing and generation, and on tracking daughter evidence more » that develops during their analyses; (3) Lab. Managers place the greatest value on chain of custody, daughter evidence, and not surprisingly, management reporting capabilities; and (4) Lab size affects LIMS preference in that, while all labs place daughter evidence tracking, chain of custody, and management and analyst report generation as their top three priorities, the order of this prioritization is size dependent. « less

We could have a great debate about which concepts, theories, or frameworks are the most effective when it gets to achieving profitable growth, particularly as it pertains to innovation. Despite the fact that some of these concepts and theories are more prominent than others, several have been proven to be effective when implemented by real organizations. This raises several questions regarding the selection criteria and the dynamics among these strategic frameworks. The purpose of this exploratory paper is to shed some light on the different strategy implementations at some of the most profitable and innovative organizations in the world. The high-level and practice-based research has revealed that successful organizations have formulated and executed different strategies and did not limit themselves to a single approach. In fact, some organizations have implemented several strategies simultaneously. The observed multi-strategy formulation and implementation suggests that strategic concepts, theories, and frameworks could be complementary in nature. While this paper is not intended to serve as a literature review, the findings were insightful in terms of the realization of multi-strategy implementation in organizations as well as directing new research to focus on the dynamics among different strategies.

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular logic programming paradigm that has been applied for solving a variety of complex problems. Among the most challenging real-world applications of ASP are two industrial problems defined by Siemens: the Partner Units Problem (PUP) and the Combined Configuration Problem (CCP). The hardest instances of PUP and CCP are out of reach for state-of-the-art ASP solvers. Experiments show that the performance of ASP solvers could be significantly improved by embedding domain-specific heuristics, but a proper effective integration of such criteria in off-the-shelf ASP implementations is not obvious. In this paper the combination of ASP and domain-specific heuristics is studied with the goal of effectively solving real-world problem instances of PUP and CCP. As a byproduct of this activity, the ASP solver WASP was extended with an interface that eases embedding new external heuristics in the solver. The evaluation shows that our domain-heuristic-driven ASP solver finds solutions for all the real-world instances of PUP and CCP ever provided by Siemens. This paper is under consideration for acceptance in TPLP., Comment: Paper presented at the 32nd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2016), New York City, USA, 16-21 October 2016, 15 pages, LaTeX, 3 PDF figures

This case study describes an evaluation of the process of medical staff transitioning from paper medical charting to electronic charting. The study focuses on the experiences of registered nurses in the pediatric intermediate care unit at a rural Pennsylvania hospital. The study was conducted to determine ways in which the transitional process can be optimized to increase the likelihood of successful system implementation and user acceptance. The evaluation included a user survey and a series of individual semistructured interviews with registered nurses who underwent the transition. The study took place approximately six months after the transition occurred and gathered information about the nurses’ experiences and reactions before, during, and after the transition. This paper will discuss the findings from the survey and interviews, including the resulting recommendations for improving the transitional process as similar adaptations are made in other medical facilities.

This special issue contains extended articles based on the best papers of the R&D track of the Wireless Innovation Forum’s SDR’11-WinnCommConference on Wireless Communications Technologies and Software Defined Radio (SDR). The Wireless Innovation Forum (previously known as the SDR Forum) was established in 1996. The Wireless Innovation Forum is a non-profit ‘‘mutual benefit corporation’’ dedicated to driving technology innovation in commercial, civil, and defense communications around the world. Forum members bring a broad base of experience in SDR, Cognitive Radio(CR), and Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) technologies in diverse markets and at all levels of the wireless value chain to address emerging wireless communications requirements through enhanced value, reduced total life cost of ownership, and accelerated deployment of standardized families of products, technologies, and services. The Forum acts as the premier venue for its members to collaborate to achieve these objectives, providing opportunities to network with customers, partners and competitors, educate decision makers, develop and expand markets, and advance relevant technologies. The Technical Conference was first established in 1992 after a highly successful workshop held in 1991. Now attracting a broad range of about 500 delegates including researchers, professors, industry developers, investors, commercial network operators, radio manufacturers, system integrators, government procurement officials, regulators, engineering service providers, and consultants from over 22 different countries, the conference is the only event devoted to the advancement of reconfigurable radio technologies from research through deployment. We are pleased to report that the annual US conference and product exhibition continues to hold its place in the advanced wireless community as the premier event for exploring SDR, CR, and DSA technologies. Last year there was continued strong participation in this conference. In spite of the continuing down turn in the economy in many segments of the market, our papers were downloaded more than 81,000 times. A unique feature of this conference is in providing opportunities to network from a broad mix of participants from all levels of the wireless value chain including investors, commercial network operators, radio manufacturers, system integrators, government procurement officials, regulators, technology providers, engineering service providers, and consultants. Of this group 42 % were researchers and technology developers. From this group of researchers, academically focussed papers are submitted to the Research and Development (R&D) Track of the conference. This year’s paper topics included SDR implementations and architectures, Communications Signal Processing, Physical Layer Techniques, Chip Implementations, GPUs, FPGAs, Processors, RF Technologies, Security, Software Systems, SCA, Spectrum Sharing, CR, System Implementation, and Testing. J. Glossner Optimum Semiconductor Technologies, Inc., 120 White Plains Rd, Tarrytown, NY 10601, USA e-mail: jglossner@optimumsemi.com

Despite the increasing use of tablet computers, there is evidence that paper still plays an important role for recording ideas and knowledge. Research on tablet usage suggests that they are seen to have a complementary role to that of paper. However, current methods of transferring paper-based information onto a digital device are limited to transcribing, scanning and taking a picture. We present a design study that investigates better-integrated ways of linking paper-based information with digital documents, such as websites or files. Our solution leverages new transparent display technologies for providing a direct augmentation of paper-based information while at the same time being capable of displaying associated digital documents. Through a series of design iterations and user evaluations, we identified interaction mappings for this new type of augmented reality as well as considerations for future implementations of transparent mobile devices.

Objectives: To outline contemporary and novel developments for the presentation and reporting of syntheses of qualitative, implementation, and process evaluation evidence and provide recommendations for the use of reporting guidelines. Study Design and Setting: An overview of reporting guidelines for qualitative, implementation, and process evaluation evidence syntheses drawing on current international literature and the collective expert knowledge of the Cochrane Qualitative and Implementation Methods Group.Results: Several reporting guidelines exist that can be used or adapted to report syntheses of qualitative, implementation, and process evaluation evidence. Methods to develop individual guidance varied. The use of a relevant reporting guideline can enhance the transparency, consistency, and quality of reporting. Guidelines that exist are generic, method specific, and for particular aspects of the reviewing process, searching.Conclusion: Caution is expressed over the potential for reporting guidelines to produce a mechanistic approach moving the focus away from the content and toward the procedural aspects of the review. The use of a reporting guideline is recommended and a five-step decision flowchart to guide the choice of reporting guideline is provided. Gaps remain in method-specific reporting guidelines such as mixed-study, implementation, and process evaluation evidence syntheses. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Richard Granger comments on eliminating as much paper as possible from healthcare not merely cut costs, but save lives. He opened up a debate that may prove seminal not only from the point of view of the specific issue of paper-based inefficiencies, but also in terms of how public sector IT implementations are `sold' to society. The National Health Service is fighting back against critics of increasing computerization with a simple message - paper kills.

How we interface and interact with computing, communications, and entertainment devices is going through revolutionary changes, with natural user inputs based on touch, gesture, and voice replacing or augmenting the use of traditional user interfaces based on keyboard, mouse, trackballs, joysticks, etc. This paper will review the key technologies towards realizing natural user interfaces and implementations of new interactive applications.

In this paper, we introduce a formal notion of partial compliance, called ATTACK-RESISTANCE, of a computer program running together with a defense mechanism w.r.t a non-exploitability specification. In our setting, a program may contain exploitable vulnerabilities, such as buffer overflows, but appropriate defense mechanisms built into the program or the operating system render such vulnerabilities hard to exploit by certain attackers, usually relying on the strength of the randomness of a probabilistic transformation of the environment or the program and some knowledge on the attacker's goals and attack strategy. We are motivated by the reality that most large-scale programs have vulnerabilities despite our best efforts to get rid of them. Security researchers have responded to this state of affairs by coming up with ingenious defense mechanisms such as address space layout randomization (ASLR) or instruction set randomization (ISR) that provide some protection against exploitation. However, implementations of such mechanism have been often shown to be insecure, even against the attacks they were designed to prevent. By formalizing this notion of attack-resistance we pave the way towards addressing the questions: "How do we formally analyze defense mechanisms? Is there a mathematical way of distinguishing effective defense mechanisms from ineffective ones? Can we quantify and show that these defense mechanisms provide formal security guarantees, albeit partial, even in the presence of exploitable vulnerabilities?". To illustrate our approach we discuss under which circumstances ISR implementations comply with the ATTACK-RESISTANCE definition.

SDN provides an abstract view of the network in which the switches expose a homogeneous set of capabilities. Unfortunately, the abstraction process may hide important information about the devices that finally impacts on the network operations. Although SDN implementations, like OpenFlow, already account for some device specific properties, we believe that other important ones have been so far overlooked. To this regard, we focus on the switches' performance at handling control messages and on how this may affect the control plane design. To support our discussion, we provide theoretical examples and simulation-based experiments. We conclude that accounting for switches performance at handling control messages is a crucial step in the design of advanced SDN control plane features.

This paper presents two implementations of condition monitoring of significant information in a typical machine utilized in the pulp and paper industry, a circuit oil lubrication system. The two discussed alternatives confront a traditional centralized monitoring approach against a Web Service based approach. Advantages and disadvantages of one choice over the other are considered. Both solutions make possible condition based and predictive maintenance as opposed to cyclic maintenance (the approach utilized before these improvements came into place in the presented industrial setting). The presented developments led to vital financial and time savings.

Parallel computers are becoming increasingly heterogeneous and correspondingly more difficult to program as a result. Irregular applications exacerbate this problem further, given that this class of applications is more diverse and uses different performance features of a computer system than more common application classes. Thus, new approaches are necessary to achieve performance and productivity simultaneously. Domain-specific languages are becoming increasingly popular for high-performance computing, both in the domains of regular (e.g., SPIRAL) and irregular (e.g., Green-Marl) applications. However, past languages for graph computations tend to be too limited to efficiently express the wide range of irregular algorithms needed in applications. Instead, this position paper advocates adapting a language from the database community, Datalog, to the domain of high-performance irregular applications. Although the plain Datalog language is also insufficient for the class of applications targeted, extensions can be added to increase its expressiveness. Starting with a standard language also enables taking advantage of the literature on Datalog implementations, including in the contexts of parallelism and incremental execution of algorithms. Thus, this approach promises to be a good way to implement irregular applications with both productivity and performance.

IEEE 802.15.4 is a new standard that addresses the need of low-rate wireless personal area networks (LR-WPAN) with a focus on enabling pervasive wireless sensor networks for residential, commercial and industrial applications. The standard is characterized by maintaining a high level of simplicity, allowing for low cost and low power implementations. This paper presents a brief technical introduction of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and analyzes its applicability for pulp and paper as well as other industrial process applications

Reconfigurable hardware such as FPGAs are being increasingly employed for application acceleration due to their high degree of parallelism, flexibility and power efficiency — factors which are key in the rapidly evolving field of embedded real-time vision. While recent advances in technology have increased the capacity of FPGAs, lack of standard models for developing custom accelerators creates issues with scalability and compatibility. In this paper, we describe a model for designing streaming hardware accelerators with run-time configurability. This model provides a generic interface for each hardware module, a modular and hierarchical structure for parallelism at multiple levels and a run-time reconfiguration framework for increased flexibility. We present case studies to accelerate sample neu-romorphic vision algorithms which are inspired by models of the mammalian visual cortex. Experimental results show speedups of several factors over comparable CPU implementations and higher performance-per-watt over relevant GPU implementations.

This paper overviews some of the lower bounds on the complexity of implementing software transactional memory, and explains their underlying assumptions. It discusses how these lower bounds align with experimental results and design choices made in existing implementations to indicate that the transactional approach for concurrent programming must compromise either programming simplicity or scalability. There are several contemporary research avenues that address the challenge of concurrent programming. For example, optimizing coarse-grained techniques, and concurrent programming with mini-transactions--simple atomic operations on a small number of locations.

Each year the Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference presents awards to the authors of the most outstanding papers of the previous year's conference. The selection is performed by an award committee, based on the results of the reviewing process, the quality of the final paper and the quality of the presentation. The paper selected as the most outstanding in the field of CAD (track A) is: "Exploiting the Routing Flexibility for Energy/Performance Aware Mapping of Regular NoC Architectures" by Jingcao Ju and Radu Marculescu of Carnegie Mellon University, USA. The paper selected as the most outstanding in the field of Tools (track B) is: "Validating SAT Solvers Using an Independent Resolution-Based Checker: Practical Implementations and Other Applications" by Lintao Zhang and Sharad Malik of Princeton University, USA. The paper selected as the most outstanding in the field of Test (track C) is: "Delay Defect Diagnosis Based Upon Statistical Timing Models - The First Step" by Angela Krstic, Li-C Wang and Kwang-Ting (Tim) Cheng of UC Santa Barbara, USA and Jing-Jia Liou of the National Tsing-Hua University, Taiwan, and Magdy S. Abadir, Motorola Inc, USA.

Thesis about whether China’s IPR enforcement laws are TRIPs compliant. At least on paper most of China’s IPR procedural laws are compliant with specific TRIPs provisions. China’s IPR laws are certainly non-compliant to the more general provisions of TRIPs, due to incompatible extra-judicial factors. Nevertheless, no unequivocal preference for a WTO case against China can be given. Another option, although more complicated, to tackle China’s IPR enforcement challenges is to be preferred: to address China’s transparency, market access, uniform application of law, integrity and impartiality of the courts and expertise in and respect for IPR.

It is quite a long tradition that the best papers presented at Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) conferences are selected and invited to submit as an extended paper to be published as journal article in a special issue. For the former years these selected papers have been published in the International Journal of Medical Informatics. Due to change of the publication policy, European Federation of Medical Informatics (EFMI) made an agreement with the edi tors to move to Methods of Information in Medicine. This applies first for MIE 2009 held in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. This was not just a formal change, since the whole selection procedure had to be reshaped due to the stronger volume restrictions. From about 150 oral presentations more than 25 had been invited to submit an extended paper and finally four of them could be published. This is a really strong competition, which on one side is beneficial allowing to maintain a really high quality. On the other side this makes it very hard for the editor to give a representative picture about the ongoing research activity in the field. Somewhat luckily, the finally selected four papers cover quite large part of our domain. The group from UMIT (Universitat fur Gesundheitswissenschaften, Medizinische Informatik und Technik – Tirol) [1] asks a question about the justification of all activity in medical informatics: Can users accept the developed systems? At health policy level it is a commonplace that the use of electronic health records is essential for keeping the quality and cost effectiveness of health care delivery, also for evidencebased health system planning. But health policy makers rarely use EHR systems directly and the opinion of doctors working on the “battlefield” should not be disregarded. Systems that do not serve the real needs of their users are likely to fail. Hackl and his co-authors conclude however that the success of system implementation very much depends on the way how end users are informed about the system and how their concerns are treated. For centuries, life science researchers had some reason to be jealous to the success of physics. The advantage of physics seems to be related – among others – to the relative easiness of the formalization of the descriptions of phenomena, because this made the deployment of the whole arsenal of mathematics possible. As biomedical ontologies appeared on the horizon just in the last decades, nowadays we more and more can believe that medical phenomena also can be formally described. While a number of theoretical and pragmatic problems are waiting for solution, the way towards practical applications is already open. In the second paper [2] Ceusters and his co-workers present the development of an ontology for adverse events. They used a number of “feeder ontologies”, that are already at the disposal of researches, demonstrating that reuse and merging of ontologies is both desired and feasible but by no means an easy enterprise. But this paper also demonstrates that there is a quite long way ahead us. The authors cope with three levels of reality: what exists, what Methods Inf Med 2011; 50: 51–52

OpenMP is a widely adopted standard for threading directives across compiler implementations. The standard is very successful since it provides application writers with a simple, portable programming model for introducing shared memory parallelism into their codes. However, the standards do not address key issues for supporting that programming model in development tools such as debuggers. In this paper, we present DMPL, an OpenMP debugger interface that can be implemented as a dynamically loaded library. DMPL is currently being considered by the OpenMP Tools Committee as a mechanism to bridge the development tool gap in the OpenMP standard.

The sections in this article are 1 Background 2 Network Implementations 3 Networks Used for this Study 4 Experimental Results 5 Conclusion

The editor introduces a selection of papers on the topic of intelligent transport systems. The papers start with expressed user needs; there may also be some first ideas about the predicted performance and effects of ITS. These together provide a basis for development of strategies for implementation. Examples of specific implementations include infrastructure based systems for travel information or traffic management, and vehicle-based information and assistance systems. As soon as these are deployed, the question arises concerning what the actual effects are (e.g. on comfort, safety, congestion, environmental performance etc) and also whether the user needs have been met, or more/different needs arise