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Objectives Comprehensive smokefree laws, as recommended by the WHO Framework Convention of Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC), are the most effective tool to protect the population from secondhand smoke (SHS) and to ensure healthy environments. Studies evaluating how laws govern SHS protection are scarce. This study assessed the level of protection from SHS of laws from countries belonging to the WHO European Region. Methods A new methodology system was developed to evaluate the smokefree legislation according to the principles provided by the WHO guidelines for the correct implementation of Article 8 of the FCTC. For each law, six main sectors and 28 facilities were evaluated. Results Overall 68 laws from 48 countries from the WHO European Region were reviewed. 'Education' and 'Public transport' were the most protected sectors from SHS. Many WHO European laws do not provide protection from SHS across all public sectors. For example, 48.5% of general health facilities and 71.2% of restaurants are unprotected from SHS. The level of protection provided in the 28 facilities studied was low; many WHO European laws still allow smoking under certain conditions, permitting smoking in designated and/or ventilated areas. Conclusions Nine years after the adoption of the WHO FCTC there are still legal formulas in which smoking is allowed in several facilities, through the inclusion of separated areas, ventilated areas and other conditions. Tobacco control efforts still face the challenge of eradicating the legal clauses that prevent 100% smokefree environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sentiment analysis is an emerging technique that caters for semantic orientation and opinion mining. It is increasingly used to analyze online reviews and posts for identifying people's opinions and attitudes to products and events in order to improve business performance of companies and aid to make better organizing strategies of events. This paper presents an innovative approach to combining the outputs of sentiment classifiers under the framework of belief functions. It consists of the formulation of sentiment classifier outputs in the triplet evidence structure and the development of general formulas for combining triplet functions derived from sentiment classification results via three evidential combination rules along with comparative analyses. The empirical studies have been conducted on examining the effectiveness of our method for sentiment classification individually and in combination, and the results demonstrate that the best combined classifiers by our method outperforms the best individual classifiers over five review datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online social networks have become major battlegrounds for political campaigns, viral marketing, and the dissemination of news. As a consequence, “bad actors” are increasingly exploiting these platforms, which is a key challenge for their administrators, businesses and society in general. The spread of fake news is a classical example of the abuse of social networks by these bad actors. While some have advocated for stricter policies to control the spread of misinformation in social networks, this often happens in detriment of their democratic and organic structure. In this paper, we aim to limit the influence of a target group in a social network via the removal of a few users/links. We formulate the influence limitation problem in a data-driven fashion, by taking into account past propagation traces. More specifically, our algorithms find critical edges to be removed in order to decrease the influence of a target group based on past data. The idea is to control the diffusion processes while minimizing the amount of disturbance in the network structure. Moreover, we consider two types of constraints over edge removals, a budget constraint and also a, more general, set of matroid constraints. These problems lead to interesting challenges in terms of algorithm design. For instance, we are able to show that influence limitation is APX-hard and propose deterministic and probabilistic approximation algorithms for the budgeted and the matroid version of the problem, respectively. Experiments show that the proposed approaches outperform several baselines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recommender systems, a subclass of information filtering designed to predict the rating or preference of a user, are among the most successful examples of machine learning in action. Drawing inspiration from the benefits of using recommender systems for business, and their success in heightening the perceived utility of recommendations, this project was developed using Python to optimize collection recommendations and to help librarians make collection decisions using a recommender system. This paper illustrates several examples of building recommender systems using a variety of recommendation techniques to aid in the selection of monographs. It also points out possible future uses of recommender systems in libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to identify the dynamic structure of several time-dependent, discipline-level citation networks through a path-based method. A network data set is prepared that comprises 27 subjects and their citations aggregated from more than 27,000 journals and proceedings indexed in the Scopus database. A maximum spanning tree method is employed to extract paths in the weighted, directed, and cyclic networks. This paper finds that subjects such as Medicine, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Materials Science, Physics, and Social Sciences are the ones with multiple branches in the spanning tree. This paper also finds that most paths connect science, technology, engineering, and mathematics ( STEM) fields; 2 critical paths connecting STEM and non- STEM fields are the one from Mathematics to Decision Sciences and the one from Medicine to Social Sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of fourth-generation wireless technologies has fueled the rapid development of cellular networks, significantly increasing the energy consumption and the expenditures of mobile network operators (MNOs). In addition, network underutilization during low-traffic periods (e.g., night zone) has motivated a new business model, namely, infrastructure sharing, which allows the MNOs to have their traffic served by other MNOs in the same geographic area, thus enabling them to switch off part of their network. In this paper, we propose a novel infrastructure-sharing algorithm for multioperator environments, which enables the deactivation of underutilized base stations during low-traffic periods. Motivated by the conflicting interests of the MNOs and the necessity for effective solutions, we introduce a game-theoretic framework that enables the MNOs to individually estimate the switching-off probabilities that reduce their expected financial cost. Our approach reaches dominant strategy equilibrium, which is the strategy that minimizes the cost of each player. Finally, we provide extensive analytical and experimental results to estimate the potential energy and cost savings that can be achieved in multioperator environments, incentivizing the MNOs to apply the proposed scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Petri nets are suitable for modeling and analysis of business processes. However, the lack of data concepts often makes Petri-net-based models excessively large and difficult to analyze especially when process logic is sensitive to changes of process attribute values. Emergency treatment processes are a typical example of this situation. To solve the aforementioned problems, this paper proposes a new hierarchical Petri net model for modeling and verification of emergency treatment processes. The hierarchical Petri net model includes three separate but closely related models, i.e., a business process logic net, a business process semantic net, and a set of case models. Business process logic nets are used to model the task dependencies disregarding semantic information. Business process semantic nets introduce data concepts to business process logic nets to model semantic information such as process attributes or conditions of sequence flows. Case models are used to model the practical routes of specific business instances. Based on the three models, a formal verification algorithm of an emergency treatment process is presented. Finally, the hierarchical modeling and verification methods are validated by an emergency treatment process of highways under snow/ice weather conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A principal-agent problem with asymmetric information is considered in this paper. Based on theories of ill-posed bilevel programming, the definition of ill-posed principal-agent problem is proposed. Then, a fuzzy interactive coordinating algorithm is presented for its optimistic formulation. Furthermore, a satisfactory contract is eventually derived for both principal and agent so that both are winners. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the rationality and the operability of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Positioned as the backbone of service asset management console, a service registry has to enable real-time and offline service selection in an effective manner. This paper presents an analytic algorithm that is used to guide the architectural design of service exploration in a service registry. Service assets are proposed to be framed into a well-established categorical structure based on pattern recognition algorithm. This design aims to provide systematic methodology and enablement architecture for analyzing, clustering, and adapting heterogeneous services for dynamic application integration. The exploitation of pattern recognition algorithm maps a large amount of services into a manageable feature space, which consists of attributes that are related to static description and dynamic features, such as historical QoS and service-level agreement. The proposed architecture and associated service exploration methodology have been integrated into an industry strength service-oriented architecture solution design platform. We also present a case study using the developed platform to illustrate the proposed algorithm for business service clustering and selection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information visualization appears to be a promising technique for improving the business practices in today's electric power industry. The legacy power system visualization tools, however, restrict the visualization process to follow a limited number of pre-defined patterns created by human designers, thus hindering users' ability to discover. This paper proposes a data-driven approach to interactive visualization of power systems. The proposed approach relies on developing powerful data manipulation algorithms to create visualizations based on the characteristics of empirically or mathematically derived data. Based on this approach, a data-driven model exploratory tool has been developed to enable users to visualize the power system's physical/electrical configurations at various levels and from different perspectives. The conducted case studies have demonstrated that the data-driven approach could result in an interactive and user-driven power system visualization tool that fosters scientific understanding and insight, therefore unleashing the power of visualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of the growth of the Internet, the amount of available information is exponentially increasing. However, increasing the amount of information does not imply increasing usefulness. Furthermore, as the complexity of business relationships increases, there is a natural tendency toward less structured interaction between entities. This highlights the growing relevance of unstructured information in documenting the interactions of organizations and individuals. Analyzing and making sense of this unstructured information space requires more than text-mining algorithms; it requires a strategic approach. We propose a unified approach that addresses a variety of information space analytics problems. Our method for making sense of unstructured data is described by six steps that are analogous to the algebraic order of operations PEMDAS (parenthesis, exponent, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction). These basic text-mining operations can be combined in many interesting ways to handle a diverse set of problems, and just as in algebra, it is critical that these operations be performed in the correct order to guarantee a meaningful result. In this paper, we describe how PEMDAS has been implemented within organizations to enable decisions that produced measurable business value [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of papers on city planning published from 2007 to 2008, including "Streets, Sounds and Identity in Inter-war Harlem," by Clare Corbould, "(Re)making the Other, Heterosexualising Everyday Space," by Kath Browne, and "Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds," by Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder.

Primal methods for the transportation problem of linear programming require substantial bookkeeping to deal with constant updating of a tree describing the shipments in the current feasible solution. This paper suggests a new means of book- keeping which is useful for long narrow problems. The method builds on previous work by the same author which reduces the number of records to be updated. The new methods reduce the number of items which have to be maintained for a replication of the tree and simplify some steps in updating the remaining items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]