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This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Thesis: M.S.V.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 1980 / Includes bibliographical references (p. 43-44). / Poetry is one of the oldest forms of communication. The poet is interested in finding new ways of expressing universal truths. Science and technology also are looking for new ways to communicate universal truths. Through the use of the computer and other technologies language can be transformed, so that it can be perceived as well as read. / by Joan K. Shafran. / M.S.V.S. / M.S.V.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture

Data quality is one of many challenges experienced in electronic healthcare (e-health) services in South Africa. The collection of data with substandard data quality leads to inappropriate information for health and management purposes. Evidence of challenges with regard to data quality in e-health systems led to the purpose of this study, namely to prioritise data quality challenges experienced by data users of e-health systems in South Africa. The study followed a sequential QUAL-quan mixed method research design to realise the research purpose. After carrying out a literature review on the background of e-health and the current status of research on data quality challenges, a qualitative study was conducted to verify and extend the identified possible e-health data quality challenges. A quantitative study to prioritise data quality challenges experienced by data users of e-health systems followed. Data users of e-health systems in South Africa served as the unit of analysis in the study. The data collection process included interviews with four data quality experts to verify and extend the possible e-health data quality challenges identified from literature. This was followed by a survey targeting 100 data users of e-health systems in South Africa for which 82 responses were received. A prioritised list of e-health data quality challenges has been compiled from the research results. This list can assist data users of e-health systems in South Africa to improve the quality of data in those systems. The most important e-health data quality challenge is a lack of training for e-health systems data users. The prioritised list of e-health data quality challenges allowed for evidence-based recommendations which can assist health institutions in South Africa to ensure future data quality in e-health systems. / School of Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

The existing District Health Information System in South Africa can be described as a facility based Information System, focusing on the clinics and hospitals and not on the community. Consequently, only those who access health services through these facilities are included in the system. Many children do not have access to basic health and social services and consequently, are denied their right to good health. Additionally, they are excluded from the routine Health Information System. Policy and resource decisions made by the District Managers, based on the current health facility information, reinforces the exclusion of these already marginalised children. The premise behind this research is that vulnerability of children can be tackled using two interconnected strategies. The first is through the creation of awareness of the situation of children and the second through mobilising the commitment and action of government and society to address this situation. These strategies can be supported by designing an Information System for action / an Information System that can be used to advocate and influence decisions and policies for the rights of these children / an Information System that includes all children. An interpretive participatory action research approach, using a case study in a rural municipality in South Africa, was adopted for the study of a child-health Community-Based Information System. The context in which the community is placed, as well as the structures which are embedded in it, was examined using Structuration Theory. This theory also influenced the design of the Information System. As the aim of the research is to change the Information System to include vulnerable children, a Critical Social Theoretical and longitudinal perspective was adopted. In particular, concepts from Habermas, such as the creation of a public sphere and the &rsquo / Ideal Speech Situation&rsquo / , informed the methodology chosen and were used to analyse the research undertaken. <br /> <br /> Based on the research conducted in this municipality, four main changes to the Health Information System were made. These were: &bull / determination of the community&rsquo / s own indicators / &bull / changes in data collection forms / &bull / creation of forums for analysis and reflection, and / &bull / changes in the information flows for improved feedback. Other practical contributions of the research are the development of local capacities in data collection and analysis, the development of practical guidelines on the design of a child-health Community-Based Information System, and the development of strategies for enabling participation and communication. In line with the action research approach adopted, and the desire to link theory and practice, the research also contributed on a theoretical level. These contributions include extending the use of Structuration Theory, in conjunction with Habermas&rsquo / Critical Social Theory, to the empirical context of South Africa / addressing the gap of Community-Based Information Systems in Information System design / extending the debate on participation and communication in Information Systems to &rsquo / developing&rsquo / countries, and developing generalisations from a qualitative case study.

Bedside terminals are an approach to data entry that is maximally effective, due to capture at the point of care, to meet the challenges facing nursing today in relation to information documentation. The purpose of this evaluation research study was to determine if bedside terminals are justifiable though a cost-benefit analysis.The General Systems Theory, which was formulated by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the late 1920's, was the theoretical framework used for this study (Putt, 1978).A non-standardized checklist of factors was developed by the researcher to evaluate the associated costs. related to bedside terminals. The factors included patient census, acuity, lost charges, reimbursement denials, and medication errors.A convenience sample of one surgical nursing unit from a large midwestern metropolitan hospital was chosen for data collection. Based on the literature, monetary values werearbitrarily assigned to the factors. Costs were assigned based on projected figures for bedside terminal implementation in 1993 obtained from the literature. All participants were notified of rights as human subjects and the confidentiality of this study.This study was significant because the results will be added to the limited information on the justification of bedside terminals using a cost-benefit analysis available in the current literature.Projections of bedside terminal costs were limited due to the unwillingness of bedside terminal vendors to provide current costs to compare against the quantitative benefits collected in this study. Reimbursement denials were not obtained due to the accounting practices of the institution. Due to these limitations, a prospective rather than the retrospective approach used in this study for data collection would be recommended to ensure obtaining information on all data elements. The results of this study should be considered when contemplating purchase of bedside terminals. Based on the results of this cost-benefit analysis study, the purchase of bedside terminals is cost-justified. A favorable return on investment of a one year payback was obtained. / School of Nursing

The Future Will Be Better Tomorrow is a satirical post-apocalyptic novel that examines the personal and social ironies that occur in a society that is unbalanced by an unexplained apocalyptic event. Working with a combination of dark humor and the terrifying realities of an apocalyptic event – in this case: a blackout – the novel aims to challenge the machinery established by this particular subset of the science fiction genre. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014.. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Tao Dacheng. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-75). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Content-based Image Retrieval --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- SVM based RF in CBIR --- p.3 / Chapter 1.3 --- DA based RF in CBIR --- p.4 / Chapter 1.4 --- Existing CBIR Engines --- p.5 / Chapter 1.5 --- Practical Applications of CBIR --- p.10 / Chapter 1.6 --- Organization of this thesis --- p.11 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- Statistical Learning Theory and Support Vector Machine --- p.12 / Chapter 2.1 --- The Recognition Problem --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2 --- Regularization --- p.14 / Chapter 2.3 --- The VC Dimension --- p.14 / Chapter 2.4 --- Structure Risk Minimization --- p.15 / Chapter 2.5 --- Support Vector Machine --- p.15 / Chapter 2.6 --- Kernel Space --- p.17 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- Discriminant Analysis --- p.18 / Chapter 3.1 --- PCA --- p.18 / Chapter 3.2 --- KPCA --- p.18 / Chapter 3.3 --- LDA --- p.20 / Chapter 3.4 --- BDA --- p.20 / Chapter 3.5 --- KBDA --- p.21 / Chapter Chapter 4 --- Random Sampling Based SVM --- p.24 / Chapter 4.1 --- Asymmetric Bagging SVM --- p.25 / Chapter 4.2 --- Random Subspace Method SVM --- p.26 / Chapter 4.3 --- Asymmetric Bagging RSM SVM --- p.26 / Chapter 4.4 --- Aggregation Model --- p.30 / Chapter 4.5 --- Dissimilarity Measure --- p.31 / Chapter 4.6 --- Computational Complexity Analysis --- p.31 / Chapter 4.7 --- QueryGo Image Retrieval System --- p.32 / Chapter 4.8 --- Toy Experiments --- p.35 / Chapter 4.9 --- Statistical Experimental Results --- p.36 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- SSS Problems in KBDA RF --- p.42 / Chapter 5.1 --- DKBDA --- p.43 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- DLDA --- p.43 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- DKBDA --- p.43 / Chapter 5.2 --- NKBDA --- p.48 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- NLDA --- p.48 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- NKBDA --- p.48 / Chapter 5.3 --- FKBDA --- p.49 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- FLDA --- p.49 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- FKBDA --- p.49 / Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.50 / Chapter Chapter 6 --- NDA based RF for CBIR --- p.52 / Chapter 6.1 --- NDA --- p.52 / Chapter 6.2 --- SSS Problem in NDA --- p.53 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- Regularization method --- p.53 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Null-space method --- p.54 / Chapter 6.2.3 --- Full-space method --- p.54 / Chapter 6.3 --- Experimental results --- p.55 / Chapter 6.3.1 --- K nearest neighbor evaluation for NDA --- p.55 / Chapter 6.3.2 --- SSS problem --- p.56 / Chapter 6.3.3 --- Evaluation experiments --- p.57 / Chapter Chapter 7 --- Medical Image Classification --- p.59 / Chapter 7.1 --- Introduction --- p.59 / Chapter 7.2 --- Region-based Co-occurrence Matrix Texture Feature --- p.60 / Chapter 7.3 --- Multi-level Feature Selection --- p.62 / Chapter 7.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.63 / Chapter 7.4.1 --- Data Set --- p.64 / Chapter 7.4.2 --- Classification Using Traditional Features --- p.65 / Chapter 7.4.3 --- Classification Using the New Features --- p.66 / Chapter Chapter 8 --- Conclusion --- p.68 / Bibliography --- p.70

Ph.D. / Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology / Tools to automatically summarize gene information from the literature have the potential to help genomics researchers better interpret gene expression data and investigate biological pathways. Even though several useful human-curated databases of information about genes already exist, these have significant limitations. First, their construction requires intensive human labor. Second, curation of genes lags behind the rapid publication rate of new research and discoveries. Finally, most of the curated knowledge is limited to information on single genes. As such, most original and up-to-date knowledge on genes can only be found in the immense amount of unstructured, free text biomedical literature. Genomic researchers frequently encounter the task of finding information on sets of differentially expressed genes from the results of common highthroughput technologies like microarray experiments. However, finding information on a set of genes by manually searching and scanning the literature is a time-consuming and daunting task for scientists. For example, PubMed, the first choice of literature research for biologists, usually returns hundreds of references for a search on a single gene in reverse chronological order. Therefore, a tool to summarize the available textual information on genes could be a valuable tool for scientists. In this study, we adapted automatic summarization technologies to the biomedical domain to build a query-based, task-specific automatic summarizer of information on mouse genes studied in microarray experiments - mouse Gene Information Clustering and Summarization System (GICSS). GICSS first clusters a set of differentially expressed genes by Medical Subject Heading (MeSH), Gene Ontology (GO), and free text features into functionally similar groups;next it presents summaries for each gene as ranked sentences extracted from MEDLINE abstracts, with the ranking emphasizing the relation between genes, similarity to the function cluster it belongs to, and recency. GICSS is available as a web application with links to the PubMed (www.pubmed.gov) website for each extracted sentence. It integrates two related steps, functional gene clustering and gene information gathering, of the microarray data analysis process. The information from the clustering step was used to construct the context for summarization. The evaluation of the system was conducted with scientists who were analyzing their real microarray datasets. The evaluation results showed that GICSS can provide meaningful clusters for real users in the genomic research area. In addition, the results also indicated that presenting sentences in the abstract can provide more important information to the user than just showing the title in the default PubMed format. Both domain-specific and non-domain-specific terminologies contributed in the informative sentences selection. Summarization may serve as a useful tool to help scientists to access information at the time of microarray data analysis. Further research includes setting up the automatic update of MEDLINE records; extending and fine-tuning of the feature parameters for sentence scoring using the available evaluation data; and expanding GICSS to incorporate textual information from other species. Finally, dissemination and integration of GICSS into the current workflow of the microarray analysis process will help to make GICSS a truly useful tool for the targeted users, biomedical genomics researchers.

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Bedside computer terminals are an approach to data entry that is maximally effective to meet the challenges facing nursing today and process hospital information. The purpose of this evaluation research study was to determine if bedside computers are justifiable through a cost-benefit analysis. Costbenefit analysis was done to determine whether the benefits outweigh the costs involved in implementing a bedside computer system.The General Systems Theory formulated by Ludwig von Betalanaffy was the theoretical framework utilized for this project. A non-standardized checklist of factors was developed from the literature review. The factors included were patient census, acuity, lost charges, reimbursement denials, and medicine errors. Interrater reliability was established by a panel ofthree experts on cost-benefit analysis.A convenience sample of one 42 bed nursing unit from a large metropolitan Midwestern hospital was chosen for data retrieval. One month of financial data was analyzed for this study. The procedures for the protection of human subjects were followed.The study showed that bedside computers are costjustified.-based on the results of the cost-benefit analysis. The projection of cost versus benefits realized from the bedside terminals was limited due to the unwillingness of vendors to share actual cost information. Reimbursement denials were unable to be retrieved because of the financial accounting practices of the institution chosen.A prospective approach rather than the retrospective approach utilized in this study may produce the data necessary for reimbursement denials. Recognizing its limitations, the results of this study should be considered when contemplating the purchase of bedside terminals or the increasingly more advanced technology of hand-held and voice activated computers. / School of Nursing