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Saturday, March 7, 2015

Geographic clusters of underimmunization identified in Northern California

Researchers used spatial analysis software and electronic medical records to identify clusters of underimmunization and vaccine refusal among Kaiser Permanente members in Northern California, according to a study published today in the journal Pediatrics.

Children are considered to be underimmunized when they miss one or more recommended vaccine doses before age three, while vaccine refusal means not allowing a child to receive any vaccines.
The study reviewed the immunization records of more than 154,000 Kaiser Permanente Northern California members between birth and 3 years old. All the children were born between 2000 and 2011 and were covered continuously by Kaiser Permanente, which provides health care for about 40 percent of the insured population in 13 Northern California counties. To identify the clusters of underimmunization and vaccine refusal, researchers used sophisticated spatial analysis software, which allowed them to examine health factors in relation to geography.
The Centers for Disease Control's immunization schedule recommends a minimum of 17 separate injections during a child's first two years of life, including for hepatitis A and B, diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, influenza, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, and pneumococcal virus. Underimmunization is associated with elevated risk of vaccine-preventable disease, while nonmedical immunization exemption and refusal have been associated with increased community risk of measles and pertussis.
"This research confirms anecdotal reports of underimmunization clusters," said Tracy A. Lieu, MD, MPH, the study's lead author, a Kaiser Permanente pediatrician, and director of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. "In addition, we found clusters in places we hadn't anticipated."
Dr. Lieu noted that this study will be useful for targeting outreach efforts in particular areas, although it was not designed to figure out why children in some areas are less likely to be fully immunized.
"Everyone in the Kaiser Permanente health care system has access to vaccines, and since childhood vaccination is covered by insurance, financial barriers are not an issue," Dr. Lieu said. "Our findings raise awareness that there may be communities where parents have more vaccine hesitancy and may be interested in more information or more in-depth conversations with their children's doctors."
Underimmunization ranged from 18 percent to 23 percent within clusters, compared with 11 percent outside clusters. Between 2010 and 2012, geographic clusters of underimmunization were found in:

the East Bay (Richmond to San Leandro);
Sonoma and Napa counties;
a small area of east Sacramento;
northern San Francisco and southern Marin counties; and
a small area of Vallejo.

"Shot limiting," in which parents limit the number of injections or antigens that children receive during a pediatric visit to two or fewer, was found to cluster in similar areas.
Vaccine refusal ranged from 5.5 percent to 13.5 percent within clusters, compared with 2.6 percent outside clusters. Between 2010 and 2012, geographic clusters of vaccine refusal were found in:

the East Bay (El Cerrito to Alameda);
Marin and southwest Sonoma counties;
northeastern San Francisco;
northeastern Sacramento County and Roseville; and
a small area south of Sacramento

"Kaiser Permanente's electronic medical record system is among the richest in the world," Dr. Lieu said. "This is the first time that spatial analysis techniques have been applied to real-time vaccine data."

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Kaiser Permanente. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Software that knows the risks

Imagine that you could tell your phone that you want to drive from your house in Boston to a hotel in upstate New York, that you want to stop for lunch at an Applebee's at about 12:30, and that you don't want the trip to take more than four hours. Then imagine that your phone tells you that you have only a 66 percent chance of meeting those criteria -- but that if you can wait until 1:00 for lunch, or if you're willing to eat at TGI Friday's instead, it can get that probability up to 99 percent.

That kind of application is the goal of Brian Williams' group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory -- although the same underlying framework has led to software that both NASA and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have used to plan missions.
At the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) this month, researchers in Williams' group will present algorithms that represent significant steps toward what Williams describes as "a better Siri" -- the user-assistance application found in Apple products. But they would be just as useful for any planning task -- say, scheduling flights or bus routes.
Together with Williams, Peng Yu and Cheng Fang, who are graduate students in MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, have developed software that allows a planner to specify constraints -- say, buses along a certain route should reach their destination at 10-minute intervals -- and reliability thresholds, such as that the buses should be on time at least 90 percent of the time. Then, on the basis of probabilistic models -- which reveal data such as that travel time along this mile of road fluctuates between two and 10 minutes -- the system determines whether a solution exists: For example, perhaps the buses' departures should be staggered by six minutes at some times of day, 12 minutes at others.
If, however, a solution doesn't exist, the software doesn't give up. Instead, it suggests ways in which the planner might relax the problem constraints: Could the buses reach their destinations at 12-minute intervals? If the planner rejects the proposed amendment, the software offers an alternative: Could you add a bus to the route?
Short tails
One aspect of the software that distinguishes it from previous planning systems is that it assesses risk. "It's always hard working directly with probabilities, because they always add complexity to your computations," Fang says. "So we added this idea of risk allocation. We say, 'What's your budget of risk for this entire mission? Let's divide that up and use it as a resource.'"
The time it takes to traverse any mile of a bus route, for instance, can be represented by a probability distribution -- a bell curve, plotting time against probability. Keeping track of all those probabilities and compounding them for every mile of the route would yield a huge computation. But if the system knows in advance that the planner can tolerate a certain amount of failure, it can, in effect, assign that failure to the lowest-probability outcomes in the distributions, lopping off their tails. That makes them much easier to deal with mathematically.
At AAAI, Williams and another of his students, Andrew Wang, have a paper describing how to evaluate those assignments efficiently, in order to find quick solutions to soluble planning problems. But the paper with Yu and Fang -- which appears at the same conference session -- concentrates on identifying those constraints that prevent a problem's solution.
There's the rub
Both procedures are rooted in graph theory. In this context, a graph is a data representation that consists of nodes, usually depicted as circles, and edges, usually depicted as line segments connecting the nodes. Any scheduling problem can be represented as a graph. Nodes represent events, and the edges indicate the sequence in which events must occur. Each edge also has an associated weight, indicating the cost of progressing from one event to the next -- the time it takes a bus to travel between stops, for instance.
Yu, Williams, and Fang's algorithm first represents a problem as a graph, then begins adding edges that represent the constraints imposed by the planner. If the problem is soluble, the weights of the edges representing constraints will everywhere be greater than the weights representing the costs of transitions between events. Existing algorithms, however, can quickly home in on loops in the graph where the weights are imbalanced. The MIT researchers' system then calculates the lowest-cost way of rebalancing the loop, which it presents to the planner as a modification of the problem's initial constraints.

How attached to our smart phones are we?

Are we emotionally attached to our smart phones? That was the question scientists in the UK and Iceland hoped to answer in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation.

Gísli Thorsteinsson of the University of Iceland in Reykjavik and Tom Page of Loughborough University explain how the emergence of devices such as the Apple iPhone in January 2007 gave users a computer in their pocket. The gadget not only allowed them to make phone calls and send text messages as previous phones had, but also gave users immediate access to social media and social network systems, such as Facebook and Twitter, allowed them to access their email quickly and seamlessly, provided access to the web, video clips, music files and a whole eco system of phone-based software, apps, all via a slick touch screen interface. Today, there are myriad brands and smart phone models all competing for market share.
As such, understanding how users become reliant on their smart phone for particular tasks, how they invest time and money in these gadgets and perhaps even how their relationship with these all-in-one pocket computer-communicators is important to the manufacturers hoping to beat rivals to sell more of their brand. Today, it is considered the norm for people to repeatedly and distractedly to check their phones, not for missed calls, but for the countless notifications that social sites, apps and other software spit out at them via that touch screen.
In some circles, teenagers, journalists, business users and other professionals, it is even considered something of a social faux pas, a sign of being inept not to have a constant connection with the outside world via one's smart phone regardless of the circumstances one finds oneself at any given time.
There has been much discussion in the popular media of the pros and cons of the smart phone, irrespective of whether a person uses an iPhone, an HTC model, a Samsung, a Blackberry, a Windows phone or any other of the countless devices on the market, and whether we as a society are becoming over-reliant, dependent even, on these always-on devices. Thorsteinsson and Page wanted to know whether this attachment to one's smart phone has a serious emotional element.
Through a questionnaire given to 205 smart phone users in the age range 16 to 64 years from the UK, Hong Kong, China, Canada, Australia, Peru and the USA and through a case study the team has drawn a preliminary conclusion. They found that people do indeed grow emotionally attached to their smart phone, or at least, the connectivity and the technology that the device facilitates (Obviously, a lost or stolen phone can be replaced with the same model and a data backup restored to the replacement; the same cannot be said of a lost pet dog, for instance).
It is the ease with which smart phone can be used, the need to keep them close, the ability to pour out one's life into the apps and networks to which it connects and the customisation and personalisation options of a smart phone that bring emotional baggage to ownership, the team suggests.
"Smart phones are creating a huge ripple in the pond of human behaviour and it is important that, as smart phones develop, we continue to study the way they affect behaviour, emotions and emotional attachments," the team concludes.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Inderscience. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Massive chip design savings to be realized

IT researchers working at the University of Twente have developed a programming language making the massive costs associated with designing hardware more manageable. Chip manufacturers have been using the same chip design techniques for twenty years now. The current process calls for extensive testing after each design step -- a massively expensive state of affairs. The newly developed, so-called functional programming language makes it possible to prove, in advance, that a design transformation is a hundred percent error-free.

"While a software developer is able to fix a programming error by developing and distributing a patch, a single flaw in chip design means that all products containing the chip need to be recalled," Christiaan Baaij, doctorate candidate, explains. In 2011, such a design flaw ended up costing Intel a full billion dollars.
"Clearly, the design process of chips to be used in hardware requires extensive and repeated testing. Such testing is expensive, but is at this moment still absolutely necessary. A company like NVidia nowadays incurs over a billion dollars in design expenses annually."
In his doctoral thesis, Baaij describes the world-wide production of microchips through the years. In 1985, Intel launched the 386 processor, which had 275,000 transistors. Now, in 2015, NVidia's very largest chip contains more than 7,000,000,000 transistors. An astonishing production performance: in just thirty years, the transistor count of a chip has ballooned from less than a million to multiple billions. Sadly, design productivity did not keep the same pace. Chip designers have been using the same chip design techniques for twenty years now.
Functional programming language
The researchers developed a modern, so-called functional programming language for hardware design. The use of functional programming languages allows them to formally prove the correctness of design transformations.
These transformations make the chip work faster. The researchers are able to prove that the transformation does not alter the chip's behaviour. This means that, in contrast to traditional methods, it is not necessary to verify and re-verify everything for each step of the design process. In turn, this means that these modern programming languages allow for keeping the complexity -- and the cost -- of chip design more manageable. One important element of this research involves the CλaSH compiler, which transforms hardware descriptions as written in the Haskell functional language into a lower-level description. Standard software is then able to create a chip from this description. Baaij's work concerns the development of this compiler, allowing for the automatic generation of the hardware from an abstract description.
Large corporate sector interest
The department has already presented its work to the corporate sector, which is showing a great deal of interest. The Dutch Functional Programming Day, which was held at the University of Twente on 9 January 2015 and was organized by researcher Jan Kuper, was attended both by a sizeable number of scientists and by a great many corporate sector representatives. Collaboration projects have already been started up with Incas³ and the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, while the High performance computing center Stuttgart (HLRS) is very interested in the work.
Still, Baaij does notice some reluctance amidst all the interest. "Many companies are none too happy about having to re-train their staff and about having to face other continuity challenges. Functional programming is not part of the standard curriculum. I am becoming more hopeful, though. Apple released its 'Swift' language recently, a functional language for app development. Knowing Apple, they will really start pushing the language in the near future. This hopefully means we will soon have an army of programmers familiar with functional languages, allowing chip manufacturers to also make the switch."
More information
The functional programming language was developed within the Computer Architecture for Embedded Systems (CAES, Professor Gerard Smit) department of the University of Twente's CTIT research institute. Lecturer Jan Kuper, who also serves as a teacher for the UT's Computer Science bachelor's and the Embedded Systems master's programmes, leads the research.
Christiaan Baaij's doctoral research within this department focused on the compiler transforming the Haskell description into a low-level description. Baaij will defend his doctoral thesis, Digital Circuits in CλaSH -- Functional Specifications and Type-Directed Synthesis, on 23 January 2015.

Major breakthrough in reading ancient scrolls

After working for more than 10 years on unlocking an ancient piece of history, what lies inside damaged Herculaneum scrolls, University of Kentucky Department of Computer Science Chair and Professor Brent Seales will accomplish the next step in allowing the world to read the scrolls, which cannot be physically opened. A major development in the venture, Seales is building software that will visualize the scrolls' writings as they would be if unrolled.

A breakthrough not only in digital imaging techniques, the first-of-its-kind software could also have profound impacts on history and literature. Seales says that each scroll may well be the only remaining copy as of yet unknown literature from the Classical era. Each scroll is 20 to 30 feet long, and Seales estimates each to contain at least 3,000 words.
"The sheer volume of words available for discovery is probably larger than the entire works of Shakespeare," said Seales.
The scrolls aren't your typical 2,000-year old papyri manuscripts; they were carbonized in the Mount Vesuvius volcanic eruption of A.D. 79, and later discovered as charred clumps in the Villa of the Papyri in the ancient Italian city of Herculaneum beginning in 1752. When attempting to open, the artifacts would often shatter beyond repair.
To reveal the works inside the remaining intact scrolls, Seales and his research collaborator from the Institut de France, Daniel Delattre, knew that "virtual unrolling" was the only way.
After successfully creating 2-D images of two Herculaneum scrolls in 2009 but not being able to detect the ink in them, Seales' colleagues believe they have recently identified ink in the scrolls after applying an x-ray method often used in the medical and archeology communities.
The method, called "propagation-based phase contrast imaging," was recently featured in a Nature Communications article, "Revealing letters in rolled Herculaneum papyri by X-ray phase-contrast imaging," by authors Vito Mocella, Claudio Ferrero, Emmanuel Brun and Delattre, citing Seales' work on the scrolls. Seales says the researchers claim to "see letters and, in a few instances, whole words."
Now that he and his team can see the writings, the next step in unveiling the writings to the world is to organize them. Without unrolling the scrolls, Seales' software will run extremely high-resolution images from the tangled surfaces, making sense of the jumbled letters into words, and words into passages.
"The software will combine novel methods for finding the scroll surfaces together with a user-guided interface for correcting mistakes and improving the automatic first-guess," he said.
In other words, it will pull out a page that displays writing from the data they currently have, and then identify where that page is inside the scrolls that now resemble charcoal. Because of this, Seales, his team, partners and physicists will be able to optimize the scanning process on site, allowing them to see an entire page "unwrapped" without ever leaving the facility. Eventually, the outcome will be as complete of a manuscript as possible of the remaining Herculaneum scrolls.
"We have a ton of data from all of our preliminary work, and from the 2009-2010 work. We're using that data to build software so that we can pull out large sections and flatten them," said Seales. "To date, no tool exists that can accomplish that. The software we're building will be the first to visualize data in that way, and it's crucial to uncovering the works inside the Herculaneum scrolls."
Supported by a three-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation grant and by Google, where Seales spent his sabbatical in 2012-2013, the computer science professor has begun working to develop the software. Seales' sabbatical at Google was crucial to the new imaging method, and he credits Google as the "impetus for being unstuck" in the project.
UK students are also driving the progress. The computer science professor is working on the software with a team of UK undergraduate and graduate students including:

Melissa Shankle, a pre-computer science sophomore and member of the Honors Program from Mayfield, Kentucky;
David Pennington, a computer science senior from Union, Kentucky;
Michael Roup, a computer science and mathematics senior from Crestwood, Kentucky;
Nickolas Graczyk, a computer science senior with a minor in mathematics from Lexington;
Anastasia Kazadi, a computer science senior from Lexington;
Abigail Coleman, a computer science graduate student from Princeton, Kentucky;
Sean Karlage, a computer science and computer engineering graduate student from Edgewood, Kentucky; and
Chao Du, a computer science graduate student from Beijing, China.

In addition to UK students, Seales is working with Seth Parker, video editor at the UK Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, and collaborating with Delattre in France, as well as Roger Macfarlane, a researcher at Brigham Young University. They hope to travel back to Grenoble, France, in the spring to conduct major scans on the two scrolls scanned in 2009. The scans will utilize Seales' software, as well as the new x-ray technique.
Seales said the project plan is to release working software and datasets as soon as possible for scholars to examine.
"By project's end, the team hopes to have created a software tool and a set of scans of scrolls that together will transform the hopelessly damaged Herculaneum collection into new literary discoveries," he said.
Unmasking the Herculaneum writings is only the beginning. Seales hopes the work to uncover and decipher these ancient scrolls will propel other efforts forward, leading to an even greater impact on our understanding of classical history and literature, and revolutionary digital imaging.
"I dream of seeing renewed excavation at the Villa of the Papyri. Many believe that a treasure trove of undiscovered scrolls are waiting there to be unearthed. If more are found, these methods could be used to read them," said Seales.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Kentucky. The original article was written by Whitney Harder. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Safe production in Industry 4.0

Space invaders haven't got a chance: Production networks of the future will be attack-proof -- with the aid of the IT security laboratory found at Fraunhofer IOSB.

[Click to enlarge image]

Production facilities and components of Industry 4.0 are linked to the Internet, networked with each other, and thus open to attack. Using an IT security laboratory, Fraunhofer researchers offer a test environment in order to simulate attacks on this network and to detect any gaps.

Beautiful new production world: For value-creation chains that span multiple locations, equipment, robotics, systems components, minicomputers in components and sensors are all networked with each other in Industry 4.0. They exchange data, retrieve the status of equipment and components, calculate the optimal sequence of work processes, schedule equipment usage and much more. Yet with the entry of communications into factories via Internet technologies, the safety risk also increases. Beside the known viruses, there are new, custom-tailored malware programs threatening the networked production plants. They can spy out system parameters, remotely control machinery, manipulate controls or paralyze processes. Industry 4.0 networks therefore require particular protective measures, sophisticated network technology and effective test methods that detect security gaps and close them reliably. With an IT security laboratory specially equipped for production and automation technology, the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB in Karlsruhe provides a secured test environment in order to readjust potential attacks on production networks, to study the effects and thus, to deduce new strategies and suitable defense measures. It also enables researchers to assess the security functions of conventional communications standards and protocols for industrial automation systems. These regulate, among other things, the data encryption to counter product piracy, espionage and sabotage.
Different framework conditions than in office IT
"IT security in industrial production must take into account entirely different framework conditions that do not exist accordingly in Office IT," says Birger Krägelin, project manager at IOSB's IT Security Laboratory. The control of production facilities entails real time requirements that make changes to the systems difficult. Downloading available software patches onto the systems and installing surveillance software, malware scanners, and antivirus programs influence the stability of meticulously coordinated processes. By the same token, production processes affect conditions when updates can be realized. Firewalls within the network and encrypted connection between systems can diminish real-time conditions. "For example, it is possible that the built-in of known security measures from the office environment can delay the dispatch of messages between computers. That can lead to conveyor belts running slower, valves or outlets closing with a delay, light barriers are triggered incorrectly, the rotational speed of motors increases, or control components break down," Krägelin explains. Even the relatively long usage period of hardware and software in production is markedly different from other areas where IT is deployed.
In order to find and establish appropriate IT security mechanisms for the production environment, the research team of specialists in automation technology and IT security equipped the laboratory accordingly. It features its own model factory with real automation components that control a simulated production facility, complete with conveyor belts, electric motors, robots, and lifting equipment. All network levels of a factory are equipped with typical components, including firewalls, circuits, and components for wireless parts. Having its own private cloud means it is possible for the IOSB experts to flexibly arrange various configurations and set up the model factory for a variety of scenarios.
"In the cloud, we can patch in virtual firewalls, PCs, add additional client computers and modify entire network structures with just one mouse-click. This makes it possible for us to install a virtual firewall or even analytical systems between two components, such as a machine and an overarching MES system (Manufacturing Execution System). From the cloud, we can start malware detection and for example text controls and systems visualizations for infections," the master of information science (MIS) explains. "We are capable of building other factory situations and simulate cyber attacks -- without having to buy components and configure circuitry."
The researchers from IOSB will be demonstrating which attack scenarios could happen to networked production facilities at the Fraunhofer joint exhibition booth at this year's Hannover Messe, in Hall 2, Booth C16 from April 13 to 17. Companies can use the laboratory so they can consult on the planning and operational launch of secure industrial network structures. In addition, they benefit from the know-how of the IOSB experts when it comes to the analysis of their already existing network and components. Furthermore, the researchers want to offer the laboratory in the future as an education and learning platform for training measures. "The one thing that engineers often don't have is the knowledge of how to deal with cyber threats," Krägelin points out.

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Stock market changes: Patents provide insight into Wall Street 'technology arms race'

A new study by New Zealand's University of Otago has used US patent data to shed light on the technological roots behind Wall Street's ongoing 'technology arms race'.

The way financial assets are traded, and the nature of the markets themselves, has dramatically changed over the last two decades, says study co-author Dr Ivan Diaz-Rainey of the University's Department of Accountancy and Finance.
"Trading a share-once a hands-on transaction taking around two minutes-is now handled in mere nanoseconds by computers in many markets around the world," he says.
"A 'technology arms race' is well underway as firms vie to shave even more time off trading and maintain their competitive edge. But it's not just about trading speed. We're seeing technology used more when firms are first issuing securities and even the use of neural networks in portfolio selection."
A body of research already exists examining how these technological changes have impacted the efficiency of trading. However, the Otago study, recently published online in the journal Technological Forecasting & Social Change, is the first to use US patent data to examine which firms have led this transformation and what pattern it has taken.
Using content analysis techniques, Dr Diaz-Rainey, along with co-authors Dr Michael Falta and doctoral student Stephan Essendorfer, examined patent information extracted from the United States Patent and Trademark Office database. Specifically, the researchers examined market infrastructure (MI) patents for software or hardware used in trading filed between January 1976 and December 2013.
"Established economic theory tells us that new firms will play a leading role in transforming an industry. However, traditional finance firms are powerful and commercially astute so it is reasonable to assume at least some will have responded aggressively by patenting new MI technologies themselves," says Dr Diaz-Rainey.
Analysis of the patent data confirmed that the top firms behind most of the MI patents were indeed a mix of 'new entrant' and 'incumbent' firms.
"We identified software companies and smaller brokerage firms that have invested heavily in technology internally and through market acquisitions, right alongside major incumbent firms like the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Goldman Sachs."
The researchers' analysis revealed that the leading MI patentee is not an established firm, but a private software firm, Trading Technologies International.
In terms of the pattern the MI patenting has taken, their analysis reveals that the MI revolution began in the mid-to-late 90s and has been more intense in comparison to general patent filing levels of the same time period.
"This is consistent with the notion of a 'technological arms race'," Dr Diaz-Rainey says.
Though the data used in the study was US-based, Dr Diaz-Rainey says his team's analysis may be of interest to the New Zealand market.
"Though our own market is far less technology driven, this information could help inform regulators in New Zealand considering shifting toward computerised high frequency trading in this country."
"At a basic level all markets are increasingly integrated -- if the Wall Street sneezes, NZ is likely to catch a financial cold. So I guess a question is do we want to move towards this?"
Dr Diaz-Rainey says the impact of these findings on the financial research sector "cannot be understated."
"Until now, we have had no way of knowing who exactly was involved in this 'arms race'. Was it the finance firms themselves? Were there new players involved? We just didn't know. We were in the dark."
"The patent data has allowed us to gain, for the first time, whole new insight into this aspect of the market. This paper is just the start."

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Otago. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.