scholarly journals Ontological model for evaluating the effectiveness of scientific institutions

The article presents an approach to assessing the quality of functioning of scientific institutions based on ontologies. Today, there are a large number of scientific institutions and specialized organizations whose efficiency depends on the quality of the services they provide. In the course of their operation, institutions accumulate a large amount of information (scientific articles, reports, employee ratings, economic indicators, etc.) that can be used to evaluate them automatically by national criteria. This study proposes to use an ontological model to store, present and manipulate with such information. Ontologies are new intelligent tools for finding resources on the Internet, new methods for representing and processing knowledge and queries. They are able to accurately and efficiently describe the semantics of data for a certain domain and solve the problem of incompatibility and inconsistency of concepts. The ontological approach allows the continuous improvement of the model based on basic ontologies by completing and developing them The ontology will allow not only to structure and systematize the data of scientific institutions, but also to perform the procedure of quality assessment through the mechanism of ontological logical inference. A general ontology for describing the activities of scientific institutions is represented by a system of five connected components. In the paper the structure of such a system is described, basic elements of its ontologies and the connections between them are highlighted. The ontology of the scientific institution activity is developed using specific technological platform TEDAOS - “Transdisciplinary Educational Dialogues of Applications’ Ontology Systems”.

Information ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Nemury Silega ◽  
Eliani Varén ◽  
Alfredo Varén ◽  
Yury I. Rogozov ◽  
Vyacheslav S. Lapshin ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused the deaths of millions of people around the world. The scientific community faces a tough struggle to reduce the effects of this pandemic. Several investigations dealing with different perspectives have been carried out. However, it is not easy to find studies focused on COVID-19 contagion chains. A deep analysis of contagion chains may contribute new findings that can be used to reduce the effects of COVID-19. For example, some interesting chains with specific behaviors could be identified and more in-depth analyses could be performed to investigate the reasons for such behaviors. To represent, validate and analyze the information of contagion chains, we adopted an ontological approach. Ontologies are artificial intelligence techniques that have become widely accepted solutions for the representation of knowledge and corresponding analyses. The semantic representation of information by means of ontologies enables the consistency of the information to be checked, as well as automatic reasoning to infer new knowledge. The ontology was implemented in Ontology Web Language (OWL), which is a formal language based on description logics. This approach could have a special impact on smart cities, which are characterized as using information to enhance the quality of basic services for citizens. In particular, health services could take advantage of this approach to reduce the effects of COVID-19.


Author(s):  
Margaret Jane Radin

Boilerplate—the fine-print terms and conditions that we become subject to when we click “I agree” online, rent an apartment, or enter an employment contract, for example—pervades all aspects of our modern lives. On a daily basis, most of us accept boilerplate provisions without realizing that should a dispute arise about a purchased good or service, the nonnegotiable boilerplate terms can deprive us of our right to jury trial and relieve providers of responsibility for harm. Boilerplate is the first comprehensive treatment of the problems posed by the increasing use of these terms, demonstrating how their use has degraded traditional notions of consent, agreement, and contract, and sacrificed core rights whose loss threatens the democratic order. This book examines attempts to justify the use of boilerplate provisions by claiming either that recipients freely consent to them or that economic efficiency demands them, and it finds these justifications wanting. It argues that our courts, legislatures, and regulatory agencies have fallen short in their evaluation and oversight of the use of boilerplate clauses. To improve legal evaluation of boilerplate, the book offers a new analytical framework, one that takes into account the nature of the rights affected, the quality of the recipient's consent, and the extent of the use of these terms. It goes on to offer possibilities for new methods of boilerplate evaluation and control, and concludes by discussing positive steps that NGOs, legislators, regulators, courts, and scholars could take to bring about better practices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (13) ◽  
pp. 5826
Author(s):  
Evangelos Axiotis ◽  
Andreas Kontogiannis ◽  
Eleftherios Kalpoutzakis ◽  
George Giannakopoulos

Ethnopharmacology experts face several challenges when identifying and retrieving documents and resources related to their scientific focus. The volume of sources that need to be monitored, the variety of formats utilized, and the different quality of language use across sources present some of what we call “big data” challenges in the analysis of this data. This study aims to understand if and how experts can be supported effectively through intelligent tools in the task of ethnopharmacological literature research. To this end, we utilize a real case study of ethnopharmacology research aimed at the southern Balkans and the coastal zone of Asia Minor. Thus, we propose a methodology for more efficient research in ethnopharmacology. Our work follows an “expert–apprentice” paradigm in an automatic URL extraction process, through crawling, where the apprentice is a machine learning (ML) algorithm, utilizing a combination of active learning (AL) and reinforcement learning (RL), and the expert is the human researcher. ML-powered research improved the effectiveness and efficiency of the domain expert by 3.1 and 5.14 times, respectively, fetching a total number of 420 relevant ethnopharmacological documents in only 7 h versus an estimated 36 h of human-expert effort. Therefore, utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support the researcher can boost the efficiency and effectiveness of the identification and retrieval of appropriate documents.


Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 454
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Varvara ◽  
Sara Bernardi ◽  
Serena Bianchi ◽  
Bruna Sinjari ◽  
Maurizio Piattelli

The COVID-19 pandemic literally stopped most human movement and activities as it initially spread, which included dental practices and dental education. This defined the need for significative changes in teaching and learning with the use of “e-learning” methods, also for traineeships. This study was designed to determine the undergraduate student perception of these new methods as part of their education. This involved 353 students attending the Dental School of the G. D’Annunzio University of Chieti–Pescara, from the first to the sixth years. A questionnaire in Italian and was set-up using “Google Forms” and sent by email to the students. The questionnaire was divided into three parts: the first part included questions for general information, including age, sex and year of course; the second part had multiple choice questions related to their evaluation of the e-learning teaching, using a scale of opinion in the replies to each question (e.g., “scarce”, “fair”, “satisfying”, “very good” and “excellent”); and the third part included two open questions to indicate the strengths and limitations of these new teaching and learning approaches. The categorical variables in the first and second parts of the questionnaire were evaluated using Chi squared tests, setting significance at p < 0.05, while the comments were evaluated qualitatively. The student feedback showed significant appreciation (p < 0.05) of the new methods and the efforts that the lecturers put in to provide lectures of as high a quality as possible. However, a lack of practical training was significantly perceived as an important problem in the structure of their new curriculum (p < 0.05). COVID-19 has been an epic tragedy that has hit the human population not only in terms of health and healthcare, but also quality of life. This includes the quality of dental education within universities. However, the pandemic can be seen to also represent motivation to invest in the necessary technological innovation to deliver the best possible education to our future dentists.


2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (01) ◽  
pp. 146-155
Author(s):  
A. V. Alekseyenko ◽  
Y. Aphinyanaphongs ◽  
S. Brown ◽  
D. Fenyo ◽  
L. Fu ◽  
...  

SummaryTo survey major developments and trends in the field of Bioinformatics in 2010 and their relationships to those of previous years, with emphasis on long-term trends, on best practices, on quality of the science of informatics, and on quality of science as a function of informatics.A critical review of articles in the literature of Bioinformatics over the past year.Our main results suggest that Bioinformatics continues to be a major catalyst for progress in Biology and Translational Medicine, as a consequence of new assaying technologies, most predominantly Next Generation Sequencing, which are changing the landscape of modern biological and medical research. These assays critically depend on bioinformatics and have led to quick growth of corresponding informatics methods development. Clinical-grade molecular signatures are proliferating at a rapid rate. However, a highly publicized incident at a prominent university showed that deficiencies in informatics methods can lead to catastrophic consequences for important scientific projects. Developing evidence-driven protocols and best practices is greatly needed given how serious are the implications for the quality of translational and basic science.Several exciting new methods have appeared over the past 18 months, that open new roads for progress in bioinformatics methods and their impact in biomedicine. At the same time, the range of open problems of great significance is extensive, ensuring the vitality of the field for many years to come.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Gaston Sanglier ◽  
Jose Miguel ◽  
Jose Antonio Penaranda ◽  
y Gabriel Del Ojo

Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) has gone from being a simple laboratory curiosity to an indispensable tool in the industry to determine the level of quality achieved in its products. The new concepts of Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) bring a more universal concept of quality compared to the past philosophy based on Quality Control as a group specialized in checking whether production works within certain specifications. Even so, NDTs have not lost interest, but have seen their interest increased due to automated inspection techniques. It has become a contribution to the structuring of quality as it allows to move from purely empirical criteria to other more objective and that constitute the link between design and evaluation (Ramirez et al, 1996). The work presented, although it does not propose new methods or techniques of NDT, has the interest of converging into a single object five conventional methods each of which provides partial information about their quality of manufacture and must synthesize the results in order to evaluate it. Furthermore, it shows a situation of the application of NDT in which these must be applied in the absence of reference standards, as they do not exist. This peculiar situation is completely different from the usual situation in the use of NDT in the industry, both in manufacturing processes and in maintenance inspections.


2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nitigya Sambyal ◽  
Pawanesh Abrol

Text detection and segmentation system serves as important method for document analysis as it helps in many content based image analysis tasks. This research paper proposes a connected component technique for text extraction and character segmentation using maximally stable extremal regions (MSERs) for text line formation followed by connected components to determined separate characters. The system uses a cluster size of five which is selected by experimental evaluation for identifying characters. Sobel edge detector is used as it reduces the execution time but at the same time maintains quality of the results. The algorithm is tested along a set of JPEG, PNG and BMP images over varying features like font size, style, colour, background colour and text variation. Further the CPU time in execution of the algorithm with three different edge detectors namely prewitt, sobel and canny is observed. Text identification using MSER gave very good results whereas character segmentation gave on average 94.572% accuracy for the various test cases considered for this study.


Sci ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Anatoly Alabugin ◽  
Sergei Aliukov

The imperfection of theoretical and methodological approaches to regulate the jump process transition when combining differentiated energy resources is a pressing issue. The goal of this paper is to develop a theory and a method to regulate the integration-balancing processes of combining diversified resources. The concept of combining integration and balancing models has been substantiated by methods of transforming multidimensional space and approximating generalized functions that represent jump-like processes. Theoretical and operational-regulatory models of economic sustainability have been developed, substantiating new concepts, patterns, properties, dependencies and indicators of the dynamics of the processes of combination; the optimality conditions for the number of approximations of generalized functions, interpreting the effects of control functions of combining resources, are determined. New methods for solving problems have been developed: the organization of the energy technology complex of facilities for enhanced resource diversification and the Center for Sustainability, improving the quality of managing dynamic processes in terms of combining and diversifying resources.


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