Upon Improving the Performance of Localized Healthcare Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants are becoming popular in a variety of domains, responsible for automating repetitive tasks or allowing users to seamlessly access useful information. With the advances in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, there has been an increasing interest in applying such assistants in new areas and with new capabilities. In particular, their application in e-healthcare is becoming attractive and is driven by the need to access medically-related knowledge, as well as providing first-level assistance in an efficient manner. In such types of virtual assistants, localization is of utmost importance, since the general population (especially the aging population) is not familiar with the needed “healthcare vocabulary” to communicate facts properly; and state-of-practice proves relatively poor in performance when it comes to specialized virtual assistants for less frequently spoken languages. In this context, we present a Greek ML-based virtual assistant specifically designed to address some commonly occurring tasks in the healthcare domain, such as doctor’s appointments or distress (panic situations) management. We build on top of an existing open-source framework, discuss the necessary modifications needed to address the language-specific characteristics and evaluate various combinations of word embeddings and machine learning models to enhance the assistant’s behaviour. Results show that we are able to build an efficient Greek-speaking virtual assistant to support e-healthcare, while the NLP pipeline proposed can be applied in other (less frequently spoken) languages, without loss of generality.

Conceptualizing the Domain and an Empirical Analysis of Operations Security Management

Operations security management integrates the activities of all the information systems security controls. It ensures that the entire computing environment is adequately secured. This chapter conducts an in-depth review of scholarly and practitioner works to conceptualize the domain of operations security management. Drawing upon the existing information systems security literature, the chapter classifies operations security management into 10 domains. Following, the chapter performs an empirical analysis to investigate the state-of-practice of operations security management in organizations. The findings show that the maturity level of operations security management is at the Level 3 (well-defined). The maturity levels range from Level 0 (not performed) to Level 5 (continuously improving). The results indicate that operations security processes are documented, approved, and implemented organization-wide. Backup and malware management are the most applied operations security controls, while logging, auditing, monitoring, and reviewing are the least implemented controls.

Content of Pedagogical Education in the Modern World: Meanings, Problems, Practices and Development Prospects

The article examines modern ideas about the nature of pedagogical activity, providing a critical analysis of the state of practice and scientific research on the problems of pedagogical education and reconstructing a set of methodological ideas, concepts and schemes related to ideas about the content and forms of pedagogical education. The authors present approaches to solving such problems as the modern understanding of the essence of pedagogical activity and the trends of its transformation in connection with the changed educational space, new functions of the teacher in the digital educational environment; crisis phenomena in pedagogical education and ways to overcome them. In this vein, the authors consider the concept of pedagogical education, substantiating its goals, content options and psychological mechanisms for mastering pedagogical activity. The proposed model of the process of professional socialization of teachers reveals the content, technologies and criteria for their effective professional training, dialectics of psychological, pedagogical and subject components in the structure of professional competence. Consideration is also given to the environment of a pedagogical university as a source of development of pedagogical experience and personal and professional qualities of teachers. The article may be of interest to researchers and organizers in the field of pedagogical education.

Practices and Infrastructures for ML Systems – An Interview Study

<div> <div> <div> <p>The best practices and infrastructures for developing and maintaining machine learning (ML) enabled software systems are often reported by large and experienced data-driven organizations. However, little is known about the state of practice across other organizations. Using interviews, we investigated practices and tool-chains for ML-enabled systems from 16 organizations in various domains. Our study makes three broad observations related to data management practices, monitoring practices and automation practices in ML model training, and serving workflows. These have limited number of generic practices and tools applicable across organizations in different domains. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Practices and Infrastructures for ML Systems – An Interview Study

<div> <div> <div> <p>The best practices and infrastructures for developing and maintaining machine learning (ML) enabled software systems are often reported by large and experienced data-driven organizations. However, little is known about the state of practice across other organizations. Using interviews, we investigated practices and tool-chains for ML-enabled systems from 16 organizations in various domains. Our study makes three broad observations related to data management practices, monitoring practices and automation practices in ML model training, and serving workflows. These have limited number of generic practices and tools applicable across organizations in different domains. </p> </div> </div> </div>