Future of Health IT: Trends and Scenarios

links for 2009-04-27

• SPARQL Query Language for RDF
  'RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. This specification defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs.'
  (tags: physio-mimi ontology query+language sparql)
• SPARQL Query Results XML Format
  'This document describes an XML format for the variable binding and boolean results formats provided by the SPARQL query language for RDF, developed by the W3C RDF Data Access Working Group (DAWG), part of the Semantic Web Activity as described in the activity statement .'
  (tags: physio-mimi query+language sparql)
• SPARQL Query Language for RDF
  'RDF is a directed, labeled graph data format for representing information in the Web. This specification defines the syntax and semantics of the SPARQL query language for RDF. SPARQL can be used to express queries across diverse data sources, whether the data is stored natively as RDF or viewed as RDF via middleware. SPARQL contains capabilities for querying required and optional graph patterns along with their conjunctions and disjunctions. SPARQL also supports extensible value testing and constraining queries by source RDF graph. The results of SPARQL queries can be results sets or RDF graphs.'
  (tags: physio-mimi ontology query+language)

links for 2009-04-24

• Edge: LORD OF THE CLOUD: John Markoff and Clay Shirky talk to David Gelernter
  A must-read interview between some gurus of cyberspace, including the unknown god of cyberspace, David Gelernter.
• MedlinePlus: Understanding Medical Research
  Layperson's tutorial and links on how to understand and evaluate clinical research.
  (tags: search research reference)

links for 2009-04-22

• PhysioToolkit: The WFDB Library
  'This is a set of functions (subroutines) for reading and writing files in the formats used by PhysioBank databases (among others). '
  (tags: physio-mimi polysomnography repository open+source software)
• PhysioToolkit: The WFDB Software Package
  'Software for viewing, analyzing, and creating recordings of physiologic signals'
  (tags: physio-mimi polysomnography open+source software)
• PhysioToolkit Software
  'PhysioToolkit's open-source WFDB software for reading and analyzing PhysioBank data is usable with and freely available for FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS/X, MS-Windows, Solaris, and most other popular operating systems. '
  (tags: physio-mimi open+source software polysomnography repository)
• An Introduction to the PhysioBank Archives
  'PhysioBank currently contains well over 7000 recordings of annotated, digitized physiologic signals and time series, organized in over 40 databases (collections of recordings). All are freely available from PhysioNet, but where should one begin looking among 220 gigabytes? '
  (tags: physio-mimi polysomnography repository)
• PhysioBank ATM
  'PhysioBank's Automated Teller Machine is a self-service facility for exploring PhysioBank using your web browser. Currently, its toolbox includes software that can display annotated waveforms, RR interval time series and histograms, convert WFDB signal files to text, EDF, or .mat files (for use with Matlab or Octave), and more. '
  (tags: physio-mimi polysomnography repository)
• SHHS Polysomnography DB: Annotation files
  'Use the rdann-O-Matic (or any PhysioToolkit application) to read the annotation files included in the SHHS Polysomnography Database. The text strings associated with each annotation are described below. '
  (tags: physio-mimi polysomnography)
• SHHS Polysomnography Database
  'The Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS) is a prospective cohort study designed to investigate the relationship between sleep disordered breathing and cardiovascular disease. Participants were recruited from nine existing epidemiological studies in which data on cardiovascular risk factors had been collected previously.'
  (tags: physio-mimi polysomnography research repository)

links for 2009-04-20

• Elsevier: Article Locator
  (tags: HIPAA common+rule physio-mimi)

links for 2009-04-17

• BPEL Project home
  'The goal of the BPEL Project is to add comprehensive support to Eclipse for the definition, authoring, editing, deploying, testing and debugging of WS-BPEL 2.0 processes. WS-BPEL (Web Services Business Process Execution Language), or BPEL, is a vendor-neutral specification being developed by OASIS to specify business processes as a set of interactions between web services. By providing these tools, this project aims to build a community around support for BPEL in Eclipse.'
  (tags: bpel eclipse plugin SOA workflow physio-mimi)

links for 2009-04-16

• Shankar Vedantam - The Computer as a Road Map to Unknowable Territory - washingtonpost.com
  'Scientist Yaneer Bar-Yam has developed a computational model of the economy that uses virtual actors to populate the world, instead of digital representations of specific individuals, companies, and brokers, enabling researchers to change how the actors behave and study how those changes affect the economic ecosystem. Bar-Yam says the principle behind the model is that humans regularly solve problems by imaging how certain behaviors will affect specific outcomes, but in a complex system such as the economy, which can be affected by fear, rumors, and misinformation, the ability to forecast accurately is severely reduced. He wanted to understand why the economy was so turbulent, and his model provides a unique explanation for the instability.'
  (tags: economics society+and+culture agent+oriented+paradigm complexity complex+systems)
• Technology Review: Microsoft Demos Augmented Vision
  'Microsoft's augmented reality software analyzes scenes from a camera and matches those images to images from a database to overlay supplementary information on the display. Microsoft researchers say that a smartphone with augmented reality would enable engineers to overlay plans for pipes on images of city streets, or allow users to see a bus route and estimate when the next bus is due at a certain stop. Augmented reality has been in development for more than a decade, but only recently has the computing power and hardware of smartphones become sophisticated enough to handle the technology.'
  (tags: virtual+reality visualization heads-up+displays hci)
• New direction in teaching computer science emphasizes activity, interaction, critique
  'The Washington University in St. Louis computer science department is using a new "active learning" approach to teach undergraduate students in an effort to better prepare them for the work place. Active learning uses a learning-laboratory-based tutorial teaching concept in which students are encouraged to get out of their seats, move around, and interact with classmates. "At the heart of active learning is the hallmark of interactive face time and students taking a more active role and not just repeating what a professor wants to hear," says Washington professor Cindy Grimm. "We think it provides a motivation to learn things that they have to know to do something that they really want to do."'
  (tags: collaboration learning education computing)
• The Case For 4D Immersive Holographic Spaces
  '4D Immersive Holographic Spaces will be joint multi-view multimedia-rich spaces where people can immerse themselves in their physical full body size into a joint cyber-physical space with other people, and execute physical activities (e.g., physiotherapy rehabilitation), walk around people and observe detailed full-body social behaviors and communication cues of people in real-time, as if they were co-located in the same room, even though they are geographically distributed and thousands of miles apart. The impact of such systems would be dramatic, contributing to the increase of innovative economic opportunities, to the “green energy” efforts, and to the decrease of gap between regions of “have” and “have-not” experts. With respect to innovation leadership, venture capitalists will for the first time be able to interact with entrepreneurs located thousands of miles away as if they were next door.'
  (tags: hci society+and+culture virtual+reality virtual+worlds)
• ECS - Conference to call for more research into the World Wide Web
  "Web Science acknowledges that the World Wide Web does not exist without the participation of people and organizations; indeed significant proportions of people’s lives are now spent on-line in many countries. The conference will therefore address major issues of people’s behaviour and motivation on-line, their ability to trust websites or agents, their security and privacy. Crucially: how can the design of the Web of the future ensure that a system on which - as Tim Berners-Lee put it – ‘democracy and commerce depends remains stable and pro-human’?"
  (tags: Web3.0 information+science society+and+culture www)
• New Search Technologies Mine the Web More Deeply - NYTimes.com
  'Google’s Deep Web search strategy involves sending out a program to analyze the contents of every database it encounters. For example, if the search engine finds a page with a form related to fine art, it starts guessing likely search terms — “Rembrandt,” “Picasso,” “Vermeer” and so on — until one of those terms returns a match. The search engine then analyzes the results and develops a predictive model of what the database contains.'
  (tags: physio-mimi information+science google deep+web semantic+web)

links for 2009-04-02

• UNIX / Linux Tutorial for Beginners
  Recommended by Dragomir Radev, so it's got to be good.
  (tags: programming reference tutorial linux unix osx)