Description: This article discusses a novel space partitioning algorithm to improve current practices in facility placement. In the presence of naturally occurring and man-made public health threats, the feasibility of regional bio-emergency contingency plans plays a crucial role in the mitigation of such emergencies. While the analysis of in-place response scenarios provides a measure of quality for a given plan, it involves human judgement to identify improvements in plans that are otherwise likely to fail. Since resource constraints and government mandates limit the availability of service provided in case of an emergency, computational techniques can determine optimal locations for providing emergency response assuming that the uniform distribution of demand across homogeneous resources will yield and optimal service outcome. This paper presents an algorithm that recursively partitions the geographic space into sub-regions while equally distributing the population across the partitions. For this method, the authors have proven the existence of an upper bound on the deviation from the optimal population size for sub-regions.

Description: This article discusses classifying genes to the correct Gene Ontology Slim term in Saccharomyces cerevisiae using neighbouring genes with classification learning. Abstract: Background: There is increasing evidence that gene location and surrounding genes influence the functionality of genes in the eukaryotic genome. Knowing the Gene Ontology Slim terms associated with a gene gives the authors insight into a gene's functionality by informing the authors how its gene product behaves in a cellular context using three different ontologies: molecular function, biological process, and cellular component. In this study, the authors analyzed if they could classify a gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to its correct Gene Ontology Slim term using information about its location in the genome and information from its nearest-neighbouring genes using classification learning. Results: The authors performed experiments to establish that the MultiBoostAB algorithm using the J48 classifier could correctly classify Gene Ontology Slim terms of a gene given information regarding the gene's location and information from its nearest-neighbouring genes for training. Different neighbourhood sizes were examined to determine how many nearest neighbours should be included around each gene to provide better classification rules. The authors' results show that by just incorporating neighbour information from each gene's two-nearest neighbours, the ...

Description: This article discusses evaluation results of an Engineering (E) and Engineering Technology (ET) education forum. Abstract: Under a two-year Department of Education FIPSE grant, the College of Technology at the University of Houston hosted a two-day forum in spring 2010 to explore a variety of issues related to E and ET education. A central focus to these discussions revolved around whether E and ET exist as separate fields or whether there was value in thinking about them as part of a continuum. The CDIO (conceive-design-implement-operate) model was used as a framework for thinking about these two knowledge areas as facets of an overarching engineering profession, where the majority of E and ET graduates flow to the middle of CDIO and engage in "design-implement" tasks within three to five years after graduation. Several implications of a continuum-based framework for engineering education were debated within the context of two alternative curricular approaches. The first approach envisions a two-year curriculum in which E and ET students enroll in a set of common technical core courses. At the end of the second year, students would make a well-educated decision to become either engineering or engineering technology majors, subsequently completing a BS degree. The second ...

Description: This article discusses text and structural data mining of influenza mentions in web and social media. Text and structural data mining of web and social media (WSM) provides a novel disease surveillance resource and can identify online communities for targeted public health communications (PHC) to assure wide dissemination of pertinent information. WSM that mention influenza are harvested over a 24-week period, 5 October 2008 to 21 March 2009. Link analysis reveals communities for targeted PHC. Text mining is shown to identify trends in flu posts that correlate to real-world influenza-like illness patient report data. The authors also bring to bear a graph-based data mining technique to detect anomalies among flu blogs connected by publisher type, links, and user-tags.

Description: This article discusses virtualization based secure execution and testing. Computer security aims at protecting confidentiality, integrity, and availability of sensitive information that are processed, used, or stored by computing systems. Computer scientists working in the field of computer security have successfully designed and developed software and hardware mechanisms to provide security in modern day computing devices. As compared to hardware security mechanisms, software-only security mechanisms are easy to implement and patch. But software-only security mechanisms cannot ensure protection against hardware-based attacks, thus rendering them vulnerable to such attacks. Hardware mechanism such as secure architectures aim to root the trust of the security solution in the hardware architecture. These security architectures typically deploy security mechanisms like encryption/decryption to protect confidentiality and hashing to protect data integrity. Though the security provided by hardware secure architectures is reliably high, they require modifications to the processor micro-architecture. Any changes to the micro-architecture is an extremely costly and time consuming process. Also, testing these hardware secure architectures is difficult as it requires testing the complete system including hardware, software and applications. Recently, virtualization has emerged to be an efficient and cost effective technology that allows emulating hardware mechanisms. It also enables emulating new hardware features ...