Objectives 1. To consider the challenges of recruiting and retaining medical patients in trials of complex interventions, that include ‘psychological’ components. 2. To discuss practical solutions to these challenges that ensure trials recruit to target and maximise outcome data collection. Examples are taken from three trials of complex interventions: SMaRT Oncology-2, SMaRT Oncology-3 and SMa...

BACKGROUND The study aimed to assess interdisciplinary communication among various Educational and Research Departments of Isfahan University of Medical Sciences (IUMS) in clinical medical sciences using social network analysis. MATERIALS AND METHODS The study was carried out using scientometrics method and interdisciplinary communication network analysis. Interdisciplinary network of 1298 ar...

3D city building models can improve many applications such as urban planning, navigation, disaster management, traffic control etc., in various aspects especially in visualisation. However, compared with the data volume and complexity of 3D city models, the capability of devices and network band are still limited. To improve the visualisation efficiency, generalisation of 3D city models is requ...

Hidden-city ticket is an interesting airline ticket pricing phenomenon. It occurs when an itinerary connecting at an intermediate city is less expensive than a ticket from the origin to the intermediate city. In such a case, passengers traveling to the intermediate city have an incentive to pretend to be traveling to the final destination, deplane at the connection point and forgo the unused po...

Intelligent environments and cities have become a popular topic in recent literature. The island nation of Singapore has often been mentioned as an example of an intelligent city for its visionary IT2000 project where Information Technology permeates every aspect of the society; at home, work and play (1). The European project IntelCities was aimed at providing citizens more services and increa...

The so-called smart factory is a novel paradigm that is rapidly gaining ground in scenarios for factories of the future. Many manufacturing companies try to raise the level of smartness by considering a number of aspects related to the smart factory. However, there is a lack of field-oriented systematic research to help them fit the interest of industry for promoting interest and diffusion of s...

These days, unless something has the epithet “smart” attached to it, it is nothing. Smart Energy solutions promise cleaner, cheaper and more reliable energy. Smart Cities promise better quality of life for its citizens. We will argue that for a “system” to be SMART, it should Sense Meaningfully, Analyze and Respond Timely. Using real-world examples from the domains of Smart Energy and Smart Cit...

So-called “Smart Dust” is envisioned to combine sensing, computing, and wireless communication capabilities in an autonomous, dust-grain-sized device. Dense networks of Smart Dust should then be able to unobtrusively monitor real-world processes with unprecedented quality and scale. In this paper, we present and evaluate a prototype implementation of a system for tracking the location of real-w...

Smart Cities require reliable means for managing installations that offer essential services to the citizens. In this paper we focus on the problem of evacuation of smart buildings in case of emergencies. In particular, we present an abstract architecture for situation-aware evacuation guidance systems in smart buildings, describe its key modules in detail, and provide some concrete examples of...