Patient safety, and more broadly the quality of care, is typically discussed with reference to the reduction of preventable adverse events within hospitals and adherence to practice guidelines on care processes. We call it the 'care-centered approach' and recognize that the United States is a leader in the field. Another face of patient safety and care quality may be defined as the 'system-cent...

Registration of subject and control brains to a common anatomical space or template is the basis for quantitatively delineating regions of abnormality in an individual brain. Normally, a brain atlas is chosen as the template. Limitations in the registration process result in persistent differences between individual subject brains and template, which can be a source of error in an analysis. We ...

The recent convergence of ubiquitous computing and context-aware computing has seen a considerable rise in interest in applications that exploit aspects of the contextual environment to enhance implicit user interaction, offer services, present information, tailor application behavior or trigger adaptation. However they are often insufficient to provide adequate environments for people with spe...

In this paper, Accountability Centered Approach (ACA) is proposed for business process engineering. The ACA approach enables the designers and users to focus on the requirements and rationales of the process design, before settling into selecting and committing to a set of activities. The approach indicates iterative decomposition of accountability to appropriate levels and mapping of subaccoun...

We present an iterative algorithm to transform a given planar triangle mesh into a well-centered one by moving the interior vertices while keeping the connectivity fixed. A well-centered planar triangulation is one in which all angles are acute. Our approach is based on minimizing a certain energy that we propose. Well-centered meshes have the advantage of having nice orthogonal dual meshes (th...

Explaining embryonic development of multicellular organisms requires insight into complex interactions between genetic regulation and physical, generic mechanisms at multiple scales. As more physicists move into developmental biology, we need to be aware of the ‘‘cultural’’ differences between the two fields, whose concepts of ‘‘explanations’’ and ‘‘models’’ traditionally differ: biologists aim...

In this paper we discuss Conceptual Knowledge Discovery in Databases (CKDD) as it is developing in the field of Conceptual Knowledge Processing. Conceptual Knowledge Processing is based on the mathematical theory of Formal Concept Analysis which has become a successful theory for data analysis during the last two decades. CKDD aims to support a human-centered process of discovering knowledge fr...

The concept of futility has been a source of discussion for many years. Even though it is tempting to propose that an action or clinical intervention should be deemed futile if it does not achieve the goals of that action, further clarification is needed in terms of the nature of the likely outcomes of an intervention and the probabilities of various outcomes being achieved. The outcome, in an ...

Characterizing the context of a conversation is a complex endeavor. In this paper we present some of the key elements that sustain the conversational context. We suggest that a conversation can be viewed as a negotiation game in which participants negotiate on several levels: some of these levels are used to manage the communication (communication channel, information transfer, turn taking) whi...

We perform an experiment designed to assess the accuracy of beliefs about distributions. The beliefs relate to behavior (mobile phone purchasing decisions, hypothetical restaurant choices), attitudes (happiness, politics) and observable characteristics (height, weight) and are typically formed through real world experiences. We find a powerful and ubiquitous bias in perceptions that is “self-ce...