We focus on a class of models used for representing the dynamics between a discrete set of probabilistic events in a continuous-time setting. The proposed framework offers tractable learning and inference procedures and provides compact state representations for processes which exhibit variable delays between events. The approach is applied to a heart sound labeling task that exhibits long-rang...

Artifact flow represents an important aspect of teaching/learning processes, especially in CSCL situations in which complex relationships may be found. However, explicit modeling of CSCL processes with artifact flow may increase the cognitive load and associated effort of the teachers-designers and therefore decrease the efficiency of the design process. The empirical study, reported in this pa...

BACKGROUND Quality of life as an endpoint in a clinical study may be sensitive to the value set used to derive a single score. Focusing on patients' actual valuations in a clinical study, we compare different value sets for the EQ-5D-3L and assess how well they reproduce patients' reported results. METHODS A clinical study comparing inpatient (n = 98) and outpatient (n = 47) rehabilitation of...

A new high-level interface to multi-threading in Prolog, implemented in hProlog, is described. Modern CPUs often contain multiple cores and through high-level multi-threading a programmer can leverage this power without having to worry about low-level details. Two common types of high-level explicit parallelism are discussed: independent and-parallelism and competitive or-parallelism. A new typ...

BACKGROUND There is debate about the psychometric characteristics of the three-level EuroQol five-dimensional questionnaire (EQ-5D-3L) for use in epilepsy. In response to the concerns, an epilepsy-specific preference-based measure (NEWQOL-6D) was developed. The psychometric characteristics of the NEWQOL-6D, however, have not been assessed. OBJECTIVES To investigate the validity and responsive...

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) studies, as noted by Hawkins (2001), contribute to the development and understanding of the SLA process. So as to establish the operation of UG in L2 acquisition, White (2003) offers two conditions to be met. First, the construction investigated should be underrepresented by the L2 input and secondly, the syntactic property should not be derived from the L1. The pr...

BACKGROUND Studies comparing the measurement properties of EQ-5D 3L (3L) and EQ-5D 5L (5L) are limited to specific patient populations with small sample sizes. Using a general population sample, we compared 3L and 5L in terms of their measurement properties and association with number of chronic conditions, including multimorbidity--the concurrent occurrence of two or more chronic conditions. ...

With the significant advances in Information and Communications Technology (ICT) over the last half century, there is an increasingly perceived vision that computing will one day be the 5th utility (after water, electricity, gas, and telephony). This computing utility, like all other four existing utilities, will provide the basic level of computing service that is considered essential to meet ...

BACKGROUND Expectations held by health professionals and their patients are likely to affect treatment choices in subacute inpatient rehabilitation settings for older adults. There is a scarcity of empirical evidence evaluating whether health professionals expectations of the quality of their patients' future health states are accurate. METHODS A prospective longitudinal cohort investigation ...