To remain competitive in this global and technological world, academic institutions and corporations worldwide need to take serious steps to created a diverse, well-trained and multicultural workforce. To this end, the Global Alliance in Science and Engineering for Diversifiing the Worvorce was created to offer an opportunity to share best practices in education, industry, government and profes...

Severe sepsis is a major cause of morbidity and mortality, claiming between 36 000 and 64 000 lives annually in the UK, with a mortality rate of 35%. International guidelines for the management of severe sepsis were published in 2004 by the Surviving Sepsis Campaign and condensed into two Care Bundles. In 2010, the Campaign published results from its improvement programme showing that, although...

This paper proposes an extension of the Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) to multi-objective optimization problems. The new algorithm, called Non-dominated Sorting GSA (NSGSA), utilizes the non-dominated sorting concept to update the gravitational acceleration of the particles. An external archive is also used to store the Pareto optimal solutions and to provide some elitism. It also guides ...

WHO is honored to cosponsor this important event together with the Ministry of Health of Brazil, ILA and ILEP. We are especially grateful to Government of Brazil and members of the Organizing Committee for planning and organizing the Congress. This is the second important meeting which the Brazilian authorities have kindly hosted this year the first being the meeting of the Global Alliance for ...

Reprinted with permission, Healthcare Purchasing News, April 2017 Sepsis, a serious condition that arises from the body’s response to infection, can cause tissue damage, organ failure, and death. According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project, sepsis is the leading cause of deaths in U.S. hospitals, at a cost of $23,663,000.1 The Sepsis All...

In Alzheimer's disease (AD), structural and functional brain network organization is disturbed. However, many of the present network analysis measures require a priori assumptions and methodological choices that influence outcomes and interpretations. Graph spectral analysis (GSA) is a more direct algebraic method that describes network properties, which might lead to more reliable results. In ...

This article describes an approach to assessing infant and young child feeding (IYCF) practices using small-sample surveys which was developed jointly by VALID International; CONCERN Worldwide; Save the Children; the Sierra Leone Ministry of Health and Sanitation; the Niger National Institute of Statistics; the Ethiopian Health and Nutrition Research Institute (EHNRI); the Sudanese Federal Mini...

Gravitational search algorithm (GSA) has been successfully applied to many scientific and engineering applications in the past few years. In the original GSA and most of its variants, every agent learns from all the agents stored in the same elite group, namely K best . This type of learning strategy is in nature a fully-informed learning strategy, in which every agent has exactly the same glob...

A new approach is presented applicable in framework of model calibration to observed data. The approach consists of a combination of the Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation technique (GLUE) and Global Sensitivity Analysis (GSA). The method is based on multiple model evaluations. The GSA is a quantitative, model independent approach and is based on estimating the fractional contributio...

A defensive alliance in a graph G = (V,E) is a set of vertices S ⊆ V satisfying the condition that for every vertex v ∈ S, the number of neighbors v has in S plus one (counting v) is at least as large as the number of neighbors it has in V − S. Because of such an alliance, the vertices in S, agreeing to mutually support each other, have the strength of numbers to be able to defend themselves fr...