Cristhian Parra

Uncovering impacts: a case study in using altmetrics tools

Altmetrics were born from a desire to see and measure research impact differently. Complementing traditional citation analysis, altmetrics are intended to reflect more broad views of research impact by taking into account the use of digital scholarly communication tools. Aggregating online attention paid to individual scholarly articles and data sets is the approach taken by Altmetric LLP, an altmetrics tool provider. Potential uses for article-level metrics collected by Altmetric include: 1) the assessment of an articles impact within a particular community, 2) the assessment of the overall impact of a body of scholarly work, and 3) the characterization of entire author and reader communities that engage with particular articles online. Although attention metrics are still being refined, qualitative altmetrics data are beginning to illustrate the rich new world of scholarly communication, and are emerging as ways to highlight the immediate societal impacts of research.

Information Technology for Active Ageing: A Review of Theory and Practice

Active Ageing aims to foster a physically, mentally and socially active lifestyle as a person ages. It is a complex, multi-faceted problem that involves a variety of different actors, such as policy makers, doctors, care givers, family members, friends and, of course, older adults. This review aims to understand the role of a new actor, which increasingly plays the role of enabler and facilitator, i.e., that of the technology provider. The review specifically focuses on Information Technology IT, with a particular emphasis on software applications, and on how IT can prevent decline, compensate for lost capabilities, aid care, and enhance existing capabilities. The analysis confirms the crucial role of IT in Active Ageing, shows that Active Ageing requires a multidisciplinary approach, and identifies the need for better integration of hardware, software, the environment and the involved actors.

Reverse-engineering conference rankings: what does it take to make a reputable conference?

In recent years, several national and community-driven conference rankings have been compiled. These rankings are often taken as indicators of reputation and used for a variety of purposes, such as evaluating the performance of academic institutions and individual scientists, or selecting target conferences for paper submissions. Current rankings are based on a combination of objective criteria and subjective opinions that are collated and reviewed through largely manual processes. In this setting, the aim of this paper is to shed light into the following question: to what extent existing conference rankings reflect objective criteria, specifically submission and acceptance statistics and bibliometric indicators? The paper specifically considers three conference rankings in the field of Computer Science: an Australian national ranking, a Brazilian national ranking and an informal community-built ranking. It is found that in all cases bibliometric indicators are the most important determinants of rank. It is also found that in all rankings, top-tier conferences can be identified with relatively high accuracy through acceptance rates and bibliometric indicators. On the other hand, acceptance rates and bibliometric indicators fail to discriminate between mid-tier and bottom-tier conferences.

Business process assignment and execution in mobile environments

Mobile devices are emerging as working equipment. Developing and maintaining mobile applications for evolving business is costly. Business Process Management technologies enable loose-coupling and composition of services to support the evolving business logic. Business Process Management becomes pervasive and more powerful when it interweaves mobile devices. However, traditional Business Process execution is inefficient in mobile environments: the computational capabilities on mobile devices are various; the movement of devices changes their connectivity. In this paper, we propose a model of mobile computational capability and connectivity. Based on that, we define the constraints of mobile environments and the requirements to execute a business process. A process assignment algorithm and its optimized version considering the cost are designed. Our approach enables more flexible and efficient business process deployment in mobile environments. Preliminary results including a graphical process designer and Android based process engine are tested in a mobile-assisted healthcare project.

Gelee: Cooperative Lifecycle Management for (Composite) Artifacts

In this demonstration we introduce Gelee , our online platform for the hosted specification and cooperative execution of lifecycles of artifacts of any kind. With Gelee we aim at filling two lacks we identify in current cooperative software systems when it comes to unstructured, artifact-based works (e.g., the writing of a project deliverable): the lack of state and the complete lack of automated actions. Lifecycles allow us to model the state of any object, and if we focus on online resources (e.g., a Google Doc) then we can also automate some lifecycle actions. If we apply Gelee to composite artifacts, e.g., a set of web services, lifecycles provide for the human-driven orchestration of services.