Jimmy Lo

Building smarter web applications with HTML5

Web applications have seen increased usage as of late, to the point where they are more favorable than desktop applications. The rise in the prevalence of web applications can be attributed to their flexibility, which enable programmers to go beyond the limitation of conventional desktop applications.

Detection of unsafe action from laparoscopic cholecystectomy video

Wellness and healthcare are central to the lives of all people, young or old, healthy or ill, rich or poor. New computing and behavioral research can lead to transformative changes in the cost-effective delivery of quality and personalized healthcare. Also beyond the daily practice of healthcare and wellbeing, basic information technology research can provide the foundations for new directions in the clinical sciences via tools and analyses that identify subtle but important causal signals in the fusing of clinical, behavioral, environmental and genetic data. In this paper we describe a system that analyzes images from the laparoscopic videos. It indicates the possibility of an injury to the cystic artery by automatically detecting the proximity of the surgical instruments with respect to the cystic artery. The system uses machine learning algorithm to classify images and warn surgeons against probable unsafe actions.

Smarter healthcare: an emergency physician view of the problem

This chapter motivates the need for smarter interaction with a case study in healthcare that demonstrate the current state of interaction. The special challenges of practicing emergency medicine are reviewed, and a scenario is constructed to illustrate problems with current methods based on an observations study carried out at a hospital. A further scenario is then constructed showing how the problems that were observed may be avoided with smarter interaction. While the demonstrations of flawed interaction in this chapter only apply to emergency medicine, we believe that similar problems may be found in a broad range of domains.

Designing effective notifications for collaborative development environments

We describe research conducted to improve the design and management of notifications in the Jazz collaborative development environment. Scenario-based design was used in conjunction with focus groups that included eight representative Jazz users. The end result of this research is presented as a proof of concept prototype implementing a new notification architecture.

New methods for clinical decision support in hospitals

Healthcare is a critical activity that consumes a high proportion of the wealth of societies. Governments and healthcare systems around the world are seeking to limit runaway healthcare costs while providing high quality services in ways that balance the competing needs of different groups of people. New technologies are providing opportunities to make healthcare more efficient and effective through better communications and access (e.g., Abraham et al., 2008). The increasing use of mobile devices in hospitals (Kuziemsky et al, 2005) is leading to new types of mobile application (e.g., Agarwal et al., 2007, Bardram and Bossen, 2005, Munoz et al., 2003).

Supporting smart interactions with predictive analytics

Smart interactions, where web services are configured and integrated across multiple servers in order to better address the needs of the user, will be much more user-centric and responsive to user needs than current interactions. However, Smart interactions associated with decision-making tasks will specifically have to provide enhanced information or guidance linked to that task. In this paper we examine how predictive analytics can be used to provide cognitive support for smart interactions and outline a method consistent with the smart internet user model to facilitate the creation of predictive analytics components or services to support smart interactions for decision-making tasks.

Intelligence for the personal web

The traditional paradigm for Web interactions, where the interactions are server-driven rather than user-driven, has limitations that are becoming increasingly apparent. The Personal Web proposes to provide intelligent services that support a more user-centric interaction paradigm in order to allow the user to more easily assemble and aggregate web elements to accomplish specific tasks. In this paper we examine the role predictive analytics can play in intelligent services supporting decision-making tasks and describe the Predictive Analytics in Smart Interactions Framework (PASIF), which is a framework for incorporating predictive analytics into intelligent services. PASIF achieves effective levels of support in the dynamic real-time environment of the Personal Web by incorporating ensemble models and techniques to detect and adapt to concept drift in the data sources.

Notification design in collaborative and social networking environments

Knowledge workers are living in an ever-connected world with information technology supporting many kinds of collaboration. This enables substantial flexibility -- working with others is no longer restricted to taking place in offices, but happens in geographically distributed locations (such as Asia and North America) and in all sorts of locales from the home, to the coffee shop, to the commuter train, and even while on the go walking down the street. Collaboration not only happens across space (at a distance as well as locally), but also across time (both synchronously and asynchronously). With the power and flexibility comes a downside, however; namely, constant notifications, which often result in interruptions. One research study estimated that unnecessary interruptions consume 28 percent of a knowledge workers day (Spira and Feintuch, 2005). Another study showed that interrupting users with many non-critical events lowers productivity and cause stress and frustration (Mark et al., 2008). Notifications come in many forms, including email messages, instant messages, phone calls (some of which can be delivered in multiple different ways across the personal computer), various forms of mobile devices and even simply a phone call on a traditional land line.