Jonathan Grady

Open user profiles for adaptive news systems: help or harm?

Over the last five years, a range of projects have focused on progressively more elaborated techniques for adaptive news delivery. However, the adaptation process in these systems has become more complicated and thus less transparent to the users. In this paper, we concentrate on the application of open user models in adding transparency and controllability to adaptive news systems. We present a personalized news system, YourNews, which allows users to view and edit their interest profiles, and report a user study on the system. Our results confirm that users prefer transparency and control in their systems, and generate more trust to such systems. However, similar to previous studies, our study demonstrate that this ability to edit user profiles may also harm the system.s performance and has to be used with caution.

Randomized controlled trial of a collaborative care intervention to manage cancer-related symptoms: lessons learned

Background Collaborative care interventions to treat depression have begun to be tested in settings outside of primary care. However, few studies have expanded the collaborative care model to other settings and targeted comorbid physical symptoms of depression. Purpose The aims of this report were to: (1) describe the design and methods of a trial testing the efficacy of a stepped collaborative care intervention designed to manage cancer-related symptoms and improve overall quality of life in patients diagnosed with hepatobiliary carcinoma; and (2) share the lessons learned during the design, implementation, and evaluation of the trial. Methods The trial was a phase III randomized controlled trial testing the efficacy of a stepped collaborative care intervention to reduce depression, pain, and fatigue in patients diagnosed with advanced cancer. The intervention was compared to an enhanced usual care arm. The primary outcomes included the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression scale, Brief Pain Inventory, and Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy (FACT)-Fatigue, and the FACT-Hepatobiliary. Sociodemographic and disease-specific characteristics were recorded from the medical record; Natural Killer cells and cytokines that are associated with these symptoms and with disease progression were assayed from serum. Results  and  Discussion The issues addressed include: (1) development of collaborative care in the context of oncology (e.g., timing of the intervention, tailoring of the intervention, ethical issues regarding randomization of patients, and changes in medical treatment over the course of the study); (2) use of a website by chronically ill populations (e.g., design and access to the website, development of the website and intervention, ethical issues associated with website development, website usage, and unanticipated costs associated with website development); (3) evaluation of the efficacy of intervention (e.g., patient preferences, proxy raters, changes in medical treatment, and inclusion of biomarkers as endpoints); and (4) analyses and interpretation of the intervention (e.g., confounding factors, dose and active ingredients, and risks and benefits of collaborative care interventions in chronically ill patients). Limitations The limitations to the study, although not fully realized at this time as the trial is ongoing, include: (1) heterogeneity of the diagnoses and treatments of participants; and (2) inclusion of caregivers as proxy raters but not as participants in the intervention. Conclusions Collaborative care interventions to manage multiple symptoms in a tertiary cancer center are feasible. However, researchers designing and implementing interventions that are web-based, target multiple symptoms, and for oncology patients may benefit from previous experiences.

Web-based collaborative care intervention to manage cancer-related symptoms in the palliative care setting.

The aim of this study was to examine the efficacy of a collaborative care intervention in reducing depression, pain, and fatigue and improve quality of life.

What should be visualized?: faculty perception of priority topics for program visualization

To guide our work on adaptive explanatory program visualization the authors prepared a questionnaire that was broadly distributed among teachers of programming-related subjects. The questionnaire was designed to collect a list of topics that are considered important, but hard to teach and to solicit suggestions on using visualization for teaching these topics. This paper introduces the questionnaire, explains how it was administered, and presents the results that we consider of interest to the teachers of programming community.

Use of a Fractional Factorial Experiment to Assess the E-healthcare Application Design Needs of Persons With Dual Diagnosis

Objective: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of 12 e-healthcare applications’ design variables on the usability of websites for persons with a dual diagnosis of substance use disorder and severe mental illness. Methods: A 212−4 fractional factorial experimental design was employed to specify the designs of 256 websites. The designs of the websites were specified to systematically vary 12 design variables, which included the number of hyperlinks, words, and content areas on a page as well as the depth of the hierarchy, that is, the number of pages one needed to navigate to find desired content. Subjects (n = 149) were adults with a dual diagnosis of substance use disorder and severe mental illness. Each participant was asked sequentially to try to find six specific pieces of information on each of eight different websites. We recorded ability and time to find each piece of information, whether a task was solved, and the time to solve each task. Analyses were completed with polychotomous logistic regression for the number of tasks solved and mixed effect regression for the mean time to solution. In both, the dependency of observations within subjects was included in the analyses. Interactions between the 12 design variables were identified with classification and regression tree analyses. Results: One of the most important variables was the depth of a websites hierarchy. Other important variables were the number of words, hyperlinks, and navigational areas per page and the use of navigational lists or navigational memory aids. There were clear differences in the usability of certain designs for these participants. Some designs were quite poor (success rate of 16%) and others quite effective (success rate of 86.5%). Conclusions: Our findings indicate that there are ways to design web-based applications that are far more effective than others for persons with a dual diagnosis and that certain variables have a far larger impact on the usability of a design than others. These are the variables that the most attention should be devoted to in creating an effective design.