Olga Vybornova

Decision support in a fieldable laboratory management during an epidemic outbreak of disease

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the decision-making process and provide a decision support framework for deployment of an on-site analytical capacity (a fieldable laboratory (FL)) to contain an expanding outbreak and protect public health. Design/methodology/approach The FL mission cycle consists of five successive interlinked phases with a set of operational functions (OFs) performed during the mission. The list of phases, OFs and their contents were iteratively developed during and after FL missions and validated with operational partners. Findings The well-defined structure of the FL domain appears as the best functional basis for tracking the decision-making process across the whole mission cycle. Description of all the FL elements and information flows addresses the major issue of interoperability of resources used by similar international capacities (inter-)acting as operational partners in global response to the crisis. Originality/value The work presents the first attempt in this field to systematically describe and chronologically organize the decisions taken by a FL manager and staff during all phases of the FL mission cycle. Definition of OFs with all the related information flows allows for comparison of procedures, their better planning and refining, validation of protocols, mutual training and operational improvement between FLs from different geographical, organizational and cultural origins.

A fusion framework for multimodal interactive applications

This research aims to propose a multi-modal fusion framework for high-level data fusion between two or more modalities. It takes as input low level features extracted from different system devices, analyses and identifies intrinsic meanings in these data. Extracted meanings are mutually compared to identify complementarities, ambiguities and inconsistencies to better understand the user intention when interacting with the system. The whole fusion life cycle will be described and evaluated in an office environment scenario, where two co-workers interact by voice and movements, which might show their intentions. The fusion in this case is focusing on combining modalities for capturing a context to enhance the user experience.

High Level Data Fusion on a Multimodal Interactive Applications Platform

We demonstrate a multimodal high-level data fusion tooling integrated on a platform aimed at the rapid development and prototyping of multimodal applications through user-centered design. The platform embeds a set of pure and combined modalities as reusable components and generic mechanisms for combining modalities with a rich support for multimodal fusion in order to improve the human-computer interaction.

Multi-domain framework for multimedia archiving using multimodal interaction

Multimedia content is very rich in terms of meaning, and archiving systems need to be improved to consider such richness. This research proposes archiving improvements to extend the ways of describing content, and enhance user interaction with multimedia archiving systems beyond the traditional text typing and mouse pointing. These improvements consider a set of techniques to segment different kinds of media, a set of indexes to annotate the supported segmentation techniques and an extensible multimodal interaction to make multimedia archiving tasks more user friendly.

Structured decision-making for the management of a biological fieldable laboratory during outbreaks: a case for European Union Civil Protection Mechanism (EUCPM)

Fast on-scene deployment of an analytical laboratory capacity to help contain an outbreak of infectious disease requires setting up an appropriate policy framework and a range of operating procedures to ensure efficient support to decision-making, as well as the optimal engagement and use of dedicated resources. This work focuses on fully autonomous deployment when the mobile capacity operators themselves need to make decisions and implement all the operational functions (OFs), from basic needs like provision of equipment, power supply, food and accommodation for the staff, to complicated procedures like logistics of transportation and supply chain. A model of the identity and structure of specific decision-making requirements for a generic deployment of laboratory capacities was built from the real experience during specific deployments of the operators and managers of the Belgian capacity Biological Light Fieldable Laboratory for Emergencies (B-LiFE). Self- and external assessments were conducted and lessons learned successively reviewed after each deployment by B-LiFE laboratory operators and managers and observers in the framework of European demonstration projects and joint exercises. The result was consolidated by integrating the assessment of European Commission-appointed certifiers during the certification procedure of B-LIFE as a self-sufficient module of the European Medical Corps, namely the European modules exercise “Modex” in April 2017 (Revinge, Sweden) followed by the “ModTTX 4” Table-top in May 2017 (Bruges, Belgium). A complete and updated set of Fieldable Laboratory operational functions is presented, including their contents, cross-links, inter-dependencies, information needs for implementation, and related decisions.

A Resource Oriented Multimedia Description Framework

This chapter presents a multimedia archiving framework to describe the content of multimedia resources. This kind of content is very rich in terms of meanings and archiving systems have to be improved to consider such richness. This framework simplifies the multimedia management in existing applications, making it accessible for non-specialized developers. This framework is fully implemented on the REST architectural style, precisely mapping the notion of resource with media artifacts, and scaling to address the growing demand for media. It offers an extensive support for segmentation and annotation to attach semantics to content, helping search mechanisms to precisely index those content. A detailed example of the framework adoption by a medical imaging application for breast cancer diagnosis is presented.

Text Watermarking against Ownership Rights Violation

The paper describes an approach to natural language watermarking and hashing based on semantic structures. In our method we are interested in the linguistic semantic phenomenon of presupposition. Presupposition is implicit information that is taken for granted by the reader and establishes common ground between the authors and readers situational knowledge; it is a semantic component of certain linguistic expressions (lexical items and syntactic constructions called presupposition triggers, 100 in total). The same sentence can be used with or without presupposition, provided that all the relations between discourse referents are preserved. 3 types of transformations are employed: triggers removal, triggers synonymic replacements and introducing triggers where there were none. The key is formed as a hash table containing information about the original text, the number of transformed sentences and the triggers on which the transformations were based. This method is resilient against data loss and data altering attacks.