This paper presents a simple shrinkage estimator of rates based on Bayesian methods. Our focus is on crime rates as a motivating example. The estimator shrinks each town’s observed crime rate toward the country-wide average crime rate according to town size. By realistic simulations we confirm that the proposed estimator outperforms the maximum likelihood estimator in terms of global risk. We also ...

Video analysis including classification, segmentation or tagging is one of the most challenging but also interesting topics multimedia research currently try to tackle. This is often related to videos from surveillance cameras or social media. In the last years, also medical institutions produce more and more video and image content. Some areas of medical image analysis, like radiology or brain ...

<p><i>Background</i>: Patients with diabetes use an increasing number of self-management tools in their daily life. However, health institutions rarely use the data generated by these services mainly due to (1) the lack of data reliability, and (2) medical workers spending too much time extracting relevant information from the vast amount of data produced. This work is part of the FullFlow project, ...

<p>Devices for observing the environment range from basic sensor systems, like step-counters, through wild-life cameras, with limited processing capabilities, to more capable devices with significant processing, memory and storage resources. Individual usage domains can benefit from a range of functionalities in these devices including flexibility in prototyping, on- device analytics, network roaming, ...

<p><i>Background</i>: Widespread access to the Internet and an increasing number of Internet users offers the opportunity of using Web-based recalls to collect detailed physical activity data in epidemiologic studies.</p> <p><i>Objective</i>: The aim of this investigation was to evaluate the validity and reliability of a computer-based 24-hour physical activity recall (cpar24) instrument with ...

Metagenomics data analyses from independent studies can only be compared if the analysis workflows are described in a harmonized way. In this overview, we have mapped the landscape of data standards available for the description of essential steps in metagenomics: (i) material sampling, (ii) material sequencing, (iii) data analysis, and (iv) data archiving and publishing. Taking examples from marine ...

Health consumers are increasingly using the Internet to search for health information. The existence of overloaded, inaccurate, obsolete, or simply incorrect health information available on the Internet is a serious obstacle for finding relevant and good-quality data that actually helps patients. Search engines of multimedia Internet platforms are thought to help users to find relevant information ...

Background: Telemedicine services have been successfully used in areas where there are adequate infrastructures such as reliable power and communication lines. However, despite the increasing number of merchants and seafarers, maritime and Arctic telemedicine have had limited success. This might be linked with various factors such as lack of good infrastructure, lack of trained onboard personnel, ...

We demonstrate a practical way to reduce latency for mobile .NET applications that interact with cloud services, without disrupting application architectures. We provide a programming abstraction for location-independent code, which has the potential to execute either locally or at a satellite execution environment in the cloud, where other cloud services can be accessed with low latency. This ...

Like other fundamental abstractions for energy-efficient com- puting, search trees need to support both high concurrency and fine- grained data locality. However, existing locality-aware search trees such as ones based on the van Emde Boas layout (vEB-based trees), poorly support concurrent (update) operations while existing highly-concurrent search trees such as the non-blocking binary search ...