Background:The time lag in detecting disease outbreaks remains a threat to global health security. The advancement of technology has made health-related data and other indicator activities easily accessible for syndromic surveillance of various datasets. At the heart of disease surveillance lies the clustering algorithm, which groups data with similar characteristics (spatial, temporal, or both) to ...

Applications that adapt to environmental and situational changes are difficult to build because computers cannot capture, represent or process context information as easily as human beings. Nevertheless, context information is very valuable because it allows applications to be made more user-friendly, flexible, and adaptable. This realization has spawned a multitude of research efforts to simplify ...

Digital photographing has become more and more popular as cameras and mobile phones get more advanced and have newer technology embedded. Manually searching in these growing image collections is problematic because of missing context information related to the image itself. If related context information could be added as an automated process, it could help the user view and locate images and ...

The ocean is vulnerable to oil related activities such as oil production and transport that can harm the environment. Environmental damages from oil spills can be large if not dealt with. Satellite images from radar are useful to detect oil spills because they cover both day and night and penetrates clouds. However, detecting oil spills in ocean areas from satellite images are not a trivial task due ...

Intraoperative tracking of laparoscopic instruments is often a prerequisite for computer and roboticassisted interventions. While numerous methods for detecting, segmenting and tracking of medical instruments based on endoscopic video images have been proposed in the literature, key limitations remain to be addressed: Firstly, robustness, that is, the reliable performance of state-of-the-art methods ...

To mitigate the adverse effects of fossil fuel-based energy, mankind is in constant search of clean and cost-effective sources of energy, such as solar energy. The economic viability of a power plant to harness solar energy mostly depends on the efficiency of solar panels. Investigations over the years show that the solar panel efficiency significantly depends on the different meteorological parameters. ...

Background: Consumer-based physical activity trackers have increased in popularity. The widespread use of these devices and the long-term nature of the recorded data provides a valuable source of physical activity data for epidemiological research. The challenges include the large heterogeneity between activity tracker models in terms of available data types, the accuracy of recorded data, and how ...

The Internet has become a natural medium for finding information and resources, and has probably become the most important tool in education and e-learning as well. Many educational institutions use on-line systems for uploading, creating and publishing educational content to students and pupils. Extended use of multimedia files, video, audio and image, as a part of the content is a growing trend ...

Scalability, reliability and adaptability are among the key requirements for the enactment of distributed workflows. In addition, system resources should be efficiently utilized. Central workflow engines and static analysis of workflow specifications are some of the important obstacles to meeting these requirements. We propose a fully decentralized approach to workflow enactment that is not subject ...