Existing research on the recognition of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) from simple sensor networks assumes that only a single person is present in the home. In real life there will be situations where the inhabitant receives visits from family members or professional health care givers. In such cases activity recognition is unreliable. In this paper, we investigate the problem of detecting multiple persons in an environment equipped with a sensor network consisting of binary sensors. We conduct a real-life experiment for detection of visits in the oce of the supervisor where the oce is equipped with a video camera to record the ground truth. We collected data during two months and used two models, a Naive Bayes Classier and a Hidden Markov Model for a visitor detection. An evaluation of these two models shows that we achieve an accuracy of 83% with the NBC and an accuracy of 92% with a HMM, respectively.
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This essay presents the concept of sustainability intelligence as a possible response to the current unsustainable course of society. We expound on the three components shaping this concept – naive intelligence, native intelligence, and narrative intelligence – and argue why they could thus serve as inspiration and key reference points for rising to our collective sustainability challenge. The essay ends with a brief exploration of the wider practical, policy and political implications of the concept.
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Since the European Union wants to reduce the oil dependence of the transportation system, the uptake of alternative vehicle technologies are stimulated in the member states. In the Netherlands, stimulation is already largely implemented in the form of a comprehensive charging infrastructure. This infrastructure is widely used by the electric vehicle drivers and thus there may occur a form of competition for the charging points. In this paper we address this problem by predicting the short-term availability of charging points at a given location and time by using the historical charging data in a space-time series model. The model shows better accuracy with respect to a naive method for short term predictions up to one day. This will allow charging point operators to provide customers with the service of looking up estimated charging point availability in the nearby future.
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Predation risk is a major driver of the distribution of prey animals, which typically show strong responses to cues for predator presence. An unresolved question is whether naïve individuals respond to mimicked cues, and whether such cues can be used to deter prey. We investigated whether playback of wolf sounds induces fear responses in naïve ungulates in a human-dominated landscape from which wolves have been eradicated since 1879. We conducted a playback experiment in mixed-coniferous and broadleaved forest that harboured three cervid and one suid species. At 36 locations, we played wolf sounds, sounds of local sheep or no sounds, consecutively, in random order, and recorded visit rate and group size, using camera traps. Visit rates of cervids and wild boar showed a clear initial reduction to playback of both wolf and sheep sounds, but the type of response differed between sound, forest type and species. For naïve wild boar in particular, responses to predator cues depended on forest type. Effects on visit rate disappeared within 21 days. Group sizes in all the species were not affected by the sound treatment. Our findings suggest that the responses of naïve ungulates to wolf sound seem to be species specific, depend on forest type and wear off in time, indicating habituation. Before we can successfully deter ungulates using predator sound, we should further investigate how different forest types affect the perception of naïve ungulates to these sounds, as responses to predator sound may depend on habitat characteristics.
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This paper presents a Decision Support System (DSS) that helps companies with corporate reputation (CR) estimates of their respective brands by collecting provided feedbacks on their products and services and deriving state-of-the-art key performance indicators. A Sentiment Analysis Engine (SAE) is at the core of the proposed DSS that enables to monitor, estimate, and classify clients’ sentiments in terms of polarity, as expressed in public comments on social media (SM) company channels. The SAE is built on machine learning (ML) text classification models that are cross-source trained and validated with real data streams from a platform like Trustpilot that specializes in user reviews and tested on unseen comments gathered from a collection of public company pages and channels on a social networking platform like Facebook. Such crosssource opinion analysis remains a challenge and is highly relevant in the disciplines of research and engineering in which a sentiment classifier for an unlabeled destination domain is assisted by a tagged source task (Singh and Jaiswal, 2022). The best performance in terms of F1 score was obtained with a multinomial naive Bayes model: 0,87 for validation and 0,74 for testing.
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Aim: To explore which factors are associated with psychological insulin resistance in insulin-naive patients with Type 2 diabetes in primary care.Methods: A sample of 101 insulin-naive patients with Type 2 diabetes completed self-administered questionnaires including demographic and clinical characteristics, the Insulin Treatment Appraisal Scale and the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale. Psychological insulin resistance was denoted by negative appraisal of insulin (Insulin Treatment Appraisal Scale).Results: Thirty-nine per cent of the sample were unwilling to accept insulin therapy. Unwilling participants perceived taking insulin more often as a failure to control their diabetes with tablets or lifestyle compared with willing participants (59 vs. 33%), unwilling participants were more reluctant to accept the responsibilities of everyday management of insulin therapy (49 vs. 24%). Multiple linear regression analysis revealed that depression and objection to lifelong insulin therapy were independently associated with psychological insulin resistance.Conclusions: In this study in primary care, depression and objection to lifelong insulin therapy are associated with psychological insulin resistance. Analysis of the objection to the indefiniteness of insulin therapy showed a sense of limitation of daily life and loss of independence that should not be underestimated. Insulin should be offered as a means to improve health as this might facilitate the acceptance of insulin therapy.
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The complexity of analysing dynamical systems often lies in the difficulty to monitor each of their dynamic properties. In this article, we use qualitative models to present an exhaustive way of representing every possible state of a given system, and combine it with Bayesian networks to integrate quantitative information and reasoning under uncertainty. The result is a combined model able to give explanations relying on expert knowledge to predict the behaviour of a system. We illustrate our approach with a deterministic model to show how the combination is done, then extend this model to integrate uncertainty and demonstrate its benefits
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New electronic tablet devices are often referred to as either saviours of newspapers or killers of traditional print media. These crude statements are based on a naive concept of media substitution and an overestimation of the actual use of new media for news consumption. It is much more likely that substitution will be marginal, and that the potential is much more in giving existing readers more options while attacking new users. Publishers should treat tablet devices as options, concentrating on issues like business models, free, freemium, sponsored and paid content, DRM, in-app payment models, partnerships, user-generated content, design and interface options. Academic research on the use of tablets is not yet available as these devices are not available on a massive scale, only appearing on the market since the spring of 2010, but experiences by many publishers of newspapers and magazines already provide us with enough material to map possibilities and no-go areas for publishers of news content
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From teh UU repository: "Background: Oral immunotherapy (OIT) is a promising therapeutic approach to treat food allergic patients. However, there are some concerns regarding its safety and long-term efficacy. The use of non-digestible oligosaccharides might improve OIT efficacy since they are known to directly modulate intestinal epithelial and immune cells in addition to acting as prebiotics. Aim: To investigate whether a diet supplemented with plant-derived fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS) supports the efficacy of OIT in a murine cow's milk allergy model and to elucidate the potential mechanisms involved. Methods: After oral sensitization to the cow's milk protein whey, female C3H/HeOuJ mice were fed either a control diet or a diet supplemented with FOS (1% w/w) and received OIT (10 mg whey) 5 days a week for 3 weeks by gavage. Intradermal (i.d.) and intragastric (i.g.) challenges were performed to measure acute allergic symptoms and mast cell degranulation. Blood and organs were collected to measure antibody levels and T cell and dendritic cell populations. Spleen-derived T cell fractions (whole spleen-and CD25-depleted) were transferred to naive recipient mice to confirm the involvement of regulatory T cells (Tregs) in allergy protection induced by OIT + FOS. Results: OIT + FOS decreased acute allergic symptoms and mast cell degranulation upon challenge and prevented the challenge-induced increase in whey-specific IgE as observed in sensitized mice. Early induction of Tregs in the mesenteric lymph nodes (MLN) of OIT + FOS mice coincided with reduced T cell responsiveness in splenocyte cultures. CD25 depletion in OIT + FOS-derived splenocyte suspensions prior to transfer abolished protection against signs of anaphylaxis in recipients. OIT + FOS increased serum galectin-9 levels. No differences in short-chain fatty acid (SCFA) levels in the cecum were observed between the treatment groups. Concisely, FOS supplementation significantly improved OIT in the acute allergic skin response, %Foxp3+ Tregs and %LAP+ Th3 cells in MLN, and serum galectin-9 levels. Conclusion: FOS supplementation improved the efficacy of OIT in cow's milk allergic mice. Increased levels of Tregs in the MLN and abolished protection against signs of anaphylaxis upon transfer of CD25-depleted cell fractions, suggest a role for Foxp3+ Tregs in the protective effect of OIT + FOS. "
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