Health care has entered the electronic domain. This domain has improved data collection and storage abilities while allowing almost instantaneous access and results to data queries. Furthermore it allows direct communication between healthcare providers and health consumers. The development of privacy, confidentiality and security principles are necessary to protect consumers’ interests against inappropriate access. The electronic health systems vendors have dominated the transition of media, claiming it will improve the quality and coherence of the care process. However, numerous studies show that the health consumer is the important stakeholder in this process, and their views are suggesting that the electronic medium is the way forward, but not just yet. With the international push towards Electronic Health Records (EHRs) by the Health and Human Services (United States of America), National Health Service (United Kingdom), Health Canada (Canada) and more recently the Ministry of Health (New Zealand), this paper presents the consumers’ role with a focus on their perceptions on the security of EHRs. A description of a study, looking at the New Zealand health consumer, is given.
Keywords: electronic health records, New Zealand health system, consumer, security
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The purpose of this study was to create a ubiquitous proximity activated interactive digital display system providing adjusted artworks as content for evaluating viewer reactions and opinions to determine if similar interactive ubiquitous systems are a beneficial, enjoyable and even an appropriate way to display art. Multimedia used in galleries predominately provides content following set patterns and disregards the viewer. Interactive displays using viewer location usually require the viewer’s conscious participation through carrying some form of hardware or using expensive sensing equipment. We created an inexpensive, simple system that reacts to the user in a ubiquitous manner, allowing the evaluation of the usability and suitability of such systems in the context of viewing art. Results from testing show that interactive displays are generally enjoyed and wanted for displaying art, however even simple ubiquitous displays can cause user difficulty due to the transparency of their interaction.
Keywords: interactive, digital displays, art, proximity, ubiquitous, gallery, intuitive interfaces
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The immune system is a complex and distributed system. It provides a multilayered form of defence, capable of identifying and responding to harmful pathogens that it does not recognise as “self”. The framework proposed in this paper incorporates a number of immunological concepts and principles, including the multilayered defence and the cooperation between cells in the adaptive immune system. An alternative model of positive selection is also presented. It is suggested that the framework discussed here could lead to reduced false positive responses in anomaly detection tasks, such as intrusion detection, as well being extended to a population of computational immune systems that are able to maintain population diversity of recognition and response.
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With the advent of Web Services, more and more business organizations make their services available on the Internet through Web Services and also use other services that are available on the corporate Intranet. From the viewpoint of workflow systems, these freely available Web Services and the proprietary intranet-based services should be integrated into individual businesses for their day-to-day workflows. Businesses that use Web Services not only provide the services to their customers but can also use Web Services to customize their internal processing, such as online order placement for raw materials. In this paper we describe the architecture of our agent-based workflow system that can be used for Web Service composition. In the context of an example from the apparel manufacturing industry, we demonstrate how Web Services can be composed and used.
Keywords: web services, multi-agent systems, workflow systems
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This paper describes efforts to facilitate collaborative work in a distributed environment by providing infrastructure that facilitates the understanding of inter-connected processes involved and how they interact. In this work we describe how our agent-based framework supports these. This distributed work environment makes use of both P2P and client-server architectures. Using an example of developing an open source software system, we explain how a collaborative work environment can be achieved. In particular we address how the support for coordination, collaboration and communication are provided using our framework.
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This paper presents an implementation of the first stage of a Virtual Organization (VO) life cycle, which is the VO’s creation. This implementation is based on previous work by one of the authors describing a framework which facilitates the establishment of VO agreements. In accordance with the framework, the implementation makes the VO’s creation fully automated, thereby reducing its duration considerably. This is beneficial for the VO, which should only exist for the limited period needed to satisfy its goal. The VO is implemented as a Multi-Agent System (MAS), where autonomous agents negotiate the agreement leading the the VO’s establishment. The Opal FIPA-compliant MAS platform was used to implement the VO agents. Different scenarios and evaluations provide a clear demonstration of the implementation, showing how agents dynamically negotiate the establishment of the agreement and how opportunistic agents’ behavior affect the trust level during the negotiation process.
Keywords: virtual organization, trust, autonomy, agent
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