In the last few years, legislations such as the Patient Protection and A ordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have emphasised the need for improving the quality of health care. Part of the programs introduced by this Act is the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which reduces payments to hospitals with excess ...

Historically, most video games lean primarily on visual communication, making them inaccessible to the blind. Non-sighted gaming is beginning to gain some momentum, particularly with the proliferation of mobile devices, whose multiple sensor inputs allow for the exploration of inventive control schemes. The arrival of built-in ...

In the past decade, the United States federal government has made improving the healthcare system a major focus with legislation such as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the financial incentives for meaningful use within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. This focus has caused an increase in data ...

Online social networks are very popular with millions of people creating online profiles and sharing personal information including their interests, activities, likes/dislikes and thoughts with their friends and family. This rich user generated content from social media makes them an ideal platform to study human behavior. ...

Building models has been a human activity for centuries. Through the ages man has discovered patterns in how objects function together in the exchange of information, materials, and energy. We know these groups of objects and how they behave as 'systems'. As we study systems, we have learned that systems can be extraordinarily ...

In this thesis, we investigate the problem of designing personalized intervention strategies to minimize 30-day readmission risk for heart failure (HF) patients. In particular, we propose a novel framework that recommends personalized intervention to the patients by analyzing the complex interplay among a multitude of factors, ...

Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) is one of the leading causes of hospitalization, and studies show that many of these admissions are readmissions. Identifying patients who are at a greater risk of hospitalization, can guide implementation of appropriate plans to prevent these readmissions. In the field of medical sciences, ...

The multifaceted complexity of real-time strategy (RTS) games requires AI systems to break down policy computation into smaller subproblems such as strategic planning, tactical planning, and reactive control. To further simplify planning at the strategic and tactical levels, state-of-the-art automatic techniques such as ...

In their 2001 work Latent Dirichlet Allocation, Blei, Ng, and Jordan proposed the generative model of the same name that has since become the basis for most research in the field of topic modeling. The model overcame many of the shortcomings of previous probabilistic models such as allowing the inference of topics in documents ...

The increasing need of large-scale data centers has brought new challenges to the development of energy-efficiency techniques. Although many optimization techniques have been proposed, most of them neglect the characteristics of tasks and fail to consider the dependencies between tasks. Therefore, more comprehensive optimization ...