The increasing popularity of wireless technologies and mobile computing devices has enabled new application areas and research. One of these new areas is pervasive systems in urban environments, because urban environments are characterized by high concentration of these technologies and devices. In this paper we will show the process of pervasive system design in urban environments, using as us...

Predicting where humans look in images has gained significant popularity in recent years. In this work, we present a novel method for learning top-down visual saliency, which is well-suited to locate objects of interest in complex scenes. During training, we jointly learn a superpixel based class-specific dictionary and a Conditional Random Field (CRF). While using such a discriminative diction...

Rural hospitals play a crucial role in providing healthcare to rural Americans, a vulnerable and underserved population; however, rural hospitals have faced threats to their financial viability and many have closed as a result. This paper examines the hospital characteristics that are associated with patients choosing rural hospitals, and sheds light on the types of patients who depend on rural...

Even though physical activity and sedentary behaviour are two distinct behaviours, their interdependent relationship needs to be studied in the same environment. This study examines the influence of urban design, neighbourhood built and social environment, and household and individual factors on the interdependent relationship between objectively measured physical activity and sedentary behavio...

BACKGROUND Disruptive behavior disorders (DBDs) (oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and conduct disorder (CD)) are prevalent, costly, and oftentimes chronic psychiatric disorders of childhood. Evidence-based interventions that focus on assisting parents to utilize effective skills to modify children's problematic behaviors are first-line interventions for the treatment of DBDs. Although effica...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the effectiveness of an educational intervention on pediatric residents' resuscitation fund of knowledge, technical skills, confidence, and overall performance. DESIGN Prospective, nonconcurrent, controlled interventional trial. SETTING Urban pediatric tertiary care hospital. PARTICIPANTS An intervention group (IG) of 28 pediatric residents graduating in 1997, and a ...

Homeless women with children living in transitional housing programs are at risk for inadequate and inappropriate navigation of the health care system, both medical and mental health services. Effective intervention programs to enhance navigational skills are needed to improve health outcomes and to decrease health care costs. This research study had two objectives: to identify whether the resi...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of initial first and second language proficiencies as well as the language of instruction that a student receives on the relationship between native language ability of students who are English language learners (ELLs) and their development of early literacy skills and the second language. METHOD This study investigated the developm...