the article by brenna and spandonaro on interregional mobility for acute hospital care in italy raises important issues concerning social and territorial equity in a healthcare system. based on regions and private providers’ strategic behavior, the hypothesis adopted to explain patient cross-border mobility (cbm), demonstrated by statistical analysis, may be further explored using qualitative m...

Specifying the behavior of an intelligent autonomous robot or agent is a non-trivial task. The question is: how can the knowledge of the domain expert be encoded in the agent program? Qualitative representations in general facilitate to express the knowledge of a domain expert. In this paper, we propose a semantics for qualitative fluents in the situation calculus. Our semantics is based on fuz...

This study applied the Theory of Planned Behavior model in predicting dietary behavior among Type 2 diabetics in a Kenyan environment. The study was conducted for three months within the diabetic clinic at Kisii Hospital in Nyanza Province in Kenya and adopted sequential mixed methods design combing both qualitative and quantitative phases. Qualitative data was analyzed using grounded theory an...

BACKGROUND In Iranian women, the use of hookah is the most common method of tobacco smoking. This study aimed to find the role of psycho-social needs and gaps as a possible risk factor for hookah smoking initiation in women. METHODS This qualitative study was conducted during 2012-2013 in Tehran, Iran. Thirty-six women participated in the study. They were current or former users of hookah. Da...

Qualitative reasoning about physical systems has become one of the most productive areas in AI in recent years, due in part to the 1984 special issue of Artificial Intelligence on that topic. My contribution to that issue was a paper entitled "Commonsense reasoning about causality: deriving behavior from structure" [9]. From my perspective, that paper laid out a research program that has contin...

Our work features an ontology-supported framework for developing a qualitative simulator for explaining the behaviors of selected sample of organic chemistry reactions. The design of the simulator uses Qualitative Reasoning (QR), and in particular, Qualitative Process Theory (QPT) for constructing qualitative models and the simulation of basic steps in the chemical reactions such as creating an...

results seven concepts emerged after exploratory factor analysis of the 48 items. the content validity ratio (cvr) of the questionnaire constructs were 0.55 to 0.76, and content validity index (cvi) structure was 0.86 to 0.95. cronbach's alpha coefficient for the entire questionnaire was 0.78, and correlation coefficient of the test-retest reliability for the constructs was from 0.73 to 0.89. c...

This paper presents a tool developed to obtain qualitative trend representations from signals, Qualtras. The aim of such a type of description is to offer an understandable representation of process behavior based on the concept of qualitative episode. The tool is intended to be used as a numeric to qualitative interface for supervisory applications. The applicability of this tool is demonstrat...

1 Overview A simulation contains a sequence of predicted states of a modeled system. A qualitative-numeric simulation is one containing both qualitative and quantitative state information, such that the qualitative information alone would be a qualitative simulation, and the quantitative information alone would be a numerical simulation. Qualitative-numeric simulation is thus a generalization o...