OBJECTIVE This paper describes a text processing system designed to automate the manual data abstraction process in a quality improvement (QI) program. The Surgical Care and Outcomes Assessment Program (SCOAP) is a clinician-led, statewide performance benchmarking QI platform for surgical and interventional procedures. The data elements abstracted as part of this program cover a wide range of c...

We study the problem of constructing multi-source extractors in the quantum setting, which extract almost uniform random bits against an adversary who collects quantum side information from several initially independent classical random sources. This is a natural generalization of the two much studied problems of seeded randomness extraction against quantum side information, and classical indep...

BACKGROUND Agitated behaviors are frequently observed in patients with dementia and can cause severe distress to caregivers. However, little evidence of the efficacy of nonpharmacological interventions for agitated behaviors exists for patients with dementia. The present pilot study aimed to evaluate a behavioral management program developed by the Seattle Protocols for patients with agitated b...

Optimal dispersers have better dependence on the error than optimal extractors. In this paper we give explicit disperser constructions that beat the best possible extractors in some parameters. Our constructions are not strong, but we show that having such explicit strong constructions implies a solution to the Ramsey graph construction problem.

The breakthrough result of Chattopadhyay and Zuckerman (2016) gives a reduction from the construction of explicit two-source extractors to the construction of explicit non-malleable extractors. However, even assuming the existence of optimal explicit nonmalleable extractors only gives a two-source extractor (or a Ramsey graph) for poly(logn) entropy, rather than the optimal O (logn). In this pa...

A dimension extractor is an algorithm designed to increase the effective dimension – i.e., the computational information density – of an infinite sequence. A constructive dimension extractor is exhibited by showing that every sequence of positive constructive dimension is Turing equivalent to a sequence of constructive strong dimension arbitrarily close to 1. Similar results are shown for compu...

This chapter presents a general approach for handling secret biometric data in cryptographic applications. The generality manifests itself in two ways: we attempt to minimize the assumptions we make about the data, and to present techniques that are broadly applicable wherever biometric inputs are used. Because biometric data comes from a variety of sources that are mostly outside of anyone’s c...