Population Digital Health: Continuous Health Monitoring and Profiling at Scale.

This paper introduces population digital health (PDH)-the use of digital health information sourced from health internet of things (IoT) and wearable devices for population health modeling-as an emerging research domain that offers an integrated approach for continuous monitoring and profiling of diseases and health conditions at multiple spatial resolutions. PDH combines health data sourced from health IoT devices, machine learning, and ubiquitous computing or networking infrastructure to increase the scale, coverage, equity, and cost-effectiveness of population health. This contrasts with the traditional population health approach, which relies on data from structured clinical records (eg, electronic health records) or health surveys.

DFML: Dynamic Federated Meta-Learning for Rare Disease Prediction.

Millions of patients suffer from rare diseases around the world. However, the samples of rare diseases are much smaller than those of common diseases. Hospitals are usually reluctant to share patient information for data fusion due to the sensitivity of medical data.

Flexico: An efficient dual-mode consensus protocol for blockchain networks.

Blockchain is a Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) system wherein decentralized nodes execute consensus protocols to drive the agreement process on new blocks added to a distributed ledger. Generally, two-round communications among [Formula: see text] nodes are required to tolerate up to [Formula: see text] faults in BFT-based consensus networks. This communication pattern corresponds to the worse-case scenario of consensus achievement, even under asynchronous network conditions.

Interpretable Machine Learning for COVID-19: An Empirical Study on Severity Prediction Task.

The black-box nature of machine learning models hinders the deployment of some high-accuracy medical diagnosis algorithms. It is risky to put one's life in the hands of models that medical researchers do not fully understand or trust. However, through model interpretation, black-box models can promptly reveal significant biomarkers that medical practitioners may have overlooked due to the surge of infected patients in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Predictive topology refinements in distributed stream processing system.

Cloud computing has evolved the big data technologies to a consolidated paradigm with SPaaS (Streaming processing-as-a-service). With a number of enterprises offering cloud-based solutions to end-users and other small enterprises, there has been a boom in the volume of data, creating interest of both industry and academia in big data analytics, streaming applications, and social networking applications. With the companies shifting to cloud-based solutions as a service paradigm, the competition grows in the market.

Cost-aware orchestration of applications over heterogeneous clouds.

The orchestration of applications and their components over heterogeneous clouds is recognized as being critical in solving the problem of vendor lock-in with regards to distributed and cloud computing. There have been recent strides made in the area of cloud application orchestration with emergence of the TOSCA standard being a definitive one. Although orchestration by itself provides a considerable amount of benefit to consumers of cloud computing services, it remains impractical without a compelling reason to ensure its utilization by cloud computing consumers.

From Smart Homes to Smart-Ready Homes and Communities.

Background: People have various and changing needs as they age, and the number of people living with some form of dementia is steadily increasing. Smart homes have a unique potential to provide assisted living but are often designed rigidly with a specific and fixed problem in mind.

Objectives: To make smart-ready homes and communities that can be adaptively and easily updated over time to support varying user needs and to deliver the needed assistance, empowerment, and living independence.

VM Capacity-Aware Scheduling within Budget Constraints in IaaS Clouds.

Recently, cloud computing has drawn significant attention from both industry and academia, bringing unprecedented changes to computing and information technology. The infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model offers new abilities such as the elastic provisioning and relinquishing of computing resources in response to workload fluctuations. However, because the demand for resources dynamically changes over time, the provisioning of resources in a way that a given budget is efficiently utilized while maintaining a sufficing performance remains a key challenge.

Participatory and persuasive telehealth.

Technological advances in telehealth systems are primarily focused on sensing and monitoring. However, these systems are limited in that they only rely on sensors and medical devices to obtain vital signs. New research and development are urgently needed to offer more effective and meaningful interactions between patients, medical professionals and other individuals around the patients.