No Arabic abstract
There are many normative and technical questions involved in evaluating the quality of software used in epidemiological simulations. In this paper we answer some of these questions and offer practical guidance to practitioners, funders, scientific journals, and consumers of epidemiological research. The heart of our paper is a case study of the Imperial College London (ICL) COVID-19 simulator. We contend that epidemiological simulators should be engineered and evaluated within the framework of safety-critical standards developed by the consensus of the software engineering community for applications such as automotive and aircraft control.
Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific communitys expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical standards for research methods commonly used in software engineering. These living documents, which should be continuously revised to reflect evolving consensus around research best practices, will improve research quality and make peer review more effective, reliable, transparent and fair.
Accessible epidemiological data are of great value for emergency preparedness and response, understanding disease progression through a population, and building statistical and mechanistic disease models that enable forecasting. The status quo, however, renders acquiring and using such data difficult in practice. In many cases, a primary way of obtaining epidemiological data is through the internet, but the methods by which the data are presented to the public often differ drastically among institutions. As a result, there is a strong need for better data sharing practices. This paper identifies, in detail and with examples, the three key challenges one encounters when attempting to acquire and use epidemiological data: 1) interfaces, 2) data formatting, and 3) reporting. These challenges are used to provide suggestions and guidance for improvement as these systems evolve in the future. If these suggested data and interface recommendations were adhered to, epidemiological and public health analysis, modeling, and informatics work would be significantly streamlined, which can in turn yield better public health decision-making capabilities.
The article presents the possibilities of using game simulator Sotware Inc in the training of future software engineer in higher education. Attention is drawn to some specific settings that need to be taken into account when training in the course of training future software engineers. More and more educational institutions are introducing new teaching methods, which result in the use of engineering students, in particular, future software engineers, to deal with real professional situations in the learning process. The use of modern ICT, including game simulators, in the educational process, allows to improve the quality of educational material and to enhance the educational effects from the use of innovative pedagogical programs and methods, as it gives teachers additional opportunities for constructing individual educational trajectories of students. The use of ICT allows for a differentiated approach to students with different levels of readiness to study. A feature of any software engineer is the need to understand the related subject area for which the software is being developed. An important condition for the preparation of a highly qualified specialist is the independent fulfillment by the student of scientific research, the generation, and implementation of his idea into a finished commercial product. In the process of research, students gain knowledge, skills of the future IT specialist and competences of the legal protection of the results of intellectual activity, technological audit, marketing, product realization in the market of innovations. Note that when the real-world practice is impossible for students, game simulators that simulate real software development processes are an alternative.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have lead to an explosion of multimedia applications (e.g., computer vision (CV) and natural language processing (NLP)) for different domains such as commercial, industrial, and intelligence. In particular, the use of AI applications in a national security environment is often problematic because the opaque nature of the systems leads to an inability for a human to understand how the results came about. A reliance on black boxes to generate predictions and inform decisions is potentially disastrous. This paper explores how the application of standards during each stage of the development of an AI system deployed and used in a national security environment would help enable trust. Specifically, we focus on the standards outlined in Intelligence Community Directive 203 (Analytic Standards) to subject machine outputs to the same rigorous standards as analysis performed by humans.
Digital contact tracing is a public health intervention. It should be integrated with local health policy, provide rapid and accurate notifications to exposed individuals, and encourage high app uptake and adherence to quarantine. Real-time monitoring and evaluation of effectiveness of app-based contact tracing is key for improvement and public trust.