Showing items 1 - 20 of 13541

Merger mania? The Finnish higher education experience

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

Publishing and presenting: A cross-national analysis of engineering academics in Europe

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Global Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 15, no. 3 (2013), p. 148-154
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  • Description: The international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey was used to compare several measures of research output in participating European countries. When looking at the output of books, articles, reports and conference presentations, results indicated variations between countries and between the engineering field of education and other fields of education. European university engineering academics produced relatively more research reports/monographs written for a funded project, but tended to produce at lower rates than academics overall in the other three forms of written research output. © WIETE 2013.

Time is on my side : How do engineering academics spend their days - an international study

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: World Transactions on Engineering and Technology Education Vol. 10, no. 3 (2012), p. 184-191
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  • Description: This article uses empirical data from the international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey to establish similarities and differences in work patterns among the world's academic engineers. Overall working hours and the distribution of work between teaching, research and other activities are examined. Summary results indicate that in periods when classes are in session, engineering academics from South Korea and Hong Kong reported a longer working week than equivalent staff from other countries. Engineering academics from Mexico and South Africa spent the highest proportion of their time on teaching, whereas those from Argentina, China and Italy spent the highest proportion on research. The most likely reason for international differences in the length of the working week is that national systems (such as higher education) have been constructed from the individual histories and cultures in each country. © 2012 WIETE.
  • Description: 2003010832

Is there a conflict between teaching and research? the views of engineering academics in Europe

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Global Journal of Engineering Education Vol. 15, no. 2 (2013), p. 75-81
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  • Description: This article presents an analysis of data from the international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) and the Academic Profession in Europe: Response to Societal Changes (EUROAC) surveys to compare engineering academics that prefer teaching over research, and vice versa. It also highlights the attitudes of each of these groups to teaching and research, the two major academic activities. There has long been debate about whether research and teaching are mutual activities or in competition with each other. According to the survey results, the majority stated a leaning towards research, but this preference was stronger in some countries than in others. In fact, data from the CAP survey reveal that 30% of engineering academics from the 12 participating European countries believe that teaching and research are hardly compatible with each other, but opinions from different countries vary considerably. Even though much higher proportions of academics agree that their research reinforces teaching, even on this measure, there are considerable gaps between countries. © WIETE 2013.
  • Description: 2003011212

Changing employment and working conditions

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian, Wikström, Janne

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian , Wikström, Janne
  • Date: 2015
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Academic Work and Careers in Europe : Trends, Challenges, Perspectives p. 95-115
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  • Description: This chapter considers the academic working environment in eight European countries and reports on academics' impressions of the changes that environment has undergone in recent years. We focus on the extent to which the content of academic work in these countries is similar or different; the nature of academics' working conditions and how they have changed; and what academics' affiliations are. The analysis also considers differences according to seniority. Based on interviews with European academics, we consider how changes in working conditions, employment and modes of operation have affected scholarly work and related activities, and the impact change has had on academic freedom. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Academics under pressure : Fear and loathing in finnish universities?

- Aarrevaara, Timo, Dobson, Ian

  • Authors: Aarrevaara, Timo , Dobson, Ian
  • Date: 2015
  • Type: Text , Book chapter
  • Relation: Forming, Recruiting and Managing the Academic Profession p. 211-223
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  • Description: This chapter presents an examination of Finnish university academics and the pressures they encounter in the rapidly changing academic milieu. In addition to the evolution all societies are subject to, staff in Finnish universities has had to adjust to a Universities Act that came into force from 2010, and this ushered in fundamental changes in governance arrangements and confirmed a pattern of increasing managerialism. Evidence indicates that many academics feel little capacity to influence decision making, and some are trapped in a cycle of precarious employment by oft-renegotiated short contracts. In addition, universities find themselves in competition with other labour market segments for highly qualified knowledge workers, a factor which has the capacity to have an impact on universities and their academic workforce. Using quantitative data from the Changing Academic Profession survey and augmenting this with qualitative data from the EUROAC project, this chapter examines Finnish university academics perceptions of academic life in the twenty-first century. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
  • Description: This chapter presents an examination of Finnish university academics and the pressures they encounter in the rapidly changing academic milieu. In addition to the evolution all societies are subject to, staff in Finnish universities has had to adjust to a Universities Act that came into force from 2010, and this ushered in fundamental changes in governance arrangements and confirmed a pattern of increasing managerialism. Evidence indicates that many academics feel little capacity to influence decision making, and some are trapped in a cycle of precarious employment by oft-renegotiated short contracts. In addition, universities find themselves in competition with other labour market segments for highly qualified knowledge workers, a factor which has the capacity to have an impact on universities and their academic workforce. Using quantitative data from the Changing Academic Profession survey and augmenting this with qualitative data from the EUROAC project, this chapter examines Finnish university academics’ perceptions of academic life in the twenty-first century. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.

Classification systems based on combinatorial semigroups

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Semigroup forum Vol. 86, no. 3 (2013), p. 603-612
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  • Description: The present article continues the investigation of constructions essential for applications of combinatorial semigroups to the design of multiple classification systems in data mining. Our main theorem gives a complete description of all optimal classification systems defined by one-sided ideals in a construction based on combinatorial Rees matrix semigroups. It strengthens and generalizes previous results, which handled the more narrow case of two-sided ideals.

Predicting cardiac autonomic neuropathy category for diabetic data with missing values

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei, Chowdhury, Morshed, Stranieri, Andrew, Jelinek, Herbert

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei , Chowdhury, Morshed , Stranieri, Andrew , Jelinek, Herbert
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Computers in Biology and Medicine Vol. 43, no. 10 (2013), p. 1328-1333
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  • Description: Cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy (CAN) is a serious and well known complication of diabetes. Previous articles circumvented the problem of missing values in CAN data by deleting all records and fields with missing values and applying classifiers trained on different sets of features that were complete. Most of them also added alternative features to compensate for the deleted ones. Here we introduce and investigate a new method for classifying CAN data with missing values. In contrast to all previous papers, our new method does not delete attributes with missing values, does not use classifiers, and does not add features. Instead it is based on regression and meta-regression combined with the Ewing formula for identifying the classes of CAN. This is the first article using the Ewing formula and regression to classify CAN. We carried out extensive experiments to determine the best combination of regression and meta-regression techniques for classifying CAN data with missing values. The best outcomes have been obtained by the additive regression meta-learner based on M5Rules and combined with the Ewing formula. It has achieved the best accuracy of 99.78% for two classes of CAN, and 98.98% for three classes of CAN. These outcomes are substantially better than previous results obtained in the literature by deleting all missing attributes and applying traditional classifiers to different sets of features without regression. Another advantage of our method is that it does not require practitioners to perform more tests collecting additional alternative features. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
  • Description: C1

A multi-tier ensemble construction of classifiers for phishing email detection and filtering

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: 4th International Symposium on Cyberspace Safety and Security, CSS 2012 Vol. 7672 LNCS, p. 48-56
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  • Description: This paper is devoted to multi-tier ensemble classifiers for the detection and filtering of phishing emails. We introduce a new construction of ensemble classifiers, based on the well known and productive multi-tier approach. Our experiments evaluate their performance for the detection and filtering of phishing emails. The multi-tier constructions are well known and have been used to design effective classifiers for email classification and other applications previously. We investigate new multi-tier ensemble classifiers, where diverse ensemble methods are combined in a unified system by incorporating different ensembles at a lower tier as an integral part of another ensemble at the top tier. Our novel contribution is to investigate the possibility and effectiveness of combining diverse ensemble methods into one large multi-tier ensemble for the example of detection and filtering of phishing emails. Our study handled a few essential ensemble methods and more recent approaches incorporated into a combined multi-tier ensemble classifier. The results show that new large multi-tier ensemble classifiers achieved better performance compared with the outcomes of the base classifiers and ensemble classifiers incorporated in the multi-tier system. This demonstrates that the new method of combining diverse ensembles into one unified multi-tier ensemble can be applied to increase the performance of classifiers if diverse ensembles are incorporated in the system. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.
  • Description: 2003010675

Performance evaluation of multi-tier ensemble classifiers for phishing websites

- Abawajy, Jemal, Beliakov, Gleb, Kelarev, Andrei, Yearwood, John

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Beliakov, Gleb , Kelarev, Andrei , Yearwood, John
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
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  • Description: This article is devoted to large multi-tier ensemble classifiers generated as ensembles of ensembles and applied to phishing websites. Our new ensemble construction is a special case of the general and productive multi-tier approach well known in information security. Many efficient multi-tier classifiers have been considered in the literature. Our new contribution is in generating new large systems as ensembles of ensembles by linking a top-tier ensemble to another middletier ensemble instead of a base classifier so that the toptier ensemble can generate the whole system. This automatic generation capability includes many large ensemble classifiers in two tiers simultaneously and automatically combines them into one hierarchical unified system so that one ensemble is an integral part of another one. This new construction makes it easy to set up and run such large systems. The present article concentrates on the investigation of performance of these new multi-tier ensembles for the example of detection of phishing websites. We carried out systematic experiments evaluating several essential ensemble techniques as well as more recent approaches and studying their performance as parts of multi-level ensembles with three tiers. The results presented here demonstrate that new three-tier ensemble classifiers performed better than the base classifiers and standard ensembles included in the system. This example of application to the classification of phishing websites shows that the new method of combining diverse ensemble techniques into a unified hierarchical three-tier ensemble can be applied to increase the performance of classifiers in situations where data can be processed on a large computer.

Empirical investigation of multi-tier ensembles for the detection of cardiac autonomic neuropathy using subsets of the Ewing features

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei, Stranieri, Andrew, Jelinek, Herbert

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei , Stranieri, Andrew , Jelinek, Herbert
  • Date: 2012
  • Type: Text , Conference proceedings
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  • Description: This article is devoted to an empirical investigation of performance of several new large multi-tier ensembles for the detection of cardiac autonomic neuropathy (CAN) in diabetes patients using sub-sets of the Ewing features. We used new data collected by the diabetes screening research initiative (DiScRi) project, which is more than ten times larger than the data set originally used by Ewing in the investigation of CAN. The results show that new multi-tier ensembles achieved better performance compared with the outcomes published in the literature previously. The best accuracy 97.74% of the detection of CAN has been achieved by the novel multi-tier combination of AdaBoost and Bagging, where AdaBoost is used at the top tier and Bagging is used at the middle tier, for the set consisting of the following four Ewing features: the deep breathing heart rate change, the Valsalva manoeuvre heart rate change, the hand grip blood pressure change and the lying to standing blood pressure change.

Classification systems based on combinatorial semigroups

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Semigroup Forum Vol. 86, no. 3 (2013), p. 603-612
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  • Description: The present article continues the investigation of constructions essential for applications of combinatorial semigroups to the design of multiple classification systems in data mining. Our main theorem gives a complete description of all optimal classification systems defined by one-sided ideals in a construction based on combinatorial Rees matrix semigroups. It strengthens and generalizes previous results, which handled the more narrow case of two-sided ideals. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York.
  • Description: 2003011021

A data mining application of the incidence semirings

- Abawajy, Jemal, Kelarev, Andrei, Yearwood, John, Turville, Christopher

  • Authors: Abawajy, Jemal , Kelarev, Andrei , Yearwood, John , Turville, Christopher
  • Date: 2013
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Houston Journal of Mathematics Vol. 39, no. 4 (2013), p. 1083-1093
  • Relation: http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/LP0990908
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  • Description: This paper is devoted to a combinatorial problem for incidence semirings, which can be viewed as sets of polynomials over graphs, where the edges are the unknowns and the coefficients are taken from a semiring. The construction of incidence rings is very well known and has many useful applications. The present article is devoted to a novel application of the more general incidence semirings. Recent research on data mining has motivated the investigation of the sets of centroids that have largest weights in semiring constructions. These sets are valuable for the design of centroid-based classification systems, or classifiers, as well as for the design of multiple classifiers combining several individual classifiers. Our article gives a complete description of all sets of centroids with the largest weight in incidence semirings.

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019 : a systematic analysis for the global burden of disease study 2019

- Abbafati, Christiana, Abbas, Kaja, Abbasi-Kangevari, Mohsen, Abd-Allah, Foad, Rahman, Muhammad Aziz

  • Authors: Abbafati, Christiana , Abbas, Kaja , Abbasi-Kangevari, Mohsen , Abd-Allah, Foad , Rahman, Muhammad Aziz
  • Date: 2020
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: The Lancet Vol. 396, no. 10258 (2020), p. 1223-1249
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  • Description: Background: Rigorous analysis of levels and trends in exposure to leading risk factors and quantification of their effect on human health are important to identify where public health is making progress and in which cases current efforts are inadequate. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2019 provides a standardised and comprehensive assessment of the magnitude of risk factor exposure, relative risk, and attributable burden of disease. Methods: GBD 2019 estimated attributable mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), years of life lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) for 87 risk factors and combinations of risk factors, at the global level, regionally, and for 204 countries and territories. GBD uses a hierarchical list of risk factors so that specific risk factors (eg, sodium intake), and related aggregates (eg, diet quality), are both evaluated. This method has six analytical steps. (1) We included 560 risk–outcome pairs that met criteria for convincing or probable evidence on the basis of research studies. 12 risk–outcome pairs included in GBD 2017 no longer met inclusion criteria and 47 risk–outcome pairs for risks already included in GBD 2017 were added based on new evidence. (2) Relative risks were estimated as a function of exposure based on published systematic reviews, 81 systematic reviews done for GBD 2019, and meta-regression. (3) Levels of exposure in each age-sex-location-year included in the study were estimated based on all available data sources using spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression, DisMod-MR 2.1, a Bayesian meta-regression method, or alternative methods. (4) We determined, from published trials or cohort studies, the level of exposure associated with minimum risk, called the theoretical minimum risk exposure level. (5) Attributable deaths, YLLs, YLDs, and DALYs were computed by multiplying population attributable fractions (PAFs) by the relevant outcome quantity for each age-sex-location-year. (6) PAFs and attributable burden for combinations of risk factors were estimated taking into account mediation of different risk factors through other risk factors. Across all six analytical steps, 30 652 distinct data sources were used in the analysis. Uncertainty in each step of the analysis was propagated into the final estimates of attributable burden. Exposure levels for dichotomous, polytomous, and continuous risk factors were summarised with use of the summary exposure value to facilitate comparisons over time, across location, and across risks. Because the entire time series from 1990 to 2019 has been re-estimated with use of consistent data and methods, these results supersede previously published GBD estimates of attributable burden. Findings: The largest declines in risk exposure from 2010 to 2019 were among a set of risks that are strongly linked to social and economic development, including household air pollution; unsafe water, sanitation, and handwashing; and child growth failure. Global declines also occurred for tobacco smoking and lead exposure. The largest increases in risk exposure were for ambient particulate matter pollution, drug use, high fasting plasma glucose, and high body-mass index. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor globally for attributable deaths was high systolic blood pressure, which accounted for 10·8 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 9·51–12·1) deaths (19·2% [16·9–21·3] of all deaths in 2019), followed by tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 8·71 million (8·12–9·31) deaths (15·4% [14·6–16·2] of all deaths in 2019). The leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable DALYs globally in 2019 was child and maternal malnutrition, which largely affects health in the youngest age groups and accounted for 295 million (253–350) DALYs (11·6% [10·3–13·1] of all global DALYs that year). The risk factor burden varied considerably in 2019 between age groups and locations. Among children aged 0–9 years, the three leading detailed risk factors for attributable DALYs were all related to malnutrition. Iron deficiency was the leading risk factor for those aged 10–24 years, alcohol use for those aged 25–49 years, and high systolic blood pressure for those aged 50–74 years and 75 years and older. Interpretation: Overall, the record for reducing exposure to harmful risks over the past three decades is poor. Success with reducing smoking and lead exposure through regulatory policy might point the way for a stronger role for public policy on other risks in addition to continued efforts to provide information on risk factor harm to the general public. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license

Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

- Abbafati, Christiana, Abbas, Kaja, Abbasi-Kangevari, Mohsen, Abd-Allah, Foad, Rahman, Muhammad Aziz

  • Authors: Abbafati, Christiana , Abbas, Kaja , Abbasi-Kangevari, Mohsen , Abd-Allah, Foad , Rahman, Muhammad Aziz
  • Date: 2020
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: The Lancet Vol. 396, no. 10258 (2020), p. 1204-1222
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  • Description: Background: In an era of shifting global agendas and expanded emphasis on non-communicable diseases and injuries along with communicable diseases, sound evidence on trends by cause at the national level is essential. The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) provides a systematic scientific assessment of published, publicly available, and contributed data on incidence, prevalence, and mortality for a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive list of diseases and injuries. Methods: GBD estimates incidence, prevalence, mortality, years of life lost (YLLs), years lived with disability (YLDs), and disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) due to 369 diseases and injuries, for two sexes, and for 204 countries and territories. Input data were extracted from censuses, household surveys, civil registration and vital statistics, disease registries, health service use, air pollution monitors, satellite imaging, disease notifications, and other sources. Cause-specific death rates and cause fractions were calculated using the Cause of Death Ensemble model and spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression. Cause-specific deaths were adjusted to match the total all-cause deaths calculated as part of the GBD population, fertility, and mortality estimates. Deaths were multiplied by standard life expectancy at each age to calculate YLLs. A Bayesian meta-regression modelling tool, DisMod-MR 2.1, was used to ensure consistency between incidence, prevalence, remission, excess mortality, and cause-specific mortality for most causes. Prevalence estimates were multiplied by disability weights for mutually exclusive sequelae of diseases and injuries to calculate YLDs. We considered results in the context of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a composite indicator of income per capita, years of schooling, and fertility rate in females younger than 25 years. Uncertainty intervals (UIs) were generated for every metric using the 25th and 975th ordered 1000 draw values of the posterior distribution. Findings: Global health has steadily improved over the past 30 years as measured by age-standardised DALY rates. After taking into account population growth and ageing, the absolute number of DALYs has remained stable. Since 2010, the pace of decline in global age-standardised DALY rates has accelerated in age groups younger than 50 years compared with the 1990–2010 time period, with the greatest annualised rate of decline occurring in the 0–9-year age group. Six infectious diseases were among the top ten causes of DALYs in children younger than 10 years in 2019: lower respiratory infections (ranked second), diarrhoeal diseases (third), malaria (fifth), meningitis (sixth), whooping cough (ninth), and sexually transmitted infections (which, in this age group, is fully accounted for by congenital syphilis; ranked tenth). In adolescents aged 10–24 years, three injury causes were among the top causes of DALYs: road injuries (ranked first), self-harm (third), and interpersonal violence (fifth). Five of the causes that were in the top ten for ages 10–24 years were also in the top ten in the 25–49-year age group: road injuries (ranked first), HIV/AIDS (second), low back pain (fourth), headache disorders (fifth), and depressive disorders (sixth). In 2019, ischaemic heart disease and stroke were the top-ranked causes of DALYs in both the 50–74-year and 75-years-and-older age groups. Since 1990, there has been a marked shift towards a greater proportion of burden due to YLDs from non-communicable diseases and injuries. In 2019, there were 11 countries where non-communicable disease and injury YLDs constituted more than half of all disease burden. Decreases in age-standardised DALY rates have accelerated over the past decade in countries at the lower end of the SDI range, while improvements have started to stagnate or even reverse in countries with higher SDI. Interpretation: As disability becomes an increasingly large component of disease burden and a larger component of health expenditure, greater research and developm nt investment is needed to identify new, more effective intervention strategies. With a rapidly ageing global population, the demands on health services to deal with disabling outcomes, which increase with age, will require policy makers to anticipate these changes. The mix of universal and more geographically specific influences on health reinforces the need for regular reporting on population health in detail and by underlying cause to help decision makers to identify success stories of disease control to emulate, as well as opportunities to improve. Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an Open Access article under the CC BY 4.0 license. **Please note that there are multiple authors for this article therefore only the name of the first 5 including Federation University Australia affiliate “Muhammad Rahman” is provided in this record**

The discrete gradient evolutionary strategy method for global optimization

- Abbas, Hussein, Bagirov, Adil, Zhang, Jiapu

  • Authors: Abbas, Hussein , Bagirov, Adil , Zhang, Jiapu
  • Date: 2003
  • Type: Text , Conference paper
  • Relation: Paper presented at the Congress on Evolutionary Computation CEC 2003, Canberra : 8th December, 2003
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  • Description: Global optimization problems continue to be a challenge in computational mathematics. The field is progressing in two streams: deterministic and heuristic approaches. In this paper, we present a hybrid method that uses the discrete gradient method, which is a derivative free local search method, and evolutionary strategies. We show that the hybridization of the two methods is better than each of them in isolation.
  • Description: E1
  • Description: 2003000440

Enlargements of the moreau–rockafellar subdifferential

- Abbasi, Malek, Kruger, Alexander, Théra, Michel

Out & Online effectiveness of a tailored online multi-symptom mental health and wellbeing program for same-sex attracted young adults: Study protocol for a randomised controlled trial

- Abbott, Jo-Anne, Klein, Britt, McLaren, Suzanne, Austin, David, Molloy, Mari, Meyer, Denny, McLeod, Bronte

  • Authors: Abbott, Jo-Anne , Klein, Britt , McLaren, Suzanne , Austin, David , Molloy, Mari , Meyer, Denny , McLeod, Bronte
  • Date: 2014
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Trials Vol. 15, no. 1 (2014), p. 1-19
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  • Description: Background: Same-sex attracted young adults have been found to experience higher rates of mental health problems and greater difficulties in accessing specialist mental health care services compared to their heterosexual peers. Internet-based mental health interventions have the potential to be more engaging and accessible to young adults compared to those delivered face-to-face. However, they are rarely inclusive of lesbian women and gay men. Thus, the current study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of an online mental health and wellbeing program, Out & Online (http://www.outandonline.org.au), in comparison to a wait-list control group, for reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms in same-sex attracted young adults aged between 18 and 25 years. Methods/Design: We are recruiting, through media and community organisations, 200 same-sex attracted young adults with anxiety and/or depressive symptoms and mild to moderate psychological distress (Kessler-10 score between 16 to 21). Participants will be randomly allocated to the intervention (the online program) or the wait-list control group based on a permuted blocked randomisation method to allow for stratification by gender. Participants in the intervention group will receive a tailored program for up to three types of mental health difficulties simultaneously. The primary outcome of anxiety and/or depressive symptoms, and secondary outcomes related to psychological distress, wellbeing and health behaviour will be measured at pre-intervention (0 week), post-intervention (8 weeks) and at a 3-month follow-up (20 weeks). Discussion: This online mental health and wellbeing program will be one of the first online interventions to be designed specifically to be relevant for same-sex attracted individuals. If the program is found to be effective it will improve access to specialist same-sex attracted-relevant mental health services for young adults and will facilitate wellbeing outcomes for these individuals. This program will also be a significant development in the delivery of tailored interventions that target multiple types of mental health conditions simultaneously. © 2014 Abbott et al.

Best practices in online therapy

- Abbott, Jo-Anne, Klein, Britt, Ciechomski, Lisa

  • Authors: Abbott, Jo-Anne , Klein, Britt , Ciechomski, Lisa
  • Date: 2008
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Journal of Technology in Human Services Vol. 26, no. 2-4 (2008), p. 360-375
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  • Description: This article discusses important issues in delivery of best practice Internet-based therapy (etherapy). Etherapy is first defined as the interaction between a consumer and a therapist via the Internet (commonly via e-mail) in association with the use of a structured web-based clinical treatment program. A summary of the professional and ethical issues is provided, along with illustrated examples of best-practice principles experienced in clinical and research work by members of the Swinburne University of Technology Etherapy Unit (formerly the Etherapy Research, Education, and Training Unit in the Department of General Practice at Monash University). Etherapy has been found to be effective in treating a range of psychological disorders. Future research investigating methods of enhancing consumers' ability to engage in etherapy should further increase the effectiveness of this type of therapy. © 2008 by The Haworth Press. All rights reserved.

A cluster randomised trial of an internet-based intervention program for tinnitus distress in an industrial setting

- Abbott, Jo-Anne, Kaldo, Viktor, Klein, Britt, Austin, David, Hamilton, Catherine, Piterman, Leon, Williams, Ben, Andersson, Gerhard

  • Authors: Abbott, Jo-Anne , Kaldo, Viktor , Klein, Britt , Austin, David , Hamilton, Catherine , Piterman, Leon , Williams, Ben , Andersson, Gerhard
  • Date: 2009
  • Type: Text , Journal article
  • Relation: Cognitive Behaviour Therapy Vol. 38, no. 3 (2009), p. 162-173
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  • Description: The effectiveness of a therapist-supported Internet intervention program for tinnitus distress in an industrial setting was evaluated using a cluster randomised design. Fifty-six Australian employees of two industrial organisations were randomly assigned, based on their work site (18 work sites from BP Australia and five from BHP Billiton), to either a cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) program or an information-only control program. Participants were assessed at pre- and postprogram, measuring tinnitus distress, depression, anxiety, stress, quality of life, and occupational health. The CBT program was not found to be superior to the information program for treating tinnitus distress. A high attrition rate and small sample size limit the generalisability of the findings, and further developments of the program and assessment process are needed to enhance engagement and compliance. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.