Free or low-cost sources of unstructured information, such as Internet news and online discussion sites, provide detailed local and near real-time data on disease outbreaks, even in countries that lack traditional public health surveillance. To improve public health surveillance and, ultimately, interventions, we examined 3 primary systems that process event-based outbreak information: Global Public Health Intelligence Network, HealthMap, and EpiSPIDER. Despite similarities among them, these systems are highly complementary because they monitor different data types, rely on varying levels of automation and human analysis, and distribute distinct information. Future development should focus on linking these systems more closely to public health practitioners in the field and establishing collaborative networks for alert verification and dissemination. Such development would further establish event-based monitoring as an invaluable public health resource that provides critical context and an alternative to traditional indicator-based outbreak reporting.
Embedded operational analytics help applications and business users take close to real-time action. However, there is another class of applications where even close to real-time analytics are not
sufficient.
A key component of a company's IT framework is a business intelligence (BI) system. Traditional BI systems were designed for senior management and business analysts to report on, analyze and optimize business operations to reduce costs and increase revenues. Organizations use BI for strategic and tactical decision making where the decision-making cycle may span a time period of several weeks or months. Competitive pressures coming from a very dynamic business environment are forcing companies to react faster to changing business conditions and customer requirements. As a result, there is now a need to use BI to help drive and optimize business operations on a daily basis, and, in some cases, even for intraday decision making. This type of BI is called operational business intelligence and real-time business intelligence and it is used not only by senior management and analysts (as in traditional BI) but also by line of business managers and operational users. In other words this is BI for everyone.
The objective of this document(*)
is to provide some rational, structured access to an analysis of cognitive and agent architectures (for
more information on accessing the document, see the Reader's Guide). Twelve architectures have
been used for this preliminary analysis representing a wide range of
current architectures in artificial
intelligence (AI). The aim of the project is to facilitate both
an understanding of current architectures and provide insight to the
development of future, improved intelligent agent architectures.
This work was based on publications from 1992 and before and has not
been authorized by the researchers responsible for particular
architectures (see DISCLAIMER for additional
information).