The EU in the AIIB: taming China’s influence from within. Egmont Security Policy Brief No. 86 May 2017

With the recent approval of the membership request of Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Ireland and Romania, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will soon count 20 EU countries among its members. But how could the EU make the most of this presence in the bank? Apart from direct business opportunities for its private sector, there are strategic, long-term considerations too. It will be imperative that the EU exploit the link between the AIIB and the Belt and Road Initiative and ensure that the bank’s functioning remains consistent with EU development standards through a carefully co-ordinated voice within the institution

Personalised trails and learner profiling within e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on personalisation and personalised trails. We begin by introducing and defining the concepts of personalisation and personalised trails. Personalisation requires that a user profile be stored, and so we assess currently available standard profile schemas and discuss the requirements for a profile to support personalised learning. We then review techniques for providing personalisation and some systems that implement these techniques, and discuss some of the issues around evaluating personalisation systems. We look especially at the use of learning and cognitive styles to support personalised learning, and also consider personalisation in the field of mobile learning, which has a slightly different take on the subject, and in commercially available systems, where personalisation support is found to currently be only at quite a low level. We conclude with a summary of the lessons to be learned from our review of personalisation and personalised trails

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future

Challenges to Longitudinal Characterization of Lower Urinary Tract Dysfunction in Multiple Sclerosis

Background: Neurogenic lower urinary tract dysfunction (LUTD) results in lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) that impact quality of life in people with multiple sclerosis (PwMS). The risk factors and the contribution of LUTD to multiple sclerosis (MS) disease progression are under-researched. Objective: To identify clinical and demographic predictors of LUTS in PwMS and gaps in clinical ascertainment. Methods: Participants were adults with MS enrolled in a prospective, multicenter study (SUMMIT, N=802), including a subset of N = 258 patients in the UCSF EPIC study for whom medical records were further reviewed. Demographic (age, sex, race, ethnicity), clinical (disease duration, MS type), and female-specific reproductive factors (e.g., parity) were evaluated to determine associations with bowel/bladder functional system scores. Participants’ medical records were analyzed to understand the patterns of LUTS ascertainment by physicians and the specific contribution of LUTS to overall bowel/bladder functional system scores. Results: 802 participants (71.3% female) contributed to these analyses. Higher bowel/bladder functional system scores, indicating worsening symptoms and function, were significantly associated with female sex (p=0.001) and progressive MS type (p≤ 0.001). In the EPIC participants, female-specific reproductive exposures (parity, menopause) were not significantly associated with worse bowel/bladder functional system scores. Most (98%) bowel/bladder functional system scores reflected the severity of LUTS (relative to bowel dysfunction). LUTS were under-ascertained clinically, and more so in women (X2 = 5.02, p=0.08). Conclusions: Female sex and MS type are predictive of worsening LUTS. Symptoms may be less likely to be ascertained by clinicians in females compared to males. © 202