BackgroundSynthesis of multiple randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in a systematic review can summarize the effects of individual outcomes and provide numerical answers about the effectiveness of interventions. Filtering of searches is time consuming, and no single method fulfills the principal requirements of speed with accuracy. Automation of systematic reviews is driven by a necessity to expedite the availability of current best evidence for policy and clinical decision-making.We developed Rayyan (http://rayyan.qcri.org), a free web and mobile app, that helps expedite the initial screening of abstracts and titles using a process of semi-automation while incorporating a high level of usability. For the beta testing phase, we used two published Cochrane reviews in which included studies had been selected manually. Their searches, with 1030 records and 273 records, were uploaded to Rayyan. Different features of Rayyan were tested using these two reviews. We also conducted a survey of Rayyan’s users and collected feedback through a built-in feature.ResultsPilot testing of Rayyan focused on usability, accuracy against manual methods, and the added value of the prediction feature. The “taster” review (273 records) allowed a quick overview of Rayyan for early comments on usability. The second review (1030 records) required several iterations to identify the previously identified 11 trials. The “suggestions” and “hints,” based on the “prediction model,” appeared as testing progressed beyond five included studies. Post rollout user experiences and a reflexive response by the developers enabled real-time modifications and improvements. The survey respondents reported 40% average time savings when using Rayyan compared to others tools, with 34% of the respondents reporting more than 50% time savings. In addition, around 75% of the respondents mentioned that screening and labeling studies as well as collaborating on reviews to be the two most important features of Rayyan.As of November 2016, Rayyan users exceed 2000 from over 60 countries conducting hundreds of reviews totaling more than 1.6M citations. Feedback from users, obtained mostly through the app web site and a recent survey, has highlighted the ease in exploration of searches, the time saved, and simplicity in sharing and comparing include-exclude decisions. The strongest features of the app, identified and reported in user feedback, were its ability to help in screening and collaboration as well as the time savings it affords to users.ConclusionsRayyan is responsive and intuitive in use with significant potential to lighten the load of reviewers.

Despite the efforts in 70+ years in all aspects of entity resolution (ER), there is still a high demand for democratizing ER - by reducing the heavy human involvement in labeling data, performing feature engineering, tuning parameters, and defining blocking functions. With the recent advances in deep learning, in particular distributed representations of words ( a.k.a . word embeddings), we present a novel ER system, called D eep ER, that achieves good accuracy, high efficiency, as well as ease-of-use ( i.e ., much less human efforts). We use sophisticated composition methods, namely uni- and bi-directional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with long short term memory (LSTM) hidden units, to convert each tuple to a distributed representation ( i.e ., a vector), which can in turn be used to effectively capture similarities between tuples. We consider both the case where pre-trained word embeddings are available as well the case where they are not; we present ways to learn and tune the distributed representations that are customized for a specific ER task under different scenarios. We propose a locality sensitive hashing (LSH) based blocking approach that takes all attributes of a tuple into consideration and produces much smaller blocks, compared with traditional methods that consider only a few attributes. We evaluate our algorithms on multiple datasets (including benchmarks, biomedical data, as well as multi-lingual data) and the extensive experimental results show that D eep ER outperforms existing solutions.

In this paper we present GDR, a Guided Data Repair framework that incorporates user feedback in the cleaning process to enhance and accelerate existing automatic repair techniques while minimizing user involvement. GDR consults the user on the updates that are most likely to be beneficial in improving data quality. GDR also uses machine learning methods to identify and apply the correct updates directly to the database without the actual involvement of the user on these specific updates. To rank potential updates for consultation by the user, we first group these repairs and quantify the utility of each group using the decision-theory concept of value of information (VOI). We then apply active learning to order updates within a group based on their ability to improve the learned model. User feedback is used to repair the database and to adaptively refine the training set for the model. We empirically evaluate GDR on a real-world dataset and show significant improvement in data quality using our user guided repairing process. We also, assess the trade-off between the user efforts and the resulting data quality.

Mapping out the challenges and strategies for the widespread adoption of service computing.

Systematic reviews (SR) are vital to health care, but have become complicated and time-consuming, due to the rapid expansion of evidence to be synthesised. Fortunately, many tasks of systematic reviews have the potential to be automated or may be assisted by automation. Recent advances in natural language processing, text mining and machine learning have produced new algorithms that can accurately mimic human endeavour in systematic review activity, faster and more cheaply. Automation tools need to be able to work together, to exchange data and results. Therefore, we initiated the International Collaboration for the Automation of Systematic Reviews (ICASR), to successfully put all the parts of automation of systematic review production together. The first meeting was held in Vienna in October 2015. We established a set of principles to enable tools to be developed and integrated into toolkits.This paper sets out the principles devised at that meeting, which cover the need for improvement in efficiency of SR tasks, automation across the spectrum of SR tasks, continuous improvement, adherence to high quality standards, flexibility of use and combining components, the need for a collaboration and varied skills, the desire for open source, shared code and evaluation, and a requirement for replicability through rigorous and open evaluation.Automation has a great potential to improve the speed of systematic reviews. Considerable work is already being done on many of the steps involved in a review. The ‘Vienna Principles’ set out in this paper aim to guide a more coordinated effort which will allow the integration of work by separate teams and build on the experience, code and evaluations done by the many teams working across the globe.