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Surgical site infections (SSI) are significant postoperative complications and a leading cause of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) worldwide. They are associated with excess morbidity and mortality, and lead to decreased quality of life, prolonged hospital length of stay, and increased costs. Surveillance of HAI, including SSI, is a cornerstone of effective infection prevention and control (IPC) programmes. Surveillance activities can guide the implementation, and assess the effectiveness of preventive programmes aimed at reducing SSI incidence. In this Privat-Docent thesis we include four publications that contribute a unique perspective to SSI surveillance. The first publication addresses the intrinsic effect of surveillance. We performed a large international cohort study of SSI surveillance networks in 15 countries, and were able to determine that a hospital’s duration of participation in a surveillance network was associated with a decrease in its SSI incidence. This study confirms the existence of the “surveillance effect”, implying that awareness and monitoring can drive improvements in clinical practice and outcomes. The second publication examines the temporal trends and epidemiology of SSI due to Staphylococcus aureus in Switzerland, using data from the Swiss SSI surveillance network (Swissnoso), and showed that there were decreasing trends in incidence. We also examined risk factors associated with both methicillin-susceptible and methicillin-resistant S. aureus, helping to inform targeted prevention approaches, and to identify high-risk populations for further studies. The third publication used data from SSI surveillance networks in England, France, and Switzerland to externally validate risk predictions scores for SSI in colorectal surgery, where the burden is the highest, and to develop a novel score. The study highlighted the limitations of current models and underscores the need for more accurate prediction tools, which rely on data that is beyond what is routinely collected for the purposes of surveillance. The fourth publication charts a strategic roadmap, developed by a multidisciplinary group of European experts in surveillance, for the transition to automated HAI surveillance across Europe, including SSI. It emphasises benefits for surveillance practices that are brought about by digitalisation and automation in terms of efficiency and standardization, but also discusses common challenges and key questions such as surveillance targets. It is intended to accompany individuals or institutions that wish to implement an automated HAI surveillance programme.

Citoyenne canadienne née dans une petite ville relativement rurale du nord du Canada. Au cours de sa vie d'adulte, elle a beaucoup voyagé à travers le monde. Elle a vécu à Pau à deux reprises et s'y est rendue à chaque fois pour suivre son mari qui travaille dans l'industrie pétrolière. Elle pense avoir eu une vie très différente de celle de ses enfants, principalement en raison des voyages qu'ils ont effectués dès leur plus jeune âge. Elle évoque toutefois les inconvénients de cette situation et la notion d'appartenance. Elle parle également de l'apprentissage d'une langue étrangère et de la façon dont cela affecte les traits de personnalité, en raison de l'incapacité à s'exprimer correctement en français. Elle note qu'il y a eu des moments difficiles dans sa vie en raison des déménagements et du fait qu'elle n'avait pas d'amis sur lesquels compter, ni de famille autour d'elle. Pour y faire face, elle a créé une entreprise florissante qui fournit de l'aide et des opportunités aux femmes qui sont dans la même situation qu'elle. Elle parle également des problèmes de santé mentale et de la manière dont elle les a surmontés grâce à la thérapie. Female Canadian citizen born in a relatively rural small northern town in Canada. She has travelled extensively during her adult life around the world. She has lived in Pau on two different occasions, and each time travelled to follow her husband her works in the petrol industry. She believes that she had a very different life to that of her children, mainly due to the travelling that they have experienced from an early age. However, she speaks of the downside of that and the notion of belonging. She also speaks of learning a foreign language and how this affects personality traits, due to inability to express herself correctly in French. She notes that there have been hard times in her life due to moving around, and not having friends to count on, or family around her. In order to deal with this, she set up a thriving business that provides assistance and opportunities to women who are in the same position as her. She also speaks about mental health issues and how she overcame these through therapy. Migratory trajectory and oral history of English-speakers in the city of Pau Temporal: 20th and 21st century Temporal: 1980-2023

This paper describes the work done to track the supply chains of sur-veillance technologies from the global North to African governments for illegal surveillance of their citizens. We conducted desk research to analyse the supply side of surveillance technology exported to African countries. Our preliminary findings show nine key exporting states-actors for surveillance technologies to Africa. These are China; European Union agencies, and member states France, Germany, Italy; Israel, United Kingdom, Russia, and the United States of Amer-ica. Regarding the specific surveillance technologies being transferred, each export-ing state tends to have a focus area, both in geographic area and within the five surveillance technology categories covered by this study. The paper identified six motives for state surveillance, including the suppliers' perspective. These are: 1) surveillance as legitimacy for state security, 2) surveillance for political gain, 3) surveillance as diplomacy, 4) surveillance as a tool for development, 5) Surveil-lance as neocolonialism, and 6) surveillance as business opportunity. Further re-search is needed to deepen the analysis of surveillance technologies exports to the African continent and the human rights violations.

The study “Science Diplomacy in CEI Member States”, based on data collected in 11 CEI countries, is the first attempt to explore the state and prospects of SD in this broad portion of Europe. It provides a first overview able to map how SD is approached by these countries, as well as their interest in developing further joint actions in this field.

The dataset is based on telephone surveys that have been conducted every third year between 2003 and 2021. The respondents are representatives of the EU member states to 11 different working groups and committees in the Council of the EU. The purpose of the project is to improve our understanding of international decision-making, negotiations and cooperation with a special focus on the Council of the EU. The survey includes questions that are repeated in all the six survey rounds as well as questions that have been asked one or several times. Some of the questions are survey experiments. The design of the survey makes possible comparisons across policy areas, member states and over time. Datasetet bygger på en telefonenkät som genomförts vart tredje år mellan 2003 och 2021. Respondenterna är representanter för EU:s medlemsstater i 11 olika arbetsgrupper och kommittéer i EU:s ministerråd. Projektet syftar till att skapa bättre kunskaper om internationella beslutsprocesser, samarbete och förhandlingar med särskilt fokus på den Europeiska Unionen. Enkäten innehåller både frågor som upprepas vid varje mättillfälle och frågor som ställts vid ett eller flera tillfällen. En del av frågorna utgör surveyexperiment. Enkätens upplägg skapar möjligheter för att genomföra jämförande analyser mellan policyområden, medlemsstater och år.

Citoyen américain, naturalisé français. Paul Nash a déménagé 16 fois aux États-Unis et considère que le premier endroit qu’il se sent vraiment ‘chez lui’, a été après son arrivée en France, il y a vingt ans, pour vivre à Pau, avec son épouse, à la suite de la naissance de sa première fille. Il est fier d'être Français et de pouvoir dire que la France et son pays. Il estime avoir vécu une vie privilégiée et riche, mais il est conscient que les histoires de migration des autres ne sont pas aussi simples. Il parle de l'apprentissage de la langue française et de l'enseignement de l'anglais dans de multiples contextes internationaux, avec des Français, mais aussi des Indiens, des Allemands et des Ukrainiens, par exemple. Il a rencontré sa femme alors qu'il étudiait dans un institut de langue en Allemagne, et ils ont d'abord décidé de retourner aux États-Unis, où ils ont travaillé tous les deux. Ils se sont ensuite mariés, ont eu un enfant et ont décidé de s'installer en France, le pays d’origine de son épouse, Frédérique. Ils se sont installés à Pau et y ont fait leur vie. Il parle de ce qu'a signifié pour lui l'obtention de la nationalité française et de l'enthousiasme qu'il a ressenti quand on le lui avait accordé. Male American citizen, naturalized French. Paul Nash moved around the USA 16 times and considered that his first home was when he arrived twenty years ago in France, to live in Pau, with his wife, after the birth of their first daughter. He is proud to be French and also to call France his home country, today. He feels that he has lived a privileged and rich life but is aware that the migration stories of others are not so simple. He speaks of learning the French language and also teaching the English language in multiple international contexts, with French people, but also Indians, Germans, and Ukrainians, for example. He met his wife while studying at a German language institute and they decided first to return to the USA, where they both worked. They then married, had a child, and decided to move to France, where his wife, Frédérique, was originally from. They settled in Pau and have made their home there. He speaks of what it meant for him to obtain French nationality and the enthusiasm he felt in getting it. Migratory trajectory and oral history of English speakers in the city of Pau Temporal: 20th and 21st century

The automatic evaluation of video content is today one of the biggest challenges in computer Vision. When the purpose is to work with static surveillance cameras, where most of the time the scenes do not change ,a full Convolutional Network (CNN) approach seems to require too much CPU effort, specially when the objects are slightly moving between different frames. On the other side, visual tracking has seen great recent advances in either speed or accuracy but still remain scarce when have to deal with long videos where objects constantly new ones come into the scene and others disappear. In this paper, we present a parallelization scheme to handle multiple instances of object tracking. The main purpose is reduce overall processing time . The idea is to use already pre-trained CNNs for discovering objects and a parallel multi-tracker for following them, using both CPU and GPU devices. Our multi-tracker framework consists of three main components, a movement detector, an object classification and a tracker. We use the object detector as an initialization for trackers. When there are plenty of objects in the scene, the other two components are incorporated for reducing CPU effort. The first one is a scheduler than prioritizes tracking those objects that seems more relevant than the others. This scheduler use a criteria that balances the multi-tasking trying to reach the greatest speed-up with minimal detections lost. The second one, is a GPU memory handler, that lets adapt the framework to different hardware configuration specially when the CNNs could not be completely allocated into the device. As a general framework, it is very flexible and it could be customized with different trackers and CNN, adapting to different situations and platforms. We evaluate this framework in different cases and cameras configurations, reaching reasonable speed-up and confidence. Fil: Dominguez, Leonardo Daniel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comision de Investigaciones Científicas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados; Argentina Fil: Rubiales, Aldo Jose. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comision de Investigaciones Científicas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados; Argentina Fil: D'amato, Juan Pablo. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Tandil; Argentina. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comision de Investigaciones Científicas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados; Argentina Fil: Stramana, Franco Andrés. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comision de Investigaciones Científicas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados; Argentina Fil: Pérez, Alejandro. Universidad Nacional del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados. Provincia de Buenos Aires. Gobernación. Comision de Investigaciones Científicas. Grupo de Plasmas Densos Magnetizados; Argentina Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas 8th Workshop on Engineering Applications Universidad Santo Tomás Medellín

Background A psychosocial dementia care programme for challenging behaviour (DEMBASE®) was developed in collaboration with a Swedish BPSD‐registry team for in‐home care services use in Japan. The programme consisted of a web‐based tool for the continued assessment of challenging behaviours and interdisciplinary discussion meetings. Effectiveness of the adapted programme was verified through a cluster‐randomised controlled trial. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government provided municipal funding to introduce the programme into daily practice beginning in April 2018. Objectives To investigate both facilitators and barriers associated with programme implementation. Design A secondary analysis of qualitative and quantitative data. Settings Data were collected in naturalistic long‐term care settings from April 2018 to March 2019. Participants A total of 138 professionals and 157 people with dementia participated in the programme. Methods Challenging behaviour in persons with dementia was assessed by professionals using a total Neuropsychiatric Inventory score. Data on expected facilitators and barriers were extracted for qualitative analysis from a debriefing meeting between professionals. Results Of the 157 persons with dementia, 81 (51.6%) received follow‐up behavioural evaluations by March 2019. The average level of challenging behaviour was significantly reduced for 81 persons from baseline to their most recent follow‐up evaluations. Facilitators included ‘programme available for care managers’, ‘visualised feedback on professionals’ work’, ‘affordable for providers and professionals’ and ‘media coverage’. Barriers included ‘professionals from different organisations’, ‘unpaid work’, ‘operation requirement for municipalities’ and ‘conflict with daily benefit‐oriented framework’. Conclusions A follow‐up evaluation was not fully achieved. Further strategies to address barriers may include the development of a benefit‐rewarding scheme for interdisciplinary discussion meetings, an e‐learning system capable of substituting training course portions and a cross‐municipality training course.