A content analysis-based approach to explore simulation verification and identify its current challenges.

Verification is a crucial process to facilitate the identification and removal of errors within simulations. This study explores semantic changes to the concept of simulation verification over the past six decades using a data-supported, automated content analysis approach. We collect and utilize a corpus of 4,047 peer-reviewed Modeling and Simulation (M&S) publications dealing with a wide range of studies of simulation verification from 1963 to 2015. We group the selected papers by decade of publication to provide insights and explore the corpus from four perspectives: (i) the positioning of prominent concepts across the corpus as a whole; (ii) a comparison of the prominence of verification, validation, and Verification and Validation (V&V) as separate concepts; (iii) the positioning of the concepts specifically associated with verification; and (iv) an evaluation of verification's defining characteristics within each decade. Our analysis reveals unique characterizations of verification in each decade. The insights gathered helped to identify and discuss three categories of verification challenges as avenues of future research, awareness, and understanding for researchers, students, and practitioners. These categories include conveying confidence and maintaining ease of use; techniques' coverage abilities for handling increasing simulation complexities; and new ways to provide error feedback to model users.

Temporal and spatiotemporal investigation of tourist attraction visit sentiment on Twitter.

In this paper, we propose a sentiment-based approach to investigate the temporal and spatiotemporal effects on tourists' emotions when visiting a city's tourist destinations. Our approach consists of four steps: data collection and preprocessing from social media; visitor origin identification; visit sentiment identification; and temporal and spatiotemporal analysis. The temporal and spatiotemporal dimensions include day of the year, season of the year, day of the week, location sentiment progression, enjoyment measure, and multi-location sentiment progression. We apply this approach to the city of Chicago using over eight million tweets. Results show that seasonal weather, as well as special days and activities like concerts, impact tourists' emotions. In addition, our analysis suggests that tourists experience greater levels of enjoyment in places such as observatories rather than zoos. Finally, we find that local and international visitors tend to convey negative sentiment when visiting more than one attraction in a day whereas the opposite holds for out of state visitors.

Toward Live Virtual Constructive Simulations in Healthcare Learning.

STATEMENT: This article explores the combination of live, virtual, and constructive (LVC) simulations in healthcare. Live, virtual, and constructive simulations have long existed in the military, but their consideration (and deployment) in medical and healthcare domains is relatively new. We conducted a review on LVC- its current application in the military domain -and highlight an approach, challenges, and present suggestions for its implementation in healthcare learning. Furthermore, based on the state of the art in simulation in healthcare, we suggest that a combination of two simulation types (LV, VC, LC) at the time may be a simpler approach to the community at large.

Identifying key papers within a journal via network centrality measures.

This article examines the extent to which existing network centrality measures can be used (1) as filters to identify a set of papers to start reading within a journal and (2) as article-level metrics to identify the relative importance of a paper within a journal. We represent a dataset of published papers in the Public Library of Science (PLOS) via a co-citation network and compute three established centrality metrics for each paper in the network: closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector. Our results show that the network of papers in a journal is scale-free and that eigenvector centrality (1) is an effective filter and article-level metric and (2) correlates well with citation counts within a given journal. However, closeness centrality is a poor filter because articles fit within a small range of citations. We also show that betweenness centrality is a poor filter for journals with a narrow focus and a good filter for multidisciplinary journals where communities of papers can be identified.