Abstract: In this competitive age, one of the key tools of most successful organizations is knowledge management. Today some organizations measure their current knowledge and use it as an indicator for rating the organization on their reports. Noting that the universities and colleges of medical science have a great role in public health of societies, their access to newest scientific research and the establishment of organizational knowledge management systems is very important. In order to explore the Application of Knowledge Management Factors, a national study was undertaken. The main purpose of this study was to find the rate of the application of knowledge management factors and some ways to establish more application of knowledge management system in Esfahan University-s Medical College (EUMC). Esfahan is the second largest city after Tehran, the capital city of Iran, and the EUMC is the biggest medical college in Esfahan. To rate the application of knowledge management, this study uses a quantitative research methodology based on Probst, Raub and Romhardt model of knowledge management. A group of 267 faculty members and staff of the EUMC were asked via questionnaire. Finding showed that the rate of the application of knowledge management factors in EUMC have been lower than average. As a result, an interview with ten faculty members conducted to find the guidelines to establish more applications of knowledge management system in EUMC.
Abstract: Since 1984 many schemes have been proposed for
digital signature protocol, among them those that based on discrete
log and factorizations. However a new identification scheme based
on iterated function (IFS) systems are proposed and proved to be
more efficient. In this study the proposed identification scheme is
transformed into a digital signature scheme by using a one way hash
function. It is a generalization of the GQ signature schemes. The
attractor of the IFS is used to obtain public key from a private one,
and in the encryption and decryption of a hash function. Our aim is
to provide techniques and tools which may be useful towards
developing cryptographic protocols. Comparisons between the
proposed scheme and fractal digital signature scheme based on RSA
setting, as well as, with the conventional Guillou-Quisquater
signature, and RSA signature schemes is performed to prove that, the
proposed scheme is efficient and with high performance.
Abstract: To investigate the correspondence of theory and
practice, a successfully implemented Knowledge Management
System (KMS) is explored through the lens of Alavi and Leidner-s
proposed KMS framework for the analysis of an information system
in knowledge management (Framework-AISKM). The applied KMS
system was designed to manage curricular knowledge in a distributed
university environment. The motivation for the KMS is discussed
along with the types of knowledge necessary in an academic setting.
Elements of the KMS involved in all phases of capturing and
disseminating knowledge are described. As the KMS matures the
resulting data stores form the precursor to and the potential for
knowledge mining. The findings from this exploratory study indicate
substantial correspondence between the successful KMS and the
theory-based framework providing provisional confirmation for the
framework while suggesting factors that contributed to the system-s
success. Avenues for future work are described.
Abstract: In Knowledge Structure Graph, each course unit
represents a phase of learning activities. Both learning portfolios and
Knowledge Structure Graphs contain learning information of students
and let teachers know which content are difficulties and fails. The
study purposes "Dual Mode On-line Learning Diagnosis System" that
integrates two search methods: learning portfolio and knowledge
structure. Teachers can operate the proposed system and obtain the
information of specific students without any computer science
background. The teachers can find out failed students in advance and
provide remedial learning resources.
Abstract: Nowadays, Gene Ontology has been used widely by many researchers for biological data mining and information retrieval, integration of biological databases, finding genes, and incorporating knowledge in the Gene Ontology for gene clustering. However, the increase in size of the Gene Ontology has caused problems in maintaining and processing them. One way to obtain their accessibility is by clustering them into fragmented groups. Clustering the Gene Ontology is a difficult combinatorial problem and can be modeled as a graph partitioning problem. Additionally, deciding the number k of clusters to use is not easily perceived and is a hard algorithmic problem. Therefore, an approach for solving the automatic clustering of the Gene Ontology is proposed by incorporating cohesion-and-coupling metric into a hybrid algorithm consisting of a genetic algorithm and a split-and-merge algorithm. Experimental results and an example of modularized Gene Ontology in RDF/XML format are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the algorithm.
Abstract: General requirements for knowledge representation in
the form of logic rules, applicable to design and control of industrial
processes, are formulated. Characteristic behavior of decision trees
(DTs) and rough sets theory (RST) in rules extraction from recorded
data is discussed and illustrated with simple examples. The
significance of the models- drawbacks was evaluated, using
simulated and industrial data sets. It is concluded that performance of
DTs may be considerably poorer in several important aspects,
compared to RST, particularly when not only a characterization of a
problem is required, but also detailed and precise rules are needed,
according to actual, specific problems to be solved.
Abstract: Chlorine is one of the most abundant elements in
nature, which undergoes a complex biogeochemical cycle. Chlorine
bound in some substances is partly responsible for atmospheric ozone
depletion and contamination of some ecosystems. As due to
international regulations anthropogenic burden of volatile
organochlorines (VOCls) in atmosphere decreases, natural sources
(plants, soil, abiotic formation) are expected to dominate VOCl
production in the near future. Examples of plant VOCl production are
methyl chloride, and bromide emission from (sub)tropical ferns,
chloroform, 1,1,1-trichloroethane and tetrachloromethane emission
from temperate forest fern and moss. Temperate forests are found to
emit in addition to the previous compounds tetrachloroethene, and
brominated volatile compounds. VOCls can be taken up and further
metabolized in plants. The aim of this work is to identify and
quantitatively analyze the formed VOCls in temperate forest
ecosystems by a cryofocusing/GC-ECD detection method, hence
filling a gap of knowledge in the biogeochemical cycle of chlorine.
Abstract: Due to today-s fierce competition, companies have to
be proactive creators of the future by effectively developing
innovations. Especially radical innovations allow high profit margins
– but they also entail high risks. One possibility to realize radical
innovations and reduce the risk of failure is cross-industry innovation
(CII). CII brings together problems and solution ideas from different
industries. However, there is a lack of systematic ways towards CII.
Bridging this gap, the present paper provides a systematic approach
towards planned CII. Starting with the analysis of potentials, the
definition of promising search strategies is crucial. Subsequently,
identified solution ideas need to be assessed. For the most promising
ones, the adaption process has to be systematically planned –
regarding the risk affinity of a company. The introduced method is
explained on a project from the furniture industry.
Abstract: In networks, mainly small and medium-sized businesses benefit from the knowledge, experiences and solutions offered by experts from industry and science or from the exchange with practitioners. Associations which focus, among other things, on networking, information and knowledge transfer and which are interested in supporting such cooperations are especially well suited to provide such networks and the appropriate web platforms. Using METORA as an example – a project developed and run by the Federal Association for Information Economy, Telecommunications and New Media e.V. (BITKOM) for the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) – This paper will discuss how associations and other network organizations can achieve this task and what conditions they have to consider.
Abstract: The new framework the Higher Education is
immersed in involves a complete change in the way lecturers must
teach and students must learn. Whereas the lecturer was the main
character in traditional education, the essential goal now is to
increase the students' participation in the process. Thus, one of the
main tasks of lecturers in this new context is to design activities of
different nature in order to encourage such participation. Seminars
are one of the activities included in this environment. They are active
sessions that enable going in depth into specific topics as support of
other activities. They are characterized by some features such as
favoring interaction between students and lecturers or improving
their communication skills. Hence, planning and organizing strategic
seminars is indeed a great challenge for lecturers with the aim of
acquiring knowledge and abilities. This paper proposes a method
using Artificial Intelligence techniques to obtain student profiles
from their marks and preferences. The goal of building such profiles
is twofold. First, it facilitates the task of splitting the students into
different groups, each group with similar preferences and learning
difficulties. Second, it makes it easy to select adequate topics to be a
candidate for the seminars. The results obtained can be either a
guarantee of what the lecturers could observe during the development
of the course or a clue to reconsider new methodological strategies in
certain topics.
Abstract: The main objective of this paper is to contribute the
existing knowledge transfer and IT Outsourcing literature
specifically in the context of Malaysia by reviewing the current
practices of e-government IT outsourcing in Malaysia including the
issues and challenges faced by the public agencies in transferring the
knowledge during the engagement. This paper discusses various
factors and different theoretical model of knowledge transfer starting
from the traditional model to the recent model suggested by the
scholars. The present paper attempts to align organizational
knowledge from the knowledge-based view (KBV) and
organizational learning (OL) lens. This review could help shape the
direction of both future theoretical and empirical studies on inter-firm
knowledge transfer specifically on how KBV and OL perspectives
could play significant role in explaining the complex relationships
between the client and vendor in inter-firm knowledge transfer and
the role of organizational management information system and
Transactive Memory System (TMS) to facilitate the organizational
knowledge transferring process. Conclusion is drawn and further
research is suggested.
Abstract: Knowledge sharing in general and the contextual
access to knowledge in particular, still represent a key challenge in
the knowledge management framework. Researchers on semantic
web and human machine interface study techniques to enhance this
access. For instance, in semantic web, the information retrieval is
based on domain ontology. In human machine interface, keeping
track of user's activity provides some elements of the context that can
guide the access to information. We suggest an approach based on
these two key guidelines, whilst avoiding some of their weaknesses.
The approach permits a representation of both the context and the
design rationale of a project for an efficient access to knowledge. In
fact, the method consists of an information retrieval environment
that, in the one hand, can infer knowledge, modeled as a semantic
network, and on the other hand, is based on the context and the
objectives of a specific activity (the design). The environment we
defined can also be used to gather similar project elements in order to
build classifications of tasks, problems, arguments, etc. produced in a
company. These classifications can show the evolution of design
strategies in the company.
Abstract: Knowledge development in companies relies on
knowledge-intensive business processes, which are characterized by
a high complexity in their execution, weak structuring,
communication-oriented tasks and high decision autonomy, and often the need for creativity and innovation. A foundation of knowledge development is provided, which is based on a new conception of
knowledge and knowledge dynamics. This conception consists of a three-dimensional model of knowledge with types, kinds and qualities. Built on this knowledge conception, knowledge dynamics is
modeled with the help of general knowledge conversions between
knowledge assets. Here knowledge dynamics is understood to cover
all of acquisition, conversion, transfer, development and usage of
knowledge. Through this conception we gain a sound basis for
knowledge management and development in an enterprise. Especially
the type dimension of knowledge, which categorizes it according to
its internality and externality with respect to the human being, is crucial for enterprise knowledge management and development,
because knowledge should be made available by converting it to
more external types.
Built on this conception, a modeling approach for knowledgeintensive
business processes is introduced, be it human-driven,e-driven or task-driven processes. As an example for this approach, a model of the creative activity for the renewal planning of
a product is given.
Abstract: We present a method for fast volume rendering using
graphics hardware (GPU). To our knowledge, it is the first implementation
on the GPU. Based on the Shear-Warp algorithm, our
GPU-based method provides real-time frame rates and outperforms
the CPU-based implementation. When the number of slices is not
sufficient, we add in-between slices computed by interpolation. This
improves then the quality of the rendered images. We have also
implemented the ray marching algorithm on the GPU. The results
generated by the three algorithms (CPU-based and GPU-based Shear-
Warp, GPU-based Ray Marching) for two test models has proved that
the ray marching algorithm outperforms the shear-warp methods in
terms of speed up and image quality.
Abstract: Participation in sporting activities can lead to injury.
Sport injuries have been widely studied in many sports including the
more extreme categories of aquatic board sports. Kitesurfing is a
relatively new water surface action sport, and has not yet been
widely studied in terms of injuries and stress on the body. The aim of
this study was to get information about which injuries that are most
common among kitesurfing participants, where they occur, and their
causes. Injuries were studied using an international open web
questionnaire (n=206).
The results showed that many respondents reported injuries, in
total 251 injuries to knee (24%), ankle (17%), trunk (16%) and
shoulders (10%), often sustained while doing jumps and tricks
(40%). Among the reported injuries were joint injuries (n=101),
muscle/tendon damages (n=47), wounds and cuts (n=36) and bone
fractures (n=28). Also environmental factors and equipment can
influence the risk of injury, or the extent of injury in a hazardous
situation. Conclusively, the information from this retrospective study
supports earlier studies in terms of prevalence and site of injuries.
Suggestively, this information should be used for to build a
foundation of knowledge about the sport for development of
applications for physical training and product development.
Abstract: This paper introduces a tool that is being developed for the expression of information security policy controls that govern electronic healthcare records. By reference to published findings, the paper introduces the theory behind the use of knowledge management for automatic and consistent security policy assertion using the formalism called the Secutype; the development of the tool and functionality is discussed; some examples of Secutypes generated by the tool are provided; proposed integration with existing medical record systems is described. The paper is concluded with a section on further work and critique of the work achieved to date.
Abstract: Rule Discovery is an important technique for mining knowledge from large databases. Use of objective measures for discovering interesting rules lead to another data mining problem, although of reduced complexity. Data mining researchers have studied subjective measures of interestingness to reduce the volume of discovered rules to ultimately improve the overall efficiency of KDD process. In this paper we study novelty of the discovered rules as a subjective measure of interestingness. We propose a hybrid approach that uses objective and subjective measures to quantify novelty of the discovered rules in terms of their deviations from the known rules. We analyze the types of deviation that can arise between two rules and categorize the discovered rules according to the user specified threshold. We implement the proposed framework and experiment with some public datasets. The experimental results are quite promising.
Abstract: Existing literature ondesign reasoning seems to give
either one sided accounts on expert design behaviour based on
internal processing. In the same way ecological theoriesseem to
focus one sidedly on external elementsthat result in a lack of unifying
design cognition theory. Although current extended design cognition
studies acknowledge the intellectual interaction between internal and
external resources, there still seems to be insufficient understanding
of the complexities involved in such interactive processes. As
such,this paper proposes a novelmulti-directional model for design
researchers tomap the complex and dynamic conduct controlling
behaviour in which both the computational and ecological
perspectives are integrated in a vertical manner. A clear distinction
between identified intentional and emerging physical drivers, and
relationships between them during the early phases of experts- design
process, is demonstrated by presenting a case study in which the
model was employed.
Abstract: This article concerns the presentation of an integrated
method for detection of steganographic content embedded by new
unknown programs. The method is based on data mining and
aggregated hypothesis testing. The article contains the theoretical
basics used to deploy the proposed detection system and the
description of improvement proposed for the basic system idea.
Further main results of experiments and implementation details are
collected and described. Finally example results of the tests are
presented.
Abstract: The amplitude response of infrared (IR) sensors
depends on the reflectance properties of the target. Therefore, in
order to use IR sensor for measuring distances accurately, prior
knowledge of the surface must be known. This paper describes the
Phong Illumination Model for determining the properties of a surface
and subsequently calculating the distance to the surface. The angular
position of the IR sensor is computed as normal to the surface for
simplifying the calculation. Ultrasonic (US) sensor can provide the
initial information on distance to obtain the parameters for this
method. In addition, the experimental results obtained by using
LabView are discussed. More care should be taken when placing the
objects from the sensors during acquiring data since the small change
in angle could show very different distance than the actual one.
Since stereo camera vision systems do not perform well under some
environmental conditions such as plain wall, glass surfaces, or poor
lighting conditions, the IR and US sensors can be used additionally to
improve the overall vision systems of mobile robots.