Abstract: Performance appraisal of employee is important in
managing the human resource of an organization. With the change
towards knowledge-based capitalism, maintaining talented
knowledge workers is critical. However, management classification
of “outstanding", “poor" and “average" performance may not be an
easy decision. Besides that, superior might also tend to judge the
work performance of their subordinates informally and arbitrarily
especially without the existence of a system of appraisal. In this
paper, we propose a performance appraisal system using
multifactorial evaluation model in dealing with appraisal grades
which are often express vaguely in linguistic terms. The proposed
model is for evaluating staff performance based on specific
performance appraisal criteria. The project was collaboration with
one of the Information and Communication Technology company in
Malaysia with reference to its performance appraisal process.
Abstract: Hybrid knowledge model is suggested as an underlying
framework for product development management. It can support such
hybrid features as ontologies and rules. Effective collaboration in
product development environment depends on sharing and reasoning
product information as well as engineering knowledge. Many studies
have considered product information and engineering knowledge.
However, most previous research has focused either on building the
ontology of product information or rule-based systems of engineering
knowledge. This paper shows that F-logic based knowledge model can
support such desirable features in a hybrid way.
Abstract: The goal of this research is discovering the
determinants of the success or failure of external cooperation in small
and medium enterprises (SMEs). For this, a survey was given to 190
SMEs that experienced external cooperation within the last 3 years. A
logistic regression model was used to derive organizational or strategic
characteristics that significantly influence whether external
collaboration of domestic SMEs is successful or not. Results suggest
that research and development (R&D) features in general
characteristics (both idea creation and discovering market
opportunities) that focused on and emphasized indirected-market
stakeholders (such as complementary companies and affiliates) and
strategies in innovative strategic characteristics raise the probability of
successful external cooperation. This can be used meaningfully to
build a policy or strategy for inducing successful external cooperation
or to understand the innovation of SMEs.
Abstract: Intelligent deep-drawing is an instrumental research field in sheet metal forming. A set of 28 different experimental data have been employed in this paper, investigating the roles of die radius, punch radius, friction coefficients and drawing ratios for axisymmetric workpieces deep drawing. This paper focuses an evolutionary neural network, specifically, error back propagation in collaboration with genetic algorithm. The neural network encompasses a number of different functional nodes defined through the established principles. The input parameters, i.e., punch radii, die radii, friction coefficients and drawing ratios are set to the network; thereafter, the material outputs at two critical points are accurately calculated. The output of the network is used to establish the best parameters leading to the most uniform thickness in the product via the genetic algorithm. This research achieved satisfactory results based on demonstration of neural networks.
Abstract: Collaborative working environments for distance
education can be considered as a more generic form of contemporary
remote labs. At present, the majority of existing real laboratories are
not constructed to allow the involved participants to collaborate in
real time. To make this revolutionary learning environment possible
we must allow the different users to carry out an experiment
simultaneously. In recent times, multi-user environments are
successfully applied in many applications such as air traffic control
systems, team-oriented military systems, chat-text tools, multi-player
games etc. Thus, understanding the ideas and techniques behind these
systems could be of great importance in the contribution of ideas to
our e-learning environment for collaborative working. In this
investigation, collaborative working environments from theoretical
and practical perspectives are considered in order to build an
effective collaborative real laboratory, which allows two students or
more to conduct remote experiments at the same time as a team. In
order to achieve this goal, we have implemented distributed system
architecture, enabling students to obtain an automated help by either
a human tutor or a rule-based e-tutor.
Abstract: From an economic standpoint the current and future
road traffic situation in urban areas is a cost factor. Traffic jams and
congestion prolong journey times and tie up resources in trucks and
personnel. Many discussions about imposing charges or tolls for
cities in Europe in order to reduce traffic congestion are currently in
progress. Both of these effects lead – directly or indirectly - to
additional costs for the urban distribution systems in retail
companies. One approach towards improving the efficiency of retail
distribution systems, and thus towards avoiding negative
environmental factors in urban areas, is horizontal collaboration for
deliveries to retail outlets – Urban Retail Logistics. This paper
presents a classification system to help reveal where cooperation
between retail companies is possible and makes sense for deliveries
to retail outlets in urban areas.
Abstract: It is necessary to incorporate technological advances
achieved in the field of engineering into dentistry in order to enhance
the process of diagnosis, treatment planning and enable the doctors to
render better treatment to their patients. To achieve this ultimate goal
long distance collaborations are often necessary. This paper discusses
the various collaborative tools and their applications to solve a few
burning problems confronted by the dentists. Customization is often
the solution to most of the problems. But rapid designing,
development and cost effective manufacturing is a difficult task to
achieve. This problem can be solved using the technique of digital
manufacturing. Cases from 6 major branches of dentistry have been
discussed and possible solutions with the help of state of art
technology using rapid digital manufacturing have been proposed in
the present paper. The paper also entails the usage of existing tools in
collaborative and digital manufacturing area.
Abstract: Social, mobility and information aggregation inside
business environment need to converge to reach the next step of
collaboration to enhance interaction and innovation. The following
article is based on the “Assemblage" concept seen as a framework to
formalize new user interfaces and applications. The area of research
is the Energy Social Business Environment, especially the Energy
Smart Grids, which are considered as functional and technical
foundations of the revolution of the Energy Sector of tomorrow. The
assemblages are modelized by means of mereology and simplicial
complexes. Its objective is to offer new central attention and
decision-making tools to end-users.
Abstract: Purpose of this work is to develop an automatic classification system that could be useful for radiologists in the breast cancer investigation. The software has been designed in the framework of the MAGIC-5 collaboration. In an automatic classification system the suspicious regions with high probability to include a lesion are extracted from the image as regions of interest (ROIs). Each ROI is characterized by some features based generally on morphological lesion differences. A study in the space features representation is made and some classifiers are tested to distinguish the pathological regions from the healthy ones. The results provided in terms of sensitivity and specificity will be presented through the ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves. In particular the best performances are obtained with the Neural Networks in comparison with the K-Nearest Neighbours and the Support Vector Machine: The Radial Basis Function supply the best results with 0.89 ± 0.01 of area under ROC curve but similar results are obtained with the Probabilistic Neural Network and a Multi Layer Perceptron.
Abstract: Nowadays, many manufacturing companies try to
reinforce their competitiveness or find a breakthrough by considering
collaboration. In Korea, more than 900 manufacturing companies are
using web-based collaboration systems developed by the
government-led project, referred to as i-Manufacturing. The system
supports some similar functions of Product Data Management (PDM)
as well as Project Management System (PMS). A web-based
collaboration system provides many useful functions for collaborative
works. This system, however, does not support new linking services
between buyers and suppliers. Therefore, in order to find new
collaborative partners, this paper proposes a framework which creates
new connections between buyers and suppliers facilitating their
collaboration, referred to as Excellent Manufacturer Scouting System
(EMSS). EMSS plays a role as a bridge between overseas buyers and
suppliers. As a part of study on EMSS, we also propose an evaluation
method of manufacturability of potential partners with six main factors.
Based on the results of evaluation, buyers may get a good guideline to
choose their new partners before getting into negotiation processes
with them.
Abstract: Implementing Information Technology/ Information
System (IT/IS) is critical for every industry as its potential benefits
have been to motivate many industries including the Malaysian
construction industry to invest in it. To successfully implement IT/IS
has become the major concern for every organisation. Identifying the
critical success factors (CSFs) has become the main agenda for
researchers, academicians and practitioners due to the wide number
of failures reported. This research paper seeks to identify the CSFs
that influence the successful implementation of IT/IS in construction
industry in Malaysia. Limited factors relating to people issue will be
highlighted here to showcase some as it becomes one of the major
contributing factors to the failure. Three (3) organisations have
participated in this study. Semi-structured interviews are employed as
they offer sufficient flexibility to ensure that all relevant factors are
covered. Several key issues contributing to successful
implementations of IT/IS are identified. The results of this study
reveal that top management support, communication, user
involvement, IT staff roles and responsibility, training/skills, leader/
IT Leader, organisation culture, knowledge/ experience, motivation,
awareness, focus and ambition, satisfaction, teamwork/ collaboration,
willingness to change, attitude, commitment, management style,
interest in IT, employee behaviour towards collaborative
environment, trust, interpersonal relationship, personal characteristic
and competencies are significantly associated with the successful
implementations of IT/IS. It is anticipated that this study will create
awareness and contribute to a better understanding amongst
construction industry players and will assist them to successfully
implement IT/IS.
Abstract: With the rapid growth in business size, today-s businesses orient Throughout thirty years local, national and international experience in medicine as a medical student, junior doctor and eventually Consultant and Professor in Anaesthesia, Intensive Care and Pain Management, I note significant generalised dissatisfaction among medical students and doctors regarding their medical education and practice. We repeatedly hear complaints from patients about the dysfunctional health care system they are dealing with and subsequently the poor medical service that they are receiving. Medical students are bombarded with lectures, tutorials, clinical rounds and various exams. Clinicians are weighed down with a never-ending array of competing duties. Patients are extremely unhappy about the long waiting lists, loss of their records and the continuous deterioration of the health care service. This problem has been reported in different countries by several authors [1,2,3]. In a trial to solve this dilemma, a genuine idea has been suggested implementing computer technology in medicine [2,3]. Computers in medicine are a medium of international communication of the revolutionary advances being made in the application of the computer to the fields of bioscience and medicine [4,5]. The awareness about using computers in medicine has recently increased all over the world. In Misr University for Science & Technology (MUST), Egypt, medical students are now given hand-held computers (Laptop) with Internet facility making their medical education accessible, convenient and up to date. However, this trial still needs to be validated. Helping the readers to catch up with the on going fast development in this interesting field, the author has decided to continue reviewing the literature, exploring the state-of-art in computer based medicine and up dating the medical professionals especially the local trainee Doctors in Egypt. In part I of this review article we will give a general background discussing the potential use of computer technology in the various aspects of the medical field including education, research, clinical practice and the health care service given to patients. Hope this will help starting changing the culture, promoting the awareness about the importance of implementing information technology (IT) in medicine, which is a field in which such help is needed. An international collaboration is recommended supporting the emerging countries achieving this target.
Abstract: Image-based Rendering(IBR) techniques recently
reached in broad fields which leads to a critical challenge to build up
IBR-Driven visualization platform where meets requirement of high
performance, large bounds of distributed visualization resource
aggregation and concentration, multiple operators deploying and
CSCW design employing. This paper presents an unique IBR-based
visualization dataflow model refer to specific characters of IBR
techniques and then discusses prominent feature of IBR-Driven
distributed collaborative visualization (DCV) system before finally
proposing an novel prototype. The prototype provides a well-defined
three level modules especially work as Central Visualization Server,
Local Proxy Server and Visualization Aid Environment, by which
data and control for collaboration move through them followed the
previous dataflow model. With aid of this triple hierarchy architecture
of that, IBR oriented application construction turns to be easy. The
employed augmented collaboration strategy not only achieve
convenient multiple users synchronous control and stable processing
management, but also is extendable and scalable.
Abstract: Environmental statistics reveals that the pollution of
acid rain in South Korea is a serious issue. Yet the awareness of people
is low. Even after a gradual decrease of pollutant emission in Korea,
the acidity has not been reduced. There no boundaries in the
atmosphere are set and the influence of the neighboring countries such
as China is apparent. Governmental efforts among China, Japan and
Korea have been made on this issue. However, not much progress has
been observed. Along with the governmental activities, therefore, an
active monitoring of the pollution among the countries and the
promotion of environmental awareness at the civil level including
especially the middle and high schools are highly recommended. It
will be this young generation who will face damaged country as
inheritance not the current generation.
Abstract: Following the loss of NASA's Space Shuttle
Columbia in 2003, it was determined that problems in the agency's
organization created an environment that led to the accident. One
component of the proposed solution resulted in the formation of the
NASA Engineering Network (NEN), a suite of information retrieval
and knowledge-sharing tools. This paper describes the
implementation of communities of practice, which are formed along
engineering disciplines. Communities of practice enable engineers to
leverage their knowledge and best practices to collaborate and take
information learning back to their jobs and embed it into the
procedures of the agency. This case study offers insight into using
traditional engineering disciplines for virtual collaboration, including
lessons learned during the creation and establishment of NASA-s
communities.
Abstract: Design for Disassembly (DfD) aims to reuse the
structural components instead of demolition followed by recycling of
the demolition debris. This concept preserves the invested embodied
energy of materials, thus reducing inputs of new embodied energy
during materials reprocessing or remanufacturing. Both analytical and
experimental research on a proposed DfD beam-column connection
for use in residential apartments is currently investigated at the
National University of Singapore in collaboration with the Housing
and Development Board of Singapore. The present study reports on
the results of a numerical analysis of the proposed connection utilizing
finite element analysis. The numerical model was calibrated and
validated by comparison against experimental results. Results of a
parametric study will also be presented and discussed.
Abstract: The term Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) describes a collection of organizational and IT practices that help organizations establish flexible work models, visible knowledge-sharing practices, and higher levels of community participation. E2.0 parallels and builds on another term commonly being used in the industry – Web 2.0. E2.0 represents also new packaging for strategic collaboration and Knowledge Management (KM). Organizations rely on collaboration and KM initiatives to attain innovation, growth, productivity, and performance goals.