31,864 research outputs found
Performance Appraisal Research: A Critical Review of Work on âThe Social Context and Politics of Appraisalâ
This paper reviews existing literatures on the analysis of performance appraisal (PA) paying special attention to those which try to take into account the âsocial contextâ of appraisal systems and processes. The special place of political action within these processes is underlined and the different levels at which politics need to be considered in research are outlined. Research on politics is considered and shown to lack an adequate consideration of the social relations involved in the reciprocal interactions between PA tools and processes and users interpretation and manipulation of them.Performance appraisal; Social context; Politics
Optimizing fire station locations for the Istanbul metropolitan municipality
Copyright @ 2013 INFORMSThe Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) seeks to determine locations for additional fire stations to build in Istanbul; its objective is to make residences and historic sites reachable by emergency vehicles within five minutes of a fire stationâs receipt of a service request. In this paper, we discuss our development of a mathematical model to aid IMM in determining these locations by using data retrieved from its fire incident records. We use a geographic information system to implement the model on Istanbulâs road network, and solve two location modelsâset-covering and maximal-coveringâas what-if scenarios. We discuss 10 scenarios, including the situation that existed when we initiated the project and the scenario that IMM implemented. The scenario implemented increases the cityâs fire station coverage from 58.6 percent to 85.9 percent, based on a five-minute response time, with an implementation plan that spans three years
Optimizing fire station locations for the Istanbul metropolitan municipality
Copyright @ 2013 INFORMSThe Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IMM) seeks to determine locations for additional fire stations to build in Istanbul; its objective is to make residences and historic sites reachable by emergency vehicles within five minutes of a fire stationâs receipt of a service request. In this paper, we discuss our development of a mathematical model to aid IMM in determining these locations by using data retrieved from its fire incident records. We use a geographic information system to implement the model on Istanbulâs road network, and solve two location modelsâset-covering and maximal-coveringâas what-if scenarios. We discuss 10 scenarios, including the situation that existed when we initiated the project and the scenario that IMM implemented. The scenario implemented increases the cityâs fire station coverage from 58.6 percent to 85.9 percent, based on a five-minute response time, with an implementation plan that spans three years
Automated Generation of Cross-Domain Analogies via Evolutionary Computation
Analogy plays an important role in creativity, and is extensively used in
science as well as art. In this paper we introduce a technique for the
automated generation of cross-domain analogies based on a novel evolutionary
algorithm (EA). Unlike existing work in computational analogy-making restricted
to creating analogies between two given cases, our approach, for a given case,
is capable of creating an analogy along with the novel analogous case itself.
Our algorithm is based on the concept of "memes", which are units of culture,
or knowledge, undergoing variation and selection under a fitness measure, and
represents evolving pieces of knowledge as semantic networks. Using a fitness
function based on Gentner's structure mapping theory of analogies, we
demonstrate the feasibility of spontaneously generating semantic networks that
are analogous to a given base network.Comment: Conference submission, International Conference on Computational
Creativity 2012 (8 pages, 6 figures
Learning, Social Intelligence and the Turing Test - why an "out-of-the-box" Turing Machine will not pass the Turing Test
The Turing Test (TT) checks for human intelligence, rather than any putative
general intelligence. It involves repeated interaction requiring learning in
the form of adaption to the human conversation partner. It is a macro-level
post-hoc test in contrast to the definition of a Turing Machine (TM), which is
a prior micro-level definition. This raises the question of whether learning is
just another computational process, i.e. can be implemented as a TM. Here we
argue that learning or adaption is fundamentally different from computation,
though it does involve processes that can be seen as computations. To
illustrate this difference we compare (a) designing a TM and (b) learning a TM,
defining them for the purpose of the argument. We show that there is a
well-defined sequence of problems which are not effectively designable but are
learnable, in the form of the bounded halting problem. Some characteristics of
human intelligence are reviewed including it's: interactive nature, learning
abilities, imitative tendencies, linguistic ability and context-dependency. A
story that explains some of these is the Social Intelligence Hypothesis. If
this is broadly correct, this points to the necessity of a considerable period
of acculturation (social learning in context) if an artificial intelligence is
to pass the TT. Whilst it is always possible to 'compile' the results of
learning into a TM, this would not be a designed TM and would not be able to
continually adapt (pass future TTs). We conclude three things, namely that: a
purely "designed" TM will never pass the TT; that there is no such thing as a
general intelligence since it necessary involves learning; and that
learning/adaption and computation should be clearly distinguished.Comment: 10 pages, invited talk at Turing Centenary Conference CiE 2012,
special session on "The Turing Test and Thinking Machines
Finnish pupilsâ success in mathematics: factors that contribute to Finnish pupilsâ success in mathematics
This report focuses on the factors that contribute positively to Finnish pupilsâ success in mathematics and considers the implications for policy and practice in England. Includes examples of items from the PISA and TIMSS test
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Improving music genre classification using automatically induced harmony rules
We present a new genre classification framework using both low-level signal-based features and high-level harmony features. A state-of-the-art statistical genre classifier based on timbral features is extended using a first-order random forest containing for each genre rules derived from harmony or chord sequences. This random forest has been automatically induced, using the first-order logic induction algorithm TILDE, from a dataset, in which for each chord the degree and chord category are identified, and covering classical, jazz and pop genre classes. The audio descriptor-based genre classifier contains 206 features, covering spectral, temporal, energy, and pitch characteristics of the audio signal. The fusion of the harmony-based classifier with the extracted feature vectors is tested on three-genre subsets of the GTZAN and ISMIR04 datasets, which contain 300 and 448 recordings, respectively. Machine learning classifiers were tested using 5 Ă 5-fold cross-validation and feature selection. Results indicate that the proposed harmony-based rules combined with the timbral descriptor-based genre classification system lead to improved genre classification rates
Recommended from our members
Improving music genre classification using automatically induced harmony rules
We present a new genre classification framework using both low-level signal-based features and high-level harmony features. A state-of-the-art statistical genre classifier based on timbral features is extended using a first-order random forest containing for each genre rules derived from harmony or chord sequences. This random forest has been automatically induced, using the first-order logic induction algorithm TILDE, from a dataset, in which for each chord the degree and chord category are identified, and covering classical, jazz and pop genre classes. The audio descriptor-based genre classifier contains 206 features, covering spectral, temporal, energy, and pitch characteristics of the audio signal. The fusion of the harmony-based classifier with the extracted feature vectors is tested on three-genre subsets of the GTZAN and ISMIR04 datasets, which contain 300 and 448 recordings, respectively. Machine learning classifiers were tested using 5 Ă 5-fold cross-validation and feature selection. Results indicate that the proposed harmony-based rules combined with the timbral descriptor-based genre classification system lead to improved genre classification rates
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