Management of Knowledge Representation Standards Activities

This report describes the efforts undertaken over the last two years to identify the issues underlying the current difficulties in sharing and reuse, and a community wide initiative to overcome them. First, we discuss four bottlenecks to sharing and reuse, present a vision of a future in which these bottlenecks have been ameliorated, and describe the efforts of the initiative's four working groups to address these bottlenecks. We then address the supporting technology and infrastructure that is critical to enabling the vision of the future. Finally, we consider topics of longer-range interest by reviewing some of the research issues raised by our vision

Cmmi Implementation Framework

Tez (Yüksek Lisans) -- İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, Fen Bilimleri Enstitüsü, 2007Thesis (M.Sc.) -- İstanbul Technical University, Institute of Science and Technology, 2007Bu çalısmada, sistematik ve en iyi pratiklere dayanan bir süreç yönetimi yazılımı gelistirilmektir. Tasarlanan proses altyapısı ve gelistirilen yazılım, yazılım mühendisliginin proje yönetimi, gereksinim yönetimi, analiz ve tasarm, uygulama gelistirme, test, degisiklik yönetimi ve aktarım süreçlerinde gerekli olan spesifik tecrübeleri bir bütün içinde, yönetilebilir bir sekilde tutulmasını hedeflemektedir. CMMI modelinde yer alan temel özellik olan izlenebilirligin süreç altyapısına uygulanması ve uygulamada maksimum faydanın alınması amaçlanmaktadır. Orta ve küçük ölçekli firmaların süreç yönetimi konularına adaptasyonunu en hızlı ve en dogru yapabilecekleri bir ortam gelistirilmistir.This thesis studies the development of a systematic software solution to provide software engineering process management based on best practices. The said software solution which has been designed and developed for this study aims to provide specific practices for integrated management of project management, requirements management, analysis & design, implementation, testing, change management, and deployment. Accordingly, this thesis aims to establish an environment that provides fast and applicable adaptation to such software engineering processes for small and medium scale companies. The solution provided within this thesis study is based on one of the more popular models developed by Carnegie Mellon University (U.S.) Software Engineering Institute, the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) model.Yüksek LisansM.Sc

Technology Integration in Tennessee Twenty-first Century Classrooms

In the study, the population of educators in 21st Century Classrooms across the State of Tennessee was surveyed to determine teachers\u27 satisfaction with 21st Century program implementation and associated changes in instructional practices. During fall 1998, six hundred of the 4,800 21st century classroom teachers were surveyed using the Technology Use Questionnaire. Three hundred two completed surveys were returned. Frequency rates and percentages were calculated for each of the 33 questions and the 8 demographic items. The questions were grouped into 7 subscales: Administration, Teacher Training, Implementation, Integration, Use on the Job, Use at Home and Instructional Change. Correlation analysis determined that at the.05 alpha level there were significant relationships between 5 subscales (Administration, Teacher Training, Implementation of the Technology Plan, Integration, and Use on the Job) and Instructional Change. Conversely, there was no significant relationship between the demographic data and instructional change. In general, teachers were unsatisfied with the implementation of the Master Plan for the 21st Century program and had made only moderate instructional changes. The correlation data supported previous research citing teacher training, use on the job, inclusion in future planning, administrative support as impacting instructional change

Health State Estimation

Life's most valuable asset is health. Continuously understanding the state of our health and modeling how it evolves is essential if we wish to improve it. Given the opportunity that people live with more data about their life today than any other time in history, the challenge rests in interweaving this data with the growing body of knowledge to compute and model the health state of an individual continually. This dissertation presents an approach to build a personal model and dynamically estimate the health state of an individual by fusing multi-modal data and domain knowledge. The system is stitched together from four essential abstraction elements: 1. the events in our life, 2. the layers of our biological systems (from molecular to an organism), 3. the functional utilities that arise from biological underpinnings, and 4. how we interact with these utilities in the reality of daily life. Connecting these four elements via graph network blocks forms the backbone by which we instantiate a digital twin of an individual. Edges and nodes in this graph structure are then regularly updated with learning techniques as data is continuously digested. Experiments demonstrate the use of dense and heterogeneous real-world data from a variety of personal and environmental sensors to monitor individual cardiovascular health state. State estimation and individual modeling is the fundamental basis to depart from disease-oriented approaches to a total health continuum paradigm. Precision in predicting health requires understanding state trajectory. By encasing this estimation within a navigational approach, a systematic guidance framework can plan actions to transition a current state towards a desired one. This work concludes by presenting this framework of combining the health state and personal graph model to perpetually plan and assist us in living life towards our goals.Comment: Ph.D. Dissertation @ University of California, Irvin

The role of organisational and resource factors in determining lung cancer outcomes

Lung cancer outcomes in the UK show significant variation which are not entirely explained by case mix. Differences in access to lung cancer services contribute. However, the specific factors that underlie the relationship between service organisation and disease outcomes are not known. The systematic review highlights that co-ordinated access to specialist care is likely to be an important determinant of patient outcomes. In addition, a bundle of service factors, rather than an individual factor is a more robust proxy for hospital infrastructure quality. This hypothesis is explored through the creation of a novel organisational score. When adjusted for patient factors a higher score is associated with higher curative intent treatment rates, increased likelihood of patients receiving treatment within 62 days and improved one-year survival. To achieve these improved outcomes national variation in the provision of services and workforce as well as gaps in the optimal care of stage III patients in England need to be addressed. As well as aligning units with national commissioning guidance, qualitative work into decision making suggests that clinician preconceptions and nihilistic attitudes also require consideration. This work shows that inequity in access to essential services exists in the UK and this has a direct impact on patients

Risks in new product development (NPD) projects

New product development (NPD) is vulnerable to a wide variety of risks arising from within the firm or from the external environment. Existing categorizations of NPD project risks are partial or ill-defined and consequently there is no clear consensus among researchers and practitioners about what constitute NPD project risks. To address this gap, this thesis deploys a systematic literature methodology to inductively develop a comprehensive risk taxonomy from a review of 124 empirical studies. This taxonomy is then empirically validated through a survey capturing data from 263 NPD projects conducted by UK firms. The thesis further investigated the moderating effect of NPD project type (incremental or radical), firm size (SMEs and large firms) and industry sectors on the proposed risk taxonomy. Variation in the perceptions of NPD risk by different members of the team was explored as well. The findings revealed that the principal risk factors affecting NPD projects are technological rapidity risk, supply chain risk, lack of funding and resource risk. The risk profile of radical NPD projects differed to that of incremental projects. SMEs were more vulnerable to NPD project risks than large firms. Most risks influenced NPD projects equally across industrial sectors. Members of NPD project teams from different backgrounds or with different roles perceived risks differently. The proposed taxonomy and its subsequent empirical validation provides a comprehensive and robust taxonomy for identifying and managing risks associated with different types of NPD project conducted by firms of varying sizes from different industrial sectors

The Influence of Self-Efficacy and Attitude Towards Digital Technologies on Teachers’ Technology, Pedagogy and Content Knowledge

This research aims to investigate Indonesian teachers’ perceptions of self-efficacy and attitudes towards digital technologies, as well as their technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) in teaching and factors that affect digital technology integration into classroom. A mixed-methods approach was employed. Finding revealed that teachers ‘possessed good self-efficacy, attitudes, and TPACK in the classroom. Findings also suggested that students’ access to ICT facilities was the most preventive factor for employing digital tools in the classroom