Improving Knowledge Acquisition in Collaborative Knowledge Construction Tool with Virtual Catalyst

Noctua is a web tool to assist in Knowledge Acquisition and Collaborative Knowledge Construction processes. Noctua has an innovation: a Virtual Catalyst designed to facilitate the task of eliciting and validating knowledge. The Virtual Catalyst queries participants, proposing new knowledge, seeking confirmation to the knowledge already elicited, and showing conflicting opinions. The Virtual Catalyst takes into account participants' profiles in order to automatically ask them questions related to each one's field of knowledge or interest. This paper presents Noctua and its Virtual Catalyst. The tool was submitted to experimentation and the analysis of the results showed that the primary goal of increasing the rate of knowledge construction was achieved (up to 144 % in the rate of knowledge creation), and also showed some unexpected beneficial outcomes

Beyond the “ivory tower”. Comparing academic and non-academic knowledge on social entrepreneurship

The increasing relevance of societal challenges has recently brought social entrepreneurship to the fore due to its capacity to leverage entrepreneurial processes to achieve social value while ensuring profits. In this study, we apply an experimental research method to analyse the concept of social entrepreneurship comprehensively. More specifically, we develop bibliometric analysis and web crawling techniques to gather information related to social entrepreneurship from Scopus and Wikipedia. We conduct a comparative network analysis of social entrepreneurship’s conceptual structure at academic and non-academic levels. This analysis has been performed considering scientific articles’ keywords and Wikipedia webpages’ co-occurrences, enabling us to identify four different thematic clusters in both cases. Moreover, plotting the centrality and density of each cluster on a bi-dimensional matrix, we have sketched a strategic diagram and provided the thematic evolution of this research topic, based on the level of interaction among clusters, and the degree of cohesion of keywords in each cluster. This paper represents one of the first attempts in the entrepreneurship literature to shed light on the conceptual boundaries of a research topic based on the analysis of both a scientific and an open-source knowledge database. Our results reveal similarities and discrepancies between those two different sources of knowledge, and outline avenues for future studies at the intersection between social entrepreneurship and the research domains of digital transformation, performance measurement, entrepreneurial ecosystems, and ethics. We also call for a further conceptualisation of social entrepreneurship in the face of the increasing complexity that characterises grand challenges

Dagstuhl News January - December 2008

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

Scholarly Collaboration In Engineering Education: From Big-Data Scientometrics To User-Centered Software Design

Engineering education research has grown into a flourishing community with an-ever increasing number of publications and scholars. However, recent studies show that a significant amount of engineering education knowledge retains a clear disciplinary orientation. If the gaps in scholarly collaboration continue to be prevalent within the entire community, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain community memory. This will eventually inhibit the propagation of innovations and slow the movement of research findings into practice. This dissertation studies scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. It provides a clear characterization of collaboration problems and proposes potential solutions. The dissertation is composed of four studies. First, the dissertation recognizes gaps in scholarly collaboration in the engineering education research community. To achieve this goal, a bibliometric analysis based on 24,172 academic articles was performed to describe the anatomy of collaboration patterns. Second, the dissertation reviewed existing technologies that enhance communication and collaboration in engineering and science. This review elaborated and compared features in 12 popular social research network sites to examine how these features support scholarly communication and collaboration. Third, this dissertation attempted to understand engineering education scholars‟ behaviors and needs related to scholarly collaboration. A grounded theory study was conducted to investigate engineering education scholars‟ behaviors in developing collaboration and their technology usage. Finally, a user-centered software design was proposed as a technological solution that addressed community collaboration needs. Results show that the engineering education research community is at its early stage of forming a small world network relying primarily on a small number of key scholars in the community. Scholars‟ disciplinary background, research areas, and geographical locations are factors that affect scholarly collaboration. To facilitate scholarly communication and collaboration, social research network sites started to be adopted by scholars in various disciplines. However, engineering education scholars still prefer face-to-face interactions, emails, and phone calls for connecting and collaborating with other scholars. Instead of connecting to other scholars online, the present study shows that scholars develop new connections and maintain existing connections mainly by attending academic conferences. Some of these connections may eventually develop into collaborative relationships. Therefore, one way to increase scholarly collaboration in engineering education is to help scholars better network with others during conferences. A new mobile/web application is designed in this dissertation to meet this user need. The diffusion of innovation theory and the small world network model suggest that a well-connected community has real advantages in disseminating information quickly and broadly among its members. It allows research innovations to produce greater impacts and to reach a broader range of audiences. It can also close the gap between scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds. This dissertation contributes to enhancing community awareness of the overall collaboration status in engineering education research. It informs policy making on how to improve collaboration and helps individual scientists recognize potential collaboration opportunities. It also guides the future development of communication and collaboration tools used in engineering education research

Knowing together

In den letzten Jahren sind eine Reihe neuer Anwendungen im Internet entstanden, die zumeist als Web2.0 oder social software bezeichnet werden. Viele dieser Anwendungen sind gekennzeichnet durch die Einbindung mehrerer Agenten in Prozesse zur Verbreitung, Organisation und Herstellung von Wissen. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Dissertation besteht in der Analyse der epistemologischen Relevanz dieser epistemischen social software Anwendungen. Da die Kommunikation und Interaktion zwischen mehreren Agenten deren Schlüsselmerkmal darstellt, bildet die Soziale Erkenntnistheorie als philosophische Disziplin, welche die Weisen untersucht, in denen Wissen sozial bedingt ist, die theoretische Grundlage für die Analyse der epistemischen Prozesse innerhalb dieser Systeme. Weil bisher keine soziale Erkenntnistheorie eine ausreichende Theorie für die Analyse epistemischer social software zur Verfügung stellen konnte, habe ich die Grundlagen für ein neues sozio-epistemisches Model entwickelt, welches zwar im sozio-epistemologischen Diskurs verankert ist, jedoch um Erkenntnisse aus dem Feld der Science and Technology Studies (STS) erweitert wurde. Dieses Model gründet in der Klassifikation von sozio-technischen epistemischen Systemen anhand unterschiedlicher Mechanismen der Schließung, welche zur Beendigung sozio-epistemischer Prozesse verwendet werden. Diese Klassifikation anhand der drei Schließungsmechanismen Integration, Aggregation und Selektion zielt nicht auf die Einebnung der Differenzen zwischen sozio-technischen epistemischen Systemen, vielmehr liegt ihr Wert in ihrer heuristischen Fruchtbarkeit, darin Differenzen aufzumachen. Systeme, welche unterschiedliche Schließungsmechanismen nutzen, sind gebunden an unterschiedliche soziale, technische und epistemische Voraussetzungen, sie haben unterschiedliche Stärken und Schwächen und eignen sich daher für unterschiedliche epistemische Aufgaben. Das von mir entwickelte Modell lenkt dabei die Aufmerksamkeit auf ein bislang weitgehend in der sozialen Erkenntnistheorie vernachlässigtes Thema: das Technische und seine Beziehung zum Sozialen und zum Epistemischen. Da die meisten epistemischen Praktiken heute durchdrungen sind von Technologie, ist deren Berücksichtigung von entscheidender Bedeutung für jede soziale Erkenntnistheorie, die beansprucht, nicht nur normativ angemessen, sondern auch empirisch adäquat zu sein.In recent years new applications emerged on the Web which received the labels Web2.0 or social software. In many of these applications people are engaged in epistemic activities, such as the dissemination, organization or creation of knowledge. The goal of this thesis is to analyze the epistemological relevance of such epistemic social software. Because communication and interaction between multiple agents seems to be the key to understand the epistemic processes within such systems, social epistemology, the philosophical discipline exploring the ways and the extent to which knowledge is social, was chosen as a theoretical framework. However, none of the existing comprehensive social epistemologies delivers a sufficient framework to analyze epistemic social software. Therefore, I have developed a new socio-epistemological framework to analyze epistemic social software which is rooted in socio-epistemological discourse, but amends it with insights from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). My framework is founded on a tripartite classification of socio-technical epistemic system based on the mechanisms they employ to close socio-epistemic processes. These three mechanisms are integration, aggregation and selection. With this classification I do not aim at reducing the differences between systems to their mechanisms of closure. However, I argue that the classification based on this indicator is heuristically fruitful. Systems employing different mechanisms of closure depend on different social, technical and epistemic prerequisites, have different strengths and weaknesses and are optimal for different epistemic tasks. My model puts a fact into the focus that has been neglected so far in social epistemology: the technical and its relationship to the social and the epistemic. Since most epistemic practices are nowadays pervaded by technologies, such a consideration of the role of technologies in these practices seems to be indispensable for any social epistemology that aims at being not only normatively appropriate, but also empirically adequate

Intelligence artificielle: Les défis actuels et l'action d'Inria - Livre blanc Inria

Livre blanc Inria N°01International audienceInria white papers look at major current challenges in informatics and mathematics and show actions conducted by our project-teams to address these challenges. This document is the first produced by the Strategic Technology Monitoring & Prospective Studies Unit. Thanks to a reactive observation system, this unit plays a lead role in supporting Inria to develop its strategic and scientific orientations. It also enables the institute to anticipate the impact of digital sciences on all social and economic domains. It has been coordinated by Bertrand Braunschweig with contributions from 45 researchers from Inria and from our partners. Special thanks to Peter Sturm for his precise and complete review.Les livres blancs d’Inria examinent les grands défis actuels du numérique et présentent les actions menées par noséquipes-projets pour résoudre ces défis. Ce document est le premier produit par la cellule veille et prospective d’Inria. Cette unité, par l’attention qu’elle porte aux évolutions scientifiques et technologiques, doit jouer un rôle majeur dans la détermination des orientations stratégiques et scientifiques d’Inria. Elle doit également permettre à l’Institut d’anticiper l’impact des sciences du numérique dans tous les domaines sociaux et économiques. Ce livre blanc a été coordonné par Bertrand Braunschweig avec des contributions de 45 chercheurs d’Inria et de ses partenaires. Un grand merci à Peter Sturm pour sa relecture précise et complète. Merci également au service STIP du centre de Saclay – Île-de-France pour la correction finale de la version française