Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications

‘Knotworking’ and ‘not working’: a realist evaluation of a culture change intervention with a frontline clinical team in an acute hospital

Culture change and teamwork are often cited in healthcare policy and research as central to improvements in patient care. A critical review of the literature suggests that theory is insufficiently used to inform culture change or team development interventions. Culture change interventions are rarely evaluated in implementation research with few rich qualitative accounts of clinical team development in context. This case study drew on the principles of realist evaluation to identify what worked, or did not work, for whom, in what circumstances in relation to an eighteen-month culture change intervention that had been carried out with a frontline clinical team identified as being in difficulty. It addressed the following research questions using multiple methods in a pragmatic and reflexive way: 1. How does a clinical team identified as being in difficulty experience a change process directed at changing team culture? 2. How do collaborative change processes engender culture change in the context of teams in difficulty? Conventional problem-solving approaches to team development were found to reinforce existing patterns of deficit relating leading to a critique of organization development practice. The project found that different contextualized experiences had different effects on the learning behaviour of the team and on the leadership-followership relationship. A critical appreciative approach and narrative methods were found to create psychological safety for a collaborative inquiry to take place. Building on previous theoretical research, the study proposes a reconceptualization of experiences of teamwork as emergent states of “knotworking” and “not working”. The project offers a framework for realist evaluation with clinical teams in difficulty. It recommends that intervention and evaluation are collapsed into a single approach of collaborative inquiry, and has provided easy to use resources for clinical teams to evaluate and improve their team culture in a climate of psychological safety. A practice model of creating a critically appreciative space is proposed and described. Narratives of patient care emerged as a source of generativity for team development, which led to reflections about how patient experience and involvement might support future team development interventions and directions for research

Organizational ethics and maintaining an ethical environment through employee involvement

With the promulgation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines in 1991 organizations as a whole began implementing Ethics Programs. Greater attention was being given to organizational behavior and the courts were now able to hold organizations accountable for misconduct with stronger sanctions; Organizations have now had more than ten years to implement their Ethics Programs for effectiveness. Yet today we see numerous cases of unethical decisions in organizations, most of them having Ethics Programs or Codes of Ethics in place, with results of the unethical behavior being as serious as loss of life, trust, millions of dollars, employment etc; It appears that there is a gap between the Guidelines intentions for the nation and their ability to enforce them. This thesis will review the components of ethical and unethical organizational cultures and make recommendations for maintaining ethical organizations in order to reduce the harm that is caused by unethical behavior

Requirements for Explainability and Acceptance of Artificial Intelligence in Collaborative Work

The increasing prevalence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in safety-critical contexts such as air-traffic control leads to systems that are practical and efficient, and to some extent explainable to humans to be trusted and accepted. The present structured literature analysis examines n = 236 articles on the requirements for the explainability and acceptance of AI. Results include a comprehensive review of n = 48 articles on information people need to perceive an AI as explainable, the information needed to accept an AI, and representation and interaction methods promoting trust in an AI. Results indicate that the two main groups of users are developers who require information about the internal operations of the model and end users who require information about AI results or behavior. Users' information needs vary in specificity, complexity, and urgency and must consider context, domain knowledge, and the user's cognitive resources. The acceptance of AI systems depends on information about the system's functions and performance, privacy and ethical considerations, as well as goal-supporting information tailored to individual preferences and information to establish trust in the system. Information about the system's limitations and potential failures can increase acceptance and trust. Trusted interaction methods are human-like, including natural language, speech, text, and visual representations such as graphs, charts, and animations. Our results have significant implications for future human-centric AI systems being developed. Thus, they are suitable as input for further application-specific investigations of user needs

Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard

David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). The article was based on a multi-company research project to study performance measurement in companies whose intangible assets played a central role in value creation (Nolan Norton Institute, 1991). Norton and I believed that if companies were to improve the management of their intangible assets, they had to integrate the measurement of intangible assets into their management systems. After publication of the 1992 HBR article, several companies quickly adopted the Balanced Scorecard giving us deeper and broader insights into its power and potential. During the next 15 years, as it was adopted by thousands of private, public, and nonprofit enterprises around the world, we extended and broadened the concept into a management tool for describing, communicating and implementing strategy. This paper describes the roots and motivation for the original Balanced Scorecard article as well as the subsequent innovations that connected it to a larger management literature.

Infusion of TeamSTEPPS

Infusion of TeamSTEPPS studied the transformational change within a surgical department at a military treatment facility. TeamSTEPPS has been implemented in many hospitals to help with team development, communication, and patient safety. Infusion of TeamSTEPPS maintains the integrity of the program and gains additional buy-in from the team members by involving them in the infusion process. The process involved a gap analysis in understanding the team\u27s integrated components of TeamSTEPPS and looked at infusing the unobserved components. The project revealed a significate change in team satisfaction and an increase in operating room utilization rates. Patient safety reporting increased during this period. The team felt empowered to speak up on the behave the patient and the organization. The Infusion of TeamSTEPPS influenced the culture of the operating room

Developing as a learning organization : a Hong Kong case of sensegiving and career contracts

I discuss a qualitative case study of a Hong Kong-based utility company where commercial imperatives drove, but also circumscribed, development toward ‘Learning Organization’ (LO) ideals. The case illuminates the paradox of promoting greater openness and creativity through top down sensegiving, as many managers and professionals participated in collective development towards LO ideals, but were seduced into what nearly became a propaganda trap. The case also highlights the importance of honouring psychological contracts, in that a covenant with the workforce, which leveraged the company’s dominant industry position, restored an atmosphere of mutuality with a marginalized rump. Noting that the focal company may have been blessed with relatively munificent circumstances, I conclude by identifying four viability tasks that aspiring LOs may need to perform continually in order to forestall resentment and disillusion