Agents to assist in finding help

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-105).The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. Our approach to addressing this problem is to use software agents to assist the search for expertise. Previous research on this topic has been mostly in the areas of information marketplaces, referral systems or information repositories. We built a system, called Expert Finder, which provides a testbed for ideas and techniques developed in the context of this thesis. Expert Finder analyzes previous work of both the novice and the expert to automatically categorize expertise and match it with the user's problem while providing a community-based incentive mechanism. We present alternative profiling and incentive mechanisms to those that had been presented in previous work. We chose the Java Programming domain for our initial implementation and testing of the system. Expert Finder uses each user's Java source files to determine their expertise and uses a Java domain model to match questions and experts. It keeps track of users' willingness to help out as a measure of the social capital in the community. We ran some tests using the prototype system to assess how well these ideas worked, and results are also reported in this thesis.by Adriana Santarosa Vivacqua.S.M

Open entrepreneurship centers in Brazil: To promote sustainable development and poverty reduction

Degen introduced the teaching of entrepreneurship in Brazil in 1980 and wrote the first Portuguese language textbook on entrepreneurship in 1989. The purpose was to raise awareness of the country?s poverty among students, motivate them to become entrepreneurs, and promote the sustainable development necessary to eliminate the country?s extreme poverty. After almost 30 years extreme poverty continues to be the greatest challenge for the sustainable development of Brazil. Without solving this problem there will be no preservation of the country?s natural resources, no personal safety for its citizens, and no political stability. Degen demonstrates that the teaching of entrepreneurship in Brazilian business schools has not in fact been effective in promoting entrepreneurship and sustainable development. In this paper he proposes a new approach for Brazilian universities in which they create open entrepreneurship centers and enhance their role so as to act as social agents promoting sustainable development and poverty reduction. Their new role will be to better motivate students to become entrepreneurs with social responsibility, to assist them in finding business opportunities that preserve the country?s natural resources and reduce poverty, and to help them find investors for sustainable development projects in Brazil.open entrepreneurship centers, teaching entrepreneurship in Brazil, entrepreneurship to promote sustainable development, entrepreneurship to reduce extreme poverty, universities as social agents

Management of Digital Evidence: Body Worn Camera Use by Law Enforcement Agents

Body Worn Camera (BWC) is an emergent technology that has started to be deployed in law enforcement agencies in the recent past. Although there are many expected advantages to adoption and implementation of BWC, potential negative concerns range from loss of public privacy to failure in appropriate management of digital evidence. As insiders in police organizations, law enforcement agents have the capacity of either correctly or incorrectly managing digital evidence. Having clear and well-developed written policies regarding the BWC based on organizational, moral, and individual issues, is important for successful BWC implementation. In this research, we focus on ethical judgement regarding potential privacy violations of law enforcement agents in the context of BWC usage. Finding from this study will help in understanding perceptions of police officers and their ethical judgement and will assist in development of policies and provide actionable guidelines

Mining the Web for Law Related Jobs in Intellectual Property in the United States

Intellectual property law has remained the hottest practice group for over a decade; it is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting fields today. The trend was clearly recognized as early as 1995 in an article Lesley Ellen Harris. 2 As far back as 1997, according to The National Law Journal, IP has been reported to be the most highly compensated segment of the legal profession for both trial and non-trial attorneys. 3 This article examines the process of finding IP jobs on the web

Iowa Department of Commerce, Iowa Insurance Division Performance Report, FY 2007

Agency Performance Repor