Adapting Search Theory to Networks

The CSE is interested in the general problem of locating objects in networks. Because of their exposure to search theory, the problem they brought to the workshop was phrased in terms of adapting search theory to networks. Thus, the first step was the introduction of an already existing healthy literature on searching graphs. T. D. Parsons, who was then at Pennsylvania State University, was approached in 1977 by some local spelunkers who asked his aid in optimizing a search for someone lost in a cave in Pennsylvania. Parsons quickly formulated the problem as a search problem in a graph. Subsequent papers led to two divergent problems. One problem dealt with searching under assumptions of fairly extensive information, while the other problem dealt with searching under assumptions of essentially zero information. These two topics are developed in the next two sections

Security-Informed Safety: Supporting Stakeholders with Codes of Practice

Codes of practice provide principles and guidance on how organizations can incorporate security considerations into their safety engineering lifecycle and become more security minded

Initiating organizational memories using ontology network analysis

One of the important problems in organizational memories is their initial set-up. It is difficult to choose the right information to include in an organizational memory, and the right information is also a prerequisite for maximizing the uptake and relevance of the memory content. To tackle this problem, most developers adopt heavy-weight solutions and rely on a faithful continuous interaction with users to create and improve its content. In this paper, we explore the use of an automatic, light-weight solution, drawn from the underlying ingredients of an organizational memory: ontologies. We have developed an ontology-based network analysis method which we applied to tackle the problem of identifying communities of practice in an organization. We use ontology-based network analysis as a means to provide content automatically for the initial set up of an organizational memory

Learning architectures and negotiation of meaning in European trade unions

As networked learning becomes familiar at all levels and in all sectors of education, cross-fertilisation of innovative methods can usefully inform the lifelong learning agenda. Development of the pedagogical architectures and social processes, which afford learning, is a major challenge for educators as they strive to address the varied needs of a wide range of learners. One area in which this challenge is taken very seriously is that of trade unions, where recent large-scale projects have aimed to address many of these issues at a European level. This paper describes one such project, which targeted not only online courses, but also the wider political potential of virtual communities of practice. By analysing findings in relation to Wengers learning architecture, the paper investigates further the relationships between communities of practice and communities of learners in the trade union context. The findings suggest that a focus on these relationships rather than on the technologies that support them should inform future developments

Advanced Knowledge Technologies at the Midterm: Tools and Methods for the Semantic Web

The University of Edinburgh and research sponsors are authorised to reproduce and distribute reprints and on-line copies for their purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation hereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are the author’s and shouldn’t be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of other parties.In a celebrated essay on the new electronic media, Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1962:Our private senses are not closed systems but are endlessly translated into each other in that experience which we call consciousness. Our extended senses, tools, technologies, through the ages, have been closed systems incapable of interplay or collective awareness. Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. (McLuhan 1962, p.5, emphasis in original)Over forty years later, the seamless interplay that McLuhan demanded between our technologies is still barely visible. McLuhan’s predictions of the spread, and increased importance, of electronic media have of course been borne out, and the worlds of business, science and knowledge storage and transfer have been revolutionised. Yet the integration of electronic systems as open systems remains in its infancy.Advanced Knowledge Technologies (AKT) aims to address this problem, to create a view of knowledge and its management across its lifecycle, to research and create the services and technologies that such unification will require. Half way through its sixyear span, the results are beginning to come through, and this paper will explore some of the services, technologies and methodologies that have been developed. We hope to give a sense in this paper of the potential for the next three years, to discuss the insights and lessons learnt in the first phase of the project, to articulate the challenges and issues that remain.The WWW provided the original context that made the AKT approach to knowledge management (KM) possible. AKT was initially proposed in 1999, it brought together an interdisciplinary consortium with the technological breadth and complementarity to create the conditions for a unified approach to knowledge across its lifecycle. The combination of this expertise, and the time and space afforded the consortium by the IRC structure, suggested the opportunity for a concerted effort to develop an approach to advanced knowledge technologies, based on the WWW as a basic infrastructure.The technological context of AKT altered for the better in the short period between the development of the proposal and the beginning of the project itself with the development of the semantic web (SW), which foresaw much more intelligent manipulation and querying of knowledge. The opportunities that the SW provided for e.g., more intelligent retrieval, put AKT in the centre of information technology innovation and knowledge management services; the AKT skill set would clearly be central for the exploitation of those opportunities.The SW, as an extension of the WWW, provides an interesting set of constraints to the knowledge management services AKT tries to provide. As a medium for the semantically-informed coordination of information, it has suggested a number of ways in which the objectives of AKT can be achieved, most obviously through the provision of knowledge management services delivered over the web as opposed to the creation and provision of technologies to manage knowledge.AKT is working on the assumption that many web services will be developed and provided for users. The KM problem in the near future will be one of deciding which services are needed and of coordinating them. Many of these services will be largely or entirely legacies of the WWW, and so the capabilities of the services will vary. As well as providing useful KM services in their own right, AKT will be aiming to exploit this opportunity, by reasoning over services, brokering between them, and providing essential meta-services for SW knowledge service management.Ontologies will be a crucial tool for the SW. The AKT consortium brings a lot of expertise on ontologies together, and ontologies were always going to be a key part of the strategy. All kinds of knowledge sharing and transfer activities will be mediated by ontologies, and ontology management will be an important enabling task. Different applications will need to cope with inconsistent ontologies, or with the problems that will follow the automatic creation of ontologies (e.g. merging of pre-existing ontologies to create a third). Ontology mapping, and the elimination of conflicts of reference, will be important tasks. All of these issues are discussed along with our proposed technologies.Similarly, specifications of tasks will be used for the deployment of knowledge services over the SW, but in general it cannot be expected that in the medium term there will be standards for task (or service) specifications. The brokering metaservices that are envisaged will have to deal with this heterogeneity.The emerging picture of the SW is one of great opportunity but it will not be a wellordered, certain or consistent environment. It will comprise many repositories of legacy data, outdated and inconsistent stores, and requirements for common understandings across divergent formalisms. There is clearly a role for standards to play to bring much of this context together; AKT is playing a significant role in these efforts. But standards take time to emerge, they take political power to enforce, and they have been known to stifle innovation (in the short term). AKT is keen to understand the balance between principled inference and statistical processing of web content. Logical inference on the Web is tough. Complex queries using traditional AI inference methods bring most distributed computer systems to their knees. Do we set up semantically well-behaved areas of the Web? Is any part of the Web in which semantic hygiene prevails interesting enough to reason in? These and many other questions need to be addressed if we are to provide effective knowledge technologies for our content on the web

Formalising the Continuous/Discrete Modeling Step

Formally capturing the transition from a continuous model to a discrete model is investigated using model based refinement techniques. A very simple model for stopping (eg. of a train) is developed in both the continuous and discrete domains. The difference between the two is quantified using generic results from ODE theory, and these estimates can be compared with the exact solutions. Such results do not fit well into a conventional model based refinement framework; however they can be accommodated into a model based retrenchment. The retrenchment is described, and the way it can interface to refinement development on both the continuous and discrete sides is outlined. The approach is compared to what can be achieved using hybrid systems techniques.Comment: In Proceedings Refine 2011, arXiv:1106.348

Community, domain, practice: facilitator catch cry for revitalising learning and teaching through communities of practice

This Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Teaching Fellowship 'Community, Domain, Practice: Facilitator catch cry for revitalising learning and teaching through communities of practice' contributes to ALTC's aim to advance learning and teaching in higher education through a program of activities designed to build the capacity of Facilitators of Communities of Practice at the University of Southern Queensland. Communities of practice (CoPs) are cited in higher education literature and ALTC applications as a successful way of building and sharing a scholarly approach to enhancing learning and teaching practice. This fellowship builds on the Teaching Fellow, Associate Professor Jacquie McDonald's, CoP leadership role at the University of Southern Queensland (USQ), where the first CoP started in 2006 to provide a space for academic staff to build a community, increase their knowledge and share learning and teaching practice. Wenger, McDermott and Snyder (2002) describe communities of practice as: Groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis. Over time... [t]hey become a community of practice (pp. 4-5). CoPs operate differently from institutionalised higher education work groups, as they are located in the immediate practice field, usually membership is voluntary, and the agenda and outcomes are member driven. The CoP Facilitator role differs from the familiar chairperson roles, so investigation of the complexity and different aspects of the role and development of activities and resources to support and grow the Facilitator role were the focus of the Fellowship. CoPs epitomise distributed leadership (Jones, Lefoe, Harvey & Ryland, 2012), and investigation of, and capacity building of leadership within CoPs contributes to this ALTC priority area. Aims and deliverables The Fellowship was designed to build on USQ CoP Facilitators and the Teaching Fellow's knowledge of USQ CoP processes to: • Identify of the key aspects of a USQ CoP Facilitator role • Increase the knowledge and capacity of existing USQ CoP Facilitators through workshops and resources • Establish a Facilitator CoP for the USQ Facilitators to share and grow their practice • Develop resources to provide a sustained Fellowship legacy • Engage with national and international CoP practitioners to develop and evaluate activities and resources for CoP Facilitators • Disseminate Fellowship knowledge and resources across the sector • Promote ALTC Fellowship activities across the sector The Teaching Fellowship was focused on building the capacity of USQ CoP Facilitators, so the majority of planned activities and resources have a USQ focus. A distributed leadership approach is a basic operating principal of how the Fellow engaged with, and continues to engage with, both academic and professional staff evolved in Communities of Practice (CoPs). An action research approach used qualitative date collected through semi structured interviews (2010) with fifteen USQ CoP facilitators to identify roles, experience and critical incidents. Grounded theory analysis of the interviews identified key features and issues of the role and a comparative analysis with USA data (2009) identify themes to inform subsequent workshop and resource design. Within the action research cycle, ongoing collaboration with the external evaluator and analysis of summative evaluation feedback informed the planned Fellowship activities. USQ CoP Facilitator capacity was built through these workshops, resources, the establishment of a community of practice for Facilitators and ongoing interaction with the Teaching Fellow. Dissemination The Fellow has engaged in round table discussions, seminars and workshops to both develop CoP Facilitator capacity and to disseminate activities to a wide audience. These included: • Engagement with senior management and CoP champions • Seminars, round table discussions and workshops • Refereed conference papers • ALTC sponsored Fellowship and Leadership forums • Media releases • Fellowship resources website The Fellowship web resources include links to the workshop resources, workshop videos and interview audios. The links to the contents page the Miami Facilitator's Handbook, distributed at the February 2011 two and half day facilitator workshop, Designing, Implementing, and Leading CoPs, provide a significant resource and Fellowship outcome. Additional Facilitator resources for establishing and sustaining CoPs are linked to the Phases and Key Issues of a Nurtured Higher Education CoP developed by Star & McDonald (accepted for publication). These resources provide CoP facilitators with ideas and practical resources at different CoP phases . Recommendations Significant changes are continuing to occur in the ways universities are governed and managed, moving to more corporate and business-like structures, with significant flow-on in terms of academic roles, their working arrangements and staff morale. Within this context, it is recommended to cultivate CoPs as a way of creating a bottom-up, member-driven approach to engage in generative dialogue around learning and teaching practice. Further research is recommended into both the practical aspects of growing and sustaining Higher Education CoPs, and the best approach for identifying and cultivating the leadership role of CoP facilitors. The ALTC Fellowships and leadership grants have generated many excellent resources and academics and institutional leaders are encouraged to make the time and rewards available to ensure their application across the sector. 'With communities of practice – I know I'm not alone.' University of Southern Queensland Community of Practice membe

An "All Hands" Call to the Social Science Community: Establishing a Community Framework for Complexity Modeling Using Agent Based Models and Cyberinfrastructure

To date, many communities of practice (COP) in the social sciences have been struggling with how to deal with rapidly growing bodies of information. Many CoPs across broad disciplines have turned to community frameworks for complexity modeling (CFCMs) but this strategy has been slow to be discussed let alone adopted by the social sciences communities of practice (SS-CoPs). In this paper we urge the SS-CoPs that it is timely to develop and establish a CBCF for the social sciences for two major reasons: the rapid acquisition of data and the emergence of critical cybertools which can facilitate agent-based, spatially-explicit models. The goal of this paper is not to prescribe how a CFCM might be set up but to suggest of what components it might consist and what its advantages would be. Agent based models serve the establishment of a CFCM because they allow robust and diverse inputs and are amenable to output-driven modifications. In other words, as phenomena are resolved by a SS-CoP it is possible to adjust and refine ABMs (and their predictive ability) as a recursive and collective process. Existing and emerging cybertools such as computer networks, digital data collections and advances in programming languages mean the SS-CoP must now carefully consider committing the human organization to enabling a cyberinfrastructure tool. The combination of technologies with human interfaces can allow scenarios to be incorporated through 'if' 'then' rules and provide a powerful basis for addressing the dynamics of coupled and complex social ecological systems (cSESs). The need for social scientists to be more engaged participants in the growing challenges of characterizing chaotic, self-organizing social systems and predicting emergent patterns makes the application of ABMs timely. The enabling of a SS-CoP CFCM human-cyberinfrastructure represents an unprecedented opportunity to synthesize, compare and evaluate diverse sociological phenomena as a cohesive and recursive community-driven process.Community-Based Complex Models, Mathematics, Social Sciences