Epistemologies of competence related knowledge - A system theoretical analysis

The purpose of this study is to examine the multiple views of knowledge and competence in organizations at different levels that cause indistinctness in competence management and to find out how competence related knowledge is achieved at different organizational levels. The objective is thus to bring underlying epistemologies of knowledge and competence into the academic discussion and further examine how they are expressed in practice. In the theoretical part of this study system theories and their use in management and organizational studies are examined. Open-system, connectivist and autopoietic approaches are clarified and their theoretical implications in organizational studies are presented. Also, the role of knowledge and its management in organizations is discussed, the vast field of knowledge management is presented and cognitivist, connectionist and autopoietic ways to conceptualize knowledge are considered. After a theoretical review a theoretical construct was formed and empirical findings were compared to it. This study was carried out in four Finnish companies and 11 persons from different organizational levels were interviewed in summer 2009. The methodology of this study is qualitative and empirical data was collected by using semi–structured interviews. In the analyzing phase the transcripts were carefully read, coded and further analyzed. As a result of this study different approaches to knowledge and competence could be found in different organizational levels. The supervisor level was found to achieve knowledge in everyday work in own unit. The HR level acted as a bridge builder in organizations and gathered knowledge through networking. The strategic management level created knowledge in strategy making process and focused on strategic competences. These findings were compared to the formed theoretical construct. Some distinctions could be made, autopoietic, connetionist and cognitivist characteristics were all found in the examined functions, but more research in the area is needed and thus future research suggestions are presented.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

What is an intelligent system?

The concept of intelligent system has emerged in information technology as a type of system derived from successful applications of artificial intelligence. The goal of this paper is to give a general description of an intelligent system, which integrates previous approaches and takes into account recent advances in artificial intelligence. The paper describes an intelligent system in a generic way, identifying its main properties and functional components, and presents some common categories. The presented description follows a practical approach to be used by system engineers. Its generality and its use is illustrated with real-world system examples and related with artificial intelligence methods

Text Summarisation: From Human Activity to Computer Program. The Problem of Tacit Knowledge

In this article I discuss whether the human activity of text summarisation can be successfully simulated in a computer. In order to write a computer program that produces high-quality summaries it becomes necessary to specify the cognitive pro-cesses involved when humans summarise text. As texts can be summarised in many different ways, evaluation of summaries becomes an important aspect in the discussion. The article discusses relevant factors in such an evaluation process. It turns out that humans when summarising texts make use of knowledge which is not readily open to scrutiny; it is tacit knowledge. This makes it very difficult to produce computer-generated summaries which are as good as those produced by skilled humans. New developments within artificial intelligence, relying on network processing techniques, may offer solutions to the problem of dealing with tacit knowledge. At present, accept-able computer summaries may be generated by programs combining accessible human knowledge of the summarisation process and knowledge about text