Discussions on semantic-based in decision support systems

This paper outlines some present researches in describing decision-making context by information systems, and especially Decision Support Systems (DSS). We present the results of an empirical study that had the main propose to demonstrate the idea that describing context decision-making in an incorrect manner may lead to an inaccurate decision-making process. We discuss therefore some possible solutions. The paper ends with conclusions drawn from our research

Collaborative authoring and the virtual problem of context in writing courses

Since the 1980s, the field of rhetoric and composition has embraced the idea of collaborative writing as a means of generating new knowledge, troubling traditional conceptions of the author, and repositioning power within the student-teacher hierarchy. Authors such as David Bleich, Kenneth Bruffee, and Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede have written about, and advocated for, teachers' engagement with collaboration in the composition classroom. Yet in discussions of collaborative writing, scholars have tended to ignore an important element: the limitations placed upon student agency by the institutional context in which students write. We can ask students to work together in the classroom, but limitations on their choice of collaborators, their time together, and their ability to determine the outcome of their work result in an unproductive simulacrum of collaboration in which students write together but do not engage deeply with each other in the ways scholars describe. Ignoring the fact that classroom collaborative writing is embedded in different fields of power than writing done by scholars working outside institutional limitations results in a conception of collaborative writing as little more than an element of pedagogy, one that can be added to a syllabus without significantly changing the structure, goals, or ideology of the course. Rather than approaching collaborative writing as a means of pushing against the limits of institutional writing, the context in which collaboration takes place is naturalized. As a result, the assessment and disciplinary structures of the academy, the physical division of the student body into class sections, and the tools available to support (or undercut) collaborative work vanish in the scholarship. To counter this trend, I explore how the denial of context and the resulting disconnection between theory (the claims for collaborative writing) and practice (the twenty-first-century composition classroom) promote not collaboration, but a simulacrum of collaboration: academic work that mimics the appearance of true collaboration while failing to enact the liberatory possibility of working with other writers. This project explores collaborative theory on three levels: the personal, in which collaborative writing is illustrated via specific business, public, and academic contexts; the pedagogical, in which current collaborative theory and practice is deployed and analyzed to understand its limitations; and the disciplinary, in which current collaborative theory and practice is questioned, critiqued, and remediated to propose an alternative collaborative classroom praxis. The structure of the dissertation, which uses interchapters to draw connections between larger theoretical issues and my ethnographic research, interviews, and analysis, reflects these three strands as a means of illustrating the interdependence of the personal, pedagogical, and disciplinary conceptions of and engagements with collaborative writing

Embodied Energy Geographies: An Exploration of Fracked Landscapes in the Ohio River Valley

Methane gas production has boomed across the United States as a result of the development of fracking technology and its associated infrastructures, including pipelines. This production has provoked resistance over a litany of environmental and social concerns at both global and local scales. These concerns are compounded by a history of extractive economies and degradation in the Marcellus shale region of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley. To date, there has been limited research at the intersection of extractive industry and emotional geography, especially around pipelines. This research draws on feminist, emotional, and energy geographies and uses semi-structured interviews and body mapping focus groups to investigate the ways in which place-based identity, sense of place, and place attachment have been impacted by the oil and gas buildout, and how these impacts are emotionally embodied. Participants in this research spoke to the ways in which pipelines, compressor stations, gas wells, and other fracked gas infrastructures have significantly impacted their relationships to their homes, communities, and selves. They described the physical and psychological impacts from the industrial buildout, including health impacts and emotional upheaval, which could feel inescapable and uncontrollable. Participants invoked concepts of energy landscapes and energy terrains to discuss multiple scales and sites of impact from industry buildout, and understood the linked geographies of the home, landscape, and self through embodied emotions. These findings highlight that fracked gas infrastructures have the affectual, emotional capacity to disrupt place attachment and place identity for impacted residents, manifested through embodied emotions. This thesis addresses the conceptual gap at the intersection of energy and emotional geographies through a focus on the embodied experiences of the self, home, and landscape in relation to the oil and gas buildout in the Ohio River Valley. This thesis has broad implications for decision-making processes around extreme energy production through an illustration of the lived experiences of fenceline communities

Provision, discovery and development of ubiquitous services and applications

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Gender differences in innovation and competitive settings

This dissertation adds to the growing body of literature at the intersection of economic sociology and psychology on how gender differences shape outcomes, by putting the spotlight on women and men top performers in competitive settings. It is particularly important to look at gender differences and their effects on outcomes in these settings for three reasons. First, top performers contribute disproportionately to value creation, economic growth, and innovation, implying a strong lever for gender differences to materialize. Second, it remains to be understood whether gender differences that have been indicated for the general population also apply to men and women in these specific settings. Third, due to the underrepresentation of women in the most competitive segments of the labor market, there is an unmet need for large-scale empirical evidence. In combination with the first two points, this evidence is important to not only understand drivers and antecedents of the prevailing gender gap in competitive settings, but also to highlight the gendered potential in human capital that is likely foregone. This evidence can help to derive and articulate countermeasures aimed at increasing the representation of women in such settings. In three separate chapters, this thesis aims to advance our understanding of how gender differences shape outcomes in innovation and competitive settings by answering three distinct questions: 1) How do gendered evaluations of top performers spillover to their protégés in a mentor-protégé relationship? 2) How do gender differences between star inventors impact innovation outcomes in inventor teams? 3) How do gender differences moderate the influence of pressure on performance of extreme precision tasks

TB STIGMA – MEASUREMENT GUIDANCE

TB is the most deadly infectious disease in the world, and stigma continues to play a significant role in worsening the epidemic. Stigma and discrimination not only stop people from seeking care but also make it more difficult for those on treatment to continue, both of which make the disease more difficult to treat in the long-term and mean those infected are more likely to transmit the disease to those around them. TB Stigma – Measurement Guidance is a manual to help generate enough information about stigma issues to design and monitor and evaluate efforts to reduce TB stigma. It can help in planning TB stigma baseline measurements and monitoring trends to capture the outcomes of TB stigma reduction efforts. This manual is designed for health workers, professional or management staff, people who advocate for those with TB, and all who need to understand and respond to TB stigma

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

Design of a collaborative information and communication technology platform to support creativity in innovation activities - prototyping and user experience test

This research project reports the results of the thesis, “Design of a Collaborative Information and Communication Technology Platform to support Creativity in Innovation Activities -Prototyping and User Experience Test” and provides details of the procedure followed in realizing the thesis. The research was conducted between Fall 2010 and Winter 2013. The research problem was based on an analysis of three challenges observed in innovation activities, especially at the level of creative collaboration among R&D enterprises and creative teams of “Les 24 heures de l’innovation”. These challenges must be overcome before the knowledge production and ideas sharing process can be improved. Three types of challenges were identified: - Communication: The communication of knowledge for innovation, which must be transmitted to successfully resolve complex issues, in the proposal of new products or new services - Organizational: Development of knowledge management strategies for distributed idea sharing, which should be encouraged by the organization to create or support teams by means of a collaborative platform - Technology: Transmission of tacit, unstructured, and informal knowledge, especially using collaborative ICT and technologies Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 tools. This thesis investigates two dimensions of the research problem: the theoretical and the practical (technology issues). The theoretical dimension examines the environment for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, which supports creative collaboration in distributed conditions. The practical and technological dimensions involve a creative collaboration model which will take the form of a platform for creative teams. The aim of this thesis is to support the creative teams in the process of conceptualization of a new innovation-oriented product. Through this thesis, we seek to: - Determine the needs of creative teams during the conceptualization stage of a new product; - Propose a Knowledge Management System (knowledge and tools) that enables the support of tacit knowledge produced in distributed condition of team members; - Modeling a Platform that supports internal creative team’s needs and the external context for innovation; - Propose the assessment of the creative collaboration meaning the user experience testing and the realized task by creative teams on the ICT prototype. We carry out a review of the literature in Chapter 1, a study of collaboration among creative R&D teams in Canada in Chapter 2, and in Chapter 4, we perform a knowledge needs analysis of creative teams in “Les 24 heures de l’innovation”. These will enable us to achieve the first objective, the definition of the needs for supporting creative teams. Ultimately, we characterize the context of R&D activities in Canada, as well as interactions among creative R&D teams for innovation, with a theoretical study, by analyzing statistical data obtained from Statistics Canada. A detailed presentation of the problem statement and the methodology used for this thesis is provided in Chapter 3. The second objective is fulfilled by analyzing the idea production process and the current ICTs, for proposing a conceptual model based on the observation of creative teams participating in “Les 24 heures de l’innovation” November 2011. On the other hand, by proposing the new specifications that support collaboration, we select a methodology based on the law of ideality (TRIZ), in which we observe the evolution of technological state-of-the-art of current functionalities (Chapter 5) in contrast with the needs and useful operations of ICT. To realize the third objective, we model the collaborative platform, and its primary functionalities are presented using the UML 2, Unified Modeling Language, also we describe the prototype deployment at Chapter 6. The fourth objective is reached by an experimental evaluation of the platform that is presented in Chapter 7 and in Chapter 8. These chapters summarize the results obtained by the application of the following user experience test: validation of UML use-cases user’s acceptance, the task analysis of the main used functionalities, the creative performance Analysis of user (PAN) and the usability test. Finally, the other sections of this document are the conclusion, findings, proposals for further research, and recommendations. In the Appendix, we include the ethical plan presented to the École de technologie supérieure Ethical Review Board, as well as the results obtained from “Les 24 heures de l’innovation” of May 2012

The value in those you know: dimensions of social capital in COVID-19 vaccination uptake among ethnic and religious minority groups in Georgia

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the diverse roles of information. While the interconnected nature of the globe has seen the rapid transmission of knowledge, disinformation has continued to spread in parallel. This thesis examines COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy through the example of Georgia, a country distinguished by high levels of ‘bonding’ social capital. More specifically, it draws attention to the experience of three minority communities: (1) the Georgian-Azerbaijani community of Kvemo Kartli, (2) the Georgian-Armenian community of Samtskhe-Javakheti, and (3) the Georgian Muslim community of Mountainous Adjara. Georgia’s COVID-19 vaccination process has shed light on the inequalities these marginalised communities face within a nationalising state heavily attached to notions of ‘ethnodoxy’. Consequently, these three communities have each developed strategies of resilience against the COVID-19 pandemic. This thesis examines the relationship between social capital and vaccination uptake via a social-anthropological approach, focusing particular attention on community-level mechanisms. Through doing so, it finds the prevalence of informal networks — characterised by the dual-phenomenon of close in-group ties and out-group mistrust — profoundly impacts attitudes and practices towards vaccine uptake among these communities. In light of persistently low vaccination rates in Georgia, these findings on the reliance on informal networking as a means of obtaining information seek to provide a deeper insight into both the positive and negative outcomes of close-knit bonding ties

Audiencing Strategies and Student Collaboration in Digitally-mediated Genres of Writing in English

This thesis presents an investigation into the experience of ESL Higher Education young writers when composing three online genres: academic text, diary texts, and blog texts. Central to this investigation is the authenticity of audience and directing texts to ‘real’ readers. Hence, technological tools are utilised in order to approximate such experience of writing for real readers. A qualitative case study was employed over three months of an academic semester at an Omani Higher Education College. Two cases participated in the study of overall 17 students across both cases: 5 males and 12 females and 10 students in case 1 and 7 students in case 2. To attain an in-depth understanding of the cases; different tools of data collection were deployed, including: interviews, classroom observation, reflective diary for recording student perceptions and experiences, and three forms of written texts were collected from the participating students: academic essay, diary, and blog. Thus the reflective diary was both a genre of writing and a data collection method. The study findings highlight that having only a teacher as an ‘audience’ restricted students’ attempts to focus on content, and most of this focus was given to shaping texts in accordance with student perceptions of teacher approved organisation and representation of text. Whereas blogging provided an opportunity to think of a wider range of readers and therefore a greater tendency to author personally selected texts. Also, diary was mostly associated with teacher-audience; though some writers enjoyed writing diary for personal use, the fact that these diary texts vary in accordance with these different understandings of audience offers further credence to claims about the role of real and assumed readers in shaping texts. The significance of the current study is that it offers practical and pedagogical thinking for teaching writing in ESL exploiting the affordances of technology in teaching process writing. It suggests that varying both audience and genres in relation to classroom writing tasks can have benefits for student writers in terms of their understanding of audience, their shaping of text for an audience and increased investment in the content of what they write. It offers insights into problems and issues felt by young writers that are usually unknown to the teachers. Based on those insights, differing issues such as collaboration, process writing and grading are re-evaluated.Ministry of Higher Education (Oman