A visão dos conceitos de Informação e Tecnologia à luz da Engenharia Organizacional

Apresenta o campo da engenharia organizacional, bem como o método DEMO de desenho e engenharia para organizações (do inglês: Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations – DEMO) e como se pode perspectivar de maneira menos ambígua os conceitos de informação e tecnologia. Vários conceitos fundamentais são introduzidos, seguindo-se a apresentação de dois casos de estudo, confirmando alguns dos benefícios providenciados pelo método DEMO

Tendências do BPM

Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Engenharia e Gestão de Sistemas de InformaçãoAtualmente, as organizações encontram-se inseridas em ambientes de mercado cada vez mais competitivos, deparando-se com várias dificuldades, em que face a estas, necessitam de encontrar soluções. Por essa razão, viram o BPM como uma solução para melhorar o seu negócio. Um dos objetivos do BPM é ter a capacidade de identificar, monitorar e otimizar processos de negócio cujo resultado final é um conjunto de atividades realizadas. Com base nesta monitorização e otimização, as organizações tornam-se capazes de identificar possíveis lacunas nos seus processos e com isto melhorá-los. Com isto, verificou-se a falta de informação existente cientificamente em relação à identificação de novas tendências para o BPM. Neste sentido, com este trabalho propomos realizar uma investigação seguindo a metodologia de pesquisa em Design Science Research, em que iniciamos uma pesquisa de levantamento de tendência seguindo a abordagem proposta por Webster e Watson (2002), com base em duas conferências internacionais em BPM de ranking elevado, em que se identificou os tópicos mais abordados como também problemas e soluções desde 2013 até 2015. Posteriormente, com informação recolhida ao longo de três anos, através da criação de um framework identificamos algumas tendências para o BPM, de forma a melhorá-lo. Para garantir a credibilidade dos resultados, através da criação de um inquérito por questionário realizou-se a avaliação dos resultados obtidos.Nowadays, the market gets more and more competitive, thus companies need to learn how to manage and find the right solutions for their business when facing challenges. For that reason, they saw BPM as a great tool to expand their business. One of the features of BPM is the capacity to identify, monetize and optimize processes within the business which ultimately allow for an aggregation of performed activities. Thanks to these features, the business have been capable of identifying possible gaps in their processes and how to improve them. With this, it was verified the lack of scientific information regarding the identification of new trends for BPM. Therefore, with this work we propose to conduct an investigation that follows the searching methodology in Design Science Research, where we initiate a search of lifting trends as proposed by Webster and Watson (2002). This is based on two international conferences on BPM, in which it identified the most discussed topics and also the problems and solutions since 2013 until 2015. After this investigation, with collected information over 3 years, through the creation of framework we identify some BPM trends. To approve this results, we created a survey that was held an evaluation of the final results

General framework for service engineering analysis and design

The research produced a General Service Engineering Framework (GSEF), a process guideline for building a service system which covers both the business and informatics aspects. The framework also defines service engineering ontologi, which collects and specifies components of service engineering and its internal relations

Building robust and modular question answering systems

Over the past few years, significant progress has been made in QA systems due to the availability of annotated datasets on a large scale and the impressive advancements in large-scale pre-trained language models. Despite these successes, the black-box nature of end-to-end trained QA systems makes them hard to interpret and control. When these systems encounter inputs that deviate from their training data distribution or are subjected to adversarial perturbations, their performance tends to deteriorate by a large margin. Furthermore, they may occasionally produce unanticipated results, potentially leading to confusion among users. Additionally, this deficiency in robustness and interpretability poses challenges when deploying such models in real-world scenarios. In this dissertation, we aim to build robust QA systems by explicitly decomposing various QA tasks into distinct sub-modules, each responsible for a particular aspect of the overall QA process. Through this decomposition, we seek to achieve improved performance in terms of both the system's ability to handle diverse and challenging inputs (robustness) and its capacity to provide transparent and explainable reasoning (interpretability). To address the aforementioned limitations, in this dissertation, we aim to build robust QA models by explicitly decomposing different QA tasks into different sub-modules. We argue that utilizing these sub-modules can substantially improve the robustness and interpretability of different QA systems. In the first half of this dissertation, we introduce three sub-modules to mitigate the dataset artifacts that models learn from datasets. These sub-modules also enable us to examine and exert explicit control over the intermediate outputs. In the first work, to address question answering that requires multi-hop reasoning, we propose a chain extractor, which extracts the reasoning chains necessary for models to derive the final answer. The reasoning chains not only prevent the model from exploiting reasoning shortcuts but also provide an explanation of how the answer is derived. In the second work, we incorporate an alignment layer between the question and the context before generating the answer. This alignment layer can help us interpret the models' behavior and improve the robustness of adversarial settings. In the third work, we add an answer verifier after QA models generate the answer. This verifier can boost QA models' prediction confidence across several different domains and help us spot cases where QA models predict the right answer for the wrong reason by utilizing the external NLI datasets and models. In the second half of this dissertation, we tackle the problem of complex fact-checking in the real world by treating it as a modularized QA task. We first decompose a complex claim into several yes-no subquestions whose answer directly contributes to the veracity of the claim. Then, each sub-question is fed into a commercial search engine to retrieve relevant documents. Additionally, we extract the relevant snippets in the retrieved documents and use a GPT3-based summarizer to generate the core evidence for checking the claim. We show that the decompositions can play an important role in both evidence retrieval and veracity composition of an explainable fact-checking system. Also, we show the GPT3-based evidence summarizer generates faithful summaries of documents most of the time indicating it can be used as an effective part of the pipeline. Moreover, we annotate a dataset -- ClaimDecomp, containing 1,200 complex claims and the decompositions. We believe that this dataset can further promote building explainable fact-checking systems and analyzing complex claims in the real world.Computer Science

Communication planning for development: an operational framework

This thesis is concerned with communication planning for national development: specifically with the problem of utilising a developing country's communication resources to support an integrated programme of social, political and economic mobilisation. The research which it describes sets out to construct, and test, an operational planning framework, to include among its parameters decision-making processes and political factors as well as planning strategies for communication. Following a literature search, a number of guiding principles in support of communication planning are hypothesized. These principles are then evaluated, modified and categorised, through comparison with selected communication projects and surveys, at levels ranging from the local to the national and regional. Subsequently, on the basis of this analysis, an experimental planning framework is devised, which is constructed around two basic axes: the first defining planning participants (including both planners and decision-makers), and the second defining the sequence of planning. A particular emphasis in elaborating this framework is on the relationship between communication and development planning, and on interactions between the various sectors concerned with national development. An account is then given of a field test of the experimental framework in a developing country (Afghanistan); during which independent evaluations of both the framework and of its application were carried out. Following an analysis of these evaluations, the framework is modified and a revised version proposed. Finally, an attempt is made to relate the planning framework to current concerns with popular access to communication resources, and participation in communication planning and management, as a guide to future application and evaluation

Proposing a framework for organisational sustainable development: integrating quality management, supply chain management and sustainability

Increasing worldwide demand for products and services is applying a significant pressure on firms and supply chains operationally and financially, along with negative implications on our planet and the public. New approaches are highly required to be adopted by all members of the society, including the businesses for sustainable development. On the other hand, enabling such integration from an organisational management perspective is not straightforward, due to complexities and conflicts associated with balanced integration of economic, environmental and social agendas. Aimed towards addressing this important research requirement, a tailored conceptual framework is presented, constructed upon the synergistic principles of quality management (QM) and supply chain management (SCM) to facilitate integration of triple bottom line sustainability into business management. As the first step of the research, a systematic literature review was conducted, evidencing research gaps, and opportunities. A conceptual framework was established, and an implementation procedure to facilitate operationalisation of the framework was developed including a business diagnostic tool contribution, aiding current state maturity assessment as one of the key implementation steps. These developments were verified, validated and improved through the Delphi method, and applied at an organisation in Cyprus as the final validation step, using the action research method. Positive relationships were established and verified conceptually between the ISO 9001 principles of QM, supply chain integration principle of SCM, and organisational triple bottom line sustainability integration. The relative importance of these principles adopted in the framework were determined based on expert Delphi panel feedback. The action research demonstrated the application of the framework, outlined its contextual implementation factors, and concluded positive effects on the sustainable development of the participating organisation. Several contributions to knowledge were made, including the refinement of existing QM and SCM concepts for organisational sustainability improvement, and formulation of a practical framework including a novel diagnostic tool to facilitate integration of triple bottom line sustainability through QM and SCM. Particularly, a new management perspective was introduced with implications to many organisational managers that adopt ISO 9001 and supply chain integration principles, setting the way for extending these principles beyond their original QM and SCM agendas towards organisational sustainable development.N/

JURI SAYS:An Automatic Judgement Prediction System for the European Court of Human Rights

In this paper we present the web platform JURI SAYS that automatically predicts decisions of the European Court of Human Rights based on communicated cases, which are published by the court early in the proceedings and are often available many years before the final decision is made. Our system therefore predicts future judgements of the court. The platform is available at jurisays.com and shows the predictions compared to the actual decisions of the court. It is automatically updated every month by including the prediction for the new cases. Additionally, the system highlights the sentences and paragraphs that are most important for the prediction (i.e. violation vs. no violation of human rights)

Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Space Applications, part 1

The application of artificial intelligence to spacecraft and aerospace systems is discussed. Expert systems, robotics, space station automation, fault diagnostics, parallel processing, knowledge representation, scheduling, man-machine interfaces and neural nets are among the topics discussed