Exploratory Analysis of Highly Heterogeneous Document Collections

We present an effective multifaceted system for exploratory analysis of highly heterogeneous document collections. Our system is based on intelligently tagging individual documents in a purely automated fashion and exploiting these tags in a powerful faceted browsing framework. Tagging strategies employed include both unsupervised and supervised approaches based on machine learning and natural language processing. As one of our key tagging strategies, we introduce the KERA algorithm (Keyword Extraction for Reports and Articles). KERA extracts topic-representative terms from individual documents in a purely unsupervised fashion and is revealed to be significantly more effective than state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we evaluate our system in its ability to help users locate documents pertaining to military critical technologies buried deep in a large heterogeneous sea of information.Comment: 9 pages; KDD 2013: 19th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Minin

Maintenance factors in building design

The degree to which the design of a building embraces maintenance considerations has a major impact on its performance. In Malaysia for instance, most designers claimed to have knowledge and experience on building maintenance aspects but only few are aware of the importance to consider maintenance factors during design stage. A survey was carried out on 38 designer firms (architectural, civil & structural consultant firms) and 30 maintenance firms located in Shah Alam and Kuala Lumpur districts. The aim was to find out the building defects and other maintenance problems that are heavily attributed to design deficiencies, inadequate information gathering, material limitations and lack of maintenance knowledge. The data were analyzed using SPSS (Statistical Package of Social Sciences). Findings show that main problems that the maintenance firms are currently facing are caused by building design deficiencies, poor construction quality and poor performance of building which is directly related to functional layout, choice of building material and choice of building equipment. It appears that designer firms consider maintenance factors like ease of cleaning, access to cleaning area and repair and replacement to be the least important when designing buildings. Lack of communication between designer firms and maintenance firms as well as building users or owners resulted in designer firms not fully aware of the maintenance-related problems frequently reported by building owners. Designers seem to be neglecting the benefits of designing for ease of maintenance that can prolong the building lifespan, reduce defects rate and therefore reduce maintenance costs. Therefore, it is important for project team management to develop awareness and policy from the very early start of project to ensure the concept for ease of maintenance can be understood and implemented successfully in local construction practice

Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams

In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness. We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety. This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201

Towards exploratory hypothesis testing and analysis

10.1109/ICDE.2011.5767907Proceedings - International Conference on Data Engineering745-75