2,383 research outputs found
The question of research relevance: a university management perspective
Purpose:
The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the issue of research relevance from the frame of reference of university leaders. Its specific aim is to gain insights into how ârelevanceâ is conceptualised, and the underlying assumptions upon which such conceptualizations are based.
Design/methodology/approach:
Adopting an inductive approach, the study collects and analyses data from semi-structured interviews with 31 senior research-related university leaders, and archival sources in five Australian universities.
Findings:
Research relevance is primarily viewed as a means of responding to government and political imperatives, as a pathway to ensuring university legitimacy, and as a means of generating further resources. The authors apply this understanding to develop a framework that adopts a nuanced view of relevance, reflecting what is driving research, and to whom research is principally targeted.
Research limitations/implications:
The evidence-base upon which the study is based represents a relatively small number of university leaders of Australian universities. Moreover, restricting the investigation to a few senior hierarchical levels nonetheless offers insights into high level organisational drivers hitherto neglected in the accounting research literature on university strategy, governance and accountability. While not addressing perceptions across the university population, this study focusses on and unpacks the social construction of relevance of this select group as research policy makers.
Originality/value:
As one of the few empirically informed investigations exploring the issue of research relevance from the perspective of university leaders, this study provides insights rather than âanswersâ. Its findings therefore serve as a foundational basis for further empirical and theoretical enquiry
Methodology to predict construction contractorsâ performance using non-price measures
Despite being one of the largest industry sectors in the world, construction continues to suffer from underperformance. Contractors are the driving force behind built assets, and selecting high-performing contractors is crucial to the success of construction projects. However, the industry lacks a systematic and purpose-driven method of assessing contractorsâ performance using objective metrics. Furthermore, contractors do not have a systematic way to gauge their own performance in the pursuit of continuous improvement. Although there are numerous approaches to the measurement of contractorsâ performance, the literature suggests that most are complicated and highly dependent on data that are difficult to attain. The research presented in this thesis addresses this knowledge gap by creating a model for predicting construction contractorsâ performance based on directly attributable measures that are quantitatively measurable and easily accessible. The findings of this research make a number of contributions to theory and practice. The developed performance modelâthe Contractorsâ Performance Index (CPIx) provides a performance score based on seven non-price CMoPs. As the CPIx is based on factors that are within the control of the contractor, it provides a fair and independent assessment of performance that is not influenced by other factors. In an industry significantly driven by pricebased decisions that are solely based on non-price measures, the CPIx shifts the focus towards other aspects such as quality, health and safety, sustainability and productivity when evaluating performance, leaving price based measures for commercial considerations. Contractors can use the CPIx to self-evaluate their levels of project and organisational performance. If implemented as a sector-based performance evaluator, it can then be used to develop industry benchmarks for different categories of construction. The CPIx is presented as a prototype mobile application that can be conveniently used by various stakeholders to track performance within the construction industry
Coping with low data availability for social media crisis message categorisation
During crisis situations, social media allows people to quickly share
information, including messages requesting help. This can be valuable to
emergency responders, who need to categorise and prioritise these messages
based on the type of assistance being requested. However, the high volume of
messages makes it difficult to filter and prioritise them without the use of
computational techniques. Fully supervised filtering techniques for crisis
message categorisation typically require a large amount of annotated training
data, but this can be difficult to obtain during an ongoing crisis and is
expensive in terms of time and labour to create.
This thesis focuses on addressing the challenge of low data availability when
categorising crisis messages for emergency response. It first presents domain
adaptation as a solution for this problem, which involves learning a
categorisation model from annotated data from past crisis events (source
domain) and adapting it to categorise messages from an ongoing crisis event
(target domain). In many-to-many adaptation, where the model is trained on
multiple past events and adapted to multiple ongoing events, a multi-task
learning approach is proposed using pre-trained language models. This approach
outperforms baselines and an ensemble approach further improves performance..
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The playthrough evaluation framework reliable usability evaluation for video games
This thesis presents the playthrough evaluation framework, a novel framework for the reliable usability evaluation of first-person shooter console video games. The framework includes playthrough evaluation, a structured usability evaluation method adapted from heuristic evaluation.
Usability evaluation can help guide developers by pointing out design issues that cause users problems. However, usability evaluation methods suffer from the evaluator effect, where separate evaluations of the same data do not produce reliably consistent results. This can
result in a number of undesirable consequences affecting issues such as:
âą Unreliable evaluation: Without reliable results, evaluation reports risk giving incorrect or misleading advice.
âą Weak methodological validation: Typically new methods (e.g., new heuristics) are validated against user tests. However, without a reliable means to describe observations, attempts to validate novel methods against user test data will also be affected by weak reliability.
The playthrough evaluation framework addresses these points through a series of studies presenting the need for, and showing the development of the framework, including the following stages,
1. Explication of poor reliability in heuristic evaluation.
2. Development and validation of a reliable user test coding scheme.
3. Derivation of a novel usability evaluation method, playthrough evaluation.
4. Testing the method, quantifying results.
Evaluations were conducted with 22 participants, on 3 first-person shooter action console video games, using two methodologies, heuristic evaluation and the novel playthrough evaluation developed in this thesis. Both methods proved effective, with playthrough evaluation providing more detailed analysis but requiring more time to conduct
Coupling as a trade-off in an Enterprise Service Bus
Traditionally, integration problems between IT systems were solved by point-to-point
connections. These point-to-point connections pose issues with scalability, reliability, and
flexibility. To overcome these issues, companies typically invest in Enterprise Application
Integration (EAI) using an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to integrate the IT systems
through a central middleware infrastructure. EAI promises improvement of scalability,
reliability, and flexibility by implementing loosely coupled integration solutions to realise
loosely coupled IT systems.
By wrongly implementing EAI on an ESB IT systems may still be tightly coupled and the
issues with point-to-point connections could be recreated on the ESB. Currently there is
no out-of-the-box solution to identify the integration solution where tight coupling causes
these issues. The goal of this research is to investigate an approach to identify the coupling
state in an Enterprise Service Bus and identify the integration solutions on an ESB which
have a negative impact on the quality attributes due to tight coupling.
The first step in the approach is applying a set of properties on the integration solutions
to identify their coupling state. Manually identifying the coupling state is labour intensive,
so it is automated by implementing a prototype with the Eclipse MoDisco framework. The
second step in the approach is evaluating a trade-off between the risk of being in a certain
coupling state and the efficiency loss of migrating to a less risky coupling state. With the
outcome of the trade-off it can be ascertained whether or not it is beneficial to migrate to
a different coupling state.
The result of the approach is a list of integration solutions for which it would be beneficial
to migrate to a different coupling state. This gives a concrete measure to be able to
determine which integration solutions need to be improved to strive for the optimal
balance between quality and the effort needed to realise quality. The approach was
validated using the ESB implementation of a large European airport as a case study
Developing a catalogue of errors and evaluating its impact on software development
The development of quality software is of paramount importance, yet this has been and continues to be an elusive goal for software engineers. Delivered software often fails due to errors that are injected during its development. Correcting these errors early in the development or preventing them altogether can, therefore, be considered as one way to improve software quality. In this thesis, the development of a Catalogue of Errors is described. Field studies with senior software engineering students are used to confirm that developers using the Catalogue of Errors commit fewer errors in their development artifacts. The impact of the Catalogue of Errors on productivity is also examined
A conceptual procedural framework for effective scheduling to enhance efficient use of construction resources on the jobsite
Selection of construction methods, scheduling, site layout and component procurement
arrangement affect efficiency of operations on the jobsite. Efficiency has been
previously measured by such parameters as; budget, on time completion and meeting
specification standards. Little attention has been given to the interim processes which
create these. Efficiency in man- and machine-hour management may translate to cost
and time gains and enhanced quality.
The study reported recognises that there are numerous aspects to the question of
efficiency of operations. To focus the study and narrow the scope to a manageable size,
the issues of efficiency that can be addressed in the scheduling process are those
considered.
Extensive and thorough literature search identified guidelines for effective construction
scheduling. Empirical data were collected following these guidelines to develop a
scheduling procedure aimed at making the process more effective and which may
enhance efficient use of construction resources on the jobsite. The developed framework
show that activity criticality based on time analysis alone is a necessary condition but
not usually sufficient to declare an activity critical. Other tasks not on the critical path
which have very high delay potential should be considered. Therefore though the study
does not out rightly refute the idea of criticality based on time analysis alone, it adds to
it that if criticality means those things that should be done so as to progress the works to
a scheduled finish, criticality should be re-assessed to include several other tasks not
hitherto identified on the critical path
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