173,561 research outputs found

    AN EMPIRICAL TEST FOR THE EXPANSION-CONTROL MODEL FOR MANAGING END-USER COMPUTING

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    The purpose of this research is to determine if the expansion-control model as proposed, adapted, and refined (Munro and Huff 1985; Munro, Huff and Moore 1987) is useful for understanding and predicting changes in EUC management strategy over time. The long-term interest is not so much in understanding the specific problem of managing end-user computing as in understanding the general problem of managing new information technology in organizations. A field study was conducted with eighteen large firms in manufacturing and services to review their experience with EUC management over a nine year period. As predicted, most firms took a hands-off approach to EUC management during the initiation phase and evolved toward a balance between control and slack by 1987. However, changes in firms\u27 EUC management strategy over time were more complex than predicted. In addition, the expansion and control constructs were not as independent as previously thought. The interaction between the two variables appears to be related, at least in part, to time and the stage of diffusion. The research suggests that current models of EUC management (and thus organizational learning about information technology) may be too simplistic. Suggestions for developing more general models of the process are offered

    An affect-based video retrieval system with open vocabulary querying

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    Content-based video retrieval systems (CBVR) are creating new search and browse capabilities using metadata describing significant features of the data. An often overlooked aspect of human interpretation of multimedia data is the affective dimension. Incorporating affective information into multimedia metadata can potentially enable search using this alternative interpretation of multimedia content. Recent work has described methods to automatically assign affective labels to multimedia data using various approaches. However, the subjective and imprecise nature of affective labels makes it difficult to bridge the semantic gap between system-detected labels and user expression of information requirements in multimedia retrieval. We present a novel affect-based video retrieval system incorporating an open-vocabulary query stage based on WordNet enabling search using an unrestricted query vocabulary. The system performs automatic annotation of video data with labels of well defined affective terms. In retrieval annotated documents are ranked using the standard Okapi retrieval model based on open-vocabulary text queries. We present experimental results examining the behaviour of the system for retrieval of a collection of automatically annotated feature films of different genres. Our results indicate that affective annotation can potentially provide useful augmentation to more traditional objective content description in multimedia retrieval

    The Dark Energy Survey Data Management System

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    The Dark Energy Survey collaboration will study cosmic acceleration with a 5000 deg2 griZY survey in the southern sky over 525 nights from 2011-2016. The DES data management (DESDM) system will be used to process and archive these data and the resulting science ready data products. The DESDM system consists of an integrated archive, a processing framework, an ensemble of astronomy codes and a data access framework. We are developing the DESDM system for operation in the high performance computing (HPC) environments at NCSA and Fermilab. Operating the DESDM system in an HPC environment offers both speed and flexibility. We will employ it for our regular nightly processing needs, and for more compute-intensive tasks such as large scale image coaddition campaigns, extraction of weak lensing shear from the full survey dataset, and massive seasonal reprocessing of the DES data. Data products will be available to the Collaboration and later to the public through a virtual-observatory compatible web portal. Our approach leverages investments in publicly available HPC systems, greatly reducing hardware and maintenance costs to the project, which must deploy and maintain only the storage, database platforms and orchestration and web portal nodes that are specific to DESDM. In Fall 2007, we tested the current DESDM system on both simulated and real survey data. We used Teragrid to process 10 simulated DES nights (3TB of raw data), ingesting and calibrating approximately 250 million objects into the DES Archive database. We also used DESDM to process and calibrate over 50 nights of survey data acquired with the Mosaic2 camera. Comparison to truth tables in the case of the simulated data and internal crosschecks in the case of the real data indicate that astrometric and photometric data quality is excellent.Comment: To be published in the proceedings of the SPIE conference on Astronomical Instrumentation (held in Marseille in June 2008). This preprint is made available with the permission of SPIE. Further information together with preprint containing full quality images is available at http://desweb.cosmology.uiuc.edu/wik
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