Concept-based Interactive Query Expansion Support Tool (CIQUEST)

This report describes a three-year project (2000-03) undertaken in the Information Studies Department at The University of Sheffield and funded by Resource, The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries. The overall aim of the research was to provide user support for query formulation and reformulation in searching large-scale textual resources including those of the World Wide Web. More specifically the objectives were: to investigate and evaluate methods for the automatic generation and organisation of concepts derived from retrieved document sets, based on statistical methods for term weighting; and to conduct user-based evaluations on the understanding, presentation and retrieval effectiveness of concept structures in selecting candidate terms for interactive query expansion. The TREC test collection formed the basis for the seven evaluative experiments conducted in the course of the project. These formed four distinct phases in the project plan. In the first phase, a series of experiments was conducted to investigate further techniques for concept derivation and hierarchical organisation and structure. The second phase was concerned with user-based validation of the concept structures. Results of phases 1 and 2 informed on the design of the test system and the user interface was developed in phase 3. The final phase entailed a user-based summative evaluation of the CiQuest system. The main findings demonstrate that concept hierarchies can effectively be generated from sets of retrieved documents and displayed to searchers in a meaningful way. The approach provides the searcher with an overview of the contents of the retrieved documents, which in turn facilitates the viewing of documents and selection of the most relevant ones. Concept hierarchies are a good source of terms for query expansion and can improve precision. The extraction of descriptive phrases as an alternative source of terms was also effective. With respect to presentation, cascading menus were easy to browse for selecting terms and for viewing documents. In conclusion the project dissemination programme and future work are outlined

Program Management Through the Lens of a Massive Multiplayer Online Gamer: A Pilot Study

Learning can occur through many media types. This thesis explores the possibility that guild leaders in the Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) video game World of Warcraft learn and use similar skills to those that professional program managers learn and use in the corporate world. I evaluate World of Warcraft literature, present guild member interviews and use online forums to compare gaming leadership attributes to attributes in the program manager competency model described by Partington, Pellegrinelli, and Young (2005). The results provide preliminary support for the hypothesis that a bridge exists between these two leadership roles

Social foraging behaviour in a varying environment

Social foraging behaviour has an important influence on individuals’ survival and reproduction through its role in the acquisition of food resources. It also determines the amount of foraging time required in differing environments, and so the amount of time available for other activities, such as socialising and resting, which have been implicated in an individual’s fitness, as well as the stability of the wider social group. In this thesis I explore the links between these two processes by investigating the drivers of social foraging behaviour, and how the foraging time budgets that this behaviour produces vary between environments. I do this using data collected from a wild population of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) in Namibia, under both natural and field-experimental conditions, and through the development of an individual-based model (IBM). I show that baboon foraging decisions are influenced by social and non-social factors, but that the relative influence of these factors is dependent on the characteristics of the forager and the habitat it is in. These differences in decision-making appear to allow all individuals in a group to experience similar foraging success under natural conditions, but this pattern breaks down in extreme conditions. Using these findings to build an IBM of social foraging, I show that the time individuals need to spend foraging can increase rapidly in a deteriorating environment to the point where they are no longer able to gather enough resources. Overall, the findings of this thesis contribute to the growing appreciation that social foragers can exhibit a high degree of behavioural flexibility. These findings also emphasise the long-standing recognition that individual-level behaviours have an important influence on higher-level ecological patterns and processes and that an appreciation of this is important, not only for our understanding of these patterns and processes, but also for informing conservation and management

Working Papers: Astronomy and Astrophysics Panel Reports

The papers of the panels appointed by the Astronomy and Astrophysics survey Committee are compiled. These papers were advisory to the survey committee and represent the opinions of the members of each panel in the context of their individual charges. The following subject areas are covered: radio astronomy, infrared astronomy, optical/IR from ground, UV-optical from space, interferometry, high energy from space, particle astrophysics, theory and laboratory astrophysics, solar astronomy, planetary astronomy, computing and data processing, policy opportunities, benefits to the nation from astronomy and astrophysics, status of the profession, and science opportunities

Minimally Invasive Expeditionary Surgical Care Using Human-Inspired Robots

This technical report serves as an updated collection of subject matter experts on surgical care using human-inspired robotics for human exploration. It is a summary of the Blue Sky Meeting, organized by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), Pensacola, Florida, and held on October 2-3, 2018. It contains an executive summary, the final report, all of the presentation materials, and an updated reference list

The consumer engagement-interactivity link : an e-retailing perspective

An increasingly turbulent and unpredictable consumer landscape is posing unprecedented challenges for the modern marketer. Faced with a highly fragmented and cynical consumer base, aggressive competitive strategies, a constantly evolving digital and cyber world, and economic volatility characterising the modern macro environment, marketers are under increasing pressure to align their strategic positioning with “consumer hearts and minds”. Compounding this rise in consumer complexity is the development and salience of dual and multiple consumer identities, largely as a result of the growth in online and social media communities. Against this backdrop the Marketing Science Institute (MSI), the global voice and agenda setting body for marketing research priorities, has proposed placing consumer engagement (CE) at the forefront of marketing strategy, identifying the need to understand how to engage through innovation and design.Whilst academics and practitioners alike have acknowledged the importance of consumer engagement, describing it as the ‘holy grail’ for unlocking consumer behaviour, there is still a lack of consensus as to its conceptualisation and therefore its relationship with other marketing constructs. The salience of the online and digital consumer further compounds the difficulty in formulating a CE framework that is integrative and cross contextual. For instance, the construct of interactivity has considerable overlap with CE when applied to the online and digital domain.This study therefore moves away from the predominantly adopted exploratory approach to CE investigation, to provide empirical research into consumer engagement’s conceptualisation online and clarify the nature of the relationship between CE and interactivity. A post-positivist critical realist ontology was used to guide the research process, with the initial qualitative stage conducting twenty-eight semi-structured interviews - nine with consumers, eight with academics and eleven with marketing and communications practitioners, possessing online and digital expertise. The subsequent main quantitative phase then surveyed 600 online UK consumers, yielding 496 usable responses. Interview data suggested the centricity of emotional, cognitive and behavioural dimensions in consumer engagement’s structure; highlighted the antecedent nature of interactivity in developing CE online; and identified potential moderators to the CE-interactivity relationship. The framework developed for quantitative validation was therefore based on these initial findings. The survey data was subject to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, satisfaction of goodness of fit indices, reliability and validity testing, and rival model comparison.The most pertinent finding of this research is establishing the CE-interactivity link; with the interactivity constructs of customisation, communication, control and speed of response all being found to be antecedents of CE, in order of influence. The findings also confirm consumer engagement’s multi-dimensionality; highlighting the online CE facets to be emotional CE (emotion and experience) and cognitive & behavioural CE (learning & insight and co-creation). Gender, satisfaction & trust and tolerance are also identified as moderating factors in the CE-interactivity relationship. Contributions are made through investigation of consumer engagement in the e-retailing context; providing further insight into CE’s relationship within a nomological network of already established relationship marketing constructs; large scale quantitative validation of the proposed CE-interactivity framework; and through a multi-stakeholder approach to data collection, helping to bridge the academic-practitioner divide (Gambetti et al., 2012). The investigation concludes with an in-depth discussion about the managerial implications, as well as providing an overview of the studies key limitations, contributions and recommendations for future research

Travel Routes and Spatial Abilities in Wild Chacma Baboons (Papio ursinus)

The primary objective of this research was to give insight into the spatial cognitive abilities of chacma baboons (Papio ursinus) and to address the question whether chacma baboons internally represent spatial information of large-scale space in the form of a so-called topological map or a Euclidean map. Navigating the environment using a topological map envisions that animals acquire, remember and integrate a set of interconnected pathways or route segments that are linked by frequently used landmarks or nodes, at which animals make travel decisions. When animals navigate using a Euclidean map, animals encode information in the form of true angles and distances in order to compute novel routes or shortcuts to reach out of view goals. Although findings of repeatedly used travel routes are generally considered evidence that animals possess topological-based spatial awareness, it is not necessarily evidence that they navigate (solely) using a topological map or lack complete Euclidean spatial representation. Therefore, three predictions from the hypothesised use of a topological map and Euclidean map were tested to distinguish between them. It was investigated whether there was a difference in travel linearity between the core area and the periphery of the home range, whether travel goals were approached from all directions or from one (or a few) distinct directions using the same approach routes and lastly, whether there was a difference between the initial leaving direction from a travel goal and the general direction towards the next goal. Data were collected during a 19-month period (04/2007-11/2008) at Lajuma research centre in the Soutpansberg (Limpopo Province, South Africa). A group of baboons were followed from their morning sleeping site to their evening sleeping site for 234 days, during which location records, behavioural data and important resource data were recorded. A statistical procedure termed the change-point test (CPT) was employed to identify locations at which baboons started orienting towards a goal and baboons showed goal-directed travel towards identified travel goals. Subsequently, hotspot analysis was employed to delineate clusters of such change-points, termed ‘decision hotspots’. Decision hotspots coincided with highly valuable resources, towards which baboons showed significantly faster travel. It thus seemed that they ‘knew’ when they were nearing their goals and adapted their speed accordingly. Decision hotspots were also located at navigational landmarks that delineated a network of repeatedly used travel routes characteristic of a topological map. Therewith, this method reveals an important utility to the study of decision-making by allowing a range of sites to be selected for detailed observations, which were previously limited to sleeping sites or ‘stop’ sites, which would be impossible if the decision hotspots had not been previously identified. Furthermore, baboons travelled as efficiently in the periphery as in the core area of their home range, which was suggested to be more consistent with Euclidean spatial awareness. However, comparatively low travel linearity throughout the home range revealed it is more likely that the baboons accumulated a similar knowledge of the periphery as of the core area, which allowed them to navigate with a similar efficiently through both areas. The mountainous terrain at the study site provided ample prominent landmarks to aid the baboons in navigation and allowed baboons to initiate navigation to a travel goal with the same direction as when they reached that goal. Baboons did not approach travel goals from all directions, but instead they approached their goals from the same direction(s). In conclusion, the findings of this research are more consistent with the use of a topological spatial representation of large scale space, where landmarks aid baboons to navigate efficiently through large scale space. A review of the literature shows that until date, evidence for the existence of Euclidean spatial representation in both animals and humans is extremely limited and often unconvincing. It is likely that a high level of experimental control is necessary to unambiguously demonstrate the existence of Euclidean spatial awareness in the future

Evolution: From Big Bang to Nanorobots

The present volume is the fourth issue of the Yearbook series entitled ‘Evolution’. The title of the present volume is ‘From Big Bang to Nanorobots’. In this way we demonstrate that all phases of evolution and Big History are covered in the articles of the present Yearbook. Several articles also present the forecasts about future development. The main objective of our Yearbook as well as of the previous issues is the creation of a unified interdisciplinary field of research in which the scientists specializing in different disciplines could work within the framework of unified or similar paradigms, using the common terminology and searching for common rules, tendencies and regularities. At the same time for the formation of such an integrated field one should use all available opportunities: theories, laws and methods. In the present volume, a number of such approaches are used