3,234 research outputs found
Mapping Critical Practice In A Transdisciplinary Urban Studio
Architecture and Planning exist to make positive changes to our environment. Future practitioners in these
disciplines will be responsible for how our cities develop and are managed - they will be required to exercise their professional judgement in complex and unpredictable contexts. There is increasing interest in transdisciplinary urbanism, but implementation in academic contexts has to date been relatively limited. This thesis aims to build on these examples, through a detailed account of one academic design studio which operates across architecture and urban planning; in doing so it aims to make the case for transdisciplinary, problem and place-based studio teaching.
The study considers how a transdisciplinary studio environment supported students to develop a critical
approach to practice through collaborative discourse. It looked at studio methods/practices; what it means to practice ‘critically’ in the context of design; and the role ‘going public’ by sharing ideas in public fora might play in developing critical positions.
The study was undertaken in collaboration with nine students, a single cohort undertaking the final year of a hybrid master’s qualification in Architecture with Urban Planning. It adopts socio-material and spatial approaches to follow how the studio environment and the students’ emerging interdisciplinary identities shaped both their individual and their shared work. It mapped how their approach to their practice evolved through observations, interviews, and informal conversations, and through their drawings, models and journals. In carrying out these observations, and their analysis, I have returned to drawing methods common in architecture. This allowed me to explore and record aspects of studio practice which might otherwise be missed and revealed the importance of visual and spatial thinking to my own practice. Observations revealed how material spaces, tools and artefacts acted to structure social relations in the studio, and how these relations shaped individual approaches to critical practice
Towards liminal balance: Unpacking the UK's urban canal space
This paper critically examines the liminal geographies of the United Kingdom's 7,000‐mile canal and river network, embodying a thread of complex intersections and interactions between water and land. Drawing on a study involving stakeholder interviews, group discussion with canal users, and observational walks in Manchester and London, the paper explores the concepts of liminal flux, scalar intersections, and deliminalisation. We first outline how the UK's urban canals are characterised by liminal flux over time and space, reflecting their dynamic geographies. Revealing the presence of critical intersections between liminality and scale, we then focus on the ongoing and everyday spatial and territorial entanglements between different canal and towpath users. Finally, we consider the challenge of deliminalisation, and an associated shift from liminality and in‐betweenness towards greater spatial fixity via neoliberal intervention and development. Our findings highlight the importance of preserving the unique characteristics of urban canals as liminal spaces, arguing that they provide recreational opportunities and contribute to urban wellbeing by providing opportunities for ‘transitory dwelling places’. Maintaining a liminal balance within urban canal environments is therefore crucial and requires careful curation. In turn, this notion of curating liminal balance has implications for other potential waterfront developments that offer a similar positive potential for hydrocitizenship and its fluid ambiguities of in‐betweenness. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of a ‘lighter touch’ of redevelopment and governance in some parts of the urban environment to help preserve, or even enhance, citizen wellbeing
Digital Innovations for a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa
Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE).
This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy.
Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
A Comprehensive Survey of Artificial Intelligence Techniques for Talent Analytics
In today's competitive and fast-evolving business environment, it is a
critical time for organizations to rethink how to make talent-related decisions
in a quantitative manner. Indeed, the recent development of Big Data and
Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques have revolutionized human resource
management. The availability of large-scale talent and management-related data
provides unparalleled opportunities for business leaders to comprehend
organizational behaviors and gain tangible knowledge from a data science
perspective, which in turn delivers intelligence for real-time decision-making
and effective talent management at work for their organizations. In the last
decade, talent analytics has emerged as a promising field in applied data
science for human resource management, garnering significant attention from AI
communities and inspiring numerous research efforts. To this end, we present an
up-to-date and comprehensive survey on AI technologies used for talent
analytics in the field of human resource management. Specifically, we first
provide the background knowledge of talent analytics and categorize various
pertinent data. Subsequently, we offer a comprehensive taxonomy of relevant
research efforts, categorized based on three distinct application-driven
scenarios: talent management, organization management, and labor market
analysis. In conclusion, we summarize the open challenges and potential
prospects for future research directions in the domain of AI-driven talent
analytics.Comment: 30 pages, 15 figure
A portrait of trade in cultural goods : in respect of the WTO and the UNESCO instruments in the contexts of hard-law and soft-law
Cultural Goods have the dual nature of being related to both culture and economy.
The WTO considers the trade aspects and UNESCO gives value to the cultural
aspects of cultural goods. Therefore, there are interactions between the provisions,
institutions and practices of the WTO Agreement and UNESCO CDCE on trade in
cultural goods. This book examines potential conflicts between the two agreements.
In doing so we are proposing three routes to enhance legal coherence between
them: propose an improved interpretation of the instruments; harmonise through
hard law; and foster mutual supportiveness through soft law
Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion. Collected Works, Volume 5
This fifth volume on Advances and Applications of DSmT for Information Fusion collects theoretical and applied contributions of researchers working in different fields of applications and in mathematics, and is available in open-access. The collected contributions of this volume have either been published or presented after disseminating the fourth volume in 2015 in international conferences, seminars, workshops and journals, or they are new. The contributions of each part of this volume are chronologically ordered.
First Part of this book presents some theoretical advances on DSmT, dealing mainly with modified Proportional Conflict Redistribution Rules (PCR) of combination with degree of intersection, coarsening techniques, interval calculus for PCR thanks to set inversion via interval analysis (SIVIA), rough set classifiers, canonical decomposition of dichotomous belief functions, fast PCR fusion, fast inter-criteria analysis with PCR, and improved PCR5 and PCR6 rules preserving the (quasi-)neutrality of (quasi-)vacuous belief assignment in the fusion of sources of evidence with their Matlab codes.
Because more applications of DSmT have emerged in the past years since the apparition of the fourth book of DSmT in 2015, the second part of this volume is about selected applications of DSmT mainly in building change detection, object recognition, quality of data association in tracking, perception in robotics, risk assessment for torrent protection and multi-criteria decision-making, multi-modal image fusion, coarsening techniques, recommender system, levee characterization and assessment, human heading perception, trust assessment, robotics, biometrics, failure detection, GPS systems, inter-criteria analysis, group decision, human activity recognition, storm prediction, data association for autonomous vehicles, identification of maritime vessels, fusion of support vector machines (SVM), Silx-Furtif RUST code library for information fusion including PCR rules, and network for ship classification.
Finally, the third part presents interesting contributions related to belief functions in general published or presented along the years since 2015. These contributions are related with decision-making under uncertainty, belief approximations, probability transformations, new distances between belief functions, non-classical multi-criteria decision-making problems with belief functions, generalization of Bayes theorem, image processing, data association, entropy and cross-entropy measures, fuzzy evidence numbers, negator of belief mass, human activity recognition, information fusion for breast cancer therapy, imbalanced data classification, and hybrid techniques mixing deep learning with belief functions as well
Open Innovation and Competitive Advantage: The Roles of Organizational Strategy and Corporate Risk Management
Aquesta tesi es desenvolupa a partir de la premissa de que el model d'innovació oberta millora les capacitats
innovadores de les empreses, influint en la gestió del risc empresarial, l’estratègia organitzativa i l'avantatge
competitiu. L’objectiu principal de l’estudi és, doncs, analitzar la relació de la innovació oberta amb la gestió del risc
corporativa, l’estratègia organitzativa i l’avantatge competitiu i, addicionalment, l’efecte mediador de la gestió del risc
corporativa en la relació entre la innovació oberta i l’estratègia organitzativa.
El marc teòric-conceptual es va elaborar a partir de la revisió bibliogràfica sobre el tema, de la qual es va derivar la
construcció del model analític, a partir del qual es van formular les hipòtesis de recerca dels estudis. La contrastació
empírica s’ha dut a terme a partir d'una metodologia quantitativa, que ha suposat la construcció d’un qüestionari que
s’ha aplicat, en forma d’enquesta en línia, a una mostra de màxims directius de 251 empreses del sector de l’hostaleria
a Portugal. Les dades primàries recollides van ser sotmeses a tractaments d’anàlisi estadística descriptiva i inferencial,
destacant l’aplicació del model d’equacions estructurals.
Els resultats d’aquesta tesi confirmen que (1) la innovació oberta millora positivament la gestió del risc empresarial,
l'estratègia organitzativa i l’avantatge competitiu i (2) la gestió del risc corporativa millora positivament l'estratègia
organitzativa i l’avantatge competitiu.Esta tesis se desarrolla a partir de la premisa de que el modelo de innovación abierta potencia las capacidades
innovadoras de las empresas, influyendo en la gestión del riesgo corporativo, la estrategia organizativa y la ventaja
competitiva. Así, el objetivo principal del estudio es analizar la relación de la innovación abierta con la gestión del
riesgo empresarial, la estrategia organizativa y la ventaja competitiva y, adicionalmente, el efecto mediador de la
gestión del riesgo empresarial en la relación entre la innovación abierta y la estrategia organizativa en esta relación.
El marco teórico-conceptual se elaboró a partir de la revisión de la literatura sobre el tema, de la que se derivó la
construcción del modelo analítico, a partir del cual se formularon las hipótesis de investigación de los estudios. La
contrastación empírica de las mismas se realizó a partir de una metodología cuantitativa, que implicó la construcción
de un cuestionario que se aplicó, en forma de encuesta online, a una muestra de 251 altos directivos de empresas del
sector de la hostelería en Portugal.
Los datos primarios recogidos fueron sometidos a tratamientos de análisis estadístico descriptivo e inferencial,
destacando la aplicación del modelo de ecuaciones estructurales.This thesis is developed from the premise that the open innovation model enhances the innovative capabilities of firms,
influencing corporate risk management, organizational strategy and competitive advantage. The main objective of the
study is thus to analyse the relationship of open innovation with corporate risk management, organizational strategy
and competitive advantage and, additionally, the mediating effect of corporate risk management on the relationship
between open innovation and organizational strategy in this relationship.
The theoretical-conceptual framework was elaborated based on the literature review on the subject, from which the
construction of the analytical model was derived, from which the research hypotheses of the studies were formulated.
The empirical contrasting of these was carried out based on a quantitative methodology, which involved the
construction of a questionnaire that was applied, in the form of an online survey, to a sample of 251 firms’ top
managers in the hospitality sector in Portugal. The primary data collected were subjected to descriptiv
Data-Driven Evaluation of In-Vehicle Information Systems
Today’s In-Vehicle Information Systems (IVISs) are featurerich systems that provide the driver with numerous options for entertainment, information, comfort, and communication. Drivers can stream their favorite songs, read reviews of nearby restaurants, or change the ambient lighting to their liking. To do so, they interact with large center stack touchscreens that have become the main interface between the driver and IVISs. To interact with these systems, drivers must take their eyes off the road which can impair their driving performance. This makes IVIS evaluation critical not only to meet customer needs but also to ensure road safety. The growing number of features, the distraction caused by large touchscreens, and the impact of driving automation on driver behavior pose significant challenges for the design and evaluation of IVISs. Traditionally, IVISs are evaluated qualitatively or through small-scale user studies using driving simulators. However, these methods are not scalable to the growing number of features and the variety of driving scenarios that influence driver interaction behavior. We argue that data-driven methods can be a viable solution to these challenges and can assist automotive User Experience (UX) experts in evaluating IVISs. Therefore, we need to understand how data-driven methods can facilitate the design and evaluation of IVISs, how large amounts of usage data need to be visualized, and how drivers allocate their visual attention when interacting with center stack touchscreens.
In Part I, we present the results of two empirical studies and create a comprehensive understanding of the role that data-driven methods currently play in the automotive UX design process. We found that automotive UX experts face two main conflicts: First, results from qualitative or small-scale empirical studies are often not valued in the decision-making process. Second, UX experts often do not have access to customer data and lack the means and tools to analyze it appropriately. As a result, design decisions are often not user-centered and are based on subjective judgments rather than evidence-based customer insights. Our results show that automotive UX experts need data-driven methods that leverage large amounts of telematics data collected from customer vehicles. They need tools to help them visualize and analyze customer usage data and computational methods to automatically evaluate IVIS designs.
In Part II, we present ICEBOAT, an interactive user behavior analysis tool for automotive user interfaces. ICEBOAT processes interaction data, driving data, and glance data, collected over-the-air from customer vehicles and visualizes it on different levels of granularity. Leveraging our multi-level user behavior analysis framework, it enables UX experts to effectively and efficiently evaluate driver interactions with touchscreen-based IVISs concerning performance and safety-related metrics.
In Part III, we investigate drivers’ multitasking behavior and visual attention allocation when interacting with center stack touchscreens while driving. We present the first naturalistic driving study to assess drivers’ tactical and operational self-regulation with center stack touchscreens. Our results show significant differences in drivers’ interaction and glance behavior in response to different levels of driving automation, vehicle speed, and road curvature. During automated driving, drivers perform more interactions per touchscreen sequence and increase the time spent looking at the center stack touchscreen. These results emphasize the importance of context-dependent driver distraction assessment of driver interactions with IVISs. Motivated by this we present a machine learning-based approach to predict and explain the visual demand of in-vehicle touchscreen interactions based on customer data. By predicting the visual demand of yet unseen touchscreen interactions, our method lays the foundation for automated data-driven evaluation of early-stage IVIS prototypes. The local and global explanations provide additional insights into how design artifacts and driving context affect drivers’ glance behavior.
Overall, this thesis identifies current shortcomings in the evaluation of IVISs and proposes novel solutions based on visual analytics and statistical and computational modeling that generate insights into driver interaction behavior and assist UX experts in making user-centered design decisions
Exploring levers for agility and their inter-relations in the German energy industry via neo-configurational theory
Organisational agility describes firms’ ability to proactively and reactively handle external changes like the COVID and Ukraine crises. This thesis researches how levers
like culture (in this thesis = mindset) or strategy impact agility. Existing research shows
agility’s outcome but neglects its origin and its levers’ interactions. Since mindsets guide
employees and leaders, research was requested for how organisational culture influences
other levers’ effects. Therefore, this thesis developed a literature-based framework of
levers, tailored it to the studied context, proposing that strategy, technology, linkages, and
structures, filtered through employees’ and leaders’ mindsets, interact to lead to agility.
Neo-configurational theory (NCT) provided the theoretical underpinning for lever inter-relations, basing this research in wider organisational theory. As critical realist work, the
thesis recognised agility’s context-specificity and examined the recently turbulent German
energy industry as exemplary context. 36 semi-structured interviews in 15 purposefully
sampled companies were analysed in three steps: All data were thematically analysed.
Fuzzy-values were derived using the Generic Membership Evaluation Template (GMET).
The concluding fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) determined pathways to agility and non-agility, levers’ interdependencies, and mindset’s role.
The results show that agility presupposes an implemented agile strategy (i.e. strategy
filtering agility) but not necessarily a very agile culture, while non-agility comes with
a very non-agile employee mindset (i.e. culture filtering non-agility). Three strategy-dependent paths to agility exist for energy companies: one builds on internal and external linkages, one on lacking technological capabilities with improvement spirit, and one
couples agile employee mindsets with decentralised structures. Three employee mindset-dependent paths describe non-agility: one builds on lacking linkages and supportive leadership, one on lacking technological capabilities, supportive leadership and strategy, and
one on lacking technology capabilities reflecting in inadequate structures. This thesis’
major methodological contributions are refining the GMET as new tool to transform qualitative data into fuzzy-values and further establishing fsQCA in management research.
Academics gain a sound theoretical basis for agility in form of NCT and practitioners
and academics a view on agility levers’ role, especially on culture and strategy. Utilities’
managers can use this to prioritise levers facing sudden changes
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