On the use of smart and semi-automatic interfaces to structure unstructured data

Chaque jour le volume de données numériques mondiales augmente considérablement. Plus de 75% de ces données sont non structurées. Cet article concerne la restructuration des informations graphiques contenues dans les fichiers PDF (Portable Document Format) et/ou les fichiers vectoriels. Ces documents sont détenus en général par les services de la « Smart Factory » : les bureaux d’études, les services des méthodes, les services des travaux neufs, les services de maintenance des entreprises. Pour restructurer ces données, nous proposons d’utiliser les méthodes d’Extraction des Connaissances dans les Données (ECD) ou, en anglais, Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD). Si, en théorie, l’utilisateur est présent lors de l’ECD, dans la pratique, ce n’est pas le cas. C’est le constat que faisait Fayard en 2003 lors de la conférence KDD. En général l’utilisateur n’est présent que lors de la phase de validation. Nous montrons pourquoi, dans la restructuration des données, il faut que l’utilisateur soit au centre du processus et présent à toutes les étapes. On peut parler d’E(A)CD pour une Extraction Anthropocentrée des Connaissances dans les Données.Every day, the volume of the world's digital data increases considerably. Over 75% of these data are non-structured. This paper is about restructuring graphic information contained in Portable Document Format (PDF) files and/or vector files. These documents are generally held by ''Smart Factory'' services: design offices, methods departments, new work departments and company maintenance services. To restructure these data, we propose using Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) methods. Although, theoretically, the user is present during the KDD, in practice, this is not the case. This was observed by Fayard in 2003 at the KDD conference. Generally, the user is only present during the validation phase. We show why, in data restructuring, the user must be at the heart of the process and present at all stages. We can talk about (A)KDD for the Anthropocentric Knowledge Discovery in Databases .The first stage of this restructuring consists of extracting graphic and text objects contained in Portable Document Format (PDF) files to put them in a pivot data format. The second stage consists of coding this information in the form of an alphabet. The third stage consists of recreating the graphic and text components which are repeated in these files (which we shall refer to as graphemes). And the fourth stage consists either (1) of automatically identifying these graphemes based on knowledge or (2) presenting them so the user identifies and introduces them into the knowledge base. It is this entire restructuring process, which we will describe in this paper. As we highlighted, in this incremental process it is people who play the main role, assisted by computers and not the opposite

An ambient assisted living solution for mobile environments

An Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) mobile health application solution with biofeedback based on body sensors is very useful to perform a data collection for diagnosis in patients whose clinical conditions are not favourable. This system allows comfort, mobility, and efficiency in all the process of data collection providing more confidence and operability. A physical fall may be considered something natural in the life span of a human being from birth to death. In a perfect scenario it would be possible to predict when a fall will occur in order to avoid it. Falls represent a high risk for senior people health. Those falls can cause fractures or injuries causing great dependence and debilitation to the elderly and even death in extreme cases. Falls can be detected by the accelerometer included in most of the available mobile phones or portable digital assistants (PDAs). To reverse this tendency, it can be obtained more accurate data for patients monitoring from the body sensors attached to the human body (such as, electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyography (EMG), blood volume pulse (BVP), electro dermal activity (EDA), and galvanic skin response (GSR)). Then, this dissertation reviews the related literature on this topic and introduces a mobile solution for falls prevention, detection, and biofeedback monitoring. The proposed system collects sensed data that is sent to a smartphone or tablet through Bluetooth. Mobile devices are used to process and display information graphically to users. The falls prevention system uses collected data from sensors in order to control and advice the patient or even to give instructions to treat an abnormal condition to reduce the falls risk. In cases of symptoms that last more time it can even detect a possible disease. The signal processing algorithms plays a key role in the fall prevention system. These algorithms in real time, through the capture of biofeedback data, are needed to extract relevant information from the signals detected to warn the patient. Monitoring and processing data from sensors is realized by a smartphone or tablet that will send warnings to users. All the process is performed in real time. These mobile devices are also used as a gateway to send the collected data to a Web service, which subsequently allows data storage and consultation. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype and it is ready for use

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Public Private Partnerships in Low and Middle Income Country Contexts: Case Studies from Nigeria

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a popular concept in international policy making circles. Since the 1970s they have been increasingly advocated as a way to address a range of public service issues, as part of a global proliferation of neoliberal governance methods. PPPs have recently been presented as a solution to worsening global sustainability problems such as climate change, especially in low and middle-income countries. Of the body of literature that examines PPPs in low and middle-income countries, there are relatively few empirical studies that look at how PPPs in sustainability are implemented. This thesis aims to address this gap in the literature by analysing the application of partnerships in the Niger Delta, using qualitative research methods. The thesis presents a brief political history of the Niger Delta, followed by four empirical chapters that apply distinct conceptual approaches. First, I use stakeholder mapping to study an international partnership based in the Niger Delta. This approach serves to introduce important actors and highlight power relations between them but fails to capture some of the influences on these power dynamics that were expressed in the data collected for the study. To delve further into these influences, I build an analytical framework from concepts of structure, agency,and structuration, adapted to fit the empirical organisational context of the partnership. This ap- proach allows for a novel analysis that accommodates influences on the partnership at multiple scales, including the individual scale, however the approach is not without limitations. In a second case study, I investigate the application of a partnership model of community engagement developed by International Oil Companies operating in The Delta. For this analysis I use concepts of governmentality, which serve to foreground processes of power formation, including subject formation, at multiple scales. This approach allows for an exploration of the motivations of individuals and organisations and the formation of power through the implementation of the model, giving some insight into potential mechanisms behind the model’s outcomes. Through their application, the above analytical frameworks fail to fully capture the role of the state in the Niger Delta, which an integral conceptual component of PPPs. The role of the state in the two case studies is subsequently brought into focus in the final empirical chapter using an approach that aims to visualise the role of the state in the Niger Delta from differing perspectives. This exercise highlights some characteristics of the relationship between the state and the extractives industry in the Niger Delta. It also allows the analysis to consider how the relationship between the state and the extractives industry may influence the application of PPPs in the Delta more generally, relating findings back to the context of global sustainability issues. Each of these conceptual approaches have not yet been used to investigate PPPs in sustainability and have not been used in the context of the Niger Delta. Together these approaches aim to answer calls in social science literature for a new approach to the analysis of global, market-inspired governance methods that foregrounds power and processes within the institutions that enact these methods. This study therefore presents a range of novel perspectives on PPPs as a tool central to future global sustainability policy, developed from a context where this governance method is designed to be applied

What is the contribution of personal information management systems (PIMS) to the Working Model and personal work system of knowledge workers?

The thesis reports research into a phenomenon which it calls the personal working model of an individual knowledge worker. The principal conjecture addressed in this thesis is that each of us has a personal working model which is supported by a personal work system enabled by a personal information management system. For some people, these are well defined; for most they are not even explicit. By means of structured self-reflection aided by conceptual knowledge modelling within the context of a process of action learning they can be improved. That personal working model is predicted by Ashby's law of requisite variety and by the good regulator theorem of Conant and Ashby. The latter theorem states that the only good regulator of a system is a model of that system. The thesis and the work it reports result from a systemic approach to identifying the personal information management system and personal work system which together contribute to the personal working model. Starting with abductive conjecture, the author has sought to understand what models are and to explore ways in which those models can themselves be expressed. The thesis shows how a new approach to the conceptual modelling of aspects of the personal knowledge of knowledge worker was designed, built and then used. Similarly, the actual data used by a knowledge worker had to be stored, and for this purpose a personal information management system was also designed. Both these artefacts are evaluated in accordance with principles drawn from the literature of design science research. The research methodology adopted in the first phase of the research now ending also included a relatively novel approach in which the PhD student attempted to observe himself over the last five years of his PhD research – this approach is sometimes called autoethnography. This autoethnographic element is one of a number of methods used within an overall framework grounded by the philosophical approach called critical realism. The work reported in the thesis is initial exploratory research which, it is planned, will continue in empirical action research involving mentored action learning undertaken by professional knowledge workers

A practice-based approach to examining knowledge management repository use

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Though knowledge has become an increasingly important resource for modern businesses, it was not until the mid-1990's that the 'knowledge management' research stream emerged in the business and information systems literature. Initial research on how to manage knowledge came from an objectivist epistemology of knowledge that viewed it as something that was capable of captured, stored and transferred via information to increase organisational efficiency. This study is grounded in a more recent and alternative perspective that takes a practice based epistemology seeing knowledge as embedded in and inseparable from practice. The practices of interest relate to how knowledge work is performed in environments where there is heavy reliance on information systems. Using an interpretive case study this research analyses the practices of a product support centre of a US multinational. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and internal documentation, including access to the firms „knowledge management‟ repository. Two central practices were examined: how product support engineers made sense of problems to develop fix procedures and how these were subsequently documented. Even within a work environment where client fixes were verifiable, suggesting an objectivist epistemology, this research found that the practice based perspective could be used to provide a different perspective and develop alternative and useful insights. The study contributes to the practice based perspective on knowledge management by providing an analysis of context specific knowledge work practices by analysing how even in procedural repetitive work agency can be exhibited as actors enact practices. It also helps develop the application of Structuration Theory by aiding an understanding of how meanings, norms and resources are developed, drawn upon, conflict, and are changed as everyday work is accomplished. The study is of relevance by providing an understanding of informal knowledge work practices rather than their formal description

Business improvement through a structured approach to sustainability in the precast concrete flooring industry

Different production and business procurement systems in the precast flooring industry have traditionally been designed to offer products/services with high quality, within shorter delivery times, and with the lowest cost and expense possible. However, these systems do not account for the different environmental impacts arising from its operations. This thesis explores the environmental performance of precast concrete production systems and evaluates how precast organisations can maintain their business cases within a healthy and sustainable approved practice. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study was carried out for five Hollowcore and pre-stressed beams manufacturers (members of the Precast Flooring Federation—PFF) to identify the main environmental impacts arising from the production of precast flooring. It was found that mineral extraction, carbon dioxide emissions, waste disposal, and transportation are the main sources of environmental impact in the sector. [Continues.

Ecologies of Relation: Collectivity in Art and Media

How can relation be considered a creative force in the composition of experience? Investigating the status of relation in art, media, and philosophy, this thesis outlines an account of research-creation as a creative practice and tool for analysis. Research-creation, a term used to describe creative practices comprising artistic and theoretical components, provides the backdrop for a more general discussion of the production of knowledge beyond human cognition. By taking a radical empiricist approach, the thesis proposes to include preindividual, affective, and more-than-human elements in the conception of experience. From this point of view, experience is always relationally composed and manifests itself dynamically as an “ecology.” One way of developing a theory and practice attentive to such ecologies of relation resides in the notion of the collective, which refers here to a dimension of experience that exceeds the mere grouping of individual elements under a common interest, ideology, or social bond. The first chapter analyzes collectivity and relation as activities of emergence and becoming. Considered as ecological activity, collectivity emphasizes how experience comprises spatio-temporal dynamics constituting embodied, actual events and their singular forms of knowledge. Using the work of the SenseLab as exemplary, this chapter clarifies how research-creation might be better understood as an investigation into aesthetic and conceptual practices that mutually shape how forms of knowledge and experience co-emerge. From here, the focus on the ecological relation moves toward immersive media environments, which emphasize perception as a relational act of immediation. Immediation as relational act challenges the paradigm of mediation between humans and machines, and instead inserts their activity into an ecological dynamic. In this chapter, research-creation interlaces with concerns in the field of digital aesthetics. Consequently, the entanglements between different temporalities in digital media processes require a rethinking of affect as a temporal operation, which is the focus of chapter three. In chapters four and the conclusion, research-creation as a relational-ecological practice opens up toward political concerns in urban planning and activism, respectively, allowing for the development of an extended conception of the aesthetic politics of the collective beyond art and academia. From a final speculative outlook the thesis asks how an ecological and collective account of research-creation might turn philosophy into an aesthetic and political practice of activation