Artificial general intelligence: Proceedings of the Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2009, Arlington, Virginia, USA, March 6-9, 2009

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI – to create broad human-like and transhuman intelligence, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called narrow AI – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of human level intelligence and more broadly artificial general intelligence

The nature of management work.

The thesis contributes to an understanding of the nature of Managerial work, confronting the work in its natural setting. It offers an empirically grounded description of the social organisation of managerial work; it explores the taken for granted features of managers'work that allows members to recognise and reproduce their normal everyday activities amid the variability and complexity that comprises their days work. The study finds managerial work to be a primarily verbal activity; accessible through a study of interaction. Resources of Conversation Analysis are utilised to explore how the managers use talk to accomplish their activities and to expose and test their understanding. An ethnographically informed approach reveals that the social organisation of the work is inextricable from local, referential matters. The thesis is presented in two parts. Part I explorest he 'insitu' accomplishment of a number of activities within selected instances of managerial work; a memo,a discussion of future work plans and a strategic planning meeting. It finds and demonstrates how such work as negotiating a position, identifying a problem reaching agreement is not just the outcome of a sequential organisation but of a retrospective-prospective design. Phenomena such as 'planning' and 'organising' are appropriated at the interactional level. They are found to be achieved in the insitu accomplishment of various conversational features; agreement and modification amongst others, through an understanding of local contingencies such as time scales for projects, the personalities involved, and by practices of description and explanation. Part 2 takes up an interest, begun in Part 1, with occasions when the managers offer explanations of their work. The ability to "talk about management" is found to be a competenc essential to the accomplishment of a number of managerial activities such as working up plans, making sensible a proposal. A number of occasions where particular managers offer verbal 'tours' of their work are explored. Not only doest his reveal something of how accounts get done, but it brings into the public domain some of the 'commonsense understandings' that the managers orientate in shaping up a telling of their work. Attention to these 'espoused logics' 'lines of regard' is important in terms of developing an adequate theory of the organisation of managerial work. It could be on the basis of these' practical theories' that the managers work proceeds that particular decisions get taken, plans are agreed etc

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN ROMANIA

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The survey was defined with the aim to involve the highest possible number of relevant CSR topics and give the issue a more wholesome perspective. It provides a basis for further comprehension and deeper analyses of specific CSR areas. The conditions determining the success of CSR in Romania have been defined in the paper on the basis of the previously cumulative knowledge as well as the results of various researches. This paper provides knowledge which may be useful in the programs promoting CSR.Corporate social responsibility, Supportive policies, Romania

Proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress

Published proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress, hosted by York University, 27-30 May 2018

The end of stigma? Understanding the dynamics of legitimisation in the context of TV series consumption

This research contributes to prior work on stigmatisation by looking at stigmatisation and legitimisation as social processes in the context of TV series consumption. Using in-depth interviews, we show that the dynamics of legitimisation are complex and accompanied by the reproduction of existing stigmas and creation of new stigmas

Knowledge and Management Models for Sustainable Growth

In the last years sustainability has become a topic of global concern and a key issue in the strategic agenda of both business organizations and public authorities and organisations. Significant changes in business landscape, the emergence of new technology, including social media, the pressure of new social concerns, have called into question established conceptualizations of competitiveness, wealth creation and growth. New and unaddressed set of issues regarding how private and public organisations manage and invest their resources to create sustainable value have brought to light. In particular the increasing focus on environmental and social themes has suggested new dimensions to be taken into account in the value creation dynamics, both at organisations and communities level. For companies the need of integrating corporate social and environmental responsibility issues into strategy and daily business operations, pose profound challenges, which, in turn, involve numerous processes and complex decisions influenced by many stakeholders. Facing these challenges calls for the creation, use and exploitation of new knowledge as well as the development of proper management models, approaches and tools aimed to contribute to the development and realization of environmentally and socially sustainable business strategies and practices

Self-determined teacher learning in a digital context fundamental change in thinking and practice

“Self-determined Teacher Learning in a Digital Context” reports on a longitudinal study of teacher empowerment through Constructionist learning about computational technologies and learning about learning itself. The study includes but looks beyond how teachers engage with technology, to how they redefine their own understandings o f learning as they use technology in working alongside their students. The teachers’ emerging self-reflective practice enables them to better understand the multifaceted structure of the learning situation and their own relations to its social, cognitive, and affective aspects. The “Empowering Minds” study also addresses how teachers can become critical judges o f technologies, in order to define for themselves and suggest for others what being digital can mean in learning. These processes have the potential to change educational strategies on personal, community and national scales. How teachers understand learning and how we conceptualise teacher learning will directly affect future generations’ potentials. Teachers grapple with epistemological issues in designing and developing environments around new protean materials that enable each person’s construction of ideas and expression of self. Learning theory becomes less abstract and more meaningful as teachers create a language for talking among themselves about learning. The resulting concrétisation of learning processes becomes possible through anchoring the learning with and about technologies in the teachers’ everyday reality o f the classroom. Teachers become empowered to use their own practice as “an object-to-thinkwith” in the Papertian sense. By externalising and examining their understandings of learning, they experiment with and ultimately transform their teaching practice, their relationships with their students, and their understandings of their role as teachers. Constructionists have been challenged to demonstrate that their assertions about education work. The approach described here is a compelling response. Furthermore its continuance among the original participants and its extension to a variety o f new initiatives demonstrate both sustainability and scalability