243,695 research outputs found

    Justification of Recommender Systems Results: A Service-based Approach

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    With the increasing demand for predictable and accountable Artificial Intelligence, the ability to explain or justify recommender systems results by specifying how items are suggested, or why they are relevant, has become a primary goal. However, current models do not explicitly represent the services and actors that the user might encounter during the overall interaction with an item, from its selection to its usage. Thus, they cannot assess their impact on the user's experience. To address this issue, we propose a novel justification approach that uses service models to (i) extract experience data from reviews concerning all the stages of interaction with items, at different granularity levels, and (ii) organize the justification of recommendations around those stages. In a user study, we compared our approach with baselines reflecting the state of the art in the justification of recommender systems results. The participants evaluated the Perceived User Awareness Support provided by our service-based justification models higher than the one offered by the baselines. Moreover, our models received higher Interface Adequacy and Satisfaction evaluations by users having different levels of Curiosity or low Need for Cognition (NfC). Differently, high NfC participants preferred a direct inspection of item reviews. These findings encourage the adoption of service models to justify recommender systems results but suggest the investigation of personalization strategies to suit diverse interaction needs

    Standing in a Garden of Forking Paths

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    According to the Path Principle, it is permissible to expand your set of beliefs iff (and because) the evidence you possess provides adequate support for such beliefs. If there is no path from here to there, you cannot add a belief to your belief set. If some thinker with the same type of evidential support has a path that they can take, so do you. The paths exist because of the evidence you possess and the support it provides. Evidential support grounds propositional justification. The principle is mistaken. There are permissible steps you may take that others may not even if you have the very same evidence. There are permissible steps that you cannot take that others can even if your beliefs receive the same type of evidential support. Because we have to assume almost nothing about the nature of evidential support to establish these results, we should reject evidentialism

    Are Reasons Causally Relevant for Action? Dharmakīrti and the Embodied Cognition Paradigm

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    How do mental states come to be about something other than their own operations, and thus to serve as ground for effective action? This papers argues that causation in the mental domain should be understood to function on principles of intelligibility (that is, on principles which make it perfectly intelligible for intentions to have a causal role in initiating behavior) rather than on principles of mechanism (that is, on principles which explain how causation works in the physical domain). The paper considers Dharmakīrti’s kāryānumāna argument (that is, the argument that an inference is sound only when one infers from the effect to the cause and not vice versa), and proposes a naturalized account of reasons. On this account, careful scrutiny of the effect can provide a basis for ascertaining the unique causal totality that is its source, but only for reasoning that is context‐specific

    Ethical decision-making, passivity and pharmacy

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    Background: Increasing interest in empirical ethics has enhanced understanding of healthcare professionals' ethical problems and attendant decision-making. A four-stage decision-making model involving ethical attention, reasoning, intention and action offers further insights into how more than reasoning alone may contribute to decision-making. Aims: To explore how the four-stage model can increase understanding of decision-making in healthcare and describe the decision-making of an under-researched professional group. Methods: 23 purposively sampled UK community pharmacists were asked, in semi-structured interviews, to describe ethical problems in their work and how they were resolved. Framework analysis of transcribed interviews utilised the four decision-making stages, together with constant comparative methods and deviant-case analysis. Results: Pharmacists were often inattentive and constructed problems in legal terms. Ethical reasoning was limited, but examples of appeals to consequences, the golden rule, religious faith and common-sense experience emerged. Ethical intention was compromised by frequent concern about legal prosecution. Ethical inaction was common, typified by pharmacists' failure to report healthcare professionals' bad practices, and ethical passivity emerged to describe these negative examples of the four decision-making stages. Pharmacists occasionally described more ethically active decision-making, but this often involved ethical uncertainty. Discussion: The four decision-making stages are a useful tool in considering how healthcare professionals try to resolve ethical problems in practice. They reveal processes often ignored in normative theories, and their recognition and the emergence of ethical passivity indicates the complexity of decision-making in practice. Ethical passivity may be deleterious to patients' welfare, and concerns emerge about improving pharmacists' ethical training and promoting ethical awareness and responsibility

    Contextuality and Information Systems: how the interplay between paradigms can help

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    Through this paper, we theorize on the meanings and roles of context in the study of information systems. The literatures of information systems and information science both explicitly conceptualize information systems (and there are multiple overlapping definitions). These literatures also grapple with the situated and generalizable natures of an information system. Given these shared interests and common concerns, this paper is used as a vehicle to explore the roles of context and suggests how multi-paradigmatic research ??? another shared feature of both information science and information systems scholarship ??? provides a means to carry forward more fruitful studies of information systems. We discuss the processes of reconstructed logic and logic-in-use in terms of studying information systems. We argue that what goes on in the practice of researchers, or the logic-in-practice, is typified by what we are calling the contextuality problem. In response, we envision a reconstructed logic, which is an idealization of academic practices regarding context. The logic-in-use of the field is then further explained based on two different views on context. The paper concludes by proposing a model for improving the logic-in-use for the study of information systems

    Beyond subjective and objective in statistics

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    We argue that the words "objectivity" and "subjectivity" in statistics discourse are used in a mostly unhelpful way, and we propose to replace each of them with broader collections of attributes, with objectivity replaced by transparency, consensus, impartiality, and correspondence to observable reality, and subjectivity replaced by awareness of multiple perspectives and context dependence. The advantage of these reformulations is that the replacement terms do not oppose each other. Instead of debating over whether a given statistical method is subjective or objective (or normatively debating the relative merits of subjectivity and objectivity in statistical practice), we can recognize desirable attributes such as transparency and acknowledgment of multiple perspectives as complementary goals. We demonstrate the implications of our proposal with recent applied examples from pharmacology, election polling, and socioeconomic stratification.Comment: 35 page

    Software support for manufacturing operations in Belgian SMEs: one size fits all?

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    Manufacturing companies face a big challenge to bridge the gap between their business and manufacturing processes. The urge to increase efficiency makes it necessary to align the business and manufacturing processes. Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) experience several barriers to adopt software support for manufacturing operations. This paper gives an overview of a research study conducted in Belgian SMEs. The research studied the current adoption of software support for manufacturing operations and the barriers that SMEs experience to invest in this type of software. The study is concluded with a number of considerations to enable the adoption of software support for manufacturing operations by SMEs

    Collaborative Epistemic Discourse in Classroom Information Seeking Tasks

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    We discuss the relationship between information seeking, and epistemic beliefs – beliefs about the source, structure, complexity, and stability of knowledge – in the context of collaborative information seeking discourses. We further suggest that both information seeking, and epistemic cognition research agendas have suffered from a lack of attention to how information seeking as a collaborative activity is mediated by talk between partners – an area we seek to address in this paper. A small-scale observational study using sociocultural discourse analysis was conducted with eight eleven year old pupils who carried out search engine tasks in small groups. Qualitative and quantitative analysis were performed on their discussions using sociocultural discourse analytic techniques. Extracts of the dialogue are reported, informed by concordance analysis and quantitative coding of dialogue duration. We find that 1) discourse which could be characterised as ‘epistemic’ is identifiable in student talk, 2) that it is possible to identify talk which is more or less productive, and 3) that epistemic talk is associated with positive learning outcomes
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