Memetic: from meeting memory to virtual ethnography & distributed video analysis

The JISC-funded Memetic2 project was designed as knowledge management and project memory support for teams meeting via the Access Grid environment (Buckingham Shum et al, 2006). This paper describes how these capabilities also enable it to serve as a novel distributed video analysis tool to support interaction analysis. Memetic technologies can be used to record, annotate and discuss sessions recorded within a flexible, visual hypermedia environment called Compendium. We propose that beyond the use originally conceived, the Memetic toolset could find wide ranging applications within social science for virtual ethnography and data analysis

Performing Hybrid Recommendation in Intermodal Transportation – the FTMarket System’s Recommendation Module

Diverse recommendation techniques have been already proposed and encapsulated into several e-business applications, aiming to perform a more accurate evaluation of the existing information and accordingly augment the assistance provided to the users involved. This paper reports on the development and integration of a recommendation module in an agent-based transportation transactions management system. The module is built according to a novel hybrid recommendation technique, which combines the advantages of collaborative filtering and knowledge-based approaches. The proposed technique and supporting module assist customers in considering in detail alternative transportation transactions that satisfy their requests, as well as in evaluating completed transactions. The related services are invoked through a software agent that constructs the appropriate knowledge rules and performs a synthesis of the recommendation policy

Information extraction from multimedia web documents: an open-source platform and testbed

The LivingKnowledge project aimed to enhance the current state of the art in search, retrieval and knowledge management on the web by advancing the use of sentiment and opinion analysis within multimedia applications. To achieve this aim, a diverse set of novel and complementary analysis techniques have been integrated into a single, but extensible software platform on which such applications can be built. The platform combines state-of-the-art techniques for extracting facts, opinions and sentiment from multimedia documents, and unlike earlier platforms, it exploits both visual and textual techniques to support multimedia information retrieval. Foreseeing the usefulness of this software in the wider community, the platform has been made generally available as an open-source project. This paper describes the platform design, gives an overview of the analysis algorithms integrated into the system and describes two applications that utilise the system for multimedia information retrieval

Empirical Assessment of Coherence in Information Technology Firms

Coherence is the ability to discover new – potentially profitable – combinations of various types of knowledge assets where complementarity is the basis for relevant combinations. Assets are considered complementary if doing (more of) any one of them increases the returns to doing (more of) others. Despite its strategic importance, few studies have addressed the issue of coherence in the Information Technology (IT) industry. This paper develops a novel methodology assess the extent of complementarity and coherence in the IT firms grounded in ‘sensemaking’, evolutionary economics, and strategic management. This paper uses managerial perspective for defining businesses. Managers and IT experts identify a typical IT firm based on the dimensions of applications (verticals) and specializations (service lines). Another feature of this paper is the use of survivor principle for assessing complementarity. The results on complementarity suggest that in case of applications, the boundaries between Transport & Ports and Airlines & Railways are getting blurred and these could become a generic combination. Similarly, in case of specializations Software maintenance migration and RDBMS, Datawarehousing & Datamining could become a generic combination. The results also suggest that there is substantial scope for improvement in coherence in both applications and specializations. Analysis of coherence also indicates greater fungibility of knowledge in applications than knowledge in specializations. Another finding is that the IT firms retain coherence with large number of applications but not with large number of specializations. Finally, as the number of applications and specializations reach a critical limit, the average coherence shows a definite decline.

Using the Internet to improve university education

Up to this point, university education has largely remained unaffected by the developments of novel approaches to web-based learning. The paper presents a principled approach to the design of problem-oriented, web-based learning at the university level. The principles include providing authentic contexts with multimedia, supporting collaborative knowledge construction, making thinking visible with dynamic visualisation, quick access to content resources via information and communication technologies, and flexible support by tele-tutoring. These principles are used in the MUNICS learning environment, which is designed to support students of computer science to apply their factual knowledge from the lectures to complex real-world problems. For example, students may model the knowledge management in an educational organisation with a graphical simulation tool. Some more general findings from a formative evaluation study with the MUNICS prototype are reported and discussed. For example, the students' ignorance of the additional content resources is discussed in the light of the well-known finding of insufficient use of help systems in software applications

Intelligent Management and Efficient Operation of Big Data

This chapter details how Big Data can be used and implemented in networking and computing infrastructures. Specifically, it addresses three main aspects: the timely extraction of relevant knowledge from heterogeneous, and very often unstructured large data sources, the enhancement on the performance of processing and networking (cloud) infrastructures that are the most important foundational pillars of Big Data applications or services, and novel ways to efficiently manage network infrastructures with high-level composed policies for supporting the transmission of large amounts of data with distinct requisites (video vs. non-video). A case study involving an intelligent management solution to route data traffic with diverse requirements in a wide area Internet Exchange Point is presented, discussed in the context of Big Data, and evaluated.Comment: In book Handbook of Research on Trends and Future Directions in Big Data and Web Intelligence, IGI Global, 201

dynPARTIX - A Dynamic Programming Reasoner for Abstract Argumentation

The aim of this paper is to announce the release of a novel system for abstract argumentation which is based on decomposition and dynamic programming. We provide first experimental evaluations to show the feasibility of this approach.Comment: The paper appears in the Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Applications of Declarative Programming and Knowledge Management (INAP 2011