How CIOs Can Enable Governance of Value Nets

Value nets are the architecture of sourcing agreements and alliances that firms implement to gain complementary resources and capabilities from other firms. They are a source of innovation, growth, and competitive success. However, governing value nets is challenging, and the IT support needed to enable them depends on the governance mode a firm chooses. Based on case studies of three Fortune 100 firms, we define three governance modes—prescriptive, evaluative, and collaborative. Prescriptive governance specifies partners\u27 activities and retains decisions rights. It is effectively supported by dashboards that monitor the status of partners\u27 activities, alerts that surface exceptions and errors, business rules that automate activities and handling of errors, and extended enterprise architectures that protect intellectual property. Evaluative governance delegates decision rights to partners for operational execution and assesses their capabilities through periodic evaluations. It is effectively supported by loosely coupled processes that provide partners with limited autonomy, periodic reporting of performance on service level agreements, and data and process mining directed at improving partners\u27 capabilities. Collaborative governance promotes peer-to-peer collaboration with value net partners. It is supported by metadata architectures that control repositories of information and process resources, by consistent business rules to coordinate processes, by monitoring of the total costs of the relationship, and by business intelligence for predictive monitoring. CIOs and senior IT executives can apply these findings to choose an appropriate governance mode and enable it with appropriate IT applications and processes

MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system

MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan "Clay" telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0$^\mathrm{th}$ to 16$^\mathrm{th}$ $R$-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28x28 to 7x7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide flat wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1 $\mu$m and Clio2 operating from 1-5 $\mu$m. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Proc. SPIE 9148-

Does religion promote environmental sustainability? : exploring the role of religion in local energy transitions

This article explores the role of religion in local energy transition processes. By combining insights from (a) sustainability studies and (b) academic contributions on religion and sustainability, a theoretical approach for describing the role of religion in local energy transitions is developed. Religion is conceived of as a subsystem among other local subsystems that potentially contribute via their competences to energy transition processes. Three potential functions of religion are identified: (1) Campaigning and intermediation in the public sphere; (2) “Materialization” of transitions in the form of participation in projects related to sustainable transitions; and (3) Dissemination of values and worldviews that empower environmental attitudes and action. These functions are studied in the case of the energy transition in Emden, a city in North-Western Germany. Although religion attends, to some degree, each of the three functions, it does not assume a dominant role relative to other local subsystems. Actors from other social subsystems appear to overtake these functions in a more efficient way. As such, in a highly environmentally active region, there are few indications for a specific function of religion. These results shed a critical light on the previously held assumption that religion has a crucial impact on sustainability transitions

Communication and control in an integrated manufacturing system

Typically, components in a manufacturing system are all centrally controlled. Due to possible communication bottlenecking, unreliability, and inflexibility caused by using a centralized controller, a new concept of system integration called an Integrated Multi-Robot System (IMRS) was developed. The IMRS can be viewed as a distributed real time system. Some of the current research issues being examined to extend the framework of the IMRS to meet its performance goals are presented. These issues include the use of communication coprocessors to enhance performance, the distribution of tasks and the methods of providing fault tolerance in the IMRS. An application example of real time collision detection, as it relates to the IMRS concept, is also presented and discussed

Embodied Continual Learning Across Developmental Time Via Developmental Braitenberg Vehicles

There is much to learn through synthesis of Developmental Biology, Cognitive Science and Computational Modeling. One lesson we can learn from this perspective is that the initialization of intelligent programs cannot solely rely on manipulation of numerous parameters. Our path forward is to present a design for developmentally-inspired learning agents based on the Braitenberg Vehicle. Using these agents to exemplify artificial embodied intelligence, we move closer to modeling embodied experience and morphogenetic growth as components of cognitive developmental capacity. We consider various factors regarding biological and cognitive development which influence the generation of adult phenotypes and the contingency of available developmental pathways. These mechanisms produce emergent connectivity with shifting weights and adaptive network topography, thus illustrating the importance of developmental processes in training neural networks. This approach provides a blueprint for adaptive agent behavior that might result from a developmental approach: namely by exploiting critical periods or growth and acquisition, an explicitly embodied network architecture, and a distinction between the assembly of neural networks and active learning on these networks.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Corporate strategy revisited: A view from complexity theory

Despite its long tradition and well known contributions, corporate strategy research is yet far from being mature. This paper proposes an innovative framework that approaches the field from the theoretical perspective provided by complexity theory. We propose to see the corporate level of the organization as the driver, pacer and framer of the overall firm's evolution process. Drive is provided by the cognitive representation of the corporate fitness landscape that is implicit in the firm's corporate plan. Pacing is a consequence of the kind of strategic initiatives ("search strategy") developed by the company. Framing is achieved through the architectural design that the corporate level implements for the firm.corporate strategy; complexity theory; self-organizing;

An Architectural Solution of Assistance e-Services for Diabetes Diet

The aim of this paper is to outline the requirements and main architecture for a useful tool for determining the nutrition facts of food for people having Type 2 Diabetes. This diabetes is used only to establish the target audience, a “mass of people†having, maybe, to less in common regarding the computer usage skills. The characteristics of the target audience (huge number, diversity of habits and behaviors, computer usage skills) requires a solution based on web services delivered at least partly as a standalone/ portable application, build from Web services and provided with means for domain knowledge dissemination and usage.Software Architecture, Knowledge Management, SIK, Business Rules, Type 2 Diabetes

How European structure impacts on national actors: the case of Norwegian policy-makers

This article seeks to explain the role of identity politics in defining the national elite’s perceptions of the European Union and their foreign policy choices. It is argued that when analyzing foreign policy choices of the national elite, not only the interests and preferences but also the identity questions must be taken into account. In any national context, ideas, identities, and perceptions of self and the EU are expected to impact on the subsequent policy choices about Europe. This article seeks to explain this impact by applying a combination of the fusion approach and social constructivist approach on Norwegian policy-makers. Although not a member of the EU, Norway established a good level of economic integration and political cooperation with the EU through the European Economic Area Agreement. This article seeks to analyse this relationship empirically using Justice and Home Affairs Policy as a case study area