Exploratory study to explore the role of ICT in the process of knowledge management in an Indian business environment

In the 21st century and the emergence of a digital economy, knowledge and the knowledge base economy are rapidly growing. To effectively be able to understand the processes involved in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge management in the business environment is critical to the success of an organization. This study builds on the previous research of the authors on the enablers of knowledge management by identifying the relationship between the enablers of knowledge management and the role played by information communication technologies (ICT) and ICT infrastructure in a business setting. This paper provides the findings of a survey collected from the four major Indian cities (Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Villupuram) regarding their views and opinions about the enablers of knowledge management in business setting. A total of 80 organizations participated in the study with 100 participants in each city. The results show that ICT and ICT infrastructure can play a critical role in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge in an Indian business environment

Ontology-based specific and exhaustive user profiles for constraint information fusion for multi-agents

Intelligent agents are an advanced technology utilized in Web Intelligence. When searching information from a distributed Web environment, information is retrieved by multi-agents on the client site and fused on the broker site. The current information fusion techniques rely on cooperation of agents to provide statistics. Such techniques are computationally expensive and unrealistic in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a model that uses a world ontology constructed from the Dewey Decimal Classification to acquire user profiles. By search using specific and exhaustive user profiles, information fusion techniques no longer rely on the statistics provided by agents. The model has been successfully evaluated using the large INEX data set simulating the distributed Web environment

Exploring the Effectiveness of Transit Security Awareness Campaigns in the San Francisco Bay Area, Research Report 09-19

Public involvement in alerting officials of suspicious and potentially harmful activity is critical to the overall security of a transit system. As part of an effort to get passengers and the public involved, many transit agencies have security awareness campaigns. The objective of this research is to learn how transit agencies seek to make security awareness campaigns effective and explore how they measure the effectiveness of such campaigns, if at all. This research project includes data from case studies of five major agencies that provide transit service in the San Francisco Bay Area region. The case study data are comprised of descriptions of the types of security awareness campaigns the agencies have implemented, the goals of the campaigns, and how they seek to make their campaigns effective, as well as whether and how these agencies measure and determine the effectiveness of their campaigns. A positive finding of this research is the consistency with which Bay Area transit organizations address the need for passenger awareness as part of their overall security program. However, none of the five agencies analyzed for this study measures the effectiveness of their campaigns. Whereas they all have a similar goal—to increase passenger awareness about security issues—little evidence exists confirming to what extent they are achieving this goal. The paper concludes with suggestions for using outcome measurements to provide a reasonable indication of a campaign’s effectiveness by capturing the public’s response to a campaign

Error resilience analysis of wireless image transmission using JPEG, JPEG 2000 and JPWL

The wireless extension of the JPEG 2000 standard formally known as JPWL is the newest international standard for still image compression. Different from all previous standards, this new standard was created specifically for wireless imaging applications. This paper examines the error resilience performance of the JPEG, JPEG 2000 and JPWL standards in combating multi-path and fading impairments in Rayleigh fading channels. Comprehensive objective and subjective results are presented in relation to the error resilience performance of these three standards under various conditions. The major findings in this paper reveal that a CRC approach is not a viable option for protecting wireless image data when not used in conjunction with an efficient retransmission strategy. In addition, the Reed-Solomon error correction codes in JPWL provide strong protection for wireless image transmission. However, any stronger protection beyond RS(64,32) yields diminishing returns

California Wellness Foundation - 2001 Annual Report

Contains board chair and president's message, profiles of grantees of the Work and Health Initiative, grant guidelines, grants list, and lists of board members and staff

Bus Rapid Transit: A Handbook for Partners, MTI Report 06-02

In April 2005, the Caltrans Division of Research and Innovation (DRI) asked MTI to assist with the research for and publication of a guidebook for use by Caltrans employees who work with local transit agencies and jurisdictions in planning, designing, and operating Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems that involve state facilities. The guidebook was also to assist to transit operators, local governments, community residents, and other stakeholders dealing with the development of BRT systems. Several areas in the state have experienced such projects ( San Diego , Los Angeles , San Francisco , and Alameda County ) and DRI wished to use that experience to guide future efforts and identify needed changes in statutes, policies, and other state concerns. Caltrans convened a Task Team from the Divisions of Research and Innovation, Mass Transportation, and Operations, together with stakeholders representing many of those involved with the BRT activities around the state. Prior to MTI’s involvement, this group produced a white paper on the topic, a series of questions, and an outline of the guidebook that MTI was to write. The MTI team conducted case studies of the major efforts in California, along with less developed studies of some of the other BRT programs under development or in early implementation phases around the state. The purpose was to clarify those issues that need to be addressed in the guidebook, as well as to compile information that would identify items needing legislative or regulatory action and items that Caltrans will need to address through district directives or other internal measures. A literature scan was used to develop a bibliography for future reference. The MTI team also developed a draft Caltrans director’s policy document, which provides the basis for Caltrans’ actions. This ultimately developed to be a project within a project. MTI submitted a draft document to Caltrans as a final product from the Institute. Task team members and Caltrans staff and leadership provided extensive review of the draft Bus Rapid Transit: A Handbook for Partners. Caltrans adopted a new Director’s Policy and published the document, BRT Caltrans. The MTI “wraparound” report presented below discusses in more detail the process that was followed to produce the draft report. The process was in many ways as much a project as the report itself

An improved chaos method for monitoring the depth of anaesthesia

This paper proposed a new method to monitor the depth of anaesthesia (DoA) by modifying the Hurst parameters in Chaos method. Two new indices (CDoA and CsDoA) are proposed to estimate the anaesthesia states of patients. In order to reduce the fluctuation of CDoA and CsDoA trends, the Chaos and Modified Detrended Average methods (C-MDMA) are combined together. Compared with Bispectrum (BIS) index, CDoA, the CsDoA and C-MDMA trends are close to the BIS trend in the whole scale from 100 to 0 with a full recording time

Cooperative medium access control based on spectrum leasing

Based on cooperative spectrum leasing, a distributed “win–win” (WW) cooperative framework is designed to encourage the licensed source node (SN) to lease some part of its spectral resources to the unlicensed relay node (RN) for the sake of simultaneously improving the SN’s achievable rate and for reducing the energy consumption (EC). The potential candidate RNs carry out autonomous decisions concerning whether to contend for a cooperative transmission opportunity, which could dissipate some of their battery power, while conveying their traffic in light of their individual service requirements. Furthermore, a WW cooperative medium-access-control (MAC) protocol is designed to implement the proposed distributed WW cooperative framework. Simulation results demonstrate that our WW cooperative MAC protocol is capable of providing both substantial rate improvements and considerable energy savings for the cooperative spectrum leasing system

Harmonisation, decentralisation and local governance: Enhancing aid effectiveness

During the last decades, international development assistance was often marked by overlaps, duplication of efforts and rivalry between multitudes of donor organisations. In order to translate the principles of the Paris Declaration into practice in the field of Local Governance and Decentralisation (LGD), different donor organisations have joined forces on headquarter level and formed a working group, the Development Partners Working Group for Local Governance and Decentralisation (DPWG-LGD), which is operating since 2006. InWEnt is hosting the secretariat of the group since 2008 and assigned Wageningen International to organise two lead donor workshops. The workshop drew a cross section of delegates who comprised development partners, consultants, academicians, members of parliament and local governance practitioners. The partner countries included Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda whose experiences were mutually re-enforcing and beneficial