Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: NL

Proceedings ICPW'07: 2nd International Conference on the Pragmatic Web, 22-23 Oct. 2007, Tilburg: N

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Building an Ethical Small Group (Chapter 9 of Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership)

This chapter examines ethical leadership in the small-group context. To help create groups that brighten rather than darken the lives of participants, leaders must foster individual ethical accountability among group members, ensure ethical group interaction, avoid moral pitfalls, and establish ethical relationships with other groups. In his metaphor of the leader\u27s light or shadow, Parker Palmer emphasizes that leaders shape the settings or contexts around them. According to Palmer, leaders are people who have an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being, conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 1 In this final section of the text, I\u27ll describe some of the ways we can create conditions that illuminate the lives of followers in small-group, organizational, global, and crisis settings. Shedding light means both resisting and exerting influence. We must fend off pressures to engage in unethical behavior while actively seeking to create healthier moral environments

Let’s augment the future together!:Augmented reality troubleshooting support for IT/OT rolling stock failures

The railway industry is moving to a socio-technological system that relies on computer-controlled and human-machine interfaces. Opportunities arise for creating new services and commercial business cases by using technological innovations and traffic management systems. The convergence of Information Technology (IT) with Operational Technology (OT) is critical for cost-effective and reliable railway operations. However, this convergence introduces complexities, leading to more intricate rolling stock system failures. Hence, operators necessitate assistance in their troubleshooting and maintenance strategy to simplify the decision-making and action-taking processes. Augmented Reality (AR) emerges as a pivotal tool for troubleshooting within this context. AR enhances the operator’s ability to visualize, contextualize, and understand complex data by overlaying real-time and virtual information onto physical objects. AR supports the identification of IT/OT rolling stock system failures, offers troubleshooting directions, and streamlines maintenance procedures, ultimately enhancing decision-making and action-taking processes. This thesis investigates how AR can support operators in navigating troubleshooting and maintenance challenges posed by IT/OT rolling stock system failures in the railway industry

Automatic detection of accommodation steps as an indicator of knowledge maturing

Jointly working on shared digital artifacts – such as wikis – is a well-tried method of developing knowledge collectively within a group or organization. Our assumption is that such knowledge maturing is an accommodation process that can be measured by taking the writing process itself into account. This paper describes the development of a tool that detects accommodation automatically with the help of machine learning algorithms. We applied a software framework for task detection to the automatic identification of accommodation processes within a wiki. To set up the learning algorithms and test its performance, we conducted an empirical study, in which participants had to contribute to a wiki and, at the same time, identify their own tasks. Two domain experts evaluated the participants’ micro-tasks with regard to accommodation. We then applied an ontology-based task detection approach that identified accommodation with a rate of 79.12%. The potential use of our tool for measuring knowledge maturing online is discussed