Proactive Vision for Strategy Making

Strategy makers have expressed the need for computer support systems, which they can readily use to monitor, diagnose, analyze and synthesize the current performance of their organization and estimate its future potential, direction and performance. The computer software industry has attempted to meet this demand for many years; however, in this context, the computer-based executive support and decision support systems developed so far have provided only partial solutions. These systems have supported either specific processes or specific activities. They have not provided executives with the kind of support that would enable them to acquire a holistic understanding of the constructs, concepts, variables, specific issues, and also the relations and interrelationships that must be monitored and mastered in strategic planning and implementation. In this paper, we present a new way to analyze the current and future states of company strategy. We have used the Continuous Strategy ontology as a basic construct that incorporates many current strategic constructs, concepts, and ideas, culminating in an application that contains an ontology in which we have fixed linguistic statements. Through these statements, users can analyze the current strategic situation as well as future possible improvements to the current strategy. The system operates on the Internet and this is the first prototype application constructed for this purpose. The first test runs are only to demonstrate the ideas. In the future, this application will be tested in real strategy work in business life.© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

A vision-based approach for human hand tracking and gesture recognition.

Hand gesture interface has been becoming an active topic of human-computer interaction (HCI). The utilization of hand gestures in human-computer interface enables human operators to interact with computer environments in a natural and intuitive manner. In particular, bare hand interpretation technique frees users from cumbersome, but typically required devices in communication with computers, thus offering the ease and naturalness in HCI. Meanwhile, virtual assembly (VA) applies virtual reality (VR) techniques in mechanical assembly. It constructs computer tools to help product engineers planning, evaluating, optimizing, and verifying the assembly of mechanical systems without the need of physical objects. However, traditional devices such as keyboards and mice are no longer adequate due to their inefficiency in handling three-dimensional (3D) tasks. Special VR devices, such as data gloves, have been mandatory in VA. This thesis proposes a novel gesture-based interface for the application of VA. It develops a hybrid approach to incorporate an appearance-based hand localization technique with a skin tone filter in support of gesture recognition and hand tracking in the 3D space. With this interface, bare hands become a convenient substitution of special VR devices. Experiment results demonstrate the flexibility and robustness introduced by the proposed method to HCI.Dept. of Computer Science. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .L8. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-03, page: 0883. Adviser: Xiaobu Yuan. Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004

Usability Engineering and PPGIS - Towards a Learning-improving Cycle

July 21 - 2

Libraries in transition: evolving the information ecology of the Learning Commons: a sabbatical report

This sabbatical report studied various models in order to determine best practices for design, implementation and service of Leaning Commons, a library service model which functionally and spatially integrates library services, information technology services, and media services to provide a continuum of services to the user

Tasks, cognitive agents, and KB-DSS in workflow and process management

The purpose of this paper is to propose a nonparametric interest rate term structure model and investigate its implications on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities. The nonparametric spot interest rate process is estimated from the observed short-term interest rates following a robust estimation procedure and the market price of interest rate risk is estimated as implied from the historical term structure data. That is, instead of imposing a priori restrictions on the model, data are allowed to speak for themselves, and at the same time the model retains a parsimonious structure and the computational tractability. The model is implemented using historical Canadian interest rate term structure data. The parametric models with closed form solutions for bond and bond option prices, namely the Vasicek (1977) and CIR (1985) models, are also estimated for comparison purpose. The empirical results not only provide strong evidence that the traditional spot interest rate models and market prices of interest rate risk are severely misspecified but also suggest that different model specifications have significant impact on term structure dynamics and prices of interest rate derivative securities.