An architecture for organisational decision support

The Decision Support (DS) topic of the Network Enabled Capability for Through Life Systems Engineering (NECTISE) project aims to provide organisational through-life decision support for the products and services that BAE Systems deliver. The topic consists of five streams that cover resource capability management, decision management, collaboration, change prediction and integration. A proposed architecture is presented for an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) that combines the streams to provide a structured approach to addressing a number of issues that have been identified by BAE Systems business units as being relevant to DS: uncertainty and risk, shared situational awareness, types of decision making, decision tempo, triggering of decisions, and support for autonomous decision making. The proposed architecture will identify how either individuals or groups of decision makers (including autonomous agents) would be utilised on the basis of their capability within the requirements of the scenario to collaboratively solve the decision problem. Features of the scenario such as time criticality, required experience level, the need for justification, and conflict management, will be addressed within the architecture to ensure that the most appropriate decision management support (system/naturalistic/hybrid) is provided. In addition to being reliant on a number of human factors issues, the decision making process is also reliant on a number of information issues: overload, consistency, completeness, uncertainty and evolution, which will be discussed within the context of the architecture

Knowledge as Culture

Culture must not be seen as something that merely reflects an organization’s social reality: rather, it is an integral part of the process by which that reality is constructed. Knowledge management initiatives, per se, are not culture change projects; but, if culture stands in the way of what an organization needs to do, they must somehow impact

Mixing the Digital, Social, and Cultural: Learning, Identity, and Agency in Youth Participation

Part of the Volume on Youth, Identity, and Digital MediaHow do youth use media and technology as they learn to be participants in civic and democratic practices? We share two case studies -- one from a media arts production organization and one from a school board youth group -- that revolve around youth-adult interactions in learning environments that offer youth real opportunities to be influential in their respective communities. The cases feature youth and their involvements with digital media, pedagogical approaches, and engagements that enhance their participatory capacities. There are multiple channels through which these interactions happen, some with and facilitated by adults and others created and negotiated by youth. We describe how youth and adults establish learning environments for each other, negotiate the grounds for participation, and explore the possibilities and limitations of social and digital technologies in these processes, supporting the idea that this learning is something that young people do as agents in their development

"Internet universality": Human rights and principles for the internet

This paper details proposals by UNESCO to manufacture and draft a concept of “Internet Universality” that adopts a human-rights framework as a basis for articulating a set of principles and rights for the Internet. The paper discusses various drafts of this concept before examining the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet put forward by The Internet Rights & Principles Dynamic Coalition based at the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the working law Marco Civil da Internet introduced by Brazil

Conversational Sensing

Recent developments in sensing technologies, mobile devices and context-aware user interfaces have made it possible to represent information fusion and situational awareness as a conversational process among actors - human and machine agents - at or near the tactical edges of a network. Motivated by use cases in the domain of security, policing and emergency response, this paper presents an approach to information collection, fusion and sense-making based on the use of natural language (NL) and controlled natural language (CNL) to support richer forms of human-machine interaction. The approach uses a conversational protocol to facilitate a flow of collaborative messages from NL to CNL and back again in support of interactions such as: turning eyewitness reports from human observers into actionable information (from both trained and untrained sources); fusing information from humans and physical sensors (with associated quality metadata); and assisting human analysts to make the best use of available sensing assets in an area of interest (governed by management and security policies). CNL is used as a common formal knowledge representation for both machine and human agents to support reasoning, semantic information fusion and generation of rationale for inferences, in ways that remain transparent to human users. Examples are provided of various alternative styles for user feedback, including NL, CNL and graphical feedback. A pilot experiment with human subjects shows that a prototype conversational agent is able to gather usable CNL information from untrained human subjects