108,583 research outputs found
Still minding the gap? Reflecting on transitions between concepts of information in varied domains
This conceptual paper, a contribution to the tenth anniversary special issue of information, gives a cross-disciplinary review of general and unified theories of information. A selective literature review is used to update a 2013 article on bridging the gaps between conceptions of information in different domains, including material from the physical and biological sciences, from the humanities and social sciences including library and information science, and from philosophy. A variety of approaches and theories are reviewed, including those of Brenner, Brier, Burgin and Wu, Capurro, Cárdenas-García and Ireland, Hidalgo, Hofkirchner, Kolchinsky and Wolpert, Floridi, Mingers and Standing, Popper, and Stonier. The gaps between disciplinary views of information remain, although there has been progress, and increasing interest, in bridging them. The solution is likely to be either a general theory of sufficient flexibility to cope with multiple meanings of information, or multiple and distinct theories for different domains, but with a complementary nature, and ideally boundary spanning concepts
Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development
Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern
software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user
base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software
development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific
challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from
developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a
program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we
reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems
in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help
guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we
provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference
on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18
Automatic Annotation of Images from the Practitioner Perspective
This paper describes an ongoing project which seeks to contribute to a wider understanding of the realities of bridging the semantic gap in visual image retrieval. A comprehensive survey of the means by which real image retrieval transactions are realised is being undertaken. An image taxonomy has been developed, in order to provide a framework within which account may be taken of the plurality of image types, user needs and forms of textual metadata. Significant limitations exhibited by current automatic annotation techniques are discussed, and a possible way forward using ontologically supported automatic content annotation is briefly considered as a potential means of mitigating these limitations
Transdisciplinarity seen through Information, Communication, Computation, (Inter-)Action and Cognition
Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of
industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of
knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New
developments in information processing and information communication
technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions,
representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multi-perspective,
multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative
work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences,
sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary
unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the
descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process
of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied
domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their
design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and
various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user
experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions.
When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from
different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing
common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our
environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces
for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of
transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics.
We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our
different research fields that include information studies, computability,
human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and
philosophy.Comment: Chapter in a forthcoming book: Information Studies and the Quest for
Transdisciplinarity - Forthcoming book in World Scientific. Mark Burgin and
Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Editor
Bridging the gaps in employee colunteering: Why the third sector doesn't always win
Employee Volunteering (EV) schemes represent a cornerstone of many company Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies, being identified as a classic “win-win” situation in which businesses contribute significant resources into local communities while gaining a more skilled and engaged workforce and increased reputational benefits. This article questions the “win-win” scenario of EV arguing that existing research has focused predominantly upon the business–employee dimension while largely ignoring the role of third sector organizations engaging in these relationships. By focusing more directly on third sector experiences, the article identifies four “gaps” which place considerable constraints on the reach and impact of EV. It demonstrates the importance of not simply presuming a “win” for the third sector and the added value that can be gained from redirecting EV research toward the “business/nonprofit interface”
Beyond bench and bedside: disentangling the concept of translational research
The label ‘Translational Research’ (TR) has become ever more popular in the biomedical domain in recent years. It is usually presented as an attempt to bridge a supposed gap between knowledge produced at the lab bench and its use at the clinical bedside. This is claimed to help society harvest the benefits of its investments in scientific research. The rhetorical as well as moral force of the label TR obscure, however, that it is actually used in very different ways. In this paper, we analyse the scientific discourse on TR, with the aim to disentangle and critically evaluate the different meanings of the label. We start with a brief reconstruction of the history of the concept. Subsequently, we unravel how the label is actually used in a sample of scientific publications on TR and examine the presuppositions implied by different views of TR. We argue that it is useful to distinguish different views of TR on the basis of three dimensions, related to (1) the construction of the ‘translational gap’; (2) the model of the translational process; and (3) the cause of the perceived translational gap. We conclude that the motive to make society benefit from its investments in biomedical science may be laudable, but that it is doubtful whether the dominant views of TR will contribute to this en
A Stochastic Approach to Shortcut Bridging in Programmable Matter
In a self-organizing particle system, an abstraction of programmable matter,
simple computational elements called particles with limited memory and
communication self-organize to solve system-wide problems of movement,
coordination, and configuration. In this paper, we consider a stochastic,
distributed, local, asynchronous algorithm for "shortcut bridging", in which
particles self-assemble bridges over gaps that simultaneously balance
minimizing the length and cost of the bridge. Army ants of the genus Eciton
have been observed exhibiting a similar behavior in their foraging trails,
dynamically adjusting their bridges to satisfy an efficiency trade-off using
local interactions. Using techniques from Markov chain analysis, we rigorously
analyze our algorithm, show it achieves a near-optimal balance between the
competing factors of path length and bridge cost, and prove that it exhibits a
dependence on the angle of the gap being "shortcut" similar to that of the ant
bridges. We also present simulation results that qualitatively compare our
algorithm with the army ant bridging behavior. Our work gives a plausible
explanation of how convergence to globally optimal configurations can be
achieved via local interactions by simple organisms (e.g., ants) with some
limited computational power and access to random bits. The proposed algorithm
also demonstrates the robustness of the stochastic approach to algorithms for
programmable matter, as it is a surprisingly simple extension of our previous
stochastic algorithm for compression.Comment: Published in Proc. of DNA23: DNA Computing and Molecular Programming
- 23rd International Conference, 2017. An updated journal version will appear
in the DNA23 Special Issue of Natural Computin
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