Self-Leadership Change Project

This study employs self-leadership theory applied to developing and implementing a change project involving senior level students at a regional university. Preliminary research found evidence of students’ ability to make meaningful changes through the project, and exhibit a subsequent level of influence over those who observe their change process. This is relevant to the current business environment, in that shared leadership, empowerment, and participative management require business graduates to attain some level of leadership ability to function effectively in organizations

Self-Leadership Change Project: An Ongoing Experiential Program

Self-leadership Change Project (SLCP) is an ongoing program for senior level students at a regional university designed to provide hands-on experience in building self-management skills, which is considered a pre-requisite by many leaders and scholars (e.g., Drucker, 1996; Schaetti, Ramsey and Watanabe, 2008). A majority of students participating in the projects reported achieving change in targeted behavior, with intentions to continue to utilize the SLCP approach for future “projects”. Additionally, students who successfully completed a self-leadership change project reported that observers noted change in others as a result of the project. Students who received positive feedback from observers reported that they were likely to engage in a self-leadership project in the future. This is relevant to the current business environment, in that shared leadership, empowerment, and participative management require business graduates to attain some level of leadership ability to function effectively in organizations. Self-leadership is a beginning step in that process

A Hybrid Metaheuristic Approach to a Real World Employee Scheduling Problem

Employee scheduling problems are of critical importance to large businesses. These problems are hard to solve due to large numbers of conflicting constraints. While many approaches address a subset of these constraints, there is no single approach for simultaneously addressing all of them. We hybridise 'Evolutionary Ruin & Stochastic Recreate' and 'Variable Neighbourhood Search' metaheuristics to solve a real world instance of the employee scheduling problem to near optimality. We compare this with Simulated Annealing, exploring the algorithm configuration space using the irace software package to ensure fair comparison. The hybrid algorithm generates schedules that reduce unmet demand by over 28% compared to the baseline. All data used, where possible, is either directly from the real world engineer scheduling operation of around 25,000 employees , or synthesised from a related distribution where data is unavailable

Revision and Conditional Inference for Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

For propositional beliefs, there are well-established connections between belief revision, defeasible conditionals and nonmonotonic inference. In argumentative contexts, such connections have not yet been investigated. On the one hand, the exact relationship between formal argumentation and nonmonotonic inference relations is a research topic that keeps on eluding researchers despite recently intensified efforts, whereas argumentative revision has been studied in numerous works during recent years. In this paper, we show that similar relationships between belief revision, defeasible conditionals and nonmonotonic inference hold in argumentative contexts as well. We first define revision operators for abstract dialectical frameworks, and use such revision operators to define dynamic conditionals by means of the Ramsey test. We show that such conditionals can be equivalently defined using a total preorder over three-valued interpretations, and study the inferential behaviour of the resulting conditional inference relations

On the Relation between Possibilistic Logic and Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

Abstract dialectical frameworks (in short, ADFs) are one of the most general and unifying approaches to formal argumentation. As the semantics of ADFs are based on three-valued interpretations, the question poses itself as to whether some and which monotonic three-valued logic underlies ADFs, in the sense that it allows to capture the main semantic concepts underlying ADFs. As an entry-point for such an investigation, we take the concept of model of an ADF, which was originally formulated on the basis of Kleene’s threevalued logic. We show that an optimal concept of a model arises when instead of Kleene’s three-valued logic, possibilistic logic is used. We then show that in fact, possibilistic logic is the most conservative three-valued logic that fulfils this property, and that possibilistic logic can faithfully encode all other semantical concepts for ADFs. Based on this result, we also make some observations on strong equivalence and introduce possibilistic ADFs

Arguing about Complex Formulas: Generalizing Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

Abstract dialectical frameworks (in short, ADFs) are a unifying model of formal argumentation, where argumentative relations between arguments are represented by assigning acceptance conditions to atomic arguments. This idea is generalized by letting acceptance conditions being assigned to complex formulas, resulting in conditional abstract dialectical frameworks (in short, cADFs). We define the semantics of cADFs in terms of a non-truth-functional four-valued logic, and study the semantics in-depth, by showing existence results and proving that all semantics are generalizations of the corresponding semantics for ADFs

Shift Scheduling and Employee Rostering: An Evolutionary Ruin & Stochastic Recreate Solution

For decades, since the inception of the field, scheduling problems have been solved with a variety of techniques. Many proven algorithms to these problems exist; however, there is no single method to solve all the vast variety of problems that exist across many sub-fields with differing datasets. In this paper we explore the use of an Evolutionary Ruin & Stochastic Recreate algorithm, with a Simulated Annealing control mechanism, to a real-world employee scheduling problem and its ability to solve this problem to near optimality. The combinatorial possibilities of parameterisation are very large-the Taguchi design of experiments method is used to examine a subset of those possibilities within a limited runtime budget. Evolutionary Ruin and Stochastic Recreate has not previously been applied to the specific scheduling domain of employee scheduling and rostering: we investigate the effectiveness of the algorithm with different parameter values and discuss the insight it provides into the runtime effect of the mechanisms of Evolutionary Ruin & Stochastic Recreate

Impact of Sleep and Circadian Disruption on Energy Balance and Diabetes: A Summary of Workshop Discussions

A workshop was held at the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases with a focus on the impact of sleep and circadian disruption on energy balance and diabetes. The workshop identified a number of key principles for research in this area and a number of specific opportunities. Studies in this area would be facilitated by active collaboration between investigators in sleep/circadian research and investigators in metabolism/diabetes. There is a need to translate the elegant findings from basic research into improving the metabolic health of the American public. There is also a need for investigators studying the impact of sleep/circadian disruption in humans to move beyond measurements of insulin and glucose and conduct more in-depth phenotyping. There is also a need for the assessments of sleep and circadian rhythms as well as assessments for sleep-disordered breathing to be incorporated into all ongoing cohort studies related to diabetes risk. Studies in humans need to complement the elegant short-term laboratory-based human studies of simulated short sleep and shift work etc. with studies in subjects in the general population with these disorders. It is conceivable that chronic adaptations occur, and if so, the mechanisms by which they occur needs to be identified and understood. Particular areas of opportunity that are ready for translation are studies to address whether CPAP treatment of patients with pre-diabetes and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) prevents or delays the onset of diabetes and whether temporal restricted feeding has the same impact on obesity rates in humans as it does in mice