The Development of a User Self-Help Knowledge Management System for Help Desk: Deployment of Knowledge Management Approach and Software Agent Technology

Most help desks have admitted their call volume has increased in the past decade while “help unavailable when needed” is the major reason for service delivery failure and user dissatisfaction. The habit of calling help desk for simple problems has prompted the investigation of transferring part of first-level troubleshooting duty from help desk to user. This research proposes the development of user self-help knowledge management system that allows user to solve simple and routine technical enquiries. The proposed approach incorporates software agent to allow autonomous handling of enquiries so that the most appropriate solution and user communication can be facilitated

Relieving the Overloaded Help Desk: A Knowledge Management Approach

The establishment of an organizational help desk (HD) is to provide technical support to users when they encounter technical problems related to hardware, software and network connections. Due to the lack of resources, users often have to wait for a considerably long time before their enquiries and problems are answered and solved. This paper discusses the background of HD and its existing challenges. The application of Knowledge Management (KM) techniques and Knowledge Management System (KMS) enables HD to manage its knowledge effectively. In addition, the combination is capable of relieving the overloaded HD by shifting some of the troubleshooting responsibilities to users

Biocontrol of damping-off and root-rot causing pathogens by novel Rhizobacteria isolated in Saskatchewan

Non-Peer ReviewedIn Saskatchewan, land area used to grow pulse crops is increasing, and maintenance of plant health is imperative to produce an economically viable resource. The objective of this study is to characterize novel rhizobacteria for plant growth promoting properties: enhancing the root and shoot growth of pea and lentil, and suppressing the growth and disease severity caused by fungal pathogens. From in vitro assays, isolates 5-6, 4-31, and 2-9 suppressed the growth of fungal pathogens. Mechanisms which suppress the growth of fungal pathogens may include the production of enzymes which degrade the cell wall of the fungi, and antifungal metabolites. In studies where rhizobacteria were inoculated in combination with commercial Rhizobium inoculants onto pea and lentil seeds, isolate 2-9 significantly increased the root dry weight of pea, and isolate 4-31 and 5-6 increased the ability of Rhizobium to fix nitrogen in pea and lentil, respectively. Fungicide compatibility studies using two commonly-used products (Apron®-FL, Crown®) showed that isolate 5-6 was compatible with both fungicides, whereas isolates 4-31 and 2-9 were compatible only with Apron®-FL. The three bacterial isolates (5-6, 4-31, and 2-9) chosen for possible development of a commercial inoculant show promise to be effective biological control agents against fungal pathogens

Enhancement of pulse crops: influence of novel rhizobacteria on the interaction of pea, lentil, and pathogenic fungi

Non-Peer ReviewedIn Saskatchewan, land area used to grow pulse crops (pea, lentil, bean, and chickpea) is increasing every year; between 2000 and 2001, an increase of 20% was recorded. Maintenance of plant health is imperative to produce an economically viable resource. The objective of this study is to characterize novel rhizobacteria for plant growth promoting properties: enhancing the development of pea and lentil plants, and suppressing the growth and disease severity caused by phytopathogenic fungi. Rhizobacterial isolates were selected from a preliminary group of 580 based on the ability to suppress Pythium, Rhizoctonia, and Fusarium spp. In in vitro assays, no one isolate, except for isolate 5-6, had shown the ability to strongly suppress all three pathogenic fungi. Additionally, the presence of pea or lentil seeds affected the ability of the strains to suppress the fungi. Bacterial cellfree filtrate suppressed the growth of Pythium and Rhizoctonia spp., thus fungal suppression is mediated by antifungal metabolites. Furthermore, suppression of Rhizoctonia sp. is correlated to the production of proteolytic enzymes by the rhizobacteria. Plant growth promoting rhizobacteria (PGPR) are important in food production by increasing crop productivity, and reducing crop losses caused by soil-borne phytopathogens

Optimized Compilation of Aggregated Instructions for Realistic Quantum Computers

Recent developments in engineering and algorithms have made real-world applications in quantum computing possible in the near future. Existing quantum programming languages and compilers use a quantum assembly language composed of 1- and 2-qubit (quantum bit) gates. Quantum compiler frameworks translate this quantum assembly to electric signals (called control pulses) that implement the specified computation on specific physical devices. However, there is a mismatch between the operations defined by the 1- and 2-qubit logical ISA and their underlying physical implementation, so the current practice of directly translating logical instructions into control pulses results in inefficient, high-latency programs. To address this inefficiency, we propose a universal quantum compilation methodology that aggregates multiple logical operations into larger units that manipulate up to 10 qubits at a time. Our methodology then optimizes these aggregates by (1) finding commutative intermediate operations that result in more efficient schedules and (2) creating custom control pulses optimized for the aggregate (instead of individual 1- and 2-qubit operations). Compared to the standard gate-based compilation, the proposed approach realizes a deeper vertical integration of high-level quantum software and low-level, physical quantum hardware. We evaluate our approach on important near-term quantum applications on simulations of superconducting quantum architectures. Our proposed approach provides a mean speedup of $5\times$, with a maximum of $10\times$. Because latency directly affects the feasibility of quantum computation, our results not only improve performance but also have the potential to enable quantum computation sooner than otherwise possible.Comment: 13 pages, to apper in ASPLO

Opportunities And Impacts Of Additive Manufacturing: A Literature Review

Additive manufacturing industry has experienced tremendous growth in the last decade. This paper aims to address the lack of insights and systematic research by investigating opportunity and impact of potential economic benefits of AM. Our results show that the number of publications in the AM research has increased exponentially since 2009. The papers have been identified into five themes: applications, country, opportunity, economics and social. Our results show that there are an increasing number of papers that investigate economic and social benefits of AM

An Ontology-based Collaborative Knowledge Management Network to Enhance the Reusability of Inter-organizational Knowledge

A number of knowledge management (KM) approaches based on individual organizational KM strategies and business requirements have been developed without taking system interoperation into consideration. In this paper, a collaborative inter-organizational KM network is proposed to allow various organizations to access and retrieve inter-organizational knowledge. While knowledge engineers can reuse the inter-organizational knowledge to create and evaluate its own organizational knowledge, general users benefit from the effectiveness and efficiency of searching for relevant inter-organizational knowledge within the networ

Knowledge Management in Information Technology Help Desk:Past, Present and Future

Information technology has changed the way organizations function. This resulted in the reliance of help desks to deal with information technology related areas such as hardware, software, and telecommunication. Besides, the adoption of business process reengineering and downsizing have led to the shrinkage of the size of help desk. The shorter information technology product life cycle has worsened the situation by increasing the already sizeable help desk’s user base. Consequently, the help desk has to cover more information technology products and resolute more technical enquiries with less staff. Thus, the outcome is clear that users have to wait comparably longer before help desk staff is available to offer assistance. This paper describes the contribution of knowledge management in retaining knowledge and solving “knowledge leaking” problem. The research presents the development of user selfhelp knowledge management system to re-distribute incoming enquiries so that simple and routine technical enquiries can be resolved without help desk intervention

The relationship between Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) and facilitators to achieve successful business outcomes in South Korean organizations

Strategic Information Systems Planning (SISP) is an important process in the implementation and use of IT systems in today’s dynamic and increasingly digitalized organizations. However, SISP is not a straightforward task, it is a process that covers simultaneous multiple planning issues often in changing environmental and organizational climates. Although SISP has been widely studied, and evaluating the SISP process has matured, theory on SISP facilitators that enable successful outcomes remain sparse. The main objective of this paper is to explore such facilitators and to investigate their relationshipand contribution in achieving SISP success. By postal surveying a random sample of managers with SISP experience in South Korean organizations, we modeled the relationship between facilitators of SISP and their outcomes. The study used Structural Equation Modelling to analyze and validate its findings. This study suggests that facilitators positively affect successful SISP through business and IT alignment. It also demonstrates that effective SISP has a positive effect on organizational outcomes by ensuring organizational capabilities and IT infrastructure flexibility. The findings of this study expounding the role of facilitators adds to the theory of SISP and provides a guide to planners and managers responsible for information systems

No Police in Schools: A Vision for Safe and Supportive Schools in CA

"No Police in Schools: A Vision for Safe and Supportive Schools in CA" analyzes data from the U.S. Department of Education's 2017-18 Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the 2019 California Racial and Identity Profiling Act (RIPA) Stops dataset, and data from Stockton Unified School District on police in schools. The data conclusively show harmful and discriminatory policing patterns in schools. School police contribute to the criminalization of tens of thousands of California students, resulting in them being pushed out of school and into the school-to-prison pipeline. Critically, the data suggest that schools underreport the number of assigned law enforcement officers, so these problems are likely even more severe