Exercise: Scenario Planning

Corporations operate in political, economic, and technological environments that can change rapidly. Competitive advantage can be the reward for those that anticipate, plan, and prepare for change. This exercise demonstrates the essence and value of scenario planning and enables students to experience the process of planning in volatile environments. Teams are formed, an organization is selected, and a list of strategy questions is prepared and narrowed to each team’s overriding “Big Question.” Students brainstorm a range of critical events in the competitive and general environments. Surprise is injected into the exercise by random assignment of trajectories to critical events that combine to serve as the basis for structuring a scenario. Students summarize their scenarios and prepare a strategy to capitalize on the opportunity or minimize the threat. Class presentations and discussions follow

Worlds before and beyond words

The advent of computer-generated environments for simulating experience of the real world invites a reappraisal of the role of classical and neo-classical theories of computation (e.g. views of computation based on linguistic and logical frameworks.) To make more effective use of computers in connection with Virtual Reality requires a shift in emphasis towards computers as state representers rather than calculators, towards the construction and analysis of environments rather than documents and towards empirical rather than theoretical approaches to knowledge representation. This paper discusses the prospects for gaining new insights into empirical activity through the systematic construction of models (typically - but not necessarily - computer based) in which real world state, as perceived by a particular agent, is imitated directly through the use of suitable metaphors. Such activity is exemplified in the construction of engineering models and the development and calibration of scientific instruments. A characteristic ingredient of the modelling processes involved in these applications is correlation of the results of experiments and observations that are performed in parallel in a real world environment and in the associated physical (e.g. computer) model. Conventional computer programming paradigms are not well-suited for constructing models by empirical methods. Amongst widely used software tools, only spreadsheets are well adapted to imitating real world state as it is captured through observation and experiment. The philosophical ideas to be introduced in the paper have been developed in connection with practical case-studies and software tools that contribute to a long-term Empirical Modelling Project being pursued at the Computer Science Department at the University of Warwick. A key concept in this research programme is the development of agent-oriented models in which the dependencies between observables that are used for communication are specified using generalised spreadsheet principles

Multi-Scale Local Shape Analysis and Feature Selection in Machine Learning Applications

We introduce a method called multi-scale local shape analysis, or MLSA, for extracting features that describe the local structure of points within a dataset. The method uses both geometric and topological features at multiple levels of granularity to capture diverse types of local information for subsequent machine learning algorithms operating on the dataset. Using synthetic and real dataset examples, we demonstrate significant performance improvement of classification algorithms constructed for these datasets with correspondingly augmented features.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, 8 table

Epidemiologic Questions from Anthrax Outbreak, Hunter Valley, Australia

Anthrax was introduced into Australia in 1847 near Sydney, New South Wales, and spread along stock routes throughout New South Wales and southern Queensland. Anthrax was considered endemic to the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, during the 1890s. The last recorded anthrax-related stock losses there occurred on 3 properties in the Upper Hunter Valley in 1939. During the past 4 decades, anthrax has become uncommon in Australia. However, our experience is a timely reminder that veterinary public health authorities should be on high alert for possible anthrax when unexpected livestock deaths follow flooding in areas where anthrax has historically occurred

On the Geometric Interpretation of N = 2 Superconformal Theories

We clarify certain important issues relevant for the geometric interpretation of a large class of N = 2 superconformal theories. By fully exploiting the phase structure of these theories (discovered in earlier works) we are able to clearly identify their geometric content. One application is to present a simple and natural resolution to the question of what constitutes the mirror of a rigid Calabi-Yau manifold. We also discuss some other models with unusual phase diagrams that highlight some subtle features regarding the geometric content of conformal theories.Comment: 25 pages, note adde

Sonophenology: A Tangible Interface for Sonification of Geo-Spatial Phenological Data at Multiple Time-scales

Presented at the 16th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2010) on June 9-15, 2010 in Washington, DC.Phenology is the study of periodic biological processes, such as when plants flower and birds arrive in the spring. In this paper we sonify phenology data and control the sonification process through a tangible interface consisting of a physical paper map and tracking of fiducial markers. The designed interface enables one or more users to concurrently specify point and range queries in both time and space and receive immediate sonic feedback. This system can be used to study and explore the effects of climate change, both as tool to be used by scientists, and as a way to educate members of the general public