Motivated Interpretations of Deceptive Information

We examine whether people seek information that might help them make sense of others’ dishonest behavior. Participants were told that a hypothetical partner (either a friend or a stranger) had engaged in a task in which the partner could lie to boost their earnings at the expense of the participant’s earnings. Participants were less likely to search for information that can justify potential dishonest behavior conducted by a friend than by a stranger (Experiment 1). When participants knew for certain that their partners had lied to them, they were less likely to assume that that the lie was justified when told that the partner was a friend rather than a stranger (Experiment 2). The results imply that people are more likely to search for information that may reduce the severity of possible dishonest behavior when a stranger, rather than a friend, is responsible for the behavior

Reciprocal Recommender System for Learners in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

Massive open online courses (MOOC) describe platforms where users with completely different backgrounds subscribe to various courses on offer. MOOC forums and discussion boards offer learners a medium to communicate with each other and maximize their learning outcomes. However, oftentimes learners are hesitant to approach each other for different reasons (being shy, don't know the right match, etc.). In this paper, we propose a reciprocal recommender system which matches learners who are mutually interested in, and likely to communicate with each other based on their profile attributes like age, location, gender, qualification, interests, etc. We test our algorithm on data sampled using the publicly available MITx-Harvardx dataset and demonstrate that both attribute importance and reciprocity play an important role in forming the final recommendation list of learners. Our approach provides promising results for such a system to be implemented within an actual MOOC.Comment: 10 pages, accepted as full paper @ ICWL 201

Leading organizational transformation: an action research study

Purpose – This study addresses a specific gap in the literature that centers on individual perspective of leadership within the context of organizational transformation. It explores synergies between leadership, analyzed as a combination of individual and plural perspectives, and managerial drivers relating to organizational transformation (communicating, mobilizing, and evaluating), with a focus on capturing the essence of the context. Design/methodology/approach – The study examines a complex organizational transformation initiative faced by an Italian, family-owned fashion design company through an action research project. Findings – The results illustrate that context may play a role in accelerating the implementation of plural forms of leadership and their effectiveness during some phases of transformation. Specific emerging manifestations of leadership and synergies with transformation drivers are identified. Research limitations/implications – This is a single case study derived from an action research project. Although the approach is congruent with the nature of the phenomenon and the purpose of the study, it does not aim for generalizability, and as such further empirical investigation is advocated. Originality/value – The article offers an original perspective on leadership of organizational transformation, discussing in particular the co-existence of individual and plural leadership and the role of context

Improving Search through A3C Reinforcement Learning based Conversational Agent

We develop a reinforcement learning based search assistant which can assist users through a set of actions and sequence of interactions to enable them realize their intent. Our approach caters to subjective search where the user is seeking digital assets such as images which is fundamentally different from the tasks which have objective and limited search modalities. Labeled conversational data is generally not available in such search tasks and training the agent through human interactions can be time consuming. We propose a stochastic virtual user which impersonates a real user and can be used to sample user behavior efficiently to train the agent which accelerates the bootstrapping of the agent. We develop A3C algorithm based context preserving architecture which enables the agent to provide contextual assistance to the user. We compare the A3C agent with Q-learning and evaluate its performance on average rewards and state values it obtains with the virtual user in validation episodes. Our experiments show that the agent learns to achieve higher rewards and better states.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Pengaruh Motivasi, Gaya Kepemimpinan Transaksional Dan Budaya Organisasi Terhadap Kinerja Karyawan Bagian Produksi PT. Njonja Meneer

This research is motivated by the increasingly strict business world, accompanied by the times that requires every manufacturer to be able to improve the performance of each employee. One of the products that can be affected by the times are herbs. Herbal products become one of the favorite alternative medicine in Indonesian society given the herbal raw material and has become an entity of hereditary tradition. However, in the period 2010-2013 year results that employee performance production departement of PT. Njonja Meneer Semarang fluctuated. If this is not addressed then feared PT. Njonja Meneer Semarang can not meet the needs of the market and the popularity of herbal medicine will be replaced by other manufacturers. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of motivation, transactional leadership styles and organizational culture on employee performance of production of PT. Njonja Meneer Semarang. This research method is explanatory, with data collection through questionnaires and interviews. The sampling technique used purposive technique sampling. The samples are 90 peoples whom are employees of the production departement of PT. Njonja Meneer Semarang. The analysis technique used was qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative analysis using validity, reliability, cross tabulation, correlation coefficient, coefficient of determination, simple and multiple regression analysis, as well as the significance test (t test and F test). The results of this study showed All independent variables, namely motivation (X1), transactional leadership style (X2), and organizational culture (X3) together (simultaneously) or individually (partial) affect employee performance dependent variable (Y). Advice can be given that the need for the physical layout of a good and convenient for employees as the embodiment of a strong organizational culture of the company. In addition, companies need to provide training for employees and distribution of informative information, considering the standard of the company that changes according to market conditions at that time

Analisa Strategi Pada Perusahaan Benih Tanaman Berbasis Metode Performance Prism Dan Swot (Studi Kasus: PT. X)

Pengukuran kinerja merupakan suatu metode atau alat yang digunakan untuk mencatat dan menilai pencapaian pelaksanaan kegiatan berdasarkan meningkatkan kualitas pengambilan keputusan dan akuntabilitas. Terdapat 4 elemen pokok pengukuran kinerja antara lain, menetapkan tujuan, sasaran, dan strategi organisasi, merumuskan indikator dan ukuran kinerja, mengukur tingkat ketercapaian tujuan dan sasaran organisasi, evaluasi kinerja. Sedangkan, untuk merumuskan strategi menggunakan analisis SWOT yang merupakan gambaran secara jelas bagaimana peluang dan ancaman eksternal Perusahaan yang disesuaikan dengan kekuatan dan kelemahan internal Perusahaan. Berkaitan dengan pencapaian target penjualan, target penjualan berbagai jenis benih sebagian besar tidak tercapai dimana kondisi ini terjadi pada tahun 2012. Maka dari itu dibutuhkan metode yang dapat diterapkan dalam pengukuran tersebut untuk mengetahui sejauh mana performansi kinerja Perusahaan telah tercapai sehingga dapat merumuskan strategi unggulan yang tepat dan berdaya saing. Hasil penelitian dengan metode Performance Prism didapatkan nilai indeks sebesar 8.60 yang masuk kedalam kategori hijau, sehingga dinyatakan kinerja Perusahaan secara keseluruhan telah memenuhi performa Perusahaan yang diharapkan. Pada analisis SWOT telah didapatkan 5 strategi baru yaitu memperluas pangsa pasar, menjaga hubungan baik dengan supplier, memberikan reward, peningkatan daya tahan benih, dan menjaga hubungan baik dengan koperasi

Neural Attentive Session-based Recommendation

Given e-commerce scenarios that user profiles are invisible, session-based recommendation is proposed to generate recommendation results from short sessions. Previous work only considers the user's sequential behavior in the current session, whereas the user's main purpose in the current session is not emphasized. In this paper, we propose a novel neural networks framework, i.e., Neural Attentive Recommendation Machine (NARM), to tackle this problem. Specifically, we explore a hybrid encoder with an attention mechanism to model the user's sequential behavior and capture the user's main purpose in the current session, which are combined as a unified session representation later. We then compute the recommendation scores for each candidate item with a bi-linear matching scheme based on this unified session representation. We train NARM by jointly learning the item and session representations as well as their matchings. We carried out extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets. Our experimental results show that NARM outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both datasets. Furthermore, we also find that NARM achieves a significant improvement on long sessions, which demonstrates its advantages in modeling the user's sequential behavior and main purpose simultaneously.Comment: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1511.06939, arXiv:1606.08117 by other author