Driving continuous improvement

The quality of improvement depends on the quality of leading and lagging performance indicators. For this reason, several tools, such as process mapping, cause and effect analysis and FMEA, need to be used in an integrated way with performance measurement models, such as balanced scorecard, integrated performance measurement system, performance prism and so on. However, in our experience, this alone is not quite enough due to the amount of effort required to monitor performance indicators at operational levels. The authors find that IT support is key to the successful implementation of performance measurement-driven continuous improvement schemes

Galilee: an Internet Web Based Distance Learning Support System

This paper presents a project of Web-based Distance Learning support system. The system has been built based on the Internet and World Wide Web facility. The system could be accessed with a web browser which is directed to a certain web server address so that students can do learning process just like in the real situation, such as student admissions, taking course materials, syllabus, assignments, students grades, class discussions through web, and doing online quizzes. Students could also join collaboration works by giving opinions, feedback and student produced paper/web which can be shared to the entire learning community. Therefore, it will build a collaborative learning environment where lectures together with students make constructive knowledge databases for entire learning community. This system has been developed based on Active Server Pages (ASP) technology from Microsoft which is embedded in a web server. Web pages reside in a web server which is connected to an SQL Database Server. Database server is used to store structured data such as lectures/students personal information, course lists, syllabus and its descriptions, announcement texts from lecturers, commentaries for discussion forum, student's study evaluations, scores for each assignment, quizzes for each course, assignments text from lectures, assignments which are collected by students and students contribution/materials. This system has been maintained by an administrator for maintaining and developing web pages using HTML. The administrator also does ASP scripts programming to convert web pages into active server pages. Lectures and students could contribute some course materials and share their ideas through their web browser. This web-based collaborative learning system gives the students more active role in the information gathering and learning process, making the distance students feel part of a learning community, therefore increasing motivation, comprehension and interaction with other students

Neo: A Learned Query Optimizer

Query optimization is one of the most challenging problems in database systems. Despite the progress made over the past decades, query optimizers remain extremely complex components that require a great deal of hand-tuning for specific workloads and datasets. Motivated by this shortcoming and inspired by recent advances in applying machine learning to data management challenges, we introduce Neo (Neural Optimizer), a novel learning-based query optimizer that relies on deep neural networks to generate query executions plans. Neo bootstraps its query optimization model from existing optimizers and continues to learn from incoming queries, building upon its successes and learning from its failures. Furthermore, Neo naturally adapts to underlying data patterns and is robust to estimation errors. Experimental results demonstrate that Neo, even when bootstrapped from a simple optimizer like PostgreSQL, can learn a model that offers similar performance to state-of-the-art commercial optimizers, and in some cases even surpass them

Database independent Migration of Objects into an Object-Relational Database

This paper reports on the CERN-based WISDOM project which is studying the serialisation and deserialisation of data to/from an object database (objectivity) and ORACLE 9i.Comment: 26 pages, 18 figures; CMS CERN Conference Report cr02_01