Searching for Herbert Simon

Since Herbert Simon’s seminal work (Simon, 1957) on bounded rationality researchers and practitioners have sought the “holy grail” of computer-supported decision-making. A recent wave of interest in “business analytics” (BA) has elevated interest in data-driven analytical decision making to the forefront. While reporting and prediction via business intelligence (BI) systems has been an important component to business decision making for some time, BA broadens its scope and potential impact in business decision making further by moving the focus to prescription. The authors see BA as the end-to-end process integrating the production through consumption of the data, and making more extensive use of the data through heavily automated, integrated and advanced predictive and prescriptive tools in ways that better support, or replace, the human decision maker. With the advent of “big data”, BA already extends beyond internal databases to external and unstructured data that is publicly produced and consumed data with new analytical techniques to better enable business decision makers in a connected world. BI research in the future will be broader in scope, and the challenge is to make effective use of a wide range of data with varying degrees of structure, and from sources both internal and external to the organization. In this paper, we suggest ways that this broader focus of BA will also affect future BI research streams

A system to measure physiological response during social interaction in VR for children with ASD

This chapter presents work aimed at investigating interactions between virtual reality (VR) and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using physiological sensing of affective cues. The research objectives are two-fold: 1) develop VR-based social communication tasks and integrate them into the physiological signal acquisition module to enable the capture of one's physiological responses in a time-synchronized manner during participation in the task and 2) conduct a pilot usability study to evaluate a VR-based social interaction system that induces an affective response in ASD and typically developing (TD) individuals by using a physiology-based approach. Physiological results suggest there is a different physiological response in the body in relation to the reported level of the affective states. The preliminary results from a matched pair of participants could provide valuable information about specific affect-eliciting aspects of social communication, and this feedback could drive individualized interventions that scaffold skills and improve social wellbeing.by Karla Conn Welch, Uttama Lahiri, Zachary E. Warren and Nilanjan Sarka

VLSI Processed InGaAs on Si MOSFETs with Thermally Stable, Self-Aligned Ni-InGaAs Contacts Achieving: Enhanced Drive Current and Pathway Towards a Unified S/D Contact Module

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