Identifying Bridge Users: the Knowledge Transfer Agents in Enterprise Collaboration Systems

In recent years enterprise collaboration systems (ECS) integrated with social network capabilities have become popular tools for supporting knowledge management (KM) strategies and organizational learning. Increased usage has resulted in higher interest in understanding and classifying the roles that ECS users adopt online. Previous research has investigated user role identification by considering: the degree of participation in an ECS, the user interactions with shared content, the user role in the ECS network, and the user KM-role observed within an interaction. Although all of these factors provide insights into ECS user engagement, they fail to fully consider the knowledge sharing perspective. In this paper, we define bridge users within the context of KM and present a framework for identifying them using semantic analysis of user-generated content. Further, we present results and observations from tests of our pipeline on the ECS of a large multinational engineering company with more than 100k users

Visualization of Cluster Structure and Separation in Multivariate Mixed Data: A Case Study of Diversity Faultlines in Work Teams

In organizational management, researchers and managers study separations or faultlines that occur in diverse teams when members form subgroups based on the alignment of multiple demographic characteristics. The team faultline concept is operationalized using multivariate cluster analysis—analysts use faultline measures to identify subgroups/clusters in a team and to quantify how subgroups/clusters are separated. Unfortunately, these measures have limited capacity to enable users to observe and explore faultlines and subgroup structure across the examined attributes efficiently. We address this problem and make three contributions. First, we propose a visual representation for communicating faultline information that is based on multiple linked, stacked histograms in an axis-parallel layout. Second, we evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed technique in a controlled user study, comparing it to the two other common multivariate representations of clusters: parallel coordinates and scatter plot matrices. While we chose faultline-related tasks based on the requirements by domain experts in organizational management, the study findings can be generalized to representations and tasks involving distributions of clusters of multivariate objects in mixed-type data. Finally, inspired by geological faultlines, we propose several visual enhancements to stacked histograms to further facilitate the task of identifying “cracks” within work teams.Keywords: evaluation, faultlines, clustering, cluster separation, stacked histograms, user study, functional diversit

A community focused approach toward making healthy and affordable daily diet recommendations

IntroductionMaintaining an affordable and nutritious diet can be challenging, especially for those living under the conditions of poverty. To fulfill a healthy diet, consumers must make difficult decisions within a complicated food landscape. Decisions must factor information on health and budget constraints, the food supply and pricing options at local grocery stores, and nutrition and portion guidelines provided by government services. Information to support food choice decisions is often inconsistent and challenging to find, making it difficult for consumers to make informed, optimal decisions. This is especially true for low-income and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) households which have additional time and cost constraints that impact their food purchases and ultimately leave them more susceptible to malnutrition and obesity. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the integration of data from local grocery stores and federal government databases can be used to assist specific communities in meeting their unique health and budget challenges.MethodsWe discuss many of the challenges of integrating multiple data sources, such as inconsistent data availability and misleading nutrition labels. We conduct a case study using linear programming to identify a healthy meal plan that stays within a limited SNAP budget and also adheres to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Finally, we explore the main drivers of cost of local food products with emphasis on the nutrients determined by the USDA as areas of focus: added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium.Results and discussionOur case study results suggest that such an optimization model can be used to facilitate food purchasing decisions within a given community. By focusing on the community level, our results will inform future work navigating the complex networks of food information to build global recommendation systems

Fluid flow on interacting deformable surfaces

Fluid simulation on interacting deformable surfaces is a challenging problem that has many applications. In this paper, we present a framework in which artistic as well as physically realistic flows can be generated on surfaces during deformation and collision. Our simulation system provides comprehensive control over the motion and deformation of an object as well as the movement and density of the fluid on the surface. At the heart of our system is a numerical solver that allows viscous and incompressible flows to be directly generated on surfaces using concepts from differential geometry, such as geodesic polar maps and parallel transport. This solver is fast and stable even when the object undergoes deformation or collides with other surfaces. We also propose rules that allow deformation and collisions to impact fluid flows in a physically realistic manner. By combining these rules with a set of comprehensive design functionalities, we develop a system in which the user can specify shape deformation, collision, and fluid flow in a unified framework. We demonstrate the capability of our system with a number example scenarios.Keywords: surfaces, fluid simulation, parallel transport, viscosity, collision, deformatio

Building behaviors with examples

Ph.D.Jessica K. Hodgin