Terrain-Specific: Contemporary Landscape Architecture in Canada

The Canadian landscape has typically captured a global imaginary of a pristine wild, but how might its urban designed landscapes be distinctly understood? Foregrounded by the landscape transformations accelerated by climate change, the book Innate Terrain: Canadian Landscape Architecture, edited by Professor Alissa North from the University of Toronto, highlights landscape architecture projects situated on the unique Canadian terrain. Providing further provocation on Canadian landscape architecture, Innate Terrain seeks to fill the literary gap on contemporary landscape perspectives, distinguishing Canadian landscape architecture from global practice, and particularly, its well-documented American counterpart. Landscape architecture in the Canadian context has evolved and established its own distinct identity, one imbued with national and local sensitivities. Informed by diverse environmental and cultural contexts, Canadian-designed landscapes reflect and refer to the prevailing ecosystems of Canada’s innate terrain. Contrary to the preceding International Style, landscape architecture projects in Canada have adopted the ethos of Critical Regionalism in the second half of the 20th century. Contemporary Canadian practitioners are designing landscapes that are deeply informed by their surrounding geographical context while emphasizing cultural specificity. Central to this cultural specificity, addressed by a new generation of landscape architects, is the increasing recognition of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge within the discipline. Canadian landscape architects have collaborated with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis communities, including the keepers of this knowledge, to develop land management strategies and design landscape interventions.     

LinkingPark: An automatic semantic table interpretation system

In this paper, we present LinkingPark, an automatic semantic annotation system for tabular data to knowledge graph matching. LinkingPark is designed as a modular framework which can handle Cell-Entity Annotation (CEA), Column-Type Annotation (CTA), and Columns-Property Annotation (CPA) altogether. It is built upon our previous SemTab 2020 system, which won the 2nd prize among 28 different teams after four rounds of evaluations. Moreover, the system is unsupervised, stand-alone, and flexible for multilingual support. Its backend offers an efficient RESTful API for programmatic access, as well as an Excel Add-in for ease of use. Users can interact with LinkingPark in near real-time, further demonstrating its efficiency.     

Profiling of knowledge organisation systems for the annotation of Linked Data cultural resources

The importance of cultural heritage for supporting the knowledge economy has promoted its digitisation and online publication. Many cultural heritage repositories have published millions of digitised items using semantic web technologies and Linked Data approaches. These repositories frequently use knowledge organisation systems to classify the resources, but the domain heterogeneity makes it difficult to know if they are the most suitable ones. This paper describes the process used to discover and profile the knowledge organisation systems used in the cultural heritage domain. Additionally, for those knowledge organisation systems with a thesaurus-like structure, a detailed quality analysis is performed. The results of this analysis can be used as a key factor for the selection of knowledge organisation systems in classification tasks.     

Effects of risks on the performance of business process outsourcing projects: The moderating roles of knowledge management capabilities

Although business process outsourcing (BPO) can reduce cost and enhance the competitiveness of firms, the implementation of BPO projects is unsatisfactory. By integrating knowledge management capability theory and risk-based view, we develop a model of how different types of BPO risks affect project satisfaction and how knowledge management capability changes the influences of BPO risks. A survey of 121 BPO projects was conducted among BPO client department manager and project manager through a pairwise design. Empirical evidence reveals that social system, technical system, and project management risks negatively affect BPO project satisfaction. However, cultural, technological, and structural levels of knowledge management capabilities weaken the negative risk effects of social system, technical system, and project management, respectively. Different types of risks and knowledge management capabilities should be matched to achieve effective risk management.     

Identifying cooperation for innovation―a comparison of data sources

ABSTRACT

The value of social network analysis is critically dependent on the comprehensive and reliable identification of actors and their relationships. We compare regional knowledge networks based on different types of data sources, namely, co-patents, co-publications, and publicly subsidized collaborative R&D projects. Moreover, by combining these three data sources, we construct a multilayer network that provides a comprehensive picture of intraregional interactions. By comparing the networks based on the data sources, we address the problems of coverage and selection bias. We observe that using only one data source leads to a severe underestimation of regional knowledge interactions, especially those of private sector firms and independent researchers.     

Simplifying the powder metallurgy manufacturing process using soft computing tools

The tools of soft computing will aid the knowledge mining in predicting and classifying the properties of various parameters while designing the composite preforms in the manufacturing of Powder Metallurgy (P/M) Lab. In this paper, an integrated PRNET (PCA-Radial basis functional neural NET) model is proposed in different versions to select the relevant parameters for preparing composite preforms and to predict the deformation and strain hardening properties of Al–Fe composites. It reveals that the predictability of this model has been increased by 67.89% relatively from the conventional models. A new PR-filter is proposed by slightly modifying the conventional filters of RBFNN, which improves the power of PRNET even though raw data are highly non-linear, interrelated and noisy. Moreover, fixing the range of input parameters for classifying the properties of composite preforms can be automated by the Fuzzy logic. These types of models will avoid expensive experimentation and risky environment while preparing sintered composite preforms. Thus the manufacturing process of composites in P/M Lab will be simplified with minimum energy by the support of these soft-computing tools.     

Knowledge transfer in pair programming: An in-depth analysis

Whilst knowledge transfer is one of the most widely-claimed benefits of pair programming, little is known about how knowledge transfer is achieved in this setting. This is particularly pertinent for novice−expert constellations, but knowledge transfer takes place to some degree in all constellations. We ask “what does it take to be a good “expert” and how can a “novice” best learn from a more experienced developer?”. An in-depth investigation of video and audio excerpts of professional pair programming sessions using Interaction Analysis reveals: six teaching strategies, ranging from “giving direct instructions” to “subtle hints”; and challenges and benefits for both partners. These strategies are instantiations of some but not all teaching methods promoted in cognitive apprenticeship; novice articulation, reflection and exploration are not seen in the data. The context of pair programming influences the strategies, challenges and benefits, in particular the roles of driver and navigator and agile prioritisation which considers business value rather than educational progression. Utilising these strategies more widely and recognizing the challenges and benefits for both partners will help developers to maximise the benefits from pairing sessions.     

Trajectories of knowledge economy in SSA and MENA countries

In the first critical assessment of knowledge economy dynamic paths in Africa and the Middle East, but for a few exceptions, we find overwhelming support for diminishing cross-country disparities in knowledge-based economy dimensions. The paper employs all the four components of the World Bank's Knowledge Economy Index (KEI): economic incentives, innovation, education, and information infrastructure. The main finding suggests that sub-Saharan African (SSA) and the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries with low levels of KE dynamics and catching-up their counterparts of higher KE levels. We provide the speeds of integration and time necessary to achieve full (100%) integration. Policy implications are also discussed.     

Model checking temporal knowledge and commitments in multi-agent systems using reduction

Though modeling and verifying Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) have long been under study, there are still challenges when many different aspects need to be considered simultaneously. In fact, various frameworks have been carried out for modeling and verifying MASs with respect to knowledge and social commitments independently. However, considering them under the same framework still needs further investigation, particularly from the verification perspective. In this article, we present a new technique for model checking the logic of knowledge and commitments (CTLKC⁺). The proposed technique is fully-automatic and reduction-based in which we transform the problem of model checking CTLKC⁺ into the problem of model checking an existing logic of action called ARCTL. Concretely, we construct a set of transformation rules to formally reduce the CTLKC⁺ model into an ARCTL model and CTLKC⁺ formulae into ARCTL formulae to get benefit from the extended version of NuSMV symbolic model checker of ARCTL. Compared to a recent approach that reduces the problem of model checking CTLKC⁺ to another logic of action called GCTL¹, our technique has better scalability and efficiency. We also analyze the complexity of the proposed model checking technique. The results of this analysis reveal that the complexity of our reduction-based procedure is PSPACE-complete for local concurrent programs with respect to the size of these programs and the length of the formula being checked. From the time perspective, we prove that the complexity of the proposed approach is P-complete with regard to the size of the model and length of the formula, which makes it efficient. Finally, we implement our model checking approach on top of extended NuSMV and report verification results for the verification of the NetBill protocol, taken from business domain, against some desirable properties. The obtained results show the effectiveness of our model checking approach when the system scales up.