The Climate for Transformation: Lessons for Leaders

This article reports insights for organizational leaders based on a series of case studies describing the use of the Situational Outlook Questionnaire as a tool to assist them with their transformation efforts. Leaders often assert the need to change their organizational cultures. This article seeks to clarify and differentiate culture from climate, and then focus on what leaders can do to transform their climate by applying a deliberate assessment tool. As the case studies illustrate, making organizational transformation happen is best approached through a systemic or ecological approach. This approach includes considering the people involved, the methods deployed, the desired outcome of the change as well as the context within which the transformation occurs. The broadest concept within this framework is context, which includes both culture and climate, among other things. Since context is key to initiating and sustaining transformation, emphasis on the leader's role in climate creation will be provided.     

Designing for creativity: Considerations for DSS development

Decision support systems (DSS) can be designed to support the creative and intuitive aspects of decision making. Our purpose is to provide a new perspective for the design of DSS by focusing on the important external factors that have been shown to influence creative activity. Design guidelines can then be developed by viewing a DSS as a special environment that incorporates these factors.     

Simulations for Urban Planning: Designing for Human Values

Sophisticated simulation systems such as UrbanSim model the long-term impacts of transportation and land-use alternatives. Accounting for human values throughout the design process helps in designing interactions that engage both planners and citizens in the decision-making process.     

Fieldwork for requirements: Frameworks for mobile healthcare applications

Ethnographic approaches to study of work in the field have been widely adopted by HCI researchers as resources for investigation of work settings and for requirements elicitation. Although the value of fieldwork for design is widely recognised, difficulties surround the exploitation of fieldwork data within the design process. Since not every development project can support or justify large-scale field investigation, the issue of how to build on previous work within a domain is particularly important. In this paper we consider this issue in the context of development of mobile healthcare applications. Many such systems will be built in the coming years, and already a number of influential studies have derived concepts from fieldwork data and used them to support analysis of healthcare work. Using a patient review process as an example, we examine how the concepts from such exemplar studies can be leveraged to analyse fieldwork data, and to facilitate requirements elicitation. The concepts, previous interpretation within the domain, prototypical requirements and associated critique together provide a framework for analysis. The concepts are used to highlight issues that must be addressed and to derive requirements. We make the case that these concepts are not “value free” and that the course of our analysis is significantly altered through the palette of concepts used. The methodological implications of this proposition are also considered.     

Hammer for Coq: Automation for Dependent Type Theory

Hammers provide most powerful general purpose automation for proof assistants based on HOL and set theory today. Despite the gaining popularity of the more advanced versions of type theory, such as those based on the Calculus of Inductive Constructions, the construction of hammers for such foundations has been hindered so far by the lack of translation and reconstruction components. In this paper, we present an architecture of a full hammer for dependent type theory together with its implementation for the Coq proof assistant. A key component of the hammer is a proposed translation from the Calculus of Inductive Constructions, with certain extensions introduced by Coq, to untyped first-order logic. The translation is “sufficiently” sound and complete to be of practical use for automated theorem provers. We also introduce a proof reconstruction mechanism based on an eauto-type algorithm combined with limited rewriting, congruence closure and some forward reasoning. The algorithm is able to re-prove in the Coq logic most of the theorems established by the ATPs. Together with machine-learning based selection of relevant premises this constitutes a full hammer system. The performance of the whole procedure is evaluated in a bootstrapping scenario emulating the development of the Coq standard library. For each theorem in the library only the previous theorems and proofs can be used. We show that 40.8% of the theorems can be proved in a push-button mode in about 40 s of real time on a 8-CPU system.