Supporting cooperation in the SPADE-1 environment

Software development is a cooperative activity that relies heavily on the quality and effectiveness of the communication channels established within the development team and with the end-user. Process-centered software engineering environments (PSEEs) support the definition and the execution of various phases of the software process. This is achieved by explicitly defining cooperation procedures, and by supporting synchronization and data sharing among its users. PSEE and CSCW technologies have been developed rather independently from each other, leading to a large amount of research results, tools and environments, and practical experiences. We have reached a stage in technology development where it is necessary to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the research efforts carried out so far. Moreover, it is important to understand how to integrate and exploit the results of these different efforts. The goal of the paper is to understand which kind of basic functionalities PSEEs can and should offer, and how these environments can be integrated with other tools to effectively support cooperation in software development. In particular, the paper introduces a process model we have built to support a cooperative activity related to anomaly management in an industrial software factory. The core of the paper presents and discusses the experiences and results that we have derived from this modeling activity, and how they related to the general problem of supporting cooperation in software development. The project was carried out using the SPADE (Software Process Analysis, Design and Enactment) PSEE and the ImagineDesk CSCW toolkit     

Social Media Technologies’ Use for the Competitive Information and Knowledge Sharing,and Its Effects on Industrial SMEs’ Innovation

ABSTRACT

The effective use of technologies supporting decision making is essential to companies’ survival. Recent studies analyzed social media technologies (SMT) in the context of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), contributing to the discussion on SMT benefits from the marketing perspective. This article focuses on the effects of SMT use on innovation. Our findings provide empirical evidence on the positive effects of SMT use for acquiring external information and for sharing knowledge and innovation performance.     

What makes good games go viral? The role of technology use,efficacy, emotion and enjoyment in players’ decision to share a prosocial digital game

Serious digital games may be an effective tool for prosocial message dissemination because they offer technology and experiences that encourage players to share them with others, and spread virally. But little is known about the factors that predict players’ willingness to share games with others in their social network. This panel study explores how several factors, including sharing technology use, emotional responses, and game enjoyment, contribute to players’ decision to share the game Darfur is Dying, with others. College students played the game and completed questionnaires that assessed whether they had shared the games at two different time points: during game play and after game play. Positive emotions predicted sharing while students played the game, but negative emotions predicted whether the game was shared after initial game play. Game enjoyment predicted players’ intentions to share the game, but it did not predict actual sharing behavior. Neither players’ general use of sharing technologies nor their satisfaction related to sharing digital content predicted sharing intentions or behavior. These findings have implications for the study of viral social marketing campaigns, and serious game design and theory.     

Innovation in the Agri‐Food sector: Exploiting opportunities for Industry 4.0

Agri‐Food producers have a responsibility to provide safe, secure and sustainable food in a world characterized by disruption and increasing intolerance of waste along supply chains. As such, it is critical that they adopt new technologies to ensure efficient and effective management of their responsibility. While Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies can underpin process innovation opportunities, there is a gap in research‐based understanding of how they influence innovation practice and outcomes in Agri‐Food. In this paper, we investigate how I4.0, as a set of enabling technologies, influences core process innovation practice and product innovation outcomes in Agri‐Food firms. We present case studies of two Spanish firms processing fresh food products, competing in two important subsectors of the industry, meat and fruit and vegetables. We used secondary material and semi‐structured interviews as data sources. The findings describe how, in the two cases, I4.0 has enabled responses to new customers requirements through process innovations resulting in enhanced functionality, aesthetics and meaning of the delivered products. Our paper contributes a framework identifying for researchers and managers how I4.0 technologies act as enablers of the core innovation processes and competitive outcomes.     

Fostering knowledge sharing: Design principles for persuasive digital technologies in open innovation projects

Integrating knowledge is crucial for open innovation, and digital technologies can play a central role because they support knowledge sharing. In open innovation projects, in particular, little is known about the role of technology. Here, the individual behaviour of users is taken into account concerning the extent to which knowledge is shared. Therefore, persuasive technologies offer the potential to foster sharing. In particular, to facilitate the construction of future digital technologies, this study applies a design science research approach to create and analyse artefacts as a research contribution and develop design principles as a step towards a nascent design theory. We present insights from the design and application of three artefacts in different stages of open innovation processes. Results show that digital technologies can be used for various purposes: to build a common understanding, support design phases, communicate ideas and simplify the application of the technology for the user. Our research provides insights into the role of digital technologies for knowledge sharing in open innovation projects, and four design principles are found to facilitate the construction of future persuasive digital technologies for open innovation projects.     

Using very high spatial resolution multispectral satellite sensor imagery to monitor refugee camps

Detailed geographic information is a key factor in decision making processes during refugee relief operations. The forthcoming commercial very high spatial resolution (VHSR) satellite sensors will be capable of acquiring multispectral (MS) images at spatial resolutions of 1m (panchromatic) and 4m (multispectral) of refugee camps and their environment. This work demonstrates how refugee camp environment, area and population can be analysed using a VHSR MS satellite sensor image from the Russian KVR-1000 sensor. This image, with a spatial resolution of 3.3m, was used to study Thailand's Site 2 refugee camps, which were established to accommodate Khmer refugees on the Thai-Kampuchean border. At the time of image acquisition, the total population of Site 2's five refugee camps was close to 143000. The VHSR MS image was found to be suitable for mapping the refugee camp environment and area. A statistically significant linear relationship between camp area and population was determined. Accordingly, the study suggests that VHSR MS images in general may be useful for refugee camp planning and management and points toward the utilization of forthcoming commercial VHSR MS satellite sensor images in humanitarian relief operations.     

Collectivistic health promotion tools: Accounting for the relationship between culture,food and nutrition

Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers are increasingly examining how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) can help people eat more healthfully. However, within HCI, there has been little examination of the way that cultural values influence how people think about food and wellness, and how sociocultural context supports or impedes attempts to eat healthfully. Our work focuses on the diet-related health challenges of African Americans within low-income neighborhoods. This population disproportionately experiences diet-related disease, and as such, researchers have consistently advocated research that examines the way in which food practices are culturally situated.Through formative focus groups with 46 participants we identified several design implications for tools that promote healthy eating while accounting for collectivism, a cultural value often ascribed to the African American population. Based on our design implications we developed, deployed and evaluated two systems that supported the sharing of community-held knowledge about making healthy eating decisions. In our discussion, we present implications for the design of collectivistic systems that address food practices. We conclude with recommendations for HCI research that investigates the relationship between culture and food more broadly.     

Breaking ground: Automated disturbance detection with Landsat time series captures rapid refugee settlement establishment and growth in North Uganda

Since 2015, Uganda has welcomed over 700,000 refugees from South Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and other East African nations, and currently hosts over 1.4 million refugees with 92% of that population living in UNHCR-managed settlements. Despite refugee settlements being essential spaces for physical protection and humanitarian aid distribution and reception, the sheer rate of refugee influx and settlement growth has introduced uncertainties around site planning, aid delivery, food security, and landscape change. For example, there is little publicly available information on settlement establishment, growth, or changes in land use/land cover for the vast majority of UNHCR-managed settlements in Uganda and around the world. To address this shortcoming, this research characterizes the spatial and temporal patterns of refugee settlement landscape dynamics using the case study of the Pagirinya Refugee Settlement in Northern Uganda, Landsat and Sentinel-2 satellite image time series, and BFAST, an automated land cover disturbance detection algorithm. To delineate the extent of the settlement and surrounding disturbance, a refugee settlement boundary was generated using a 2018 Landsat NDVI composite, which included land disturbed by settlement establishment and subsequent growth. Landsat time series data were sampled within this boundary to parametrize a BFAST model to detect settlement disturbance, which was deployed over 351 Landsat images from 2005 to 2018. This approach yielded sub-monthly land cover disturbances from 2016 to 2017 with an accuracy of 87.5% resulting from the rapid (within one month) settlement establishment, road construction, the spread of dwellings and other built-up infrastructure throughout the settlement, as well as the conversion of natural grassland to small-scale agriculture within the first six months after refugee settlement began. These results were generated using open-access data and open-source algorithms to pave the way for developing a near real-time satellite image-based settlement monitoring framework, which would aid refugee response and evaluation efforts that are central to Uganda's refugee hosting and settlement plans, as well as implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees.     

The Neural Knowledge DNA Based Smart Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant attention from industry as well as academia during the past decade. Smartness, however, remains a substantial challenge for IoT applications. Recent advances in networked sensor technologies, computing, and machine learning have made it possible for building new smart IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: the Neural Knowledge DNA based Smart Internet of Things that enables IoT to extract knowledge from past experiences, as well as to store, evolve, share, and reuse such knowledge aiming for smart functions. By catching decision events, this approach helps IoT gather its own daily operation experiences, and it uses such experiences for knowledge discovery with the support of machine learning technologies. An initial case study is presented at the end of this paper to demonstrate how this approach can help IoT applications become smart: the proposed approach is applied to fitness wristbands to enable human action recognition.     

ICT and learning: Lessons from Australian classrooms

Research into Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in schools is well into its third decade but there is still a pressing need to better understand how computer-based technologies are influencing learning opportunities, and how the local conditions of schooling impact on teachers’ attempts to integrate these technologies in their classrooms. In this article, we provide some insight into these questions through our research in six diverse public schools in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia. We observed classrooms and conducted interviews with teachers and other key stakeholders, such as principals and technology coordinators about the integration of ICT. Our goal was to describe and examine the ways in which teachers, in a range of settings, are utilising ICT in their classroom practices to mediate student’s learning experiences Our findings indicate that ICT is largely being integrated in ways that support and supplement existing classroom practices. From our observations, we believe that successful integration of ICT requires fundamental shifts in the core activities of schools. These shifts include new teaching. The cases described in this article suggest some ways in which these shifts may be initiated and sustained.     

A knowledge broker for collaboration and sharing for SIDS: the case of comprehensive disaster management in the Caribbean*

ABSTRACT

Knowledge sharing can be hindered by barriers that prevent the free flow of information, especially across organizational and other boundaries. Therefore information produced at one location might not be available to entities elsewhere even if there are benefits to sharing this information. This can often lead to 'reinventing the wheel' and wasted investments in duplicating resources and ultimately will lead to the development of knowledge silos. Information technologies can be used to address this problem as they provide opportunities to lower the barriers to knowledge sharing and increase collaboration. This need for knowledge sharing and collaborative technologies can be important for Small Island Developing States (SIDS) within particular regions that are exposed to similar environmental and economic issues that can hinder their development. Although each SIDS may have Knowledge Resources that it uses to address its own issues, there would be benefits to collaborating and sharing these resources to collectively tackle these regional issues. Even when there is a willingness to share and collaborate and entities have been established to foster this collaboration, there is a void in the availability of tools and technologies needed to support collaboration and sharing of resources. This paper describes the research that has been done to help fill this void by designing and developing a technological solution, a Knowledge Broker, for the identification and sharing of Knowledge Resources that may be spread across various locations (e.g. countries). The Design Science Research methodology was used to develop the Knowledge Broker architecture, which provides a single point of access to the knowledge resources within a particular domain. A critical component of this Knowledge Broker is a common, online interactive vocabulary of the domain of interest which provides the terms which are used to describe and search for the knowledge resources available. The Knowledge Broker was evaluated using informed arguments and an illustrative scenario in the Comprehensive Disaster Management domain in the Caribbean region. The initial evaluations that have been reported in this paper indicates that the Knowledge Broker has the potential to increase the efficiency of solving regional issues through the sharing of knowledge resources.     

A Study on User Experience of Automotive HUD Systems: Contexts of Information Use and User-Perceived Design Improvement Points

ABSTRACT

Despite three decades of use and related research efforts, how automotive HUD can be designed to best serve the driver is still an on-going research issue. For any human-machine system, studying the experiences of the existing users is an important first step towards design improvement and innovation. Nonetheless, surprisingly few studies have investigated the user experience of the existing commercial automotive HUD systems. In an effort to address the research gap, the current study conducted a user survey on the usage contexts and design improvement points of the existing automotive HUD systems focusing on eleven high-priority HUD information items selected among those displayed by the existing commercial HUD systems. A total of fifty-one drivers with significant prior HUD use experience participated. Design implications were derived from the survey responses. They may be useful for improving the existing automotive HUD systems in both the system functions and the interface/interaction design.     

Participatory heritage innovation: designing dialogic sites of engagement

Abstract

Innovations in digital cultural communication for museums challenge us to develop appropriate methods for participation in curatorial processes and to rethink the role of audiences inside exhibitions. The article explores the potentials of scaffolding sites of dialogue and creative engagement through the design process and final exhibition. It draws upon experiences from an interactive exhibition project, Digital Natives, in which we combined principles from Participatory Design with issues of contemporary digital culture to explore possibilities for creating heritage innovation. We suggest three critical stages of the dialogic design process in which engagement between stakeholders, researchers, and audiences can be central to shaping and transforming future conceptions of digital cultural heritage, through process and final exhibition. In this way, we argue that a participatory design anthropological approach to digital culture can expand opportunities for heritage innovation through technological means of engagement in museums.     

Effects of information technologies,department characteristics and individual roles on improving knowledge sharing visibility: a qualitative case study

Knowledge sharing visibility (KSV) is a critical environmental factor which can reduce social loafing in knowledge sharing (KS). This is especially true in ICT-based KS in learning organisations. As such, it is imperative that we better understand how to design technology enabled knowledge management systems (KMS) to support high KSV. This article examines the impact of knowledge management technology functions (e.g. tracking, knowledge storing) on KSV through qualitative analysis of 16 semi-structured interviews with participants in a Chinese company. Impact and implications of use for their existing KMS are examined. This article also examined the effects of department characteristics (i.e. group size and task characteristics) and individual roles (i.e. employee positions) on the IT–KSV relationship. Results encourage applied statistical, tracking, knowledge distribution and knowledge storing functions for monitoring explicit KS, and suggest integration of visualised knowledge maps with communication tools (e.g. Instant Messenger (IM)) to support visibility for implicit KS. Findings also suggest that KM technologies are more salient on improving KSV in large department with routine tasks, and that low-level employees may have more positive attitude on accepting communication tools on sharing knowledge. Extension to use of Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. weblogs) in KMS is also explored.     

FANTASIA: a framework for advanced natural tools and applications in social,interactive approaches

With the recent availability of industry-grade, high-performing engines for video games production, researchers in different fields have been exploiting the advanced technologies offered by these artefacts to improve the quality of the interactive experiences they design. While these engines provide excellent and easy-to-use tools to design interfaces and complex rule-based systems to control the experience, there are some aspects of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research they do not support in the same way because of their original mission and related design patterns pointing at a different primary target audience. In particular, the more research in HCI evolves towards natural, socially engaging approaches, the more there is the need to rapidly design and deploy software architectures to support these new paradigms. Topics such as knowledge representation, probabilistic reasoning and voice synthesis demand space as possible instruments within this new ideal design environment. In this work, we propose a framework, named FANTASIA, designed to integrate a set of chosen modules (a graph database, a dialogue manager, a game engine and a voice synthesis engine) and support rapid design and implementation of interactive applications for HCI studies. We will present a number of different case studies to exemplify how the proposed tools can be deployed to develop very different kinds of interactive applications and we will discuss ongoing and future work to further extend the framework we propose.

     

The Impact of Cross-Addiction on Information Sharing Behaviors on Social Networking Sites

ABSTRACT

There is a rise in the interest among researchers to understand how addiction to social networking sites (SNSs) influences the use of SNS for information sharing. Much less attention has been placed on the interactive effect of multiple addictions (i.e., cross-addiction) on information sharing behaviors on SNSs. In this study, we examine the interaction effect of SNS addiction and alcohol use on two characteristic sharing behaviors on SNSs, self-promotion, and peer promotion of alcohol use. This study contributes to theory and practice as it builds a model that integrates social cognitive theory and normative social influence to explain mechanisms through which cross-addiction shapes information sharing behaviors on SNSs. The proposed model is estimated using data from a sample of college students in a North American university. The results support the theorized relationships between cross-addiction and SNS use to promote addiction-related activities. Implications of the findings for theory and practice are discussed.     

Individual characteristics influencing the sharing of knowledge on social networking services: online identity,self-efficacy,and knowledge sharing intentions

ABSTRACT

Social media have become an important place for individuals with similar interests to exchange opinions and share resources. Ubiquitous collaborative learning environments in SNS have great educational and organisational potential and offer a platform for sharing knowledge. Rising interest in personal factors in knowledge management research calls for a better understanding of how knowledge is shared in SNS-based collaborative learning. Grounded on the theories of planned behaviour and social identity, this study investigates individual characteristics that affect the sharing of knowledge in SNS learning communities. The study also examines whether intent to share knowledge mediates those personal characteristics and sharing of knowledge. Eighty individuals from five active Facebook groups participated in this study. The findings indicate that individual characteristics, such as online personal identity, web-specific self-efficacy, and knowledge-creation self-efficacy significantly predict sharing of knowledge. In addition, intent to share knowledge mediates between the sharing of knowledge and online identity, web-specific self-efficacy, or knowledge-creation self-efficacy. The results reveal a need for customised support and environmental design focusing on online personal identity, web-specific self-efficacy, knowledge-creation self-efficacy, and intent to share knowledge in a knowledge-sharing community on SNS. Implications for the SNS communities and suggestions for further research are discussed.     

Workflow Management Systems and ERP Systems: Differences, Commonalities, and Applications

Two important classes of information systems, Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, have been used to support e-business process redesign, integration, and management. While both technologies can help with business process automation, data transfer, and information sharing, the technological approach and features of solutions provided by WfMS and ERP are different. Currently, there is a lack of understanding of these two classes of information systems in the industry and academia, thus hindering their effective applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive comparison between these two classes of systems. We discuss how the two types of systems can be used independently or together to develop intra- and inter-organizational application solutions. In particular, we also explore the roles of WfMS and ERP in the next generation of IT architecture based on Web Services. Our findings should help businesses make better decisions in the adoption of both WfMS and ERP in their e-business strategies.     

Designing a shared freight service intelligence platform for transport stakeholders using mobile telematics

Internet of Things (IoT) technology transforms freight transport operations by adopting novel data-driven services and enables information sharing among actors involved in global transport chains. Mobile telematics represents emerging IoT technologies for global forwarding increasingly applied to full loads conveyed by freight transport assets (FTAs) (e.g., ISO containers) facilitating intelligent services. In this light, telematics-enabled FTAs support freight transport operations utilized by individual stakeholders in three overarching service dimensions: transport management, fleet management, and risk management. This topic is, however, understudied by information systems (IS) research and service science. For this reason, we establish a design science research project, conceptualize a shared Freight Service Intelligence Platform (FSIP), and introduce freight service intelligence as an interdisciplinary research field. To this aim, we first review related literature, interview 14 transport stakeholders, and theorize six meta-requirements. Second, we propose five design principles that indicate how the meta-requirements may be associated. Third, we develop a web-based prototype application to instantiate the proposed design principles comprising performance analytics, anomaly detection, risk assessment including prediction, data exchange, communication, and IS integration. Subsequently, we evaluate the application with six transport stakeholders and logistics software vendors. Finally, we conclude with a discussion on the implications of an emerging topic addressed by this paper.