Fostering trust in virtual project teams: Towards a design framework grounded in a TrustWorthiness ANtecedents (TWAN) schema

Several collaboration problems in virtual project teams that work in knowledge-intensive contexts can be attributed to a hampered process of interpersonal trust formation. Solutions to trust formation problems need to be based on an understanding of how interpersonal trust forms in face-to-face project teams as well as on insight into how this process differs in virtual teams. Synthesizing literature from various disciplines, we propose a model for the formation of interpersonal trust between project team members. Taking this model as a starting point, we analyse how virtual settings may alter or even obstruct the process of trust formation. One method to improve the formation of interpersonal trust in virtual settings is to facilitate the assessment of trustworthiness. This can be done by making information available about individual virtual project team members. Previous research in virtual project teams focussed principally on the medium by which information is spread, for example, by phone, mail, or videoconferencing. Most researchers failed to take the specific content of the information into account, although there is general agreement that personal, non-task-related information is important to foster trust. For this, we propose to use the antecedents of trustworthiness, which until now have mainly been used as a framework to measure trust, as a design framework instead. This framework of antecedents can also be used to determine which type of information is relevant to assess each other’s trustworthiness. We review existing literature on the antecedents of trustworthiness and extend the well-accepted antecedents of ‘ability’, ‘benevolence’ and ‘integrity’ with several other antecedents, such as ‘communality’ and ‘accountability’. Together, these form the TrustWorthiness ANtecedents (TWAN) schema. We describe how these antecedents can be used to determine which information is relevant for team members assessing others’ trustworthiness. In future research we will first verify this extended cognitive schema of trustworthiness (TWAN) empirically and then apply it to the design of artefacts or guidelines, such as a personal identity profile to support the assessment of trustworthiness in virtual project teams.     

Exploring individual user differences in the 2D/3D interaction with medical image data

User-centered design is often performed without regard to individual user differences. In this paper, we report results of an empirical study aimed to evaluate whether computer experience and demographic user characteristics would have an effect on the way people interact with the visualized medical data in a 3D virtual environment using 2D and 3D input devices. We analyzed the interaction through performance data, questionnaires and observations. The results suggest that differences in gender, age and game experience have an effect on people’s behavior and task performance, as well as on subjective user preferences.     

Sentiment classification of online reviews to travel destinations by supervised machine learning approaches

The rapid growth in Internet applications in tourism has lead to an enormous amount of personal reviews for travel-related information on the Web. These reviews can appear in different forms like BBS, blogs, Wiki or forum websites. More importantly, the information in these reviews is valuable to both travelers and practitioners for various understanding and planning processes. An intrinsic problem of the overwhelming information on the Internet, however, is information overloading as users are simply unable to read all the available information. Query functions in search engines like Yahoo and Google can help users find some of the reviews that they needed about specific destinations. The returned pages from these search engines are still beyond the visual capacity of humans. In this research, sentiment classification techniques were incorporated into the domain of mining reviews from travel blogs. Specifically, we compared three supervised machine learning algorithms of Naïve Bayes, SVM and the character based N-gram model for sentiment classification of the reviews on travel blogs for seven popular travel destinations in the US and Europe. Empirical findings indicated that the SVM and N-gram approaches outperformed the Naïve Bayes approach, and that when training datasets had a large number of reviews, all three approaches reached accuracies of at least 80%.     

An automated day-time cloud detection technique applied to MSG-SEVIRI data over Western Europe

Since February 2003, the Spinning Enhanced Visible and Infrared Imager (SEVIRI) aboard the first Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite has provided radiance data in 12 spectral bands for a full Earth hemisphere every 15 minutes. This high frame rate renders it an excellent tool for studies of atmospheric transport of pollutants, aerosol and clouds. TNO (Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research) is currently developing an algorithm for the retrieval of aerosol properties from MSG-SEVIRI observations over cloud-free scenes. This requires rigorous cloud screening for which a fast and stand-alone algorithm is developed. The detection technique described in this paper, which is based on the ATSR-2 (Along Track Scanning Radiometer 2) cloud screening algorithm, can be easily implemented, and satisfactorily identifies clouds. The study presented here focuses on Western Europe for the year 2006. Cloud detection results are compared to the KNMI/MF (Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute/Meteo-France) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) cloud detection algorithms. According to the statistics, the results obtained with our algorithm show good agreement (>80%) with these data sets.     

An Efficient Approximate Residual Evaluation in the Adaptive Tensor Product Wavelet Method

A wide class of well-posed operator equations can be solved in optimal computational complexity by adaptive wavelet methods. A quantitative bottleneck is the approximate evaluation of the arising residuals that steer the adaptive refinements. In this paper, we consider multi-tree approximations from tensor product wavelet bases for solving linear PDE’s. In this setting, we develop a new efficient approximate residual evaluation. Other than the commonly applied method, that uses the so-called APPLY routine, our approximate residual depends affinely on the current approximation of the solution. Our findings are illustrated by numerical results that show a considerable speed-up.     

以自己为中心的设计——一切为工程师的工作着想

从本质上讲，设计工程师并不是以自我为中心的一类人。也许是团队合作的工作方式，亦或是出于职业需要，他们培养了对诸如技术等外界事物的好奇之心。工程师本人并非一切的中心。但有一点却是确凿无疑的，这就是设计工程师们在工作中表现出的一个标志性特征：自我关注（self—focused），     

Rich nutrition from the poorest – Cereal fermentations in Africa and Asia

Cereal fermentations in Africa and Asia involve mainly the processing of maize, rice, sorghum and the millets. Lactic acid bacteria (Lactobacillus, Pediococcus), Enterobacter spp., yeasts (Candida, Debaryomyces, Endomycopsis, Hansenula, Pichia, Saccharomyces and Trichosporon spp.) and filamentous fungi (Amylomyces, Aspergillus, Mucor, and Rhizopus spp.) contribute to desirable modifications of taste, flavour, acidity, digestibility, and texture in non-alcoholic beverages (e.g., uji, and ben-saalga), porridges (e.g., mawè) and cooked gels (e.g., kenkey, idli, and mifen). In addition, alcoholic beverages (beers such as tchoukoutou and jnard; and spirits e.g. jiu) are obtained using malt, or using amylolytic mixed microbial starter cultures as generators of fermentable substrates. Wet processing, marketing of multi-purpose intermediate products, co-fermentation for texture and nutrition, and mixed culture fermentations as practiced in indigenous fermentation processes are of interest for industrial innovation and for better control of natural mixed culture fermentation systems. On the other hand, the nutritional properties of traditional cereal fermented products can be enhanced by increasing their nutrient and energy density, as well as by increasing their mineral status by combining mineral fortification and dephytinization.