3062410
Conceptualizing the three dimensions of inter-organizational communities of practice
The paper describes and analyzes the way in which a particular case company stimulated the development of communities of practice as a vehicle for encouraging product and process innovation. Some unique features of these communities were explored. In particular the involvement of retired engineers and the inclusion of external parties were both found to contribute to the effectiveness of these communities. More specifically, the effectiveness of these communities were discussed in relation to three dimensions – structural, strategic and technological. Analysis of these three dimensions was useful in examining the role played by these communities within the case company. The paper concludes by considering the lessons for managers that can be drawn from this analysis. Newell,Huang,Galliers Conceptualizing the three dimensions of Inter-Organizational
5308839
Knowledge Integration as a Key Problem in an ERP Implementation
While previous studies have focused mainly on the potential benefits and critical success factors associated with ERP implementation, very few have explored the important issues of impediments encountered, especially from a knowledge integration perspective. We have adopted a knowledge integration view that focuses not on the distribution and adoption of particular technological artifacts (ERP systems), but on the knowledge integration processes involved in implementation. The focus of this case study is to understand the nature, structure and process of knowledge integration that occurs during ERP implementation. The paper has identified the integration of knowledge as a key problem in ERP implementation. We discovered four reasons: (1) knowledge is embedded in complex organizational processes; (2) knowledge is embedded in legacy systems; (3) knowledge is embedded in externally based processes; and (4) knowledge is embedded in the ERP system. Based on our analysis, we further suggest that to overcome these impediments to knowledge integration requires the development of interpersonal relations (one-to-one based) and community relations (group-based).
400858
Toward good elimination orders for symbolic SAT solving
Fundamentally different from DPLL, a new approach to SAT has recently emerged that abandons search and enlists BDDs to symbolically represent clauses of the CNF. These BDDs are conjoined according to a schedule where some variables may be eliminated by quantification at each step to reduce the size of the intermediate BDDs. SAT solving then reduces to checking whether the final BDD is the zero constant. For this approach to be practical, finding a good quantification schedule is critical. We study the use of a variable elimination algorithm for this purpose, as well as two specific methods for the generation of good elimination orders based on CNF structure. While neither method appears to dominate, we show how one can heuristically select the better using the notion of width. We implement a symbolic SAT solver based on these techniques and evaluate its efficiency and robustness on a set of benchmarks against five other solvers, each having unique characteristics, including winners of the most recent SAT competition.
806919
Using Learning to Facilitate the Evolution of Features for Recognizing Visual Concepts
This paper describes a hybrid methodology that integrates genetic algorithms (GAs) and decision tree learning in order to evolve useful subsets of discriminatory features for recognizing complex visual concepts. A GA is used to search the space of all possible subsets of a large set of candidate discrimination features. Candidate feature subsets are evaluated by using C4.5, a decision tree learning algorithm, to produce a decision tree based on the given features using a limited amount of training data. The classification performance of the resulting decision tree on unseen testing data is used as the fitness of the underlying feature subset. Experimental results are presented to show how increasing the amount of learning significantly improves feature set evolution for difficult visual recognition problems involving satellite and facial image data. In addition, we also report on the extent to which other more subtle aspects of the Baldwin effect are exhibited by the system.
17903854
The Superthreaded Processor Architecture
The common single-threaded execution model limits processors to exploiting only the relatively small amount of instruction-level parallelism that is available in application programs. The superthreaded processor, on the other hand, is a concurrent multithreaded architecture (CMA) that can exploit the multiple granularities of parallelism that are available in general-purpose application programs. Unlike other CMAs that rely primarily on hardware for run-time dependence detection and speculation, the superthreaded processor combines compiler-directed thread-level speculation of control and data dependences with run-time data dependence verification hardware. This hybrid of a superscalar processor and a multiprocessor-on-a-chip can utilize many of the existing compiler techniques used in traditional parallelizing compilers developed for multiprocessors. Additional unique compiler techniques, such as the conversion of data speculation into control speculation, are also introduced to generate the superthreaded code and to enhance the parallelism between threads. A detailed execution-driven simulator is used to evaluate the performance potential of this new architecture. It is found that a superthreaded processor can achieve good performance on complex application programs through this close coupling of compile-time and run-time information.
2348760
Adaptive live video streaming by priority drop
In this paper we explore the use of priority progress streaming (PPS) for video surveillance applications. PPS is an adaptive streaming technique for the delivery of continuous media over variable bit-rate channels. It is based on the simple idea of reordering media components within a time window into priority order before transmission. The main concern when using PPS for live video streaming is the time delay introduced by reordering. In this paper we describe how PPS can be extended to support live streaming and show that the delay inherent in the approach can be tuned to satisfy a wide range of latency constraints while supporting fine-grain adaptation.
2763612
Information Marginalization on Subgraphs
Real-world data often involves objects that exhibit multiple relationships; for example, ‘papers' and ‘authors' exhibit both paper-author interactions and paper-paper citation relationships. A typical learning problem requires one to make inferences about a subclass of objects (e.g. ‘papers'), while using the remaining objects and relations to provide relevant information. We present a simple, unified mechanism for incorporating information from multiple object types and relations when learning on a targeted subset. In this scheme, all sources of relevant information are marginalized onto the target subclass via random walks. We show that marginalized random walks can be used as a general technique for combining multiple sources of information in relational data. With this approach, we formulate new algorithms for transduction and ranking in relational data, and quantify the performance of new schemes on real world data—achieving good results in many problems.