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Some education specialists are challenging the use of traditional strategies in classrooms and are calling for the use of contemporary teaching and learning techniques. In response to these calls, many field experiments that compare different teaching and learning strategies have been conducted. However, to date, little is known on the outcomes of these strategies specific to the context of engineers and engineering education. The debate on traditional versus contemporary strategies continues, with many traditionalists holding firm to the view that contemporary techniques diminish the academic quality and integrity of teaching and learning. This paper adds to the current debate by assessing the outcome of interactive lectures, a contemporary teaching strategy, in the context of engineering education. Specifically, this paper examines the effect of interactive lectures on student academic achievement and the learning environment. This paper supported the quantitative survey responses with self-reported student reflections. The findings contradict the traditionalist view of teaching and learning; student performance was not significantly different when interactive learning strategies were employed. However, students held a more positive view toward the learning environment and felt that interactive learning enhanced their overall learning experiences and spurred interest in the subject area. This paper concluded that interactive lecturing can be an effective approach in teaching business management in engineering education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper develops an integrated technology-push and market-pull framework, a value chain model for crossing the valley of death (VOD—the gap between laboratory and market) for emerging technologies based on primary and secondary data analyses, and a survey conducted on European research and development projects. The study uses a case of micro- and nano-manufacturing technology (MNT), and confirms the existence of the VOD through the survey data analysis. A mixed-methods approach was adopted that investigated the business and technical challenges to the commercialization of MNT. A notable finding is that the emerging MNT often does not have a direct link with market demand, and the result suggests that an intermediary role between advanced technology and market demand should be integrated to act as a co-ordinator for overcoming the VOD. The paper also examines how an intermediary is crucial to escape the VOD within the value chain of the interdependent relationships between actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a Semantic Web-based context ontological reasoning service for multimedia conferencing process management. When the chairman enters the basic conference information, the process will automatically select the appropriate means of notifications based on the conference time and the participant contact details. In this system, all types of multimedia conferencing processes are encapsulated in Web services and deployed on an enterprise service bus. A large multimedia conference ontology is created that contains business rules. In addition, with the objective of improving and management for data redundancy in ontological reasoning service, we propose an extensible breadth-first-search-based graph search algorithm that can successfully eliminate the redundant portion of the ontology, which can ensure validity of context ontology reasoning. Finally, the proposed multimedia conferencing process management can obtain the desired results, and some corresponding experimental analysis are reported. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Location prediction is widely used to forecast users’ next place to visit based on his/her mobility logs. It is an essential problem in location data processing, invaluable for surveillance, business, and personal applications. It is very challenging due to the sparsity issues of check-in data. An often ignored problem in recent studies is the variety across different check-in scenarios, which is becoming more urgent due to the increasing availability of more location check-in applications. In this paper, we propose a new feature fusion based prediction approach, GALLOP, i.e., GlobAL feature fused LOcation Prediction for different check-in scenarios. Based on the carefully designed feature extraction methods, we utilize a novel combined prediction framework. Specifically, we set out to utilize the density estimation model to profile geographical features, i.e., context information, the factorization method to extract collaborative information, and a graph structure to extract location transition patterns of users’ temporal check-in sequence, i.e., content information. An empirical study on three different check-in datasets demonstrates impressive robustness and improvement of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In any competitive business, success is based on the ability to make an item more appealing to customers than the competition. A number of questions arise in the context of this task: how do we formalize and quantify the competitiveness between two items? Who are the main competitors of a given item? What are the features of an item that most affect its competitiveness? Despite the impact and relevance of this problem to many domains, only a limited amount of work has been devoted toward an effective solution. In this paper, we present a formal definition of the competitiveness between two items, based on the market segments that they can both cover. Our evaluation of competitiveness utilizes customer reviews, an abundant source of information that is available in a wide range of domains. We present efficient methods for evaluating competitiveness in large review datasets and address the natural problem of finding the top-k competitors of a given item. Finally, we evaluate the quality of our results and the scalability of our approach using multiple datasets from different domains. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Discursive strategy is important in engaging users when an organization-wide strategic change, such as an enterprise system (ES), is introduced. Although some information system (IS) studies have suggested the use of discursive framing, little is known about how such framing is conducted. Hence, our study aims to conceptualize discursive framing strategies by taking into account user diversity. A qualitative case study of China's largest food conglomerate, with its diversified subsidiaries, is presented. Specifically, the pre-implementation phase of an ES implementation is examined. Based on a spatiotemporal analysis of the IS context that could give rise to user diversity, this paper makes two contributions. It addresses a gap in the literature by conceptualizing discursive framing strategies in managing user diversity during ES pre-implementation and it extends organizational discourse analysis through a spatiotemporal analysis of users’ IS context. We conclude with guidelines for managers to anticipate and overcome potential conflicts, and offer suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

System-related engineering tasks are often conducted using process models. In this context, it is essential that these models do not contain structural or terminological inconsistencies. To this end, several automatic analysis techniques have been proposed to support quality assurance. While formal properties of control flow can be checked in an automated fashion, there is a lack of techniques addressing textual quality. More specifically, there is currently no technique available for handling the issue of lexical ambiguity caused by homonyms and synonyms. In this paper, we address this research gap and propose a technique that detects and resolves lexical ambiguities in process models. We evaluate the technique using three process model collections from practice varying in size, domain, and degree of standardization. The evaluation demonstrates that the technique significantly reduces the level of lexical ambiguity and that meaningful candidates are proposed for resolving ambiguity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The design and development of process-aware information systems is often supported by specifying requirements as business process models. Although this approach is generally accepted as an effective strategy, it remains a fundamental challenge to adequately validate these models given the diverging skill set of domain experts and system analysts. As domain experts often do not feel confident in judging the correctness and completeness of process models that system analysts create, the validation often has to regress to a discourse using natural language. In order to support such a discourse appropriately, so-called verbalization techniques have been defined for different types of conceptual models. However, there is currently no sophisticated technique available that is capable of generating natural-looking text from process models. In this paper, we address this research gap and propose a technique for generating natural language texts from business process models. A comparison with manually created process descriptions demonstrates that the generated texts are superior in terms of completeness, structure, and linguistic complexity. An evaluation with users further demonstrates that the texts are very understandable and effectively allow the reader to infer the process model semantics. Hence, the generated texts represent a useful input for process model validation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) is a common business information space populated with many entities of different system types. Each of them has its own context of how to process activities. This leads to heterogeneous e-marketplace activities, which are difficult to make interoperable and inferred from one entity to another. This study solves this problem by proposing a concept of separation strategy and implementing it through providing a semantic inference engine with a novel inference algorithm. The solution, called the RuleXPM approach, enables one to semantically infer a next e-marketplace activity across multiple contexts/domains. Experiments show that the cross-context/cross-domain semantic inference is achievable. This paper is an understanding of many aspects related to heterogeneous activity inference. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the basis of an extensive survey study conducted among business professionals engaging in global communication, this paper discusses communicative competence. Rapid changes in work environments, particularly advancing globalization and new technology, have highlighted the need for expanding our knowledge of the elements that constitute communicative competence in global encounters. Competence has been investigated by several researchers; however, the language perspective, particularly the language used for international communication, that is, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), has largely been ignored. Our findings indicate that global communicative competence (GCC) consists of three layers: multicultural competence, competence in English as a Business Lingua Franca (BELF) and the communicator's business know-how. Based on our findings, we present a model for GCC, which includes language as a key component. Implications for theory, practice, and education include the need for a multidisciplinary approach and the acknowledgement of ELF/BELF as the language of global interaction. ELF/BELF assumes a shared “core” of the English language, but focuses on interactional skills, rapport building, and the ability to ask for and provide clarifications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]