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PHOENIX--Not long after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in 2020, Zoel Zohnnie was laid off from his pipe welding job. But the Tuba City, Arizona native knew other members of [...]

The industrial progress has reached a level in which it is necessary to understand the behavior of mechanical components and to monitor their conditions without disassembling them. Nowadays, a suitable methodology is based on vibrational analysis usually performed through acceleration signals measured directly on the system to be tested. However, in the last years, the industrial scenario has deeply changed due to the need for time reduction, in particular, for the control operations at the end of the productive line. The genuine methods based on acceleration measurements, for example, through piezoelectric accelerometers, came into conflict with the industrial need as the sensors used for the quality control have to be easily and fastly mounted and unmounted. A valid alternative is represented by the exploitation of laser triangulation sensors that are able to measure the dynamic displacement in a contactless way, strongly reducing the (un)mounting time. The target of this paper is to highlight pros and cons of the contactless displacement analysis through laser triangulation sensors with respect to the contact one through genuine accelerometers by means of a comparison between the results obtained both for experimental modal analysis and vibrational diagnostics of rotating machines.

This paper describes the design and application of a dashboard for visualising the interaction of content providers and online users with cultural objects within digital environments. The dashboard combines social network analysis metrics and content analysis indicators and relies on two-mode networks where nodes can be cultural heritage objects, institutional providers (galleries, museums) or individual digital content providers (experts and content aggregators). The links provide information about the digital resources associated to each object. The dashboard offers insights on the evolution of the most central providers, the most sought-after digital resources, and the most popular cultural objects over time. We applied the dashboard to an Italian living lab focused on cultural heritage and to a European platform for sharing cultural digital objects. Results show the emergence of clusters of interest around specific digital resources, and detect contributors sharing new topics of discussion and promoting innovative ways of organising the content.

Communities of innovation (CoI) was introduced at organisational level to pursue collaboratively innovation activities. By extending this concept at territorial level, they may become government's tools to undertake innovative projects for local development. This work investigates whether and, if so, to what extent local governments support the development of CoI. We focused our attention on two different institutional settings, one in Italy and one in China. We performed a quantitative and qualitative investigation, relying on official data and web sources. With the first, we developed a measure to synthesise the intensity in promoting CoI; with the second, we highlighted the main programs' characteristics and objectives supporting CoI. Results show that in both settings, local governments make significant policy efforts in promoting CoI, focusing on similar objectives and relying on similar tools. This highlights the engagement of governments and the relevance of their industrial policies to support the development of CoI.

This article hypothesizes that virtual communities of practice (VCoPs) are valuable to business schools and universities because they contribute to the emerging paradigms of just-in-time, action-based informal learning. It presents a real case study of a VCoP called Virtual eBMS that was built by applying participative observation (Yin, 1994). In particular, the article provides a process-oriented model of Virtual eBMS that is composed of four main elements: the people participating in the community, the processes and the purpose of the community in terms of the value created for the business school, and the technology enabling the interactions between the community members. Indeed, from a technological point of view, the community is supported by an integrated Web learning and knowledge management platform, described in terms of the main knowledge processes triggered and the correspondent technologies supporting the actions. Finally, the work presents some preliminary results and the value created through the use of Virtual eBMS.

The current economical environment is subject to a continuing pressure to innovate and evolve the momentary equilibrium. In this scenario, knowledge plays a fundamental role in supporting continuous innovation; creating, protecting, diffusing and applying knowledge is a key element in the companies' strategy. A lot of approaches and techniques exist in the knowledge management field, but studies on concrete scenarios are showing that good results can be obtained only by combining 'coordination' and 'cooperation' actions. This paper introduces the semantic profiled knowledge base (SPKB), a system supporting competencies management. Profiling user's competencies, the system implement a service guiding the user in querying the database. But competencies are not viewed as a static asset. A data quality refinement process is activated by collecting feedbacks provided by the user. This way, the system can take advantage of both coordinative and cooperative actions.