Search results for "knowledge."
showing 10 items of 3090 documents
Semantic Portal as a Tool for Structural Reform of the Ukrainian Educational System
2014
Education is recognized as a fundamental enabler of human development. The adoption of information and communications technologies (ICTs) by education (especially in developing countries) contributes to educational system reforms, in addition to the traditional advantages, such as social openness and accessibility. Yet the academic community has not studied sufficiently the challenging context in which ICTs are used as instruments for the reform of inefficient, and sometimes even corrupted, educational systems rather than just as means for smarter classrooms, remote access, or content management. The object of this study is Ukrainian higher education (HE) and its quality assurance (QA) syst…
Supporting Institutional Awareness and Academic Advising using Clustered Study Profiles
2017
The purpose of academic advising is to help students with developing educational plans that support their academic career and personal goals, and to provide information and guidance on studies. Planning and management of the students’ study path is the main joint activity in advising. Based on a study log of passed courses, we propose to use robust, prototype-based clustering to identify a set of actual study path profiles. Such profiles identify groups of students with similar progress of studies, whose analysis and interpretation can be used for better institutional awareness and to support evidence-based academic advising. A model of automated academic advising system utilizing the possi…
Feature Extractors for Describing Vehicle Routing Problem Instances
2016
The vehicle routing problem comes in varied forms. In addition to usual variants with diverse constraints and specialized objectives, the problem instances themselves – even from a single shared source - can be distinctly different. Heuristic, metaheuristic, and hybrid algorithms that are typically used to solve these problems are sensitive to this variation and can exhibit erratic performance when applied on new, previously unseen instances. To mitigate this, and to improve their applicability, algorithm developers often choose to expose parameters that allow customization of the algorithm behavior. Unfortunately, finding a good set of values for these parameters can be a tedious task that…
Customer Perception Driven Product Evolution - Facilitation of Structured Feedback Collection
2016
Competitive environment not only requires effective advertising strategies from the product producers and service providers, but also to do comprehensive and sufficient analysis of their customers to understand their needs and expectations. Successfully involving customers into a product/service co-creation process, companies more likely increase their future revenue. Customer feedback analysis is widely applied in marketing and product development. Among other challenges (e.g. customer engagement, feedback collection, etc.) automation of customer feedback analysis becomes very demanding task and requires advance intelligent tools to understand customers’ product perception and preferences.…
A moral economy of patents: case of Finnish research universities' patent policies
2013
The primary objective of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of the concept of moral economy for higher education studies through a study of Finnish research universities' patent policies. Patent policies not only stimulate the commercialization of research, they also set norms for behavior and aim to clarify how to distribute rights and responsibilities during the commercialization of research results. My main research finding is that even though institutionalized university patenting is a very recent phenomenon in Finland, policies regulating it have significant similarities to the US case. The main conclusion of this paper is that the question of university patent policies should…
Realizing the social acceptance of community renewable energy: A process-outcome analysis of stakeholder influence
2014
This study shows how stakeholders influence the development of community renewable energy (CRE) schemes and how they are influenced by their outcome. It relies on information collected during 41 structured interviews with local people involved in CRE initiatives in seven regions of Europe. The interviews were thematically analyzed to identify different types of stakeholder influence. The findings show that stakeholder influence on CRE schemes take place at three distinct levels: macro, intercommunity and intracommunity. In addition, key stakeholders can support or hinder the development of a project according to whether or not they perceive that the output of the project may benefit or harm…
Phantom/liminal fat and feminist theories of the body
2017
This article brings together two concepts, ‘phantom fat’ and ‘liminal fat’, which both aim to grasp how fat in contemporary culture becomes a kind of material immateriality, corporeality in suspension. Comparing the spheres of representation and experience, we examine the challenges and usefulness of these concepts, and feminist fat studies perspectives more broadly, to feminist scholarship on the body. We ask what connects and disconnects fat corporeality and fat studies from ways of theorising other embodied differences, like gender, ‘race’, disability, class and sexuality, especially when thinking through their perceived mutability or removability, and assumptions about their relevance …
Opportunity Discovery and Creation in Cloud Computing
2013
Cloud computing provides opportunities for firms selling or using cloud services. However, little is known about how entrepreneurs discover or create these opportunities for cloud computing. In this study, we found that the opportunities discovered in cloud computing were related to the development of software for a particular need. By contrast, created opportunities were developed under conditions of technological uncertainty, at a time when the market did not yet exist. It appears that created opportunities, if successful, bring long-term competitive advantages, whereas discovered opportunities are more easily copied and exploited by competitors. peerReviewed
Addressing Complexity in Science|Environment|Health Pedagogy
2019
This paper aims to discuss complexity as a key feature for understanding the role of science knowledge in environmental and health contexts—a central issue in Science|Environment|Health pedagogy. Complex systems are, in principle, not predictable. In different contexts, ephemeral mechanisms produce different, sometimes completely unexpected results. The art of decision-making in complex contexts is to take scientific knowledge into account but to interpret its meaning in terms of concrete complex contexts. This is illustrated by four empirical studies on Science|Environment|Health issues, presented midway through this paper. The findings underscore the importance of introducing complexity i…
Committing, engaging and negotiating : Teachers’ stories about creating shared spaces for co-teaching
2019
The study examined teachers’ stories on developing co-teaching partnerships. The narratives of three two-teacher teams were used to illustrate joint professional landscapes. The teams narrated the development process as one in which commitment, engagement and negotiation were the key elements in shaping their professional landscapes. The findings indicate wide variation in the role of shared understanding and related engagement in co-constructing co-teaching practices. peerReviewed