Nowadays, successful cooperation and collaboration among developers is crucial to build successful projects in distributed software system development (DSSD). Assigning wrong developers to a specific task not only affects the performance of a component of this task but also affects other components since these projects are composed of dependent components. Another aspect that should be considered when teams are built is the social relationships between the members; disagreements between these members also affect the project team’s performance. These two aspects might cause a project’s failure or delay. Therefore, they are important to consider when teams are created. In this thesis, we developed an Expert Recommender System Framework (ERSF) that assists developers (Active Developers) to find experts who can help them complete or fix the bugs in the code at hand. The ERSF analyzes the developer technical expertise on similar code fragments to the one they need help on assuming that those who have worked on similar fragments might understand and help the Active Developer; also, it analyzes their social relationships with the Active Developer as well as their social activities within the DSSD. Our work is also concerned with improving the system performance and recommendations by tracking the developer communications through our ERSF in order to keep developer profiles up-to-date. Technical expertise and sociality are measured using a combination of technical and social heuristics. The recommender system was tested using scenarios derived from real software development data, and its recommendations compared favourably to recommendations that humans were asked to make in the same scenarios; also, they were compared to the recommendations of the NaiveBayes and other machine learning algorithms. Our experiment results show that ERSF can recommend experts with good to excellent accuracy.

This project explored the strategies that undergraduate and graduate chemistry students engaged in when solving classification tasks involving microscopic (particulate) representations of chemical substances and microscopic and symbolic representations of different chemical reactions. We were specifically interested in characterizing the basic features to which students pay attention while classifying, identifying the patterns of reasoning that they follow, and comparing the performance of students with different levels of preparation in the discipline. In general, our results suggest that advanced levels of expertise in chemical classification do not necessarily evolve in a linear and continuous way with academic training. Novice students had a tendency to reduce the cognitive demand of the task and rely on common-sense reasoning; they had difficulties differentiating concepts (conceptual undifferentiation) and based their classification decisions on only one variable (reduction). These ways of thinking lead them to consider extraneous features, pay more attention to explicit or surface features than implicit features and to overlook important and relevant features. However, unfamiliar levels of representations (microscopic level) seemed to trigger deeper and more meaningful thinking processes. On the other hand, expert students classified entities using a specific set of rules that they applied throughout the classification tasks. They considered a larger variety of implicit features and the unfamiliarity with the microscopic level of representation did not affect their reasoning processes. Consequently, novices created numerous small groups, few of them being chemically meaningful, while experts created few but large chemically meaningful groups. Novices also had difficulties correctly classifying entities in chemically meaningful groups. Finally, expert chemists in our study used classification schemes that are not necessarily traditionally taught in classroom chemistry (e.g. the structure of substances is more relevant to them than their composition when classifying substances as compounds or elements). This result suggests that practice in the field may develop different types of knowledge framework than those usually presented in chemistry textbooks.

This qualitative study explores which cognitive characteristics and strategies are common to both adult experts and adolescents when placed in the role of an expert. The basis for comparison are the nine characteristics and five strategies identified as common to all adult experts by Shanteau, 1992. Data were collected from interviews held with eight adolescents upon completion of an "Expert Project" in their Secondary II Physical Science course. Certain shared characteristics and strategies emerged during data collection and analysis, such as acts responsibly and uses help from others. Implications for future research are presented.

A number of previous studies have found that wine experts can more accurately discriminate between and describe wine samples than novices. However, the mechanisms that underlie these disparities remain unclear. This collection of studies is an investigation of whether the expert advantage is based on long-term memory structures, such as found for other obviously more cognitive skills, such as chess and bridge expertise. Experiments 1, 2 and 3 investigated whether wine experts are better than novices in recall of wine descriptions. It was hypothesised that experts would show more accurate recall than novices, although only when the descriptions were configured in a meaningful manner, that is, consistent with grape varieties commonly grown in Australia. The findings were as expected, with experts showing impaired recall for descriptions that did not match any grape variety (Experiment 2). In addition, expert recall was superior on an incidental task (Experiment 3), when recall was unexpected, suggesting that experts automatically refer to verbal long-term memory structures during a wine-related task. These structures consist of wine-relevant terms, and are organised by their relationship to grape varieties, and more broadly, grape colour. Experiments 4, 5, 6 and 7 investigated the role of the above-mentioned long-term memory structures in expert descriptive ability. The results supported their involvement, since expert�s ability to identify components was affected by sample configuration (Experiment 6) in a similar way to that found for recall of wine descriptions. Additional evidence comes from the finding that, novices, when provided with a small set of grape-relevant labels during a descriptive task, performed better than subjects given either no list or a long list of labels relevant to all the different grape varieties (Experiment 4). While experts correctly identified more flavours than novices, they also made more errors (Experiment 6), suggesting that verbal long-term memory structures do not increase the accuracy of the identification of aromas and flavours by experts. Rather, they inform experts as to which labels are likely to be correct for particular styles of wine. Experiments 8, 9 and 10 investigated both the discrimination performance of novices, intermediates and experts, as well as the role of long-term memory structures in any expert discriminative advantage. Experts (Experiments 8 and 10) and intermediates (Experiment 9) showed greater powers of discrimination than novices. However, results were equivocal in relation to the role of verbal long-term memory structures (Experiment 10), suggesting that other factors, such as perceptual learning and or memory, may be important in the expert discriminative advantage. Overall, results from these studies illustrate that long-term memory structures are essential, not only in domains of expertise that are obviously based on cognitive skills, but also that of descriptive ability with respect to wine. However, unlike in other domains, these structures do not serve to improve the relative accuracy of descriptive performance, at least with regard to aromas and flavours.

No description available.

Stuttgart, Univ., Diss., 2007.

Lorsque la Grande Guerre éclate en 1914, le champ mondial de la géographie universitaire est structuré en écoles locales et nationales, liées par des publications, des débats scientifiques et des rassemblements au niveau international. Cette étude d’histoire comparée montre que les trois principales communautés de la discipline (Allemagne, France, Etats-Unis) sont ébranlées par la violence du conflit et participent aux multiples cultures de guerre des pays belligérants. Entre combats pour les plus jeunes, travail pour les armées, notamment dans la géologie de guerre allemande et états-unienne, engagement (autour des atrocités allemandes et russes, des buts de guerre, de la géographie militaire et politique) et diplomatie culturelle chez les géographes des fronts domestiques, les spécialistes des sciences de la terre se mobilisent de façons diverses et occupent un rôle inédit d’experts, en particulier dans les discussions autour des négociations de paix, entre 1917 et 1919. Enseignants, savants, intellectuels et citoyens, ils connaissent donc une phase brutale mais intense de leur identité professionnelle, devant concilier la « géographie moderne » avec une nouvelle géographie appliquée. Le résultat est décevant, tant dans la mobilisation politique et militaire, vécue avec enthousiasme, puis avec malaise, que dans l’expertise, insatisfaisante et peu efficace auprès des autorités chargées de redessiner la carte de l’Europe et du monde. Malgré ces limites, la Première Guerre mondiale constitue un moment fort dans l’identité collective de la géographie universitaire, lente à se démobiliser et marquée par la persistance des alliances et de la violence de guerre. / When the Great War broke out in 1914, the field of academia in geography was divided into local and national schools, connected together through publications, scientific debates and international meetings. My work in comparative history aims at showing that the three main “communities” in the field (namely Germany, France and the United States of America) were affected by the war violence, and that they took an active part in many aspects of “war cultures” in the fighting countries. Indeed, the youngest ones fought, some others did some research for the army (above all in German and American war geology), some others wrote committed books (about German and Russian atrocities, war goals, political and military geography) and geographers of the Home fronts played an important role in cultural diplomacy – every specialist in Earth Sciences mobilized in various ways. They were even to be used as experts, specially during the 1919 peace negotiations. As teachers, scholars, intellectuals and citizens, these men and women went through a very brutal and intense period as far as the shaping of their professional identity is concerned, for they had to reconcile “modern geography” with applied geography. The results proved to be quite disappointing for them: political mobilization, at first enthusiastic, soon turned sour; and their expertise could appear useless as it failed to help political leaders to frame a new map of the world based on scientific grounds. Despite these frustrations and limits, the First World War seems to be a turning point in the shaping of the collective identity of academic geography: its demobilization took a long time, and remained unfinished as long as violence and alliances persisted. / Als der Erste Weltkrieg 1914 ausbrach, war die Hochschulgeographie in lokalen und nationalen Schulen organisiert, die durch Fachzeitschriften und Publikationen, wissenschaftlichen Debaten und internationalen Zusammentreffen in Verbindung waren. Diese Arbeit zeigt in einer vergleichenden Perspektive, dass die drei wichtigsten Fachgemeinschaften (Deutschland, Frankreich, Vereinigten Staaten) von der Gewalt des Konflikts erschüttert wurden und an der vielseitigen Kultur des Krieges in den Krieg führenden Mächten teilgenommen haben. Zwischen Kämpfen für die Jüngeren, wissenschaftlichen Werken für die Truppen, insbesondere im Rahmen der deutschen und amerikanischen Kriegsgeologie, politischem Engagement (über die deutschen und russischen Gräueltaten, die Kriegszielen und die Kriegs- und politische Geographie) und kulturelle Diplomatie für die Hochschulgeographen des Home fronts, mobilisieren sich die Spezialisten der Erdwissenschaften und spielen eine sehr neue Rolle von Experten, insbesondere in den Debaten über die Friedensverhandlungen, zwischen 1917 und 1919. Als Lehrer, Wissenschaftler, Intellektuellen und Bürger, erleben sie also eine brutale und intensive Etappe ihrer Berufsidentität, in der sie die „moderne Geographie“ mit einer neuen angewandten Geographie vereinbaren sollen. Die Ergebnisse sind aber enttäuschend, sowohl bei der politischen und militärischen Mobilisierung, die zuerst mit Begeisterung, dann mit Unzufriedenheit empfunden wurde, als auch bei der unbefriedigenden und unwirksamen Expertentätigkeit, insbesondere über die Neugestaltung der politischen Karte Europas und der Welt. Trotz dieser Schwierigkeiten hat der Erste Weltkrieg eine grosse Bedeutung in der kollektiven Identität der Hochschulgeographie, deren Entmobilisierung sehr langsam ist und die von dem Andauern der Kriegsbündnisse und Gewalt geprägt wird.

abstract: Most people are experts in some area of information; however, they may not be knowledgeable about other closely related areas. How knowledge is generalized to hierarchically related categories was explored. Past work has found little to no generalization to categories closely related to learned categories. These results do not fit well with other work focusing on attention during and after category learning. The current work attempted to merge these two areas of by creating a category structure with the best chance to detect generalization. Participants learned order level bird categories and family level wading bird categories. Then participants completed multiple measures to test generalization to old wading bird categories, new wading bird categories, owl and raptor categories, and lizard categories. As expected, the generalization measures converged on a single overall pattern of generalization. No generalization was found, except for already learned categories. This pattern fits well with past work on generalization within a hierarchy, but do not fit well with theories of dimensional attention. Reasons why these findings do not match are discussed, as well as directions for future research. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Psychology 2013

No description available.

This dissertation contains two essays focusing on how Self and Competitor Expertise influence valuation both during and post-auction. The first essay, "Competitor Expertise: Influences on bidding behavior and post-auction values in ascending auctions," considers how a bidder's perception of competitors' expertise types and levels influences valuation both during (bid level), after (WTP/WTA), and over time (∆WTP/∆WTA). Generally, I find that despite normative predictions regarding bidding behavior in a competitive auction environment, bidders tend to bid higher and maintain higher post-auction valuations when competing against experts in the product domain, although not amateurs or experts in other domains (e.g., auction bidding strategies). Post-auction valuation patterns further depended on Auction Outcome. The second essay, "Assessed Self-Expertise: Influences on Bidding Behavior and Post-Auction Values Against Competitors of Varying Expertise Levels," extends our investigation to consider how a bidder's perception of their own expertise type and level also influences valuation both during and post-auction. Broadly, I find additional support that bidders post higher valuations both during and post-auction when competing against Experts vs. Amateurs, but that this behavior is primarily driven by bidders who assess themselves as Experts and further depends on Auction Outcome. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation contains two essays that consider the influence of how one's own type and level of expertise (Self-Expertise) as well as one's perception of their competitors' expertise (Competitor Expertise) influence bidding behavior and post-auction product valuation. In the first essay, "Competitor Expertise: Influences on bidding behavior and post-auction values in ascending auctions," the issue of how bidders perceive Competitor Expertise levels is considered. Generally, bidders tend to bid higher and maintain higher post-auction valuations when competing against experts with expertise in the product category. Post-auction valuations and their durability further depend on whether bidders win or lose the auction. In the second essay, "Assessed Self-Expertise: Influences on Bidding Behavior and Post-Auction Values Against Competitors of Varying Expertise Levels," the issue of how one's self-assessment of their own type and level of expertise is further considered. Broadly, bidders tend to post higher valuations when they assess themselves as experts in the product category. Interestingly, this effect is largely driven by experts competing against other experts, although this also further depends on whether bidders won or lost.