Australian agriculture is one area in which a number of intelligent support systems have been developed. It appears, however, that comparatively few of these systems are widely used or have the impact the developers might have wished. In this study a possible explanation for this state of affairs was investigated. The development process for 66 systems was examined. Particular attention was paid to the nature of user involvement, if any, during development and the relationship to system success. The issue is not only whether there was user involvement but rather the nature of the involvement, that is, the degree of influence users had during development. The patterns identified in the analysis suggest user influence is an important contributor to the success of a system. These results have theoretical significance in that they add to knowledge of the role of the user in the development of intelligent support systems. The study has drawn together work from three areas: Rogers’ diffusion theory, the technology acceptance model, and theories relating to user involvement in the development of information systems. Most prior research in the information systems area has investigated one or two of the above three areas in any one study. The study synthesizes this knowledge through applying it to the field of intelligent support systems in Australian agriculture. The results have considerable practical significance, as apparently developers of intelligent support systems in Australian agriculture do not recognize the importance of user participation, and continue to develop systems with less than optimum impact.

Work on Expert Systems has received extensive attention recently, prompting growing interest in a range of environments. Much has been made of the basic concept and the rule-based system approach typically used to construct the programs. Perhaps this is a good time then to review what we know, assess the current prospects, and suggest directions appropriate for the next steps of basic research. I'd like to do that today and propose to do it by taking you on a journey of sorts, a metaphorical trip through the State of the Art of Expert Systems. We'll wander about the landscape, ranging from the familiar territory of the Land of Accepted Wisdom, to the vast unknowns at the Frontiers of Knowledge. I guarantee we'll all return safely, so come along...

Rule induction is a popular technique for knowledge acquisition and data mining. Many techniques, such as ID3, C4.5, CART (tree induction tecniques) and Artificial Neural Networks have been developed and widely used. However, most techniques are either based on categorical or numerical mechanisms to assess the importance of different input variables, which may not produce the optimal rule when a mixture of variables exists. In 1992, Liang proposed a composite approach called CRIS that use different method to analyze different types of data in inducing rules for binary classification. Yang conducted a follow-up research to extend the original algorithm to multiple categories. However, both methods do not take variable interaction into consideration. The purpose of this research is to extend previous approach and extend by including second-order interaction. We also take into consideration the kurtosis and skewness of data for numerical variables. For categorical data, we also adopt ID3 algorithm to handle classes with low representation in the sample. In order to evaluate this technique, we develop a prototype CRIS 3.0 and compare with existing techniques, including multi-category-CRIS, CART and C4.5 as benchmark. The results show that CRIS 3.0 has the highest probability of producing the highest prediction accuracy.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 148 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 90-95).

Thesis ( Ph.D. ) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-231).

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains xii, 121 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 118-121).

Thesis (M.S.)--Worcester Polytechnic Institute. / Keywords: run-time monitoring; continual validation; software probes; probing. Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-101).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Committee on Medical Physics, December 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1988.