Profession is an autonomous social system based on the fact that the work emanates in some form of scientifically produced knowledge. The purpose of the knowledge overview is to find out how the political arena has shaped subject teachers as a profession. Our question for the essay is: What does the educational science research say about how political decisions and governance have affected the teaching profession? The method in the overview was based on research after making a selection based on the relevance to our defined area of the 649 search results (which arefurther presented in the method section). Through this we have gained an insight in how political decisions have changed the teacher’s identity that has once been very strong. The background to this project is that the teachers’ profession is changed by political reforms in the era throughout the 1990s - 2000s. The reform municipalization of the school in 1991, is described as a part of the reduction of the teacher’s control, weakening of the profession and loss of autonomy. The New Public Management - model was spread through the 1890s - 1990s and is a resultoriented management as a streaming of the schoolwork unit. The reform where freedom of choice and competition among schools brings us to problems that we are encountering today, we have a strong grade inflation, especially among private schools. We are also noticing that various market forces have contributed to inequality and segregation in schools. The teacher education reform in 2001 was a change where the government shifted the discourse in the teaching profession by replacing the scientific knowledge base with pedagogical work and allowing therapists to enter school businesses. The political reforms are commonly discussed by researchers as the beginning process of the teachers’ deprofessionalization.

Referrals to the Halifax Infirmary Neurosurgery Department are submitted with regards to spinal conditions with different degrees of complications. Although there exists a Spinal Condition Consultation Protocol to standardize spinal referrals, the information provided from referring physicians is frequently inadequate to accurately triage the patient's condition, partly due to missing diagnostic therapies. The Neurosurgery Department receives a high volume of referrals each year, which imposes a significant administrative workload on the staff. We propose to develop a protocol-driven decision support system to: 1) Provide primary care physicians with timely access to condition specific consultation treatment protocols; and 2) Automate the referral assessment process to eliminate processing delays and administration burden. To this aim, we transformed the Consultation Protocol into a semantic knowledgebase. The decision support services are integrated within a standardized electronic referral system. We believe this system can significantly improve the referral process at the Neurosurgery Division.

Product Information Management (PIM) is a field that deals with the product master data management and combines into one base the experience and the principles of data integration and data quality. Product Information Management merges the specific attributes of products across all channels in the supply chain. By unification, centralization and standardization of product information into one platform, quality and timely information with added value can be achieved. The goal of the theoretical part of the thesis is to construct a picture of the PIM, to place the PIM into a broader context, to define and describe various parts of the PIM solution, to describe the main differences in characteristics between the product data and data about clients and to summarize the available information on the administration and management of knowledge bases of the PIM data quality relevant for solving practical problems. The practical part of the thesis focuses on designing the structure, the content and the method of filling the knowledge base of the Product Information Management solution in the environment of the DataFlux software tools from SAS Institute. The practical part of the thesis further incorporates the analysis of the real product data, the design of definitions and objects of the knowledge base, the creation of a reference database and the testing of the knowledge base with the help of specially designed web services.

In Automobilen Elektrik /Elektronik (E/E) Systemen sowie in der Flugzeugavionik gibt es eine Vielzahl an Funktionen, die den Fahrzeugführer/Piloten bei seinen Aufgaben unterstützen können. Die Anzahl und Verbreitung der Funktionen nahm in den letzten Jahren sehr stark zu und ein Ende dieses Trends ist nicht in Sicht. Neue Technologien, wie komplett autonomes Fahren bei Fahrzeugen sowie eine stetige Erhöhung des Autonomie Levels von Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in der Avionik bringen das heutige E/E Konzept an die Grenzen des Vertretbaren. Das klassische, statisch konfigurierte E/E Konzept steht somit vor einer neuen Herausforderung, nämlich eine Vielzahl von neuen, zusätzlichen Funktion zu integrieren und dabei die gleiche Funktionalität, Determinismus und Zuverlässigkeit an den Tag zu legen, wie in der Vergangenheit. Mit dem klassischen statischen Konzept ist diese Anforderung nur zu gewährleisten, wenn für jede neue Funktion ein eigenes Steuergerät in das System Automobil/Flugzeug integriert wird. Da dieses Konzept aber hohe Kosten und erweiterten Bauraum nach sich zieht, ist es nicht mehr vertretbar und es wird nach neuen Optimierungsansätzen gesucht. Ein Optimierungsansatz ist der Übergang vom statischen zum semi-statischen Scheduling unter Berücksichtigung der Multi-Core Prozessortechnologie. Dieser Ansatz wird im Hierarchical Asynchronous Multi-Core System (HAMS) mit der statisch generierten Knowledgebase (KB) für Multi-Core Steuergeräte beschrieben. Diese Dissertation zeigt die Konzepte und Ideen hinter HAMS auf und erörtert wie diese schon in den heutigen Domänen umgesetzt werden können. Dabei werden Funktionen in unterschiedliche Phasen eingeteilt, die sich unter anderem an den aktuellen Fahr-/Flugzustand anlehnen. Des Weiteren werden Funktionen logisch miteinander verknüpft, um konträre Aktivierungszustände zu finden. Aus diesen Eingaben und der Konfiguration des Multi-Core Systems wird das Konzept für die HAMS Knowledgebase entwickelt. Mit der Knowledgebase wird es nun ermöglicht, dass sich das System zur Laufzeit semi-statisch rekonfigurieren kann, ohne dabei den Determinismus von statischen Steuergeräten aus den Domänen Automotive und Avionik zu verletzen. In einer abschließenden Evaluation wird das Konzept an einem realen Beispiel umgesetzt und so die Vorteile und Grenzen aufgezeigt. / In the current automotive electric /electronic (E/E) systems as well as in aircraft avionics a magnitude of functions does exist to assist the driver/pilot fulfilling its tasks. The quantity and distribution of assistant functions has continuously increased over the last few years and an end of this trend is not in sight. New emerging technologies like complete autonomous driving and an increase in the autonomy levels of Unmanned Areal Vehicles (UAVs) push the current E/E architecture towards its limits. The classic, statically configured E/E concept is facing new challenges like integrating a variety of new and additional functions and still displaying the same functionality, determinism and reliability as it has done in the past. Meeting this challenge with the classic, statically configured E/E concept is only possible, by integrating a new electronic control module (ECM) for each of this functions. This approach comes along with high costs for electronic control modules and a need for more installation space. Thus this configuration is not reasonable any more and a search for optimized solutions is ongoing. One strategy is to dissolve the static configurations and evolve into a semi-static configured system with Multi-Core Technology. This approach is described in the Hierarchical Asynchronous Multi-Core System (HAMS) and its statically generated Knowledgebase (KB) for Multi-Core electronic control modules. This dissertation illustrates the concept and ideas behind HAMS and demonstrates how it can already be implemented in today's systems. To do so functions are allocated in distinct phases which reflect the current driving or flying situation. Additionally functions are logically linked together to highlight contrary activation states. Depending on this input and the configuration of the Multi-Core ECM the Knowledgebase concept is developed. Having this Knowledgebase at hand it is now possible to reconfigure a system during run-time without violating the deterministic behavior of ECMs of the automotive and avionic domain. In the final evaluation the concept is realized based on a real example and the advantages as well as the limits are demonstrated.

A paradigm shift is emerging in system reliability and maintainability. The military and industrial sectors are moving away from the traditional breakdown and scheduled maintenance to adopt concepts referred to as Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) and Prognostic Health Management (PHM). In addition to signal processing and subsequent diagnostic and prognostic algorithms these new technologies involve storage of large volumes of both quantitative and qualitative information to carry out maintenance tasks effectively. This not only requires research and development in advanced technologies but also the means to store, organize and access this knowledge in a timely and efficient fashion. Knowledge-based expert systems have been shown to possess capabilities to manage vast amounts of knowledge, but an intelligent systems approach calls for attributes like learning and adaptation in building autonomous decision support systems. This research presents an integrated knowledge-based approach to diagnostic reasoning for CBM of engineering systems. A two level diagnosis scheme has been conceptualized in which first a fault is hypothesized using the observational symptoms from the system and then a more specific diagnostic test is carried out using only the relevant sensor measurements to confirm the hypothesis. Utilizing the qualitative (textual) information obtained from these systems in combination with quantitative (sensory) information reduces the computational burden by carrying out a more informed testing. An Industrial Language Processing (ILP) technique has been developed for processing textual information from industrial systems. Compared to other automated methods that are computationally expensive, this technique manipulates standardized language messages by taking advantage of their semi-structured nature and domain limited vocabulary in a tractable manner. A Dynamic Case-based reasoning (DCBR) framework provides a hybrid platform for diagnostic reasoning and an integration mechanism for the operational infrastructure of an autonomous Decision Support System (DSS) for CBM. This integration involves data gathering, information extraction procedures, and real-time reasoning frameworks to facilitate the strategies and maintenance of critical systems. As a step further towards autonomy, DCBR builds on a self-evolving knowledgebase that learns from its performance feedback and reorganizes itself to deal with non-stationary environments. A unique Human-in-the-Loop Learning (HITLL) approach has been adopted to incorporate human feedback in the traditional Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithm.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T19:06:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 5489.pdf: 2144785 bytes, checksum: 5c239d11261b4817f357b24eb40ff8d5 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-06-07 / Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais / We are currently in the third wave of research in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) area, whose focus is on the context of applications. Technology has been spreading from the workplace to our homes; it becomes part of our everyday lives. Thinking about it, one way of trying to provide this contextualization can be done through culture insertion in applications. However, culture is a very broad concept that encompasses different factors, among them, the common sense, which is a subset of culture consisting of the knowledge we gain in our day-to-day routine activities. Within this context, this work aims to create a new strategy to culturally contextualize an application. Thinking about that, it was created a new module called Cultural Filter that, through the use of a given knowledgebase, filters the stored information to create small cultural contextualized slices according to the profile of the users who will use this application. In this case, information such as age, gender, education level, and geographic location are used in the process of creating these cultural slices. In order to observe the viability of this strategy, an instance of the cultural filter was instantiated using the cultural knowledgebase of project Open Mind Common Sense in Brazil (OMCS-Br). In this case, the filter acts creating cultural slices from the project complete knowledgebase. In the background, this also aims to further the collection of data for this database in question, collecting data generated from the use of these contextualized software. To make this set of cultural filter and knowledge collector accessible to developers and users in general, it was developed an online system that allows any interested person to use the knowledgebase of the project OMCSBr in its applications or, still, just do culturally contextualized searches in the base. We intend to expand access to the Brazilian cultural knowledgebase and make the collection and use of the OMCS-Br knowledgebase operations more flexible, facilitating the development of applications using such a database and, with the filter being part of the OMCS-Br architecture, applications become lighter, closer to the RIA (Rich Internet Application) concept. To achieve the proposed objectives, the OMCS-Br architecture was restructured and expanded. Two new modules have been developed in order to connect with the project API (Application Programming Interface), namely: (i) the Cultural Filter, responsible for performing the filtering in order to retrieve contextual data from the knowledgebase according to the predefined profile and (ii) the Knowledge Collector, responsible for entering collected data through the use of culturally contextualized software into the OMCS-Br project knowledgebase. As a proof of concept, the filter was used in some already existing applications from LIA and, therefore, it was possible to observe the appropriateness of its operation. / Atualmente, estamos na terceira onda das pesquisas na area de Interacao Humano Computador (IHC), cujo foco, encontra-se na contextualizacao das aplicacoes. A tecnologia se espalha a partir do local de trabalho para nossas casas, ela passa a fazer parte de nossas vidas cotidianas. Pensando nisso, uma das maneiras de se tentar prover essa contextualizacao se da atraves da insercao de cultura nas aplicacoes. Porem, cultura e um conceito muito amplo que abrange diferentes fatores, dentre eles, o senso comum, que e um subconjunto da cultura composto pelo conhecimento que adquirimos no nosso dia-a-dia. Dentro desse contexto, este trabalho tem como objetivo criar uma nova estrategia de se contextualizar culturalmente uma aplicacao. Para isso, foi modelado um modulo denominado Filtro Cultural que, atraves do uso de uma dada base de conhecimento, filtra as informacoes armazenadas a fim de criar recortes culturais contextualizados de acordo com o perfil dos usuarios que irao utilizar a aplicacao. Neste caso, informacoes como idade, genero, nivel de escolaridade e localizacao geografica sao utilizadas no processo de criacao desses recortes culturais. Com o intuito de observar a viabilidade dessa estrategia, uma instancia do filtro cultural foi implementada utilizando a base de conhecimento cultural do Projeto Open Mind Common Sense no Brasil (OMCS-Br). Neste caso, o filtro atua criando recortes culturais a partir da base completa do projeto. Em segundo plano, almeja-se tambem ampliar a forma de coleta de dados para essa base em questao, coletando os dados gerados a partir do uso desses software contextualizados. Para disponibilizar esse conjunto de filtro e coletor de conhecimento cultural contextualizado aos desenvolvedores e usuarios em geral, foi desenvolvido um sistema online que permite ao interessado utilizar a base de conhecimento do projeto OMCS-Br em aplicacoes ou, entao, apenas realizar consultas culturalmente contextualizadas na base. Com isso, pretendemos ampliar o acesso a base de conhecimento cultural brasileiro e flexibilizar as operacoes de coleta e uso da base de conhecimento do OMCS-Br, facilitando o desenvolvimento de aplicacoes que utilizem tal base e, com o filtro sendo parte da arquitetura do OMCS-Br, as aplicacoes se tornam mais leves, aproximando-se do conceito de RIA (Rich Internet Application). Para alcancar os objetivos propostos, a arquitetura do projeto OMCS-Br foi reestruturada e ampliada. Dois novos modulos foram elaborados, de forma a se conectarem com a API (Interface de Programacao de Aplicativo) do projeto, sendo eles: (i) o Filtro Cultural, responsavel por realizar a filtragem de modo a resgatar dados contextualizados da base de conhecimento de acordo com os dados do perfil definido e (ii) o Coletor de Conhecimento, responsavel por inserir na base de conhecimento do projeto OMCS-Br os dados coletados atraves do uso de softwares culturalmente contextualizados. Como prova de conceito, o filtro foi usado em algumas aplicacoes ja existentes no LIA e, com isso, foi possivel observar a adequacao de seu funcionamento.