Thesis (DTech. in Business Information Systems)--Tshwane University of Technology, 2008. / Existing literature propagates a variety of methods for assessment of intellectual capital. Unfortunately, awareness of, and interest in the assessment of intellectual capital far exceeds its use in practice. This research argues that, due to complexities involved in selecting and customising an appropriate method or combination of methods for assessing intellectual capital, mechanisms are needed for managing and applying the evolving body of knowledge concerning such assessment. This research proceeds to develop a model, referred to as a conceptual design for a system to (i) provide management support to the process of selecting and customising an appropriate method (or combination of methods) for assessment of intellectual capital, (ii) utilise past knowledge and expertise to accelerate and improve decision-making, (iii) promote synergism through integration of methods, and (iv) manage the evolving body of knowledge concerning the assessment of intellectual capital.

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Virtual humans and other virtual agents are becoming more common in our everyday lives. Whether in the form of phone-based personal assistants or automated customer service systems, these technologies have begun to touch more of our activities. This research aims to understand how this technology affects the way we interact with our computer systems. Using a chat bot, I studied the way a conversational computer system affects the way people interact with and perceive automated interviewing systems in two different contexts. Study 1 examines the impact of a conversational agent on behavior during deception. It found that a conversational agent can have a powerful impact on people's perception of the system, resulting in individuals viewing the system as much more engaging and human. The conversational agent further results in a suppression of deception-related cues consistent with a more human-like interaction. Study 2 focuses on the effect of a conversational agent on socially desirable responding. Results of this study indicate that a conversational agent increases social desirability when the topic of the interview is sensitive, but has no effect when the questions are non-sensitive. The results of these two studies indicate that a conversational agent can change the way people interact with a computer system in substantial and meaningful ways. These studies represent a step toward understanding how conversational agents can shape the way we view and interact with computers.

This dissertation presents three studies consisting of seven experiments that investigate the relationship between human-computer interaction (HCI) behavior and changes in cognitive states by using keystroke dynamics (KD) and mouse dynamics (MD) as physiological indicators of cognitive change. The first two chapters discuss the importance of being able to detect changes in affect, cognitive load, and deception and provide a theoretical base for this research, pulling heavily from cognitive science, psychology and communication literature. We also discuss the current state of the art in keystroke and mouse dynamics and what makes the techniques presented here different. Chapters three and four present five experiments that explore the influence of affect and cognitive load on KD and MD. The results of these experiments suggest that many features of typing and mouse movement behavior including transition time, rollovers, duration, number of direction changes, and distance traveled are influenced by changes in affect and cognitive load. In chapter five we operationalize these findings in a credibility assessment context and describe two experiments in which participants behave deceptively in computer mediated interactions. In both experiments, we find significant differences in typing behavior, in line with the findings of the first two studies. Chapter six summarizes the results and provides a way forward for future research in human computer interaction. The work presented in this dissertation describes a novel approach to inferring cognitive changes using low cost, non-invasive, and transparent monitoring of HCI behavior with important implications for both research and practice.

Η παρούσα εργασία αναλύει τη συμβολή της επιστήμης της τεχνολογίας και των επιτευγμάτων αυτής, στη λειτουργία των σύγχρονων επιχειρήσεων και ειδικότερα περιγράφονται τα πληροφοριακά συστήματα. / This paper analyzes the contribution of technology science and its achievements in modern enterprises and particularly describes the information systems.

This paper explores the potential for and progress of a gradual transition from a highly centralized model for cataloging to an iterative, collaborative, and broadly distributed model for electronic resource description. The author's purpose is to alert library managers to some experiments underway and to help them conceptualize new methods for defining, planning, and leading the e-resource description process under moderate to severe time and staffing constraints. To build a coherent library system for discovery and retrieval of networked resources, librarians and technologists are experimenting with team-based efforts and new workflows for metadata creation. In an emerging new service model for e-resource description, metadata can come from selectors, public service librarians, information technology staff, authors, vendors, publishers, and catalogers. Arguing that e-resource description demands a level of cross-functional collaboration and creative problem-solving that is often constrained by libraries' functional organizational structures, the author calls for reuniting functional groups into virtual teams that can integrate the e-resource description process, speed up operations, and provide better service. The paper includes an examination of the traditional division of labor for producing catalogs and bibliographies, a discussion of experiments that deploy a widely distributed e-resource description process (e.g., the use of CORC at Cornell and Brown), and an exploration of the results of a brief study of selected ARL libraries' e-resource discovery systems.

American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) 2007 Annual Meeting / Position Paper

Το Πανεπιστημιακό Γενικό Νοσοκομείο Πατρών ( Π.Γ.Ν.Π.) είναι το μεγαλύτερο νοσοκομείο της Δυτικής Ελλάδος. Υπάρχουν πάνω από 2.500 ιατρικές συσκευές στο Π.Γ.Ν.Π. οι οποίες χρησιμοποιούνται για διάγνωση, παρακολούθηση και θεραπεία ασθενειών. Η χρήση αυτού του μεγάλου αριθμού από τις πολύπλοκες αυτές συσκευές συνεπάγεται αυξημένη εμπλοκή του Τμήματος Κλινικής Μηχανικής ( ΤΚΜ ) στις επισκευαστικές ενέργειες και στις ενέργειες προληπτικής συντήρησης. Υπάρχει ανάγκη για παρακολούθηση και καταγραφή ενός μεγάλου αριθμού διαδικασιών όπως επισκευές ιατρικού εξοπλισμού, προληπτικές συντηρήσεις, έλεγχοι ηλεκτρικής ασφάλειας, αιτήσεις αγοράς εξοπλισμού, εποπτεία συμβολαίων συντήρησης και εκπαίδευση τεχνικών και χρηστών. Οπωσδήποτε, οι παραπάνω ανάγκες οδηγούν στη χρήση εγκατάστασης υπολογιστικών συστημάτων διαχείρισης ιατρικού εξοπλισμού (MEMS). Το MEMS που χρησιμοποιείται από το ΤΚΜ του Π.Γ.Ν.Π. είναι το σύστημα PRAXIS που αναπτύχθηκε από το Ινστιτούτο Βιοιατρικής Τεχνολογίας ( ΙΝΒΙΤ) και έχει εγκατασταθεί σε πάνω από 12 Ελληνικά νοσοκομεία. Η χρήση του συστήματος PRAXIS βελτιώνει την αποτελεσματική διαχείριση του ιατρικού εξοπλισμού και βοηθάει το ΤΚΜ του Π.Γ.Ν.Π. στην καλύτερη οργάνωση των υπηρεσιών του. Επίσης το σύστημα PRAXIS παρέχει την δυνατότητα για παρακολούθηση και ανάλυση ενός τυποποιημένου set δεικτών ποιότητας. Σ’ αυτήν την εργασία παρουσιάζονται αποτελέσματα από την δουλειά του ΤΚΜ στο Π.Γ.Ν.Π. με τη χρήση του PRAXIS. Πρώτα παρουσιάζονται αποτελέσματα που αφορούν επισκευαστικούς ελέγχους και ελέγχους προληπτικής συντήρησης στα πιο σημαντικά μηχανήματα των εταιρειών PHILIPS και SIEMENS. Κατόπιν υπάρχει μια αναφορά στην παραγωγή και χρήση των δεικτών ποιότητας του PRAXIS που θα μπορούσαν να αποτιμήσουν την απόδοση του ΤΚΜ και δίνουν στατιστική πληροφορία για τις ιατρικές συσκευές στο Π.Γ.Ν.Π. Τέλος, υπάρχει μια πιο εκτεταμένη πληροφορία για την χρήση του συστήματος PRAXIS στην παρακολούθηση του συστήματος Μαγνητικής Τομογραφίας Philips Gyroscan Intera στο Π.Γ.Ν.Π. / The University Hospital of Patras ( P.G.N.P. ) is the largest Hospital in Western Greece. There are over 2500 medical devices in P.G.N.P that are used for diagnosis, monitoring of patient condition and therapy. The use of this large number complex devices causes an increased involvement of the Clinical Engineering Dep ( CED ) in repair and maintenance actions accomplishment . There is a necessity for monitoring and recording a large number of procedures such as medical equipment repair and maintenance functions, electrical safety, equipment acquisition, supervision of service contracts and user training. Therefore, the need arises for establishing a computerized medical equipment management system (MEMS). The MEMS that is used in CED of P.G.N.P. hospital is the PRAXIS system that is developed by the Institution of Biomedical Technology (INBIT) and has been installed in > 12 Greek hospitals. The use of PRAXIS system improves the effective management of medical equipment and assists the CED of P.G.N.P. in organizing their services in better way. Also the PRAXIS system offers the ability of monitoring and analyzing a standardized set of quality indicators. In this work results of CED work with the PRAXIS system use in P.G.N.P. are presented. At first the results that are presented concerned the medical equipment repair and maintenance functions of the most important PHILIPS and SIEMENS medical devices. Secondly, there is a reference in production of quality indicators by the PRAXIS system that could evaluate the performance of CED and they give statistical information about the medical devices in P.G.N.P. Finally, there is a more extended information about the use of PRAXIS system in monitoring of Philips Gyroscan Intera MRI system in P.G.N.P hospital.

Web and mobile technologies have had such profound impact that we have witnessed significant evolutionary changes in our social, economic and cultural activities. In recent years, online social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn have gained immense popularity. Such social networks have led to an enormous explosion of network-centric data in a wide variety scenarios, posing unprecedented analytical and computational challenges to MIS researchers. At the same time, the availability of such data offers major research opportunities in various social computing and analytics areas to tackle interesting questions such as: - From a business and marketing perspective, how to mine the novel datasets of online user activities, interpersonal communications and interactions, for developing more successful marketing strategies? - From a system development perspective, how to incorporate massive amounts of available data to assist online users to find relevant, efficient, and timely information? In this dissertation, I explored these research opportunities by studying multiple analytics problems arose from the design and use of social networking services. The first two chapters (Chapter 2 and 3) are intended to study how social network can help to derive a better estimation of customer lifetime value (CLV), in the social gaming context. In Chapter 2, I first conducted an empirical study to demonstrate that friends' activities can serve as significant indicators of a player's CLV. Based on this observation, I proposed a perceptron-based online CLV prediction model considering both individual and friendship information. Preliminary results have shown that the model can be effectively used in online CLV prediction, by evaluating against other commonly-used benchmark methods. In Chapter 3, I further extended the metric of traditional CLV, by incorporating the personal influences on other customers' purchase as an integral part of the lifetime value. The proposed metric was illustrated and tested on seven social games of different genres. The results showed that the new metric can help marketing managers to achieve more successful marketing decisions in user acquisition, user retention, and cross promotion. Chapter 4 is devoted to the design of a recommendation system for micro-blogging. I studied the information diffusion pattern in a micro-blogging site (Twitter.com) and proposed diffusion-based metrics to assess the quality of micro-blogs, and leverage the new metric to implement a novel recommendation framework to help micro-blogging users to efficiently identify quality news feeds. Chapter 5 concludes this dissertation by highlighting major research contributions and future directions.

As global competition is increasingly intensified, radical innovation has become more and more important for corporations in high-velocity industries. Thanks to the advances of information systems and communication media, corporations can easily reach out to experts all over the world and form project teams dedicated to the innovation effort. However, research shows that while some innovation teams are very successful in achieving significant breakthroughs, many struggle to make their collaborations work. In this dissertation, we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of the collaboration challenges that an innovation team faces. By considering the simultaneous needs for differentiation and integration in the innovation effort and taking a communication/ interpretive perspective, we develop a theoretical model to investigate how the processes of differentiation and integration are shaped through team communication and influence an innovation team's collaboration outcomes. Specifically, we delineate four structural properties of team communication to capture these two processes - the number of issue streams explored, the number of attention switches initiated, the conceptual linkage between issue streams, and the level of deliberation after each attention switch - and identify four categories of factors that influence the development of these two processes - team composition, semi-structures, communication contexts, and communication environments. We conduct a case study as a preliminary test of our theoretical model, and find that the model provides comprehensive explanations for the collaboration dynamics and issues of these teams. We believe such a theoretical model can contribute to a better understanding of the complexity involved in an innovation project and bring fresh insights to the design of information systems for supporting an innovation team.