Acceptance on international markets is an important selling proposition for software products and a key to new markets. The adaptation of software products for specific markets is called software localisation. Practitioner reports and research suggests that activities of developers and translators do not mesh seamlessly, leading to problems such as disproportionate cost, lack of quality, and delayed product release. Yet, there is little research on localisation as a comprehensive activity and its human factors. This thesis examines how software localisation is handled in practice, how the localisation process is integrated into development, and how software developers and localisers work individually and collaboratively on international software. The research aims to understand how localisation issues around the above-mentioned classifications of cost, quality and time issues are caused. Qualitative and quantitative data is gathered through semi-structured interviews and an online survey. The interviews focused on the individual experiences of localisation and development professionals in a range of relevant roles. The online survey measured cultural competence, attitude towards and self-efficacy in localisation, and properties of localisation projects. Interviews were conducted and analysed following Straussian Grounded Theory. The survey was statistically analysed to test a number of hypotheses regarding differences between localisers and developers, as well as relationships between project properties and software quality. Results suggest gaps in knowledge, procedure and motivation between developers and translators, as well as a lack of cross-disciplinary knowledge and coordination. Further, a grounded theory of interdisciplinary collaboration in software localisation explains how collaboration strategies and conflicts reciprocally affect each other and are affected by external influences. A number of statistically significant differences between developers and localisers and the relevance of certain project properties to localisation were confirmed. The findings give new insights into interdisciplinary issues in the development of international software and suggest new ways to handle interdisciplinary collaboration in general.

Case-based reasoning (CBR), as one of the problem solving paradigms in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), is an approach to the re-use of experience to solve problem. The aim of this research was to identify and evaluate existing and new approaches to elicit and formalise knowledge for context-aware systems as well as systems that are able to perform explanation-aware computing. The research was centred on systems that employ the specific AI approach of CBR. The research identified positive and negative effects of knowledge formalisation as well as synergies of knowledge formalisation for context-awareness and explanation-aware computing. The research focused on a set of specific knowledge sources such as sensors, human experts, online sources such as web communities and social media as well as a combination of these sources. A set of knowledge formalisation approaches was evaluated during the implementation of six prototype systems, representing a series of product- and work-flow recommender systems. Example domains for the systems developed include CBR-based recommendation in audio mastering, gold ore refinement and travel medicine. Test data gathered from real-world use of the prototypes formed the basis for a quantitative and qualitative analysis to establish the performance and quality of the knowledge formalisation approaches used within the prototypes development. The outcome of this research work consists of new approaches to knowledge elicitation and formalisation for expert work-flow recommender systems, new approaches to context- and explanatory-knowledge formalisation in combination with software engineering techniques, new approaches to knowledge extraction and formalisation from web sources and contributions to the further development of the myCBR 3 software, an open source software for the rapid prototyping of CBR systems.

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The UK higher education sector is currently undergoing changes that will impact on the way students learn in the future. National, European and global education policy discourses underline the importance of higher education to the development of an active citizenry and as a way of sustaining economic growth. Corresponding to the rise of higher education on the political agenda there have been huge increases in the numbers of students going on to university education in the UK and further afield. These two aspects have placed a brighter spotlight on the problems the sector faces and change is stated to be necessary and desirable in order for higher education to fulfil its role in society. The growing political will to devise clear linkages between those individuals who benefit from a university education and those who pay for it, advances in information communication technologies, and the related requirements of the knowledge society, form the receptive landscape for moves towards private higher education in the UK. This thesis focuses on the particular phenomenon of corporate or private enterprise providing higher education in competition with government funding-dependent, so called public universities. The activities of private higher education, or independently-funded, non-state dependent higher education providers in the UK suggest that as the relationship between state and the academy goes through significant changes, these providers have become a sensitive issue. Different parties view the activities of private providers in very different ways; however they are viewed, the activities of these providers are a hot topic in higher education at present. Despite this interest, there are only small amounts of information available about this subsector of HE provision, or about the experiences of staff and students working at these companies. This thesis attempts to address this point by offering an overview of the current situation, referring to quantitative data and with a qualitative investigation. Whilst the concept of private versus public in the higher education sector in the UK is increasingly complex, and the context of a speeding up in the transformation of the sector means it is difficult to paint an accurate picture of such a fast moving object of enquiry, the thesis will attempt to shed some light on the activities of corporations in the higher education sector in the UK within the global context.

BACKGROUND: Choosing the right communication strategy is essential for organizations in today’s business. Nowadays, all organizations are facing operational changes; therefore, internal communication is significant for all businesses. Internal communication focuses on information and knowledge sharing activities within organizations, which are led by leaders that have the responsibility to distribute information and knowledge to employees in the organization and across departments PURPOSE: The purpose of the study is to investigate the relationship between internal communication and its components and how it affects team performance. METHOD: The research was a quantitative case study where 42 out of 70 employees at Specma Seals AB answered the questionnaire. The survey was sent out by email, using surveygizmo.com in April 2014. The response rate was 60%. A meeting with Specma Seals was arranged to conduct a deeper understanding of the company situation. CONCLUSION: The conclusion of this study is that two of the hypotheses were supported and one rejected meaning that leadership and information and knowledge sharing has a positive relationship with team performance meanwhile cross-functionality didn’t.

During the early modern period, practitioners in oftentimes unrelated arts and sciences began to experiment with transcribing and disseminating technical information by means of new symbolic notations. Algebra, music, chemistry, dance—whole fields of knowledge were quite literally rewritten with plus signs, treble clefs, affinity tables, and step symbols. “The Art of Signs” examines why early modern people working within and across disciplinary boundaries converged on the idea that developing complex symbolic notations would ultimately be worthwhile by reconstructing the reasons that they gave for doing so. It argues that symbolic notations appealed because they enabled powerful techniques of “visual thinking” that had no analogue in more conventional methods of inquiry. Notations transformed problems of information into problems of visualization whose solutions could then be derived by manipulating the properties of the drawn, two-dimensional plane. Indeed, early modern proponents of notations frequently described them in terms of vision, of being able to “see” things with them that they had not recognized before. However, because established methods of reasoning were predominantly verbal or empirical, symbolic notations and the visual thinking that they entailed necessarily challenged received ideas about how information ought to be represented and how knowledge ought to be discovered. Critics of the new notations argued that, at best, they amounted to a form of intellectual obscurantism that stymied rather than facilitated the circulation of knowledge. At worst, notations harbored disturbing implications for human ingenuity if the generation of new ideas truly could be reduced to the ranging and rearranging of symbols on a piece of paper. All told, “The Art of Signs” argues that early modern debates about the use and abuse of symbolic notations represent an underappreciated component of the epistemological ruptures that characterize the Scientific Revolution. Moreover, by recovering early modern understandings of symbolic notation, this dissertation demonstrates that a historical treatment of early modern semiotic thought can be leveraged to take a fresh look at perennial questions of representation that concern scholars across the humanities.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kentucky, 2001. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 75 p. : ill. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 70-72).

Thesis (M.S. in Information Technology Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Thomas Housel, Dan Dolk. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-78). Also available online.

Knowledge-based Cascade-correlation is a neural network algorithm that combines inductive learning and knowledge transfer (Shultz & Rivest, 2001). In the present thesis, this algorithm is tested on several real-world and artificial problems, and extended in several ways. The first extension consists in the incorporation of the Knowledge-based Artificial Neural Network (KBANN; Shavlik, 1994) technique for generating rule-based (RBCC) networks. The second extension consists of the adaptation of the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD; LeCun, Denker, & Solla, 1990) pruning technique to remove superfluous connection weights. Finally, the third extension consists in a new objective function based on information theory for controlling the distribution of knowledge attributed to subnetworks. A simulation of lexical ambiguity resolution is proposed. In this study, the use of RBCC networks is motivated from a cognitive and neurophysiological perspective.

This case study of the information flows within a British biotechnology company involved a population of 156 and took place over five years. It included information provision and information management as embedded studies. The main investigation into information flows was done in three parts, using questionnaires. The parts were: Use of Information Centre information resources, company-wide information flows and assessment of the perceived effectiveness of existing information flows. Combined, these three parts represent a 'snapshot' of the flows over a timespan of about three months. The methodology used to present the individual information flows is novel. The results showed that inter-personal communication or information flows were good, with e-mail being extensively used; that most inter-Group flows were functional, but that flows through the company were poor. Information flow out of the company was restricted. The main barriers to effective flows were excessive secrecy which prevented open exchange of information, lack of finance and the split sites. Although these were only a few miles from the main building, the staff felt isolated. The results further show that the most used information resources were colleagues, and that the most used non-human information resources were not held in the IC. The main users of the IC were the R&D staff, while more than 50% of the company rarely or never used the facility. The investigation represents an early example of Knowledge Management and further documents a stage in the evolution of biotechnology companies.