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The ability to remember past experiences enables a system to improve its performance as well as its competence. For example, a system might be able solve problems faster by adapting previous solutions. Additional tasks, such as avoiding unwanted behavior by detecting potential problems, monitoring long-term goals by remembering what subgoals have been achieved, and reflection on past actions, become feasible. As the tasks that an intelligent system accomplishes become more and more complex, so does the experience it acquires in the process. Such experience has a temporal extent and is expressed in terms of concepts and relations with deep semantics associated to them. Memory systems should be able to deal with the temporal aspect of experience, exploit this semantic knowledge for storage and retrieval and do so in a scalable fashion. However, relying just on experience will not achieve a broad coverage, as it needs to be used in conjunction with other reasoning mechanisms. That is why we need the ability to add episodic memory functionality to intelligent systems. Today's knowledge-based systems are complex software applications and the ability to develop them in a modular fashion, using generic, reusable components is essential. We propose to separate the episodic memory from the system that uses it and to build a generic, reusable memory module that can be attached to a variety of applications in order to provide this functionality. Its goal is to provide accurate, scalable, efficient and content-addressable access to prior episodes. Having such a reusable memory module should allow research to focus on the generic aspects of memory representation, organization and retrieval and its interaction with the external application and it should also reduce the complexity of the overall system. In this dissertation we propose a set of general requirements that any memory module should provide regarding memory encoding, storage and retrieval. We present an implementation that satisfies these requirements and evaluate it on three different tasks: plan synthesis, plan recognition and Physics problem solving. The memory module proved easily adaptable to these tasks, providing fast, accurate and scalable retrieval.

Information gathering from sources outside the company plays a critical role in most innovation projects. Particularly, it seems promising to approach external market experts to develop an indepth understanding of current use problems, changing customer needs and trends for new product solutions. When planning expert interviews, firms are confronted with the question whether knowledge is distributed rather homogeneously or heterogeneously ("scattered") among a pool of experts. This issue strongly determines how many experts need to be interviewed in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of a given search field for innovation. In the present paper we analyse expert interviews that were conducted in the context of an innovation project in the field of surgical hygiene products. We find high heterogeneity of expert knowledge: Market experts in our sample vary in terms of market information they provide for the particular product field. We argue that this finding is in alignment with the concept of "bounded rationality" and the theory of "contextual development of knowledge". Our findings have implications for the management of external information gathering and the identification of market experts.(author's abstract)

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The World Health Organization, Surgeon General of the United States, and Public Health Agency of Canada have all stated that childhood obesity is one of the most serious health challenges of the 21st century. Thus a purported obesity epidemic among children has generated intense interest in its associated health risks. Increasingly, the medical literature and media blame mothers for failing to provide proper care for their children's health by ignoring the growing weight of their children. While previous literature explores how parenting magazines can be considered public educators about children's health, there is limited literature addressing what parenting magazines specifically say about mothers and childhood obesity. Through a qualitative content analysis of the Canadian parenting magazine Today’s Parent, this paper argues that Today’s Parent stigmatizes mothers by blaming them for the weight issues of children, and suggests future research is needed to investigate to what extent this influences parenting practices.

Since MYCIN, explanation has become a fundamental feature of knowledge-based systems (KBS). Among the common deficiencies of KBS explanations, the most acute one is the lack of knowledge. This dissertation research investigates the use of explanations provided with hypertext for increasing the availability and accessibility of domain knowledge. The ultimate objective is to determine the behavioral and cognitive basis of the use of hypertext in providing KBS explanations. Two informationally equivalent KBS were comparatively studied in a laboratory setting: one used hypertext to provide explanations, while the other one used conventional lineartext. The experiment involved 26 experienced professionals, and 29 undergraduate and graduate students specializing in accounting. Subjects used the experimental KBS to work on a realistic problem of financial analysis. Both the process and outcomes of explanation use were assessed. Outcome variables included improvement in decision accuracy, trust in the KBS, and perceived usefulness of explanations. In addition to questionnaires used to measure decision accuracy and perceptions, computer logs were used to capture the number, type, and context of explanation use. Thinkingaloud procedures were used to assess the nature of explanation use. Results indicate that the use of hypertext for providing explanations significantly improved decision accuracy, and influenced users' preference for explanation types, and the number and context of explanation requests. Enhanced accessibility to deep explanations via the use of hypertext significantly increased the number of deep explanations requested by both novices and experts. Verbal protocol analysis shows that the lack of knowledge and means of accessing deep explanations could make it difficult to understand KBS recommendations, and that deep explanations could improve the understandability of KBS advice, especially in cases where unfamiliar domain concepts were involved. In the hypertext group, about 37% of the deep explanations were requested in the context of judgment making, rather than in the abstract. While only about 28% of the deep explanations requested by the lineartext group were the How type, 42% were the How type for the hypertext group. Experts and novices had different preferences for explanation types. Experts requested a much higher percentage of How, and lower percentages of Why and Strategic explanations, than novices. Verbal protocol analysis illustrates that experts and novices used explanations for different purposes.

Emergency departments (EDs) are often thought of solely as places where life-saving interventions occur. However, EDs are also places where dying patients receive end of life care. Though research examining expert nurse behaviours in care of the dying has been conducted in a variety of care settings, little is known about this topic as it relates to care of the dying adult in the ED. A descriptive exploratory study was conducted with registered nurse experts (n = 6) in two urban EDs in Western Canada. Five expert nurse behaviours deemed essential in care of the dying adult patient in the ED were identified: 1) providing comfort; 2) honouring the personhood of the patient; 3) responding to the family; 4) responding after the death of the patient; and 5) responding to colleagues. These findings contribute to the empirical evidence concerning expert nursing care of the dying.

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