Intelligent information retrieval: diagnosing information need. : Part I. The theoretical framework for developing an intelligent IR tool

The research examines the notion that the principles underlying the procedure used by doctors to diagnose a patient's disease are useful in the design of “intelligent” IR systems because the task of the doctor is conceptually similar to the computer (or human) intermediary's task in “intelligent information retrieval”: to draw out, through interaction with the IR system, the user's query/information need. The research is reported in two parts. In Part II, an information retrieval tool is described which is based on “intelligent information retrieval” assumptions about the information user. In Part I, presented here, the theoretical framework for the tool is set out. This framework is borrowed from the diagnostic procedure currently used in medicine, called “differential diagnosis”. Because of the severe consequences that attend misdiagnosis, the operating principle in differential diagnosis is (1) to expand the uncertainty in the diagnosis situation so that all possible hypotheses and evidence are considered, then (2) to contract the uncertainty in a step by step fashion (from an examination of the patient's symptoms, through the patient's history and a physical (signs), to laboratory tests). The IR theories of Taylor, Kuhlthau and Belkin are used to demonstrate that these medical diagnosis procedures are already present in IR and that it is a viable model with which to design “intelligent” IR tools and systems.     

APL-based on-line retrieval of financial data

FACTS is an APL-based interactive on-line system used for retrieval of budget and accounting data. The system provides selective retrieval and manipulation of financial data for management in a development laboratory. The terms “teilnehmer” and “teilhaber” are defined and it is argued that use of a teilnehmer system, such as APL, can considerably reduce the programming and monitary investment for information science systems applications. A brief discussion of APL's text editing facilities is also included to introduce this relatively unknown language to information scientists.     

In search of insights into the generation of techno-economic trends: Micro- and macro-constituencies in the microprocessor industry

In the field of technology policy, few challenges are more intriguing than understanding the nature of technical and market trends. This paper deals with this problem by using the sociotechnical constituencies approach in order to integrate the treatment of “micro”/“macro” issues — from product to industry. The case study is that of the microprocessor industry where at present a Risc (reduced instruction set computer) technology is emerging in a field where a powerful and far-from-exhausted Cisc (complex instruction set computer) technology tends to occupy almost every segment of the market. The analysis reveals how emerging product-constituencies do implement pro-active trend-creating strategies in order to establish themselves as industrial trends, and, by so doing, they simultaneously re-define the existing content of the “macro” industrial level. The study also reveals the important role of the nature and maturity of microprocessor technology in conditioning the constituency-building strategies implemented by different players. Microprocessor technology is specifically characterised as an architectural, codified-knowledge component with indirect network externalities and weak appropriability regime. Finally, the paper also highlights the potential risks of both fragmentation and complete proprietary control of technology in technological processes involving strongly competitive situations.     

Parameter plane control design for a stirred-tank chemical system with slow-fast multirate sampling

The control of a multirate sampled-data, stirred-tank chemical reactor system using a parameter plane method is considered. Due to wide acceptance of proportional-plus- integral-plus-derivative (PID) control in the chemical process industries, a PID controller with a “slow-fast” multirate scheme is used for the chemical reactor system. Based on two related stability equations and using the PID gains as the adjustable parameters, the set of all possible PID gains to maintain the chemical reactor system's stability, and at the same time, to ensure the system has a specified gain margin, phase margin, damping ratio and damping factor is determined. The effects of changing the integer N (which is the ratio of the sampling rates between a slow-and a fast-sampler) and the basic sampling period T on the set of PID gains are examined and the results for single-rate and multirate cases are also studied.     

The R&D performance through time of young, high-technology firms : Methodology and an illustration

This paper summarizes the pilot stage of a microeconomic study of the innovation performance through time of young, high-technology Israeli firms. It reports some results for a successful firm designing, producing and selling electronic instruments and systems. The paper begins by surveying some of the difficulties surrounding the collection and organization of data on R&D projects. One of them concerns the definition of the ‘Unit for Analysis’ - the R&D project. Three criteria are suggested for dividing the stream for innovative activities into R&D projects, and these are applied to group the tens of products, accessories and systems included in the analysis into nine projects. The paper subsequently defines a measure of “direct” project performance or profitability estimate - discounted operating profits per unit of fixed costs - and provides estimates based on R&D and sales data for the products of each project. The final sections analyze the variation of project profitability through time. The increasing profitability observed across generations of a product class is attributed to the adaptability of the firm to changes in the environment, particularly to the availability of new technology which requires the swift design and sale of more complex products. The qualitative history of the various projects suggests that this adaptability is due, to a large extent, to the skills, infrastructure and reputation of the firm accumulated from prior projects, i.e. that the “indirect” profitability of the latter is high. Some estimates of the indirect profitability of early projects are presented. A comparison of the spin-off mechanisms observed in the firm analyzed with those observed in firms of other industries is also undertaken.     

The performance impact of intra-firm organizational design on an alliance's NPD projects

This research contributes to the intra-organization, inter-organization, and new product development (NPD) management literature by studying the impact of a firm's internal organizational design on the communication within and performance of NPD projects conducted with strategic alliance partners. The empirical data were collected from three in-depth case studies of network lead companies (NLCs) operating in different industries. The three NLCs have different internal organizational designs, ranging from very flexible “organic” to very rigid “mechanistic.” In each NLC, a successful new-to-firm product development project was chosen for further detailed investigation. First, we identify the role the alliance's NPD project characteristics and industry characteristics play in determining the “intensity level” and “media richness” of communication required between the alliance's NPD project partners. Then, we examine how the internal organizational design influences the actual intensity and media richness of communication of the alliance's NPD project that matches our assumptions of what is required.     

Policy learning in Swiss research policy—the case of the National Centres of Competence in Research

The article treats the problem of “rationality” in learning processes in research policies. The underlying hypothesis is that there are contemporary efforts in research policy-making, which, against views in organisational sociology like “bounded rationality” or “garbage-can”, endeavour to “rationalise” the process of decision-making in research policies. This hypothesis is worked out by taking one example, the setting-up of the “National Centres of Competence in Research” (NCCR) in Switzerland and analyse the processes that have contributed to the acceptance of this funding measure. Our finding is that Switzerland has introduced some “rationalising devices” but that these devices are still insufficiently institutionalised and can be further elaborated. In addition, it is made clear that goal-oriented problem-solving and interests are closely intertwined and cannot be dissociated from another. This may have distorting effects on the rationality of the learning process. It is, nevertheless, a necessary condition in order to learn at all.     

The Turing Triage Test

If, as a number of writers have predicted, the computers of the future will possess intelligence and capacities that exceed our own then it seems as though they will be worthy of a moral respect at least equal to, and perhaps greater than, human beings. In this paper I propose a test to determine when we have reached that point. Inspired by Alan Turing’s (1950) original “Turing test”, which argued that we would be justified in conceding that machines could think if they could fill the role of a person in a conversation, I propose a test for when computers have achieved moral standing by asking when a computer might take the place of a human being in a moral dilemma, such as a “triage” situation in which a choice must be made as to which of two human lives to save. We will know that machines have achieved moral standing comparable to a human when the replacement of one of these people with an artificial intelligence leaves the character of the dilemma intact. That is, when we might sometimes judge that it is reasonable to preserve the continuing existence of a machine over the life of a human being. This is the “Turing Triage Test”. I argue that if personhood is understood as a matter of possessing a set of important cognitive capacities then it seems likely that future AIs will be able to pass this test. However this conclusion serves as a reductio of this account of the nature of persons. I set out an alternative account of the nature of persons, which places the concept of a person at the centre of an interdependent network of moral and affective responses, such as remorse, grief and sympathy. I argue that according to this second, superior, account of the nature of persons, machines will be unable to pass the Turing Triage Test until they possess bodies and faces with expressive capacities akin to those of the human form.     

Public policies towards Research Joint Venture: Institutional design and participants’ characteristics

In this paper, we present several insights regarding the influence of institutional design on the process of Research Joint Venture (RJV) formation. Our results are obtained with a firm-level dataset on RJVs formed under the umbrella of the Eureka initiative and of the European Union’s Framework Programmes (EU-FPs) for science and technology. We focus on firms that are known to have a high probability of forming RJVs, with the latter identified as firms with a past experience in collaborative research. The results indicate that EU-FP RJVs are consistent with a “top-down” and “mission oriented” research policy. By contrast, Eureka RJVs appear as more market driven and “bottom-up”.     

Is the Internet a US invention?—an economic and technological history of computer networking

Although the inventions embodied in the Internet originated in a diverse set of industrial economies, the US was consistently the source of critical innovations and an early adopter of new applications. Why did other nations, including several that made important inventive contributions to the Internet, not play a larger role in its development, particularly in the creation of new business organizations, governance institutions, and applications? We argue that the role of the US “national innovation system” in the creation of the Internet echoes several key themes of US technological development before 1940. The presence of a large domestic market, a set of antitrust and regulatory policies that weakened the power of incumbent telecommunications firms, and a diverse private/public research community that was willing to work with both domestic and foreign inventions were important preconditions for US leadership in computer networking innovation.     

Bibliometric maps of field of science

The present paper is devoted to two directions in algorithmic classificatory procedures: the journal co-citation analysis as an example of citation networks and lexical analysis of keywords in the titles and texts. What is common to those approaches is the general idea of normalization of deviations of the observed data from the mathematical expectation. The application of the same formula leads to discovery of statistically significant links between objects (journals in one case, keywords — in the other). The results of the journal co-citation analysis are reflected in tables and map for field “Women’s Studies” and for field “Information Science and Library Science”. An experimental attempt at establishing textual links between words was carried out on two samples from SSCI Data base: (1) EDUCATION and (2) ETHICS. The EDUCATION file included 2180 documents (of which 751 had abstracts); the ETHICS file included 807 documents (289 abstracts). Some examples of the results of this pilot study are given in tabular form . The binary links between words discovered in this way may form triplets or other groups with more than two member words.     

An essay on the past and future (?) of information science education—II: Unresolved problems of “externalities” of education

The essay examines the basic issues confronting information science education, issues that must be resolved if information science itself is to evolve in an orderly fashion. The essay is organized in three parts. In the first part definitions were considered and in a historical context the emergence, evolution and current state of information science and its education. This second part considers the problems and unresolved questions that deal with external aspects (“externalities”) of information science education: (i) academic affiliation, (ii) degree levels, (iii) admission requirements, (iv) jurisdiction and (v) financing. The third part will deal with problems and unresolved questions in respect to internal aspects (“internalities”) of education: (i) objectives, (ii) content, (iii) teachers and (iv) teaching. It is suggested that information science cannot prosper or even survive if concentrated action is not undertaken in the “externalities” and “internalities” of its education. A majority of the specific situations discussed pertain to North America, however, general aspects are valid for information science education everywhere. Recommendations about areas that need action are made.     

Systemic process management environment for building distributed locational systems

This article describes the architecture of a generic platform for building distributed locational systems over stand-alone applications. The proposed platform integrates ideas and technology from areas such as distributed and parallel databases, transaction processing systems, and workflow management. The main contribution of this research effort is to propose a “kernel” locational system providing the essentials for distributed processing and to show the important role database technology may play in supporting such functionality of workflow management. These include a powerful process management environment using the principles of the Problem Structuring Methodology (PSM), which it created as a generalization of workflow ideas and incorporated transactional notions such as spheres of isolation, atomicity, and persistence and a transactional engine enforcing these “quality guarantees” based on the nested and multi-level models. It also includes a tool kit providing externalized database functionality enabling physical database design over heterogeneous data repositories.     

Challenges of scholarly publications on the Web to the evaluation of science—A comparison of author visibility on the Web and in print journals

This article reveals different patterns of scholarly communication in the XML research field on the Web and in print journals in terms of author visibility, and challenges the common practice of exclusively using the ISI’s databases to obtain citation counts as scientific performance indicators. Results from this study demonstrate both the importance and the feasibility of the use of multiple citation data sources in citation analysis studies of scholarly communication, and provide evidence for a developing “two tier” scholarly communication system.     

Querying the French yellow pages: Natural language access to the directory

ERLI was asked by the French TELECOM to develop a specific system to query the professional headings of the French Yellow Pages directory. Approximately 4 million end users now have access (via their “Minitel” terminals) to some 6 million professionals registered under 2500 different headings. (A second application has also been developed using a similar system: the Minitel Applications Directory, which gives information on all the available applications in the Minitel network.)Although the retrieval of a heading is a necessary step in accessing data, it is of no real interest to the user, who wishes only to retrieve the phone number of a given professional or tradesperson.The general aims of the Natural Language System (NLS) are to facilitate access to headings by intelligent query processing (or even to bypass completely the necessity of choosing between headings).This is done through: • The association of a specific knowledge base to the list of headings, • The construction of a “grammar” ensuring a consistent interpretation of the queries.ERLI's system is as an alternative to the existing one, which is based on a key-word indexing technique. The weaknesses and insufficiencies of such a technique are well known, especially in this context, where queries are expressed by unqualified users, who are unfamiliar with the data (i.e., the headings of the directory).Finally, it is important to note that the NLS was developed with regard to industrial considerations (in particular, the minimizing of the average processing time per query). The system is not a prototype. Extensive on-side testing is scheduled to begin in July 1988 and a complete installation will be carried out at the end of the year.     

Heart of darkness: modeling public–private funding interactions inside the R&D black box

This paper is a first step toward closing the analytical gap in the extensive literature on the results of interactions between public and private R&D expenditures, and their joint effects on the economy. A survey focusing on econometric studies in this area reveals a plethora of sometimes confusing and frequently contradictory estimates of the response of company-financed R&D to changes in the level and nature of this category of public expenditures. Yet, a theoretical framework seldom is provided within which the empirical results are to be interpreted. Some such structure is necessary, in view of the multiple channels through which public research can affect private R&D performance, especially as not all the effects flow in the same direction. A major cause of “inconsistencies” in the empirical literature is the failure to recognize key differences among the various policy “experiments” being considered — depending upon the economy in which they are embedded, and the type of public sector R&D spending that is contemplated. Using a simple, stylized structural model, we identify the main channels of impact of public R&D. We thus can characterize the various effects, distinguishing between short- and long-run impacts that would show up in simple regression analyses of nominal public and private R&D expenditure variables. Within the context of our simple model it is possible to offer interpretations that shed light on recent cross-section and panel data findings at both high (i.e., national) and low (specific technology area) levels of aggregation.     

The open kimono: How Intel balances trust and power to maintain platform leadership

A small group of companies including Intel, Microsoft, and Cisco have used “platform leadership” with great effect as a means for driving innovation and accelerating market growth within their respective industries. Prior research in this area emphasizes that trust plays a critical role in the success of this strategy. However, many of the categorizations of trust discussed in the literature tend to ignore or undervalue the fact that trust and power are often functionally equivalent, and that the coercion of weaker partners is sometimes misdiagnosed as collaboration. In this paper, I use case study data focusing on Intel's shift from ceramic/wire-bonded packaging to organic/C4 packaging to characterize the relationships between Intel and its suppliers, and to determine if these links are based on power in addition to trust. The case study shows that Intel's platform leadership strategy is built on a balance of both trust and a relatively benevolent form of power that is exemplified by the company's “open kimono” principle, through which Intel insists that suppliers share detailed financial data and highly proprietary technical information to achieve mutually advantageous objectives. By explaining more completely the nature of these inter-firm linkages, this paper usefully extends our understanding of how platform leadership is maintained by Intel, and contributes to the literature by showing how trust and power can be used simultaneously within an inter-firm relationship in a way that benefits all of the stakeholders.     

Morphological analysis, diffusion and lockout of technologies: Ferrous casting in France and the FRG

In this paper we will try to address technological diffusion and substitution from two methodological angles. The first consists in a complete and comprehensive morphological analysis (MA) of a set of (process) technologies for a particular industry. In the second part, we use the results of our MA of the technological trajectories in the casting industry, to analyse their diffusion in two countries, France and the FRG. With respect to the results of this work, we can express two observations. First, this case study will provide valuable insights on the conditions of exit from a “lock-in” situation. Second, the MA will permit us to avoid misinterpretation concerning the asymmetrical character and discontinuities of the diffusion trajectory of the technology under consideration.     

Projects and firms as discordant complements: organisational learning in the Munich software ecology

In current theorising, projects and firms are understood as “learning organisations”. Although the learning function can be regarded as constituent for both organisational forms, the specific learning mechanisms are connected with opposing features (e.g. long-term, trustful collaboration versus short cyclical, disruptive collaboration). Referring to the first results of qualitative research conducted on the Munich software cluster, this paper aims to explore the functional interplay between projects and firms with regard to organisational learning. The main thesis is that processes of improvement, failure eradication and knowledge accumulation are more likely to take place in firms whereas processes of structural change are more likely to be organised in a project. In complementing one another these functions, however, also generate inconsistencies like contravening learning incentives or contingency traps. Therefore, projects and firms may be regarded as “discordant complements”.     

Selecting livestock periodicals through citation analysis technique

This paper describes a study using the citation analysis technique to select journals that would be used in the livestock industry. The study determines the principal journals to which a livestock library should subscribe, thus obtaining the highest possible utility of materials.By using a data base of 114 journals for a period of four years (1980–1983), citation data were applied on the Bradford bibliograph and Bradford-Zipf distribution to determine the ranking of journals in the industry and the “core journals.”It was discovered that the Journal of Animal Science is the most cited journal, with 889 citations, and the core journals were 18 in number, having 11,070 citations representing 32.3% of the total citations.