The Emotional Intelligence of National Automatic Merchandising Association (NAMA) Vending and Coffee Services Industries Executives: A Pilot Study

The authors report the pilot study focused on identifying the emotional intelligence (El) of leaders in the automatic merchandising and coffee service industries. The data were collected from 39 executives, members of National Automatic Merchandising Association (NM), who attended 2005 Executive Development Program on the campus of Michigan State University. Three elements of EI- IN, OUT, RELATIONSHIP for these leaders are discussed.

Competence in Intelligence Testing : A Training Model for Postgraduate Psychology Students

The assessment of intellectual ability is a core competency in psychology. The results of intelligence tests have many potential implications and are used frequently as the basis for decisions about educational placements, eligibility for various services, and admission to specific groups. Given the importance of intelligence test scores, accurate test administration and scoring are essential; yet there is evidence of unacceptably high rates of examiner error. This paper discusses competency and postgraduate training in intelligence testing and presents a training model for postgraduate psychology students. The model aims to achieve high levels of competency in intelligence testing through a structured method of training, practice and feedback that incorporates peer support, self-reflection and multiple methods for evaluating competency.

Partitioning composite web services for decentralized execution using a genetic algorithm

Composite web services comprise several component web services. When a composite web service is executed centrally, a single web service engine is responsible for coordinating the execution of the components, which may create a bottleneck and degrade the overall throughput of the composite service when there are a large number of service requests. Potentially this problem can be handled by decentralizing execution of the composite web service, but this raises the issue of how to partition a composite service into groups of component services such that each group can be orchestrated by its own execution engine while ensuring acceptable overall throughput of the composite service. Here we present a novel penalty-based genetic algorithm to solve the composite web service partitioning problem. Empirical results show that our new algorithm outperforms existing heuristic-based solutions.

QoS-oriented sesource allocation and scheduling of multiple composite web services in a hybrid cloud using a random-key genetic algorithm

In cloud computing resource allocation and scheduling of multiple composite web services is an important challenge. This is especially so in a hybrid cloud where there may be some free resources available from private clouds but some fee-paying resources from public clouds. Meeting this challenge involves two classical computational problems. One is assigning resources to each of the tasks in the composite web service. The other is scheduling the allocated resources when each resource may be used by more than one task and may be needed at different points of time. In addition, we must consider Quality-of-Service issues, such as execution time and running costs. Existing approaches to resource allocation and scheduling in public clouds and grid computing are not applicable to this new problem. This paper presents a random-key genetic algorithm that solves new resource allocation and scheduling problem. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the algorithm.

Opportunities of public transport experience enhancements with mobile services and urban screens

Public transportation is an environment with great potential for applying innovative ubiquitous computing services to enhance user experiences. This paper provides the underpinning rationale for research that will be looking at how real-time passenger information system deployed by transit authorities can provide a core platform to improve commuters’ user experiences during all stages of their journey. The proposal builds on this platform to inform the design and development of innovative social media, mobile computing and geospatial information applications, with the hope to create fun and meaningful experiences for passengers during their everyday travel. Furthermore, we present the findings of our pilot study that aims to offer a better understanding of passengers’ activities and social interactions during their daily commute.

The relationship between lower intelligence, crime and custodial outcomes : a brief literary review of a vulnerable group

The relationship between intellectual functioning and criminal offending has received considerable focus within the literature. While there remains debate regarding the existence (and strength) of this relationship, there is a wider consensus that individuals with below average functioning (in particular cognitive impairments) are disproportionately represented within the prison population. This paper focuses on research that has implications for the effective management of lower functioning individuals within correctional environments as well as the successful rehabilitation and release of such individuals back into the community. This includes a review of the literature regarding the link between lower intelligence and offending and the identification of possible factors that either facilitate (or confound) this relationship. The main themes to emerge from this review are that individuals with lower intellectual functioning continue to be disproportionately represented in custodial settings and that there is a need to increase the provision of specialised programs to cater for their needs. Further research is also needed into a range of areas including: (1) the reason for this over-representation in custodial settings, (2) the existence and effectiveness of rehabilitation and release programs that cater for lower IQ offenders, (3) the effectiveness of custodial alternatives for this group (e.g. intensive corrections orders) and (4) what post-custodial release services are needed to reduce the risk of recidivism.

Identifying relevant information for emergency services from twitter in response to natural disaster

This project proposes a framework that identifies high‐value disaster-based information from social media to facilitate key decision-making processes during natural disasters. At present it is very difficult to differentiate between information that has a high degree of disaster relevance and information that has a low degree of disaster relevance. By digitally harvesting and categorising social media conversation streams automatically, this framework identifies highly disaster-relevant information that can be used by emergency services for intelligence gathering and decision-making.

Artificial intelligence approaches to network management: recent advances and a survey

With increased number of new services and users being added to the communication network, management of such networks becomes crucial to provide assured quality of service. Finding skilled managers is often a problem. To alleviate this problem and also to provide assistance to the available network managers, network management has to be automated. Many attempts have been made in this direction and it is a promising area of interest to researchers in both academia and industry. In this paper, a review of the management complexities in present day networks and artificial intelligence approaches to network management are presented. Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

An intelligent procurement marketplace for web services composition

This paper presents an intelligent procurement marketplace for finding the best mix of web services to dynamically compose the business process desired by a web service requester. We develop a combinatorial auction approach that leads to an integer programming formulation for the web services composition problem. The model takes into account the Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Level Agreements (SLA) for differentiating among multiple service providers who are capable of fulfilling a functionality. An important feature of the model is interface aware composition.

Towards a Comprehensive Approach to Quantifying and Mapping Ecosystem Services Flows

25 p.

Product intelligence in warehouse management: A case study

The need for more flexible, adaptable and customer-oriented warehouse operations has been increasingly identified as an important issue by today's warehouse companies due to the rapidly changing preferences of the customers that use their services. Motivated by manufacturing and other logistics operations, in this paper we argue on the potential application of product intelligence in warehouse operations as an approach that can help warehouse companies address these issues. We discuss the opportunities of such an approach using a real example of a third-party-logistics warehouse company and we present the benefits it can bring in their warehouse management systems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.

Reasoning about trust, entrepreneurial services, and the virtual team

This Portfolio of Exploration (PoE) tracks a transformative learning developmental journey that is directed at changing meaning making structures and mental models within an innovation practice. The explicit purpose of the Portfolio is to develop new and different perspectives that enable the handling of new and more complex phenomena through self transformation and increased emotional intelligence development. The Portfolio provides a response to the question: ‘What are the key determinants that enable a Virtual Team (VT) to flourish where flourishing means developing and delivering on the firm’s innovative imperatives?’ Furthermore, the PoE is structured as an investigation into how higher order meaning making promotes ‘entrepreneurial services’ within an intra-firm virtual team, with a secondary aim to identify how reasoning about trust influence KGPs to exchange knowledge. I have developed a framework which specifically focuses on the effectiveness of any firms’ Virtual Team (VT) through transforming the meaning making of the VT participants. I hypothesized it is the way KGPs make meaning (reasoning about trust) which differentiates the firm as a growing firm in the sense of Penrosean resources: ‘inducement to expand and a limit of expansion’ (1959). Reasoning about trust is used as a higher order meaning-making concept in line with Kegan’s (1994) conception of complex meaning making, which is the combining of ideas and data in ways that transform meaning and implicates participants to find new ways of knowledge generation. Simply, it is the VT participants who develop higher order meaning making that hold the capabilities to transform the firm from within, providing a unique competitive advantage that enables the firm to grow.

Using CORBA's advanced services to enhance the integrity of QoS management programmable networks

The development of wideband network services and the new network infrastructures to support them have placed much more requirements on current network management systems. Issues such as scalability, integrity and interoperability have become more important. Existing management systems are not flexible enough to support the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) in these dynamic environments. The concept of Programmable Networks has been proposed to address these requirements. Within this framework, CORBA is regarded as a middleware technology that can enable interoperation among the distributed entities founds in Programmable Networks. By using the basic CORBA environment in a heterogeneous network environment, a network manager is able to control remote Network Elements (NEs) in the same way it controls its local resources. Using this approach both the flexibility and intelligence of the overall network management can be improved. This paper proposes the use of two advanced features of CORBA to enhance the QoS management in a Programmable Network environment. The Transaction Service can be used to manage a set of tasks, whenever the management of elements in a network is correlated; and the Concurrency Service can be used to coordinate multiple accesses on the same network resources. It is also shown in this paper that proper use of CORBA can largely reduce the development and administration of network management applications.