Knowledge magement: a rewarding challenge for SME's?

Paper presented at Information Resources Management Association International Conference, in Philadelphia (PA), 18-21 May 2003

Virtual communities of practice: examining the motivations and constraints in their knowledge creation and knowledge transfer preocesses

Paper accepted for the OKLC 2009 - International Conference on Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities (26-28th, April 2009, Amsterdam, the Netherlands).

Estudo para a implementação de plataformas de e-learning no sistema de formação dos recursos humanos da saúde: o caso particular dos enfermeiros de um hospital privado

Mestrado em Intervenção Sócio-Organizacional na Saúde - Área de especialização: Políticas de Administração e Gestão de Serviços de Saúde.

Teaching with Moodle in higher education

Nowadays, with the use of technology and the Internet, education is undergoing significant changes, contemplating new ways of teaching and learning. One of the widely methods of teaching used to promote knowledge, consists in the use of virtual environments available in various formats, taking as example the teaching-learning platforms, which are available online. The Internet access and use of Laptops have created the technological conditions for teachers and students can benefit from the diversity of online information, communication, collaboration and sharing with others. The integration of Internet services in the teaching practices can provide thematic, social and digital enrichment for the agents involved. In this paper we will talk about the advantages of LMS (Learning Management Systems) such as Moodle, to support the presential lectures in higher education. We also will analyse its implications for student support and online interaction, leading educational agents to a mixing of different learning environments, where they can combine face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated instruction, blended-learning, and increases the options for better quality and quantity of human interaction in a learning environment. We also will present some tools traditionally used in online assessment and that are part of the functionalities of Moodle. These tools can provide interesting alternatives to promote a more significant learning and contribute to the development of flexible and customized models of an evaluation which we want to be more efficient.

Multiple-choice tests: a tool in assessing knowledge

The purpose of this paper is to analyse if Multiple-Choice Tests may be considered an interesting alternative for assessing knowledge, particularly in the Mathematics area, as opposed to the traditional methods, such as open questions exams. In this sense we illustrate some opinions of the researchers in this area. Often the perception of the people about the construction of this kind of exams is that they are easy to create. But it is not true! Construct well written tests it’s a hard work and needs writing ability from the teachers. Our proposal is analyse the construction difficulties of multiple - choice tests as well some advantages and limitations of this type of tests. We also show the frequent critics and worries, since the beginning of this objective format usage. Finally in this context some examples of Multiple-Choice Items in the Mathematics area are given, and we illustrate as how we can take advantage and improve this kind of tests.

Knowledge and technologies in innovative information systems

7th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, MCIS 2012, Guimaraes, Portugal, September 8-10, 2012, Proceedings Series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 129

The Role of lifelong learning in creation of a european knowledge-based society

The dominant discourse in education and training policies, at the turn of the millennium, was on lifelong learning (LLL) in the context of a knowledge-based society. As Green points (2002, pp. 611-612) several factors contribute to this global trend: The demographic change: In most advanced countries, the average age of the population is increasing, as people live longer; The effects of globalisation: Including both economic restructuring and cultural change which have impacts on the world of education; Global economic restructuring: Which causes, for example, a more intense demand for a higher order of skills; the intensified economic competition, forcing a wave of restructuring and creating enormous pressure to train and retrain the workforce In parallel, the “significance of the international division of labour cannot be underestimated for higher education”, as pointed out by Jarvis (1999, p. 250). This author goes on to argue that globalisation has exacerbated differentiation in the labour market, with the First World converting faster to a knowledge economy and a service society, while a great deal of the actual manufacturing is done elsewhere.

Organization knowledge management change from a complex adaptive systems perpective with ability for ambidexeterity

We are working on the confluence of knowledge management, organizational memory and emergent knowledge with the lens of complex adaptive systems. In order to be fundamentally sustainable organizations search for an adaptive need for managing ambidexterity of day-to-day work and innovation. An organization is an entity of a systemic nature, composed of groups of people who interact to achieve common objectives, making it necessary to capture, store and share interactions knowledge with the organization, this knowledge can be generated in intra-organizational or inter-organizational level. The organizations have organizational memory of knowledge of supported on the Information technology and systems. Each organization, especially in times of uncertainty and radical changes, to meet the demands of the environment, needs timely and sized knowledge on the basis of tacit and explicit. This sizing is a learning process resulting from the interaction that emerges from the relationship between the tacit and explicit knowledge and which we are framing within an approach of Complex Adaptive Systems. The use of complex adaptive systems for building the emerging interdependent relationship, will produce emergent knowledge that will improve the organization unique developing.

New Technique for Uniform Voltage Sharing in Series Stacked Semiconductors

This paper describes the operation of a solid-state series stacked topology used as a serial and parallel switch in pulsed power applications. The proposed circuit, developed from the Marx generator concept, balances the voltage stress on each series stacked semiconductor, distributing the total voltage evenly. Experimental results from a 10 kV laboratory series stacked switch, using 1200 V semiconductors in a ten stages solid-state series stacked circuit, are reported and discussed, considering resistive, capacitive and inductive type loads for high and low duty factor voltage pulse operation.

Advances in smart grids - benefits on sharing background experiences from Portugal, Central Europe and Brazil

This paper presents ELECON - Electricity Consumption Analysis to Promote Energy Efficiency Considering Demand Response and Non-technical Losses, an international research project that involves European and Brazilian partners. ELECON focuses on energy efficiency increasing through consumer´s active participation which is a key area for Europe and Brazil cooperation. The project aims at significantly contributing towards the successful implementation of smart grids, focussing on the use of new methods that allow the efficient use of distributed energy resources, namely distributed generation, storage and demand response. ELECON puts together researchers from seven European and Brazilian partners, with consolidated research background and evidencing complementary competences. ELECON involves institutions of 3 European countries (Portugal, Germany, and France) and 4 Brazilian institutions. The complementary background and experience of the European and Brazilian partners is of main relevance to ensure the capacities required to achieve the proposed goals. In fact, the European Union (EU) and Brazil have very different resources and approaches in what concerns this area. Having huge hydro and fossil resources, Brazil has not been putting emphasis on distributed renewable based electricity generation. On the contrary, EU has been doing huge investments in this area, taking into account environmental concerns and also the economic EU external dependence dictated by huge requirements of energy related products imports. Sharing these different backgrounds allows the project team to propose new methodologies able to efficiently address the new challenges of smart grids.

Knowledge extraction from medium voltage load diagrams to support the definition of electrical tariffs

With the electricity market liberalization, distribution and retail companies are looking for better market strategies based on adequate information upon the consumption patterns of its electricity customers. In this environment all consumers are free to choose their electricity supplier. A fair insight on the customer´s behaviour will permit the definition of specific contract aspects based on the different consumption patterns. In this paper Data Mining (DM) techniques are applied to electricity consumption data from a utility client’s database. To form the different customer´s classes, and find a set of representative consumption patterns, we have used the Two-Step algorithm which is a hierarchical clustering algorithm. Each consumer class will be represented by its load profile resulting from the clustering operation. Next, to characterize each consumer class a classification model will be constructed with the C5.0 classification algorithm.

Symbolic Knowledge Extraction from Trained Neural Networks Governed by Lukasiewicz Logics

This work describes a methodology to extract symbolic rules from trained neural networks. In our approach, patterns on the network are codified using formulas on a Lukasiewicz logic. For this we take advantage of the fact that every connective in this multi-valued logic can be evaluated by a neuron in an artificial network having, by activation function the identity truncated to zero and one. This fact simplifies symbolic rule extraction and allows the easy injection of formulas into a network architecture. We trained this type of neural network using a back-propagation algorithm based on Levenderg-Marquardt algorithm, where in each learning iteration, we restricted the knowledge dissemination in the network structure. This makes the descriptive power of produced neural networks similar to the descriptive power of Lukasiewicz logic language, minimizing the information loss on the translation between connectionist and symbolic structures. To avoid redundance on the generated network, the method simplifies them in a pruning phase, using the "Optimal Brain Surgeon" algorithm. We tested this method on the task of finding the formula used on the generation of a given truth table. For real data tests, we selected the Mushrooms data set, available on the UCI Machine Learning Repository.

A web-based intelligent tutoring system on teaching and learning electrical project

The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) provide new strategies for disseminating information and new communication models in order to change attitudes and human behaviour concerning to education. Nowadays the internet is crucial as a means of communication and information sharing. To education or tutorship will be required to use ICT, supported on the internet, to establish the communication of teacher-student and student-student, disseminating the content of the subjects, and as a way of teaching and learning process. This paper presents an intelligent tutor that aims to be a tool to support teaching and learning in the field of the electrical engineering project.

Ontologies for reusing data cleaning knowledge

The emergence of new business models, namely, the establishment of partnerships between organizations, the chance that companies have of adding existing data on the web, especially in the semantic web, to their information, led to the emphasis on some problems existing in databases, particularly related to data quality. Poor data can result in loss of competitiveness of the organizations holding these data, and may even lead to their disappearance, since many of their decision-making processes are based on these data. For this reason, data cleaning is essential. Current approaches to solve these problems are closely linked to database schemas and specific domains. In order that data cleaning can be used in different repositories, it is necessary for computer systems to understand these data, i.e., an associated semantic is needed. The solution presented in this paper includes the use of ontologies: (i) for the specification of data cleaning operations and, (ii) as a way of solving the semantic heterogeneity problems of data stored in different sources. With data cleaning operations defined at a conceptual level and existing mappings between domain ontologies and an ontology that results from a database, they may be instantiated and proposed to the expert/specialist to be executed over that database, thus enabling their interoperability.

Children's metalinguistic activity in the construction of linguistic existence

In this paper we examine the construction of first entities in narratives produced by children of 5, 7, 10 years and adults1 . The study demonstrates that when children reformulate they try to construct entities detached from the situation of enunciation, which means that they construct a detached or a translated plane and they construct linguistic existence of entities. Entities must first be introduced into the enunciative space and then comments will be made in subsequent utterances. Constructing existence supposes extraction. This consists of “singling out an occurrence, that is, isolating and drawing its spatiotemporal boundaries” (Culioli, 1990, p. 182) . Once the occurrence of the notion is constructed (which means it has become a separate occurrence with situational properties), children can predicate about it. However, there are children who do not construct the linguistic existence of entities. I hypothesize that the mode of task presentation influences the success of constructing linguistic existence. Sharing the investigator’s knowledge about the stimulus images, children do not ascribe an existential status to the occurrence of the notional domain.