An investigation into the perceived quality of communications in dispersed construction project teams

Construction project teams are increasingly operating in dispersed arrangements in which communications predominantly take place via information communication technology (ICT) with a dose of face-to-face interactions. However, a review of literature reflects a scarcity of research on how shifting to dispersed teams affects the perceived quality of communications in construction project teams. The present study attempts to address such a gap in the body of knowledge. To this end, 12 major indicators of quality of communications were identified through a review of literature. This was followed by conducting 17 semi-structured interviews with experts in the industry to customize the indicators for the construction context. Based on the identified indicators, a questionnaire survey was designed for elucidating the perceptions of construction practitioners about changes in quality of communications in dispersed teams in comparison to fully collocated ones. Drawing upon the data collated from 285 duly completed questionnaires, confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was deployed to define the major areas of change in quality of communications in dispersed teams as perceived by the respondents. The findings showed that shifting towards dispersed working results in a change in perceived quality of communications in ten areas mainly reduction in completeness and reliability of communications. The present study contributes to the field by providing a list of indicators for assessing the quality of communications for construction project teams. Additionally, the findings provide an illuminating insight into the primary changes in perceived quality of communications in disperse team arrangements.

Weakly-constrained codes for suppression of patterning effects in digital communications

We propose weakly-constrained stream and block codes with tunable pattern-dependent statistics and demonstrate that the block code capacity at large block sizes is close to the the prediction obtained from a simple Markov model published earlier. We demonstrate the feasibility of the code by presenting original encoding and decoding algorithms with a complexity log-linear in the block size and with modest table memory requirements. We also show that when such codes are used for mitigation of patterning effects in optical fibre communications, a gain of about 0.5dB is possible under realistic conditions, at the expense of small redundancy (≈10%). © 2010 IEEE

Self-affirmation before exposure to health communications promotes intentions and health behavior change by increasing anticipated regret

Health-risk information can elicit negative emotions like anticipated regret that may positively affect health persuasion. The beneficial impact of such emotions is undermined when target audiences respond defensively to the threatening information. We tested whether self-affirming (reflecting on cherished attributes) before message exposure can be used as strategy to enhance the experience of anticipated regret. Women were self-affirmed or not before exposure to a message promoting fruit and vegetable consumption. Self-affirmation increased anticipated regret and intentions reported following message exposure and consumption in the week after the intervention; regret mediated the affirmation effect on intentions. Moreover, results suggest that anticipated regret and intentions are serial mediators linking self-affirmation and behavior. By demonstrating the mediating role of anticipated regret, we provide insights into how self-affirmation may promote healthy intentions and behavior following health message exposure. Self-affirmation techniques could thus potentially be used to increase the effectiveness of health communication efforts.

Measuring QoS in an aeronautical opportunistic network architecture with limited access to a satellite communications backhaul

We measure quality of service (QoS) in a wireless network architecture of transoceanic aircraft. A distinguishing characteristic of the network scheme we analyze is that it mixes the concept of Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) through the exploitation of opportunistic contacts, together with direct satellite access in a limited number of the nodes. We provide a graph sparsification technique for deriving a network model that satisfies the key properties of a real aeronautical opportunistic network while enabling scalable simulation. This reduced model allows us to analyze the impact regarding QoS of introducing Internet-like traffic in the form of outgoing data from passengers. Promoting QoS in DTNs is usually really challenging due to their long delays and scarce resources. The availability of satellite communication links offers a chance to provide an improved degree of service regarding a pure opportunistic approach, and therefore it needs to be properly measured and quantified. Our analysis focuses on several QoS indicators such as delivery time, delivery ratio, and bandwidth allocation fairness. Obtained results show significant improvements in all metric indicators regarding QoS, not usually achievable on the field of DTNs.

Significant Attributes and Challenges Related to Cross-Functional Team Communications

Purpose The purpose of the research work is to investigate the importance of the communication in the cross-functional teams and in what which communicational tools provide better convenience of communication in cross-functional team members. Methodology An empirical study including the data collection from the interviews conducted from the participants working in cross-functional teams. Qualitative approach has been adopted to understand the communicational attributes in the cross-functional teams. For the analysis both deductive and abductive approach has been used. With the help of theoretical framework and empirical data, conclusions drown for better understanding of the concept. Findings The author has divided the search in two main segments, communicational effects on cross-functional team performance and effectiveness of particular communicational tools used by team members and team leaders. Empirical findings shows that without proper communication, cross-functional team are less tend to perform well to achieve set goals as well as face to face communications are more effective than other communicational tools.  Research limitations The research work is limited to Scandinavian countries. Organizational communicational structures are not studied due to time factor. Other limitation of this research work is effect of cultural differences on communication. Implications The research work provides deep understanding of the different communicational effects on cross-functional team performance. The choice of communicational tool and proportional importance for the team members will help managers while selecting the tools of communication with the team members. Originality / value During the literature studies, author determined that there is potential of research for the communicational tools used in cross-functional team communications. The social media is taking over the traditional communicational tools which provide value for findings. 

Machine-to-machine communications with in-network data aggregation, processing, and actuation for large-scale cyber-physical systems

Machine-to-Machine (M2M) paradigm enables machines (sensors, actuators, robots, and smart meter readers) to communicate with each other with little or no human intervention. M2M is a key enabling technology for the cyber-physical systems (CPSs). This paper explores CPS beyond M2M concept and looks at futuristic applications. Our vision is CPS with distributed actuation and in-network processing. We describe few particular use cases that motivate the development of the M2M communication primitives tailored to large-scale CPS. M2M communications in literature were considered in limited extent so far. The existing work is based on small-scale M2M models and centralized solutions. Different sources discuss different primitives. Few existing decentralized solutions do not scale well. There is a need to design M2M communication primitives that will scale to thousands and trillions of M2M devices, without sacrificing solution quality. The main paradigm shift is to design localized algorithms, where CPS nodes make decisions based on local knowledge. Localized coordination and communication in networked robotics, for matching events and robots, were studied to illustrate new directions.

Inquiry into broadcasting, online content and live production to rural and regional Australia : submission 19. Deakin University submission to Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts

Deakin University's submission to the inquiry into 'Bringing the arts, news and other services to rural and regional Australia' by the Standing Committee on Communications and the Arts of the Parliament of Australia. The submission was one of fifty-five submissions and twelve supplementary submissions presented to the committee. The article contributed to the final report 'Arts and the news to rural and regional Australia: inquiry into broadcasting, online content and live production to rural and regional Australia’ published by The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.

Movement-based incentive for cellular traffic offloading through D2D communications

Due to the various applications for smartphones, mobile data traffic is growing at an unprecedented rate. The cellular network is suffering from traffic overloaded currently. Offloading part of the cellular traffic through opportunistic contact between mobile devices is a promising solution to solve the overload problem. However, due to the uneven distribution of devices and regular mobility of smartphone users, the contacts between mobile devices are opportunistic, the cellular traffic offloading approach results in poor performance, i.e., the relay user contacts with other mobile users with small probability. In this paper, we are the first to propose a movement-based incentive mechanism for cellular traffic offloading, where we control the mobility of relay users to improve the performance of traffic offloading. The movement-based incentive mechanism contains a relay user selection algorithm and a payment determination algorithm. Comparing with existing solutions, our proposed movement-based incentive mechanism has better performance.

A game-theoretic resource allocation approach for intercell device-to-device communications in cellular networks

Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is a recently emerged disruptive technology for enhancing the performance of current cellular systems. To successfully implement D2D communications underlaying cellular networks, resource allocation to D2D links is a critical issue, which is far from trivial due to the mutual interference between D2D users and cellular users. Most of the existing resource allocation research for D2D communications has primarily focused on the intracell scenario while leaving the intercell settings not considered. In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation issue for intercell scenarios where a D2D link is located in the overlapping area of two neighboring cells. Specifically, We present three intercell D2D scenarios regarding the resource allocation problem. To address the problem, we develop a repeated game model under these scenarios. Distinct from existing works, we characterize the communication infrastructure, namely Base Stations (BSs), as players competing resource allocation quota from D2D demand, and we define the utility of each player as the payoff from both cellular and D2D communications using radio resources. We also propose a resource allocation algorithm and protocol based on the Nash equilibrium derivations. Numerical results indicate that the developed model not only significantly enhances the system performance including sum rate and sum rate gain, but also sheds lights on resource configurations for intercell D2D scenarios.