The modern university functions as a knowledge watershed for civilization. A faculty of informati... more The modern university functions as a knowledge watershed for civilization. A faculty of informatics trains students to create, distribute, mediate, deploy, interpret, translate, and utilize the products of information and communication technology for the greater good of the society it serves. Quantifiable research must be able to factor in the cost of a comfortable and secure society, a verdant and sustainable ecology, and a resilient environment for communities and business to thrive. CSR brings qualifiable research in sustainability science to the task of coordinating emerging big data platforms, offices, and skills.
The purpose of this study is to test whether the use of graphic information interfaces such as ma... more The purpose of this study is to test whether the use of graphic information interfaces such as maps and simulations can enhance the general public's understanding of scientific data and risk analysis, improve communication and virtual collaboration, and lead to environmental decision making that is less positional and more consensual. The research will be located in upstate New York in the Adirondack Park region, and will focus on land use proposals such as cellular telephone tower installations within and near the Park's Blue Line that have been issues of contention. This design-based research study proposes to investigate the use of geospatial and telecommunications technologies (webdeployed maps and simulations) for presenting scientific data and analyses in a way that balances stakeholders' interests and promotes understanding. The research addresses the need for empirically-based guidelines for presenting the results of scientific inquiry to the public to support rational decision-making. The investigation will result in more effective virtual collaboration between civic leaders, planners and communities, leading to better ways to engage stakeholders on a broad range of environmental and urban planning, resource management, and education issues through leveraging geospatial and telecommunications technologies.
Each title word of this paper is a keyword, a key to a field or constellated area of research. Ta... more Each title word of this paper is a keyword, a key to a field or constellated area of research. Tacit knowing, first articulated in 1966 by the physicist Michael Polanyi, is the knowledge encoded in the whole person. As such, it forms an object of scientific inquiry via such disciplines as cognitive science and developmental psychology (Vygotsky, Piaget) and cybernetics (Wiener, Bateson). It is also the means by which we propose that freshmen and sophomores gain skills to give presentations. The presentation is an example of a peak communication performance, counted among the “soft skills”. Mastery is attained in a complex learning process, which is an integration of materials, media, and contents, which are organized, practiced, and presented by a person. If first and second year students of technology and engineering get experience giving presentations about their extracurricular experiences rather than their specialty, they are concurrently creating a cognitive map, supported by their peers in the academy, of the shape of organizational experience, including such things as “people skills”, team learning, planning, executing, and evaluating. Campus events and clubs are complex adaptive systems (CAS), structurally identical with all “Learning Organizations” (LO), which are non-linear process structures in environments. Experience is the gateway for students of engineering and technology to add procedural “know how” and an indexed map of complexity to their academic specialty, which will be invaluable in their multi-disciplinary cooperative research and development teams.
Situation awareness, the ability to share and disseminate timely, accurate and useful information... more Situation awareness, the ability to share and disseminate timely, accurate and useful information where and when it is needed, is a significant challenge in emergency response.
Enterprises face a challenge in providing ways for employees to use Bring Your Own Device (BYOD).... more Enterprises face a challenge in providing ways for employees to use Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Current solutions provide a means for many companies to tie such devices to Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). This approach, however, leaves both the device and the corporate desktop vulnerable to intrusions. A better approach is to create an ecosystem that treats the BYOD as vulnerable until it is approved by a multi-part sign-on procedure and that lends itself to embedding enterprise applications in a separate partition of a BYOD. In the first part of the White Paper, we explain the forces driving large enterprises to view solutions to Workplace as a Service (WPaaS) as part of a larger effort to transform the enterprise, in particular, enterprise IT. Enterprises view BYOD as a way to: 1. Reduce costs by altering the use of software, computing resources, and staff. 2. Use BYOD solutions provide new ways to support important customer groups. 3. These solutions are innovative bec...
The Wireless Grid Internet of Things (WiGIT) and its Wireless Grid architecture and Edgeware have... more The Wireless Grid Internet of Things (WiGIT) and its Wireless Grid architecture and Edgeware have been developed under the auspices of the National Science Foundation Partnerships for Innovation (PFI) grant #0227879 for WiGiT (Wireless Grid Innovation Testbed). Syracuse University (SU) and Virginia Tech (VT) created the first national WiGiT distributed experimental testbed in 2009. Working software prototypes were first demonstrated at Syracuse University in 2003, and field tested since 2005. Hardware implementations have been lab tested iteratively over the years, with initial field testing in 2008/9 and a new series of field trials begun once again in 2011/2012. In August 2012 an enhanced iDAWG (intelligent Deployable Augmented Wireless Gateway) was demonstrated, with additional evaluations scheduled for 2013. Field tests of WiGiT specifications, applications, services, and devices are ongoing in cooperation with WiGiT partner firms, schools, public agencies, healthcare institutions, universities, and emergency managers. All are welcome to join WiGIT, at no cost, and no obligation.
Workplace as Service/Mobile Clouds and BYOD
The project was supported by the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation (NSF/PFI) program, NSF # 0917973. The WiGIT v0.3 Open Specifications presented below have been developed in cooperation with Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC) of TM Forum. The ECLC ‘Workplace as a Service’ Whitepaper TR194, January 2013; and TR192, October 2012, ‘Workplace as a Service Requirements.’ These are accessible at www.tmforum.com. First, we explain the purpose for WiGiT open specifications. The relationship between WiGIT v0.3 open specifications and Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council Workplace as a Service is illustrated in Figure 1. Then we review functional requirements, and components. Use Cases, such as for Workplace as a Service which are also elaborated on in separate documents. In addition use cases such as WeJay, iDAWG (intelligent Deployable Augmented Wireless Gateway), NEERS (Networked Edgeware for Energy Resource Sharing) and Emergency Communications are included.
Demonstrations of WiGIT v0.3 in the TM Forum Workplace as a Service/Mobile Clouds/Data Center of Future context took place initially at TM Management World Europe, Nice, France, and May 13-16, 2013; and at additional academic and professional events thereafter.
Geospatial technologies in conjunction with communications technology offer a context for locatin... more Geospatial technologies in conjunction with communications technology offer a context for locating and coordinating team activities in such a way that the nature of each team member's effort may be known and understood by other members without central coordination. Constructed group knowledge enables teams to respond to unforeseen and emergent contingencies and act in concert through the active interpretation of shared systems artifacts even without prior planning and coordination. Stigmergic or sematectonic coordination refers to how an individual behaves in response to environmental cues as part of a collaborative team engaged in a complex task, i.e. where the task is of such complexity that a coordinated team effort is required to accomplish it. Human stigmergic coordination emerges on the basis of how tasks and goals are structured and understood between the members of the team. Geographically coded information, generated and shared dynamically, gives teams maps of each other’s activities. Remotely sensed data adds environmental conditions supporting the major functions of the geospatial digital workspace to provide dynamic knowledge of group activities in real time. Environmental changes reveal new dependencies for adaptive collaboration as conditions on the ground evolve, enabling participants to track the evolution of each other’s work and mutually adjust to it in a timely manner.
The critical incident technique (CIT) is a set of procedures used to identify and analyze critica... more The critical incident technique (CIT) is a set of procedures used to identify and analyze critical incidents from a behavioral-cognitive perspective. The technique was developed during WWII by Col. John C. Flanagan to better understand effective and ineffective behaviors for aviation training [17]. The technique is essentially a semi-structured interview or questionnaire which asks the participant to describe a critical incident in detail, defined by Flanagan as “any observable human activity that is sufficiently complete in itself to permit inferences and predictions to be made about the person performing the act” [17, p. 237]. The participant may be an actor in the incident or an observer. In contrast to other research methods that may examine normal practices and procedures, CIT focuses on specific incidents which are unusual or outside of the norm to quickly identify problems or opportunities. According to Butterfield et al “The CIT started out as a task analysis tool and, although it is still used as such within industrial and organizational psychology, it has expanded its use in counseling psychology, nursing, education, medicine, and elsewhere to also become an investigative and exploratory tool”.
This paper introduces the Smart Buildings = Smart Cities model for integrating alternative energy... more This paper introduces the Smart Buildings = Smart Cities model for integrating alternative energy resources with the power grid using smart grid supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system software to create networked microgrids to manage distributed electricity generation with integrated battery storage at the facility level.
There has been considerable investigation into the nature, effectiveness and performance of virtu... more There has been considerable investigation into the nature, effectiveness and performance of virtual organizations, virtual teams and virtual collaboration (Cogburn, et al, 2011) based on the affordances of information and communications technology (ICT). The recent emergence of location-based social network technologies has resulted in new modes of ad hoc virtual organizations. Developers appear to improvise systems by cobbling together existing applications and technologies, almost overnight, with uncoordinated contributions rather than traditional designs or project plans. Heylighen theorizes that stigmergic self-organization explains this kind of system development (Heylighen, 2007). As defined by the biologist Grasse, stigmergy has been defined as a sequence of indirect stimulus and response behaviors that contribute to the coordination of actions among insects through their environment, for example termites coordinating their nest building activities (Theraulaz & Bonabeau, 1999). Heylighen likens human cognitive self-organization to stigmergy. In recent years, the advent of distributed ICTs like worldwide internet computing and pervasive ubiquitous networks have made traditional top-down techniques of system development increasingly irrelevant for software application development. Instead, modular, adaptable and self-managing end-user components are combined in “mash-ups” (Merrill, 2009). Similarly, software development teams are spontaneous and ad hoc, functioning as virtual organizations. In this study, the actions leading to the creation of the Ushahidi software platform and its subsequent adaptations are identified using longitudinal case study methodology and content analysis methods applied to newspaper, magazine, website, journal and social networking publications. Based on a socio-technical theoretical framework, the Ushahidi system is framed as a dynamic, ad hoc virtual organization in the context of emergency response. The actions leading to the instantiation of the Ushahidi system are examined as examples of human cognitive stigmergic response to critical incidents and naturalistic development of complex adaptive systems.
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Papers by Janet Marsden
Workplace as Service/Mobile Clouds and BYOD
The project was supported by the National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation (NSF/PFI) program, NSF # 0917973. The WiGIT v0.3 Open Specifications presented below have been developed in cooperation with Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (ECLC) of TM Forum. The ECLC ‘Workplace as a Service’ Whitepaper TR194, January 2013; and TR192, October 2012, ‘Workplace as a Service Requirements.’ These are accessible at www.tmforum.com. First, we explain the purpose for WiGiT open specifications. The relationship between WiGIT v0.3 open specifications and Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council Workplace as a Service is illustrated in Figure 1. Then we review functional requirements, and components. Use Cases, such as for Workplace as a Service which are also elaborated on in separate documents. In addition use cases such as WeJay, iDAWG (intelligent Deployable Augmented Wireless Gateway), NEERS (Networked Edgeware for Energy Resource Sharing) and Emergency Communications are included.
Demonstrations of WiGIT v0.3 in the TM Forum Workplace as a Service/Mobile Clouds/Data Center of Future context took place initially at TM Management World Europe, Nice, France, and May 13-16, 2013; and at additional academic and professional events thereafter.