There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

From the Publisher: 
The accessible presentation of this book gives both a general view of the entire computer vision enterprise and also offers sufficient detail to be able to build useful applications. Users learn techniques that have proven to be useful by first-hand experience and a wide range of mathematical methods. A CD-ROM with every copy of the text contains source code for programming practice, color images, and illustrative movies. Comprehensive and up-to-date, this book includes essential topics that either reflect practical significance or are of theoretical importance. Topics are discussed in substantial and increasing depth. Application surveys describe numerous important application areas such as image based rendering and digital libraries. Many important algorithms broken down and illustrated in pseudo code. Appropriate for use by engineers as a comprehensive reference to the computer vision enterprise.

Computer vision : a modern approach = 计算机视觉 : 一种现代的方法

An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

The use of ontologies to model the knowledge of specific domains represents a key aspect for the integration of information coming from different sources, for supporting collaboration within virtual communities, for improving information retrieval, and more generally, it is important for reasoning on available knowledge. In the e-Learning field, ontologies can be used to model educational domains and to build, organize and update specific learning resources (i.e. learning objects, learner profiles, learning paths, etc.). One of the main problems of educational domains modeling is the lacking of expertise in the knowledge engineering field by the e-Learning actors. This paper presents an integrated approach to manage the life-cycle of ontologies, used to define personalised e-Learning experiences supporting blended learning activities, without any specific expertise in knowledge engineering.

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Advanced ontology management system for personalised e-Learning

This paper presents an approach to automatic course generation and student modeling. The method has been developed during the European funded projects Diogene and Intraserv, focused on the construction of an adaptive e-learning platform. The aim of the platform is the automatic generation and personalization of courses, taking into account pedagogical knowledge on the didactic domain as well as statistic information on both the student’s knowledge degree and learning preferences. Pedagogical information is described by means of an innovative methodology suitable for effective and efficient course generation and personalization. Moreover, statistic information can be collected and exploited by the system in order to better describe the student’s preferences and learning performances. Learning material is chosen by the system matching the student’s learning preferences with the learning material type, following a pedagogical approach suggested by Felder and Silverman. The paper discusses how automatic learning material personalization makes it possible to facilitate distance learning access to both able-bodied and disabled people. Results from the Diogene and Intraserv evaluation are reported and discussed.

/pdf/adaptive-course-generation-through-learning-styles-40sx9sfekv.pdf

Adaptive course generation through learning styles representation

In Ambient Intelligence (AmI) vision, people should be able to seamlessly and unobtrusively use and configure the intelligent devices and systems in their ubiquitous computing environments without being cognitively and physically overloaded. In other words, the user should not have to program each device or connect them together to achieve the required functionality. However, although it is possible for a human operator to specify an active space configuration explicitly, the size, sophistication, and dynamic requirements of modern living environment demand that they have autonomous intelligence satisfying the needs of inhabitants without human intervention. This work presents a proposal for AmI fuzzy computing that exploits multiagent systems and fuzzy theory to realize a long-life learning strategy able to generate context-aware-based fuzzy services and actualize them through abstraction techniques in order to maximize the users' comfort and hardware interoperability level. Experimental results show that proposed approach is capable of anticipating user's requirements by automatically generating the most suitable collection of interoperable fuzzy services.

Interoperable and adaptive fuzzy services for ambient intelligence applications

Ontologies have been frequently employed in order to solve problems derived from the management of shared distributed knowledge and the efficient integration of information across different applications However, the process of ontology building is still a lengthy and error-prone task Therefore, a number of research studies to (semi-)automatically build ontologies from existing documents have been developed In this paper, we present our approach to extract relevant ontology concepts and their relationships from a knowledge base of heterogeneous text documents We also show the architecture of the implemented system and discuss the experiments in a real-world context

Ontology Extraction for Knowledge Reuse: The e-Learning Perspective

The advent of the new technologies has brought the proliferation of artificial environments in distance and blended learning Most of the efforts have been addressed to the mere 'transfer' of paper and pen Thus, we proposed the following theoretical reflection on the learning processes: studying classical didactics that have been revised from the point-of-view of distance learning, individuating the new actors interacting in the didactics, and deducing a possible learning model The theoretical reflection, presented in its model and conceptual aspects, finds its application in the realisation of an e-learning platform, IWT The advantages of the state-of-the-art learning are also shown in this paper However, this work is essentially limited to a general positioning of e-learning and to a presentation motivated by the choices we have made in the theoretical, architectural, functional, and technological fields

Matteo Gaeta

Papers

Advanced ontology management system for personalised e-Learning

Adaptive course generation through learning styles representation

Interoperable and adaptive fuzzy services for ambient intelligence applications

Ontology Extraction for Knowledge Reuse: The e-Learning Perspective

E-learning: a model and process proposal