Repository Of Experience Research Articles

Experienced Gray Wolf Optimization Through Reinforcement Learning and Neural Networks.

In this paper, a variant of gray wolf optimization (GWO) that uses reinforcement learning principles combined with neural networks to enhance the performance is proposed. The aim is to overcome, by reinforced learning, the common challenge of setting the right parameters for the algorithm. In GWO, a single parameter is used to control the exploration/exploitation rate, which influences the performance of the algorithm. Rather than using a global way to change this parameter for all the agents, we use reinforcement learning to set it on an individual basis. The adaptation of the exploration rate for each agent depends on the agent's own experience and the current terrain of the search space. In order to achieve this, experience repository is built based on the neural network to map a set of agents' states to a set of corresponding actions that specifically influence the exploration rate. The experience repository is updated by all the search agents to reflect experience and to enhance the future actions continuously. The resulted algorithm is called experienced GWO (EGWO) and its performance is assessed on solving feature selection problems and on finding optimal weights for neural networks algorithm. We use a set of performance indicators to evaluate the efficiency of the method. Results over various data sets demonstrate an advance of the EGWO over the original GWO and over other metaheuristics, such as genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimization.

Using mutually validated memories of experts for case-based knowledge systems

Organizing a reliable case base, which serves as a repository of experience, is crucial for the success of a case-based reasoning (CBR) system. To ensure that such repositories contain high-quality cases, this paper proposes a framework employing the methodology of fuzzy linguistic group decision-making (GDM) in the context of multiple attributes. The overall process of MAGDM could be analogous to the memory-related behaviors of the human brain, in which knowledge is elicited and validated, as in the short-term memory, and then eventually integrated into the long-term memory to serve as solutions to build-up the number of high-quality cases. Moreover, the proposed approach is flexible, as it enables experts to define the set of the parameters of the membership functions associated with labels, thus improving the quality of the linguistic term sets and leading to better assessments. Furthermore, the proposed KC index, characterized by measures of both individual and group consistencies, can provide a more effective assessment to assign suitable experts’ weights than most existing GDM models. This is supported by the experimental results presented in this work, indicating that the KC index can indeed lead to a more satisfactory overall level of consensus. In addition, the mutual validation between the set of the parameters of the membership functions associated with labels by experts and the evaluation of the experts’ weights can be manifested in terms of the KC index.The extended collective decision matrix derived from the process of MAGDM that is used to construct case bases is more practical and effective than other approaches, as its elements are meaningful and interpretable. The proposed framework, integrating fuzzy linguistic GDM and CBR, thus enhances the efficiency and effectiveness of a CBR system. This is further evidenced in the results of an experiment, which show that this hybrid framework is very effective in implementing a case-based knowledge system and provides a powerful methodology for performance ranking.

Xenolinguistics, SETI, and Pre-Colonial Anthropology

Xenolinguistics, SETI, and Pre-Colonial Anthropology

Trade unions as knowledgeable participants in workplace innovation

Purpose – This article aims to demonstrate that trade unions possess unique knowledge of how organisations really work and that they are repositories of experience embracing many different situations and stretching over many years. Closing the gap between best practice and common practice needs knowledgeable advocates to actively demonstrate what workplace innovation is and how it benefits organisations and individuals. Design/methodology/approach – This article demonstrates that trade unions possess unique knowledge of how organisations really work and that they are repositories of experience embracing many different situations and stretching over many years. Yet, this experience and understanding is often an underused resource in workplaces. Findings – At the frontline, union representatives can release their members’ tacit knowledge and ideas for improvement and innovation. At strategic level, unions can deliver robust advice and consultancy, securing trust from employees and employers alike. Actively involving unions in dialogue about challenges and opportunities is the key to unlocking this potential. Practical implications – The paper draws upon examples of collaborative working and the role of unions from the USA, Ireland and Norway, while a more detailed analysis of the “Danish Experience” demonstrates how Ideas, high levels of knowledge and strong relationships between unions and employers able to handle both shared and conflicting interests, impacts on trade unions ability to “stimulate, resource and sustain workplace innovation”. Originality/value – The paper concludes with a call to action showing how a mass movement of workplace innovation can be achieved through shared learning case studies and resources and from the creation of the European Workplace Innovation Network Knowledge Bank to help people to share their knowledge and experience.

Drug Repositioning: Discovering New Virtues in The Past

Copyright: © 2013 Palthur MP. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The past is generally considered as a repository of knowledge and experience. From time to time, we look into the past to find solutions to the challenges of the future. For the most part, the history will not give us the answers directly. However, it could help us better understand the results of past experiences, and does play a pivotal role in making right decisions to solve the current and future challenges.

PISA: A framework for multiagent classification using argumentation

This paper describes an approach to multi-agent classification using an argumentation from experience paradigm whereby individual agents argue for a given example to be classified with a particular label according to their local data. Arguments are expressed in the form of classification rules which are generated dynamically. As such each local database can be conceptualised as an experience repository; and the individual classification rules, generated from this repository, as describing generalisations drawn from this experience. The argumentation process and the supporting data structures are fully described. The process has been implemented in the PISA (Pooling Information from Several Agents) multi-agent framework which is fully described. Experiments indicate that the operation of PISA is comparable with other classification approaches and that, when operating groups or in the presence of noise, PISA outperforms such comparable approaches.

MAKING DIGITAL TV SMARTER: CAPTURING AND REUSING EXPERIENCE IN DIGITAL TV

In this article, we explore an approach that integrates decisional DNA, a domain-independent, flexible, and standard knowledge repository, with digital TV in order to capture, reuse, and share viewers’ TV watching experience and preferences. Key issues in applying this approach include capturing of experience, storage and management of experience, and retrieval of experience from experience repository. We demonstrate our approach in a set of initial experiments, in which viewers’ movie watching experiences are captured and reused to support smart digital TV services.

Central pattern generator parameter search for a biped walking robot using nonparametric estimation based Particle Swarm Optimization

A parameter search for a Central Pattern Generator (CPG) for biped walking is difficult because there is no methodology to set the parameters and the search space is broad. These characteristics of the parameter search result in numerous fitness evaluations. In this paper, nonparametric estimation based Particle Swarm Optimization (NEPSO) is suggested to effectively search the parameters of CPG. The NEPSO uses a concept experience repository to store a previous position and the fitness of particles in a PSO and estimated best position to accelerate a convergence speed. The proposed method is compared with PSO variants in numerical experiments and is tested in a three dimensional dynamic simulator for bipedal walking. The NEPSO effectively finds CPG parameters that produce a gait of a biped robot. Moreover, NEPSO has a fast convergence property which reduces the evaluation of fitness in a real environment.

XLearning Object Organization Behaviors In a Home-Made Learning Content Management System

This study designed, implemented and evaluated a learning content management system to facilitate creating both standard based and free style learning objects. The system, BULeCoMas, also enabled users to tag learning objects with usage data and tools supported with components accommodated under a Global Activity Center, are Global Task Pool, Experience Repository and Learner Record Repository. This study examined whether the experience in information technology use affect e-learning object authors’; O use of assets, O organization of assets and O embedding of instructional elements into their content authoring. The system, enabling common standards of reusable learning objects, was tested for ease of use with thirty-four novice and experienced preservice teachers. The participants found the system easy to use in general, novice and experienced information technology users were able to develop learning objects similar in size and features. The study suggests some further work for using the same system in collaborative learning object authoring.

Integrating glucometers and digital photography as experience capture tools to enhance patient understanding and communication of diabetes self-management practices

Glucometers measure the accumulation of glucose in the bloodstream and are essential for avoiding health complications related to diabetes. Despite their value as tools to record and present physiological data, they lack the ability to capture the behaviors that cause fluctuations in blood glucose levels, activities that ultimately need to be understood and managed in order to maintain good health. In this paper, we describe an intervention that introduces digital photography into diabetes self-management routines to augment glucometer data and facilitate the sharing of experiences that affect long-term health. Two studies of the approach are presented to illustrate the ways that diabetics use visualizations of past activities to reflect on their health. We also discuss design suggestions for augmented memory systems based on our findings, focusing on ways to enhance learning with repositories of past experiences collected automatically and/or manually.

“What Would Jesus Do?”: Practical Christianity, Social Gospel Realism, and the Homiletic Novel

This essay makes the historical case for an unrecognized genre of fiction–the homiletic novel. Drawing on traditional Protestant interpretive practices, Social Gospel authors fused forms of spiritual identification rooted in Protestant homiletic exercises (catechisms, interactive allegories, conversion dramas) with practical Christianity's emerging ethic of social intervention, attaching older modes of readerly identification to new sites of literary culture. Homiletic novels democratized pastoral guidance and legitimized fiction as a repository of ethical experience. Through interactive fictions offering virtual models of spiritual agency in the material world, evangelicals prepared for real forays into urban poverty to intervene in human suffering. The homiletic novel became the most popular literary form of the Progressive Era and continues to flourish in the present–day American political, cultural, and religious environment. In tracing its rise and pervasive influence, this study revises conventional histories of literary genre by suggesting an alternative origin for American literary realism. (GSJ)

Organisational knowledge in high-risk industries: supplementing model-based learning approaches

High-risk industries are often facing a dilemma in their approach to creating a more competent and safe industry: they are excluded from some of the most effective learning processes such as trial-and-error learning and learning from failures and errors, due to the potentially catastrophic outcome associated with mistakes. As a consequence, these industries commonly rely on formal models of information gathering and dissemination. In a learning perspective, such approaches have often shown to be ineffective and unreliable, disregarding the social and contextual aspects of organisational knowledge. In a safety perspective, these formal repositories of experience and knowledge are often highly necessary and strictly enforced due to the high-risk environment. Is this a dilemma without solution? Are there alternative learning approaches to collectively develop, make sense of, and disseminate tacit and sticky knowledge in high-risk industries? Examples from studies of different high-risk industries are used to highlight these questions.

The Institutions of Monetary Policy

I argue that it is useful to think about the optimal design of monetary institutions using the insights from the theory of incomplete contracts. The core of the monetary policy problem is the uncertainty about future social decisions resulting from the impossibility and the undesirability of committing our successors to any given monetary policy strategy. The impossibility stems from the observation that collective decisions cannot be enforced so that it is impossible to commit to future collective decisions. The undesirability reflects the fact that we cannot articulate all possible future states of the world. Monetary institutions expand the possibility frontier of the technology of collective decisions by raising the costs of making inefficient deviationsng from pre-announced paths. Institutions also become repositories of experience and knowledge to facilitate learning about the economic environment and communication to society as a whole. I illustrate the importance of institutional design for the operation of monetary policy by reference to three case studies: the collapse of exchange rate regimes in Brazil and the United Kingdom; currency arrangements in Iraq and their reform after the 2003 war; and the relationship between central banks and governments when the zero constraint on nominal interest rates is binding.

The Self-Deceiving Muse: Fiction and the Rationalistic Dictates of the Present

One The present-ness of character in fictional narrative figures an inherently conflicted temporality. No one would dispute that plot conflict epitomizes tensions between moments in time as much as conflicts between persons. But our way of construing the thematic sense of narrative fictions, by putting an emphasis on the conflict of personalities, privileges the already formed dispositions of character. It transcends the disruptiveness of temporal immediacy, of being present in the present. A focus upon plot conflict inclines us to ignore the relative inchoateness of character in time. It inveigles us to lose sight of the possibility that character is too easily taken for granted as a repository of experience rather than a threshold of experience. Particularly from the vantage point of the novel of the present -since 1945 - character is an increasingly vexed proposition. The present moment prompts us to consider how the novel has long harbored a notion of character that resists characterization insofar as it is responsive to the circumstance of present-ness.

Spain's love affair with Russia: the attraction of exotic (Br)others1

This article examines a specific case of identification and desire between two countries at the extremities of Europe. In a cultural love affair located largely in the imaginary, Russia constituted a desired and exotic brother for Spain, while its revolution provided the possibility of a realistic engagement with a different culture. Central to these writings is the figuring of Russia as the exotic woman. In the travel writings, despite periodic attempts to figure women as individuals, non‐essentialised, and newly formulated in their post‐revolutionary situation, we find that the myth of woman as flesh, groundedness and the repository of positive experience is presented with insistence.

Women’s Autobiographical Narratives: Soviet Presentations of Self

Women’s Autobiographical Narratives:Soviet Presentations of Self Anne E. Gorsuch (bio) Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 443 pp. ISBN 0-691-01949-5 (paper). $24.95. Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya, eds., A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. 236 pp. ISBN 0-8133-3366-0 (paper). $25.00. Simon Vilensky, Till My Tale is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999. 335 pp. ISBN 0-253-33464-0 (cloth). $35.00. In Eva Hoffman's moving memoir of her emigration from Poland to North America, she describes the constructed nature of memory in reference to another earlier Jewish emigrant: "The America of her time gave her certain categories within which to see herself – a belief in self-improvement, in perfectibility of the species, in moral uplift – and these categories led her to foreground certain parts of her own experience, and to throw whole chunks of it into the barely visible background."1 These three excellent edited collections of Soviet women's life stories show that the same was clearly true, in different, but even more exaggerated ways, in Soviet Russia. The collections are part of a recent outpouring of memory from the former Soviet Union in the form of autobiography, published diaries, and oral interviews.2 This outpouring stems in part from the post-Soviet [End Page 835] opening of Russia and the release of previously private material, as well as from the possibility of asking questions about topics and of people previously closed to us. The focus on women's memoirs accords with this "opening," as the private lives of women have been generally less accessible to our eyes and our understanding than the more public lives of (some) men.3 As the citation from Eva Hoffman suggests, however, using life stories as sources for historical understanding prompts questions as well as suggesting new answers. Some of these questions relate to the life stories themselves, others to the meaning ascribed to these life stories by historians and literary scholars. What were the "categories" within which Soviet women saw themselves? What was the relationship between women, the Soviet experience, and women's own sense of self as described in these life stories? Was women's sense of self a gendered sense? Secondly, how do we use these life stories? How do we compare and evaluate the meaning, or even the "truth," of works written for official purposes, diaries written for the desk drawer, comments made around the kitchen table, and interviews done 40 years later? Are they best understood as narratives or are they also repositories of experience? Can we generalize about women's selfhood in Soviet Russia on the basis of these individual accounts? In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, contains the widest variety of source materials from the widest variety of women – émigrés writing from Paris, dissidents writing in the 1960s, Soviet heroines writing their autobiographies for newspapers, and peasant women telling their life stories in [End Page 836] oral interviews. Although the book extends from 1917 to the eve of World War II, the collection is organized around key historical periods – the Revolution and Civil War, NEP, and the 1930s – and there are only a few women whose stories cover the entire period. In contrast, A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History contains the life stories of only eight women, again of varied backgrounds (working class, peasant, the daughters of nobles and of parish priests), but we hear about each life experience from the Revolution through the early 1950s. These narratives come to us through interviews conducted by Anastasia Posadskaya in the post-Soviet period, and then selected, edited, and annotated by Posadskaya and Barbara Alpern Engel. The editors of A Revolution of Their Own write that they looked for "ordinary" women to interview; they "did not actively seek out stories either of...

Turning development standards into repositories of experiences

AbstractThere has been a resurgence of interest in developing organization‐wide standard development methodologies (SDMs) for software development. It is well known that creating an SDM is only the first step in the process of improving software engineering practices in an organization. SDMs must become living documents that evolve with changing software development needs. The research presented in this paper presents a tool and associated methodology that helps organizations tailor SDMs to the individual needs of projects and capture project experiences that are used to refine and modify the standard. In addition to creating a flexible software process with necessary degrees of formal procedures to ensure high‐quality products, a secondary goal of this research is to turn SDMs into a resource for software managers and developers, something that truly supports the development process as it is actually practised. This approach features a methodology based on organizational learning principles, a rule‐based system to tailor the SDM to meet the characteristics of individual projects, and a case‐based architecture to capture and provide relevant development knowledge throughout the development lifecycle. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Operational art in the Indian context: An open sources analysis

The Indian Army can lay claim to a large repository of combat experience, having held its own against world class foes like the Germans, Japanese and Turks in the colonial wars of the British Empire and the two World Wars of the last century. This paper focusses on the performance of the Indian Army at the level of Operational Art, within the larger ambit of our post‐independence military experience. We need to recognise the criticality of the level of Operational Art in the context of limited or unlimited wars in the subcontinent and the dire necessity of outgrowing an attrition mindset—a transition from attrition to manoeuvre warfare.

Systematic Maintenance of Corporate Experience Repositories

Experience‐based continuous learning is essential for improving products, processes, and technologies in emerging as well as established areas of business and engineering science. This can be facilitated by case‐based organizational learning through capturing relevant experience in the form of cases for reuse in a corporate experience repository. For obvious reasons, learning from experience needs to be a permanent endeavor. Thus an organization has to handle a “continuous stream of experience.” Consequently, such an experience repository requires maintenance. This should not simply happen ad hoc but in a systematic manner. To make competent decisions about maintenance, the experience base and its usage have to be analyzed (i.e., evaluated). To improve maintenance itself, it is necessary to learn about it. For this purpose, we identify the relevant tasks for maintaining an experience repository and the responsibilities of the roles involved. Maintenance addresses not only the actual experience in the form of cases but also the conceptual model and the methods, techniques, and tools that are used for filling and updating the experience repository. To support the roles involved in the maintenance tasks, we provide a flexible, practical maintenance and evaluation framework. This framework provides guidance for the roles. The framework can be combined with other approaches from artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering, and software engineering at different levels of detail. For the practical application of the framework, we describe an integrated technical solution for a corporate experience repository that is maintained using our framework. Furthermore, we discuss the empirical validation of the framework and its implementation.

The End of 'Bandwidth'

The End of 'Bandwidth'