Intelligent Clients Research Articles

Multi-center federated learning: clients clustering for better personalization

Personalized decision-making can be implemented in a Federated learning (FL) framework that can collaboratively train a decision model by extracting knowledge across intelligent clients, e.g. smartphones or enterprises. FL can mitigate the data privacy risk of collaborative training since it merely collects local gradients from users without access to their data. However, FL is fragile in the presence of statistical heterogeneity that is commonly encountered in personalized decision making, e.g., non-IID data over different clients. Existing FL approaches usually update a single global model to capture the shared knowledge of all users by aggregating their gradients, regardless of the discrepancy between their data distributions. By comparison, a mixture of multiple global models could capture the heterogeneity across various clients if assigning the client to different global models (i.e., centers) in FL. To this end, we propose a novel multi-center aggregation mechanism to cluster clients using their models’ parameters. It learns multiple global models from data as the cluster centers, and simultaneously derives the optimal matching between users and centers. We then formulate it as an optimization problem that can be efficiently solved by a stochastic expectation maximization (EM) algorithm. Experiments on multiple benchmark datasets of FL show that our method outperforms several popular baseline methods. The experimental source codes are publicly available on the Github repository (GitHub repository: https://github.com/mingxuts/multi-center-fed-learning).

Responding to information asymmetry in crisis situations: innovation in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Crises test the resilience of public service organizations. Healthcare providers must respond and innovate within tight constraints to address challenges. Presenting COVID-19 as a knowable unknown (black swan event), we adopt information processing theory to investigate how healthcare providers and their suppliers address information asymmetry to support decision-making. Building on primary and secondary datasets, we demonstrate managers were innovating internal structural responses. For black swan events, in-house ‘intelligent clients’ are intrinsic not only in managing information uncertainty associated with early stages of the crisis, but also in addressing information equivocality and joint decision-making with other organizations associated with implementing solutions.

Increasing Organizational Agility based on Effective Meta-Organizational Parameters

Agility in modern era is one of the most important components of organizational superiority towards each other and achieving goals successfully. The speed of doing things and reacting appropriately to the changes are considered as the key factors of success in the present century. However, with a brief glance at the governmental agencies in developing countries, we will find that these agencies are struggling with many problems which prevents their quick and agile performance. Therefore, this research was designed and conducted to explain and identify the effective factors on organizational agility in governmental agencies. The research method used is a case study in which the researcher tried to examine and scrutinize the organizational agility components by studying the taxation organization and conducting open and semi-structured interviews meticulously. Finally, the effective factors were identified. this category was called the meta-organization factors including factors such as economic conditions, media, inter-organizational relationships, intelligent clients, laws and political attitudes. The snowball method has also been used for sampling in the research. At the end of the article, the research model is also stated.

Guiding the Talent and Career Development of the Gifted Individual

The lost potential of academic talent can far-reaching implications for society; thus, one might assume that there would be great interest in developing the talents of the brightest students in the United States and a stronger commitment to attending to their career development needs. Because increasing the pipeline of students entering the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields is a priority among U.S. educators and policy makers (National Science Board, 2014), it may seem puzzling that the education and research and policy communities been generally resistant to addressing academic giftedness in research, policy, and practice. The resistance is derived from the assumption that academically children will be successful no matter what educational environment they are placed in, and because their families are believed to be more highly educated and hold above-average access to human capital wealth. (Subotnik, Olszewski-Kubilius, & Worrell, 2011, p. 3) Although some educators are attuned to the needs of their most advanced learners, many teachers view the students in their classrooms nothing more than peer-tutoring candidates who are ahead of the game ... not ... as children being handicapped by an unchallenging educational environment or [their own] lack of awareness (Berman, Schultz, & Weber, 2012, p. 24). One reason that educators may be reluctant to expose learners to more challenging course work is the belief that individual educational need is less important than equal for students. They may fail to recognize the distinction between equity and sameness and may believe that students should have the same curriculum at the same time. This is a violation of equal opportunity (Colangelo, Assouline, & Gross, 2004, p. 9). According to Benbow, all kids deserve to learn something new every day--including the gifted (as cited in Colangelo et al., 2004, p. 39). The widely held belief that individuals require (or merit) little or no guidance with educational and career planning is a myth noted in the education literature (e.g., Greene, 2006; Maxwell, 2007). In essence, this belief implies that students intuitively understand the process of career development and can pursue any career pathway(s) they wish and achieve a fulfilling work life because of their high-level abilities and interests. On the contrary, the academically individual requires long-term academic and career planning that should be approached systematically. Educators need to incorporate academic and career planning activities into the curriculum for every school-age child (Schenk, Anctil, Smith, & Dahir, 2012), including the academically student. Researchers acknowledge that an individual's abilities are a necessary condition for career achievement; however, occupational and career decisions are also influenced by a whole range of additional factors, including one's interests, values, social influences, and cultural considerations, and therefore require the skillful and knowledgeable approach of a counselor trained in career counseling (Jung & McCormick, 2011; Lubinski & Benbow, 2006). Effective career interventions with individuals need to be proactive and intentional (Greene, 2006; Sampson & Chason, 2008). Although these interventions clearly fall within the purview of the school counselor to assist children, career development is an ongoing and continuous process throughout one's lifetime. Thus, counselors employed in community mental health centers, private practices, and other clinical settings may also encounter highly intelligent clients of various ages struggling with career-related concerns. This article examines the unique challenges and barriers individuals may face in their academic and career development and proposes a theory-informed career counseling framework for providing guidance to this population. …

Briefing: The Institution of Civil Engineers' intelligent client capability framework

Recent aspirations to transform the delivery of major capital programmes and projects in the public sector are focusing on the achievement of value for money, whole-life asset management and sustainable procurement, embodied in the principles of the intelligent client. However, there is little support offered to those working in client functions to promote the development of the skills and behaviours that underpin effective client decision-making. In line with the relaunch of Infrastructure UK's Project Initiation Routemap, the capacity building panel at the Institution of Civil Engineers has taken the first step in providing individuals with client capability development guidance. The intelligent client capability framework translates the principles of the intelligent client into a self-assessment with big potential, not just for building the capacity of civil engineers as intelligent clients, but for UK clients in general.

Criticality of intelligent clients in the infrastructure sector

Intelligence in the form of skills that depend on tacit and explicit knowledge gained through formal and informal learning assists in informed decision-making, which is necessary for project execution. However, literature related to project failures attributes poor performance in construction to the level of skills of project stakeholders. The central issue here is the seemingly inadequate technical and management skills domiciled in public works departments of developing countries. In fact, anecdotal evidence suggests that this inadequacy marginalises the realisation of infrastructure development in sub-Saharan Africa. Therefore, using South Africa as an example, the paper reports on the consequences associated with skills inadequacies and future skills requirements. The report is therefore based on an extensive review of related literature, and an empirical study undertaken in South Africa. The research findings indicate that skills shortages in public sector departments may be responsible for a range of project failings such as unnecessary delays in contract award after tender submission, which in turn hamper project performance. Therefore, the study suggests that in order to deliver future infrastructure projects adequately, attention should be given to the development of management, project management and technical skills.

An ontology and context based client model for dart information grid

The WWW is growing at an astounding rate and various autonomous organisations have disseminated heterogeneous information resources in an 'out of order' state, across the web. It is expected to have the ability of integrating and sharing largescale information resources in dynamic virtual organisations. Integrating semantics with context theory, we propose an 'ontology based context role' model (OCR Model) for constructing intelligent clients to information grids. We implement the OCR Model as a semantic browser, which is a novel client for DartGrid and aims at providing end users with an intelligent graphical interface for accessing information effectively in the Grid environment. The semantic browser has been applied in the field of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to resolve some practical problems.

Probation Officers and the 'Intelligent' Client

Drawing on their recent research, the authors identify the threat posed by intelligent, articulate, assertive or middle class clients, who can challenge the usual power imbalance and are frequently labelled as deviant or unco-operative.