Macro Tasks Research Articles

Diversity & Inclusion: Fitness for Work Through a Personalized Work Plan For Workers With Disabilities and Chronic Diseases According to the Iso 30415/2021.

The recent standard ISO 30415-2021 - Human resources management - Diversity and inclusion - was developed internationally within the technical committee ISO/TC 260 "Human resources management" (Working group WG 8 "Diversity and inclusion") and underlines the need for actions to create a work environment that is inclusive of diversity (e.g. in terms of health, gender, age, ethnicity, culture). Developing an inclusive work environment requires ongoing commitment and input from the entire organization regarding policies, processes, organizational practices, and individual behavior. As far as the role of occupational medicine is concerned, this direction can be supported by the correct management of disabled workers and workers with chronic pathologies that affect their fitness for duty. The "reasonable accommodation" is the way by which the European Union first, and the United Nations then intended to support the inclusion of disabled people in the world of work. The Personalized Work Plan includes different approaches (organizational, technical, procedural) meant for modifying the work activity envisaged for the disabled worker or for any worker suffering from chronic diseases or dysfunctions. The adoption of the Personalized Work Plan implies the effort of redesigning the workstation, the work procedures, or even the planning of different micro and macro tasks etc., in order to prioritize the adaptation of the working environment to the worker, safeguarding the value of the worker's productivity according to the principle of reasonable accommodation.

ACTION-ORIENTED LANGUAGE TEACHING: OPINIONS OF STUDENTS OF FRENCH ABOUT SHORT FILM SHOOTING PROJECT

The aim of this study is to analyze efficiency of teaching French with a short film project and to reveal learners' opinion. In this study, case study, which is one of the qualitative research methods, was preferred. This study was conducted with 10 students of Anadolu University, Faculty of Education, French Language Teaching Department. The data is collected through observation and group interview techniques. Macro and micro tasks were assigned in order to develop learners' linguistic and extra linguistic skills during 8-weeks. Furthermore, products such as scenario, banner, short-film etc. have also been analyzed as documented data. Observation and interview notes were coded by two researchers and 92% reliability was achieved; 6 themes and 15 subthemes were thus forged. According to findings, the motivation of the participants increased. Possible reasons for this are the different and fun activities, creating a concrete product and feeling successful. In group work a positive synergy observed among good associates, but learners’ discussion, co-deciding and cooperation skills need to be improved. Participants stated that their creativity, socio–cultural, self-learning and self-assessment skills have developed. In conclusion, project-based learning, supported by action-oriented approach, helps to increase student motivation, creativity, intercultural skills and autonomous learning skills.
 
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ERGONOMIC DESIGN OF THE WORKPLACE FOR FINAL QUALITY CONTROL

The incidence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders remains high and, as these injuries have a high cost for companies and society, it is important to prevent them through ergonomic analysis and workplace design. During the work process, we are always looking to reduce lost time and improve the quality of work. From an ergonomic point of view, it is important to determine what workloads employees are exposed to and to eliminate or at least minimise them by redesigning the workplace. The aim of our research was to minimise the risk at work through the scientific design of workplaces based on a methodological approach. The manual and computerised OWAS method was used to determine and estimate body postures during the workday. It was found that certain postures resulted in significant overexertion, which meant that certain remedial actions were necessary during the work process to prevent possible damage to the body. Several improvements were proposed for the new workplace design: appropriate equipment for workers, lifting table, rotation of workers, construction of quality control facilities and automation of macro tasks.

Analysis of Enterprise Sustainable Crowdsourcing Incentive Mechanism Based on Principal-Agent Model

The utilization of crowdsourcing to acquire distant knowledge is increasing. In the new product development process, sustainable crowdsourcing is an effective way to exploit both external and internal resources to boost enterprise innovation quality and the efficiency of the competitive edge of macro tasks in a relatively long cycle. The challenge of sustainable crowdsourcing is how to design a proper incentive mechanism to achieve the maximum initiator profit and, at the same time, satisfy the solver’s motivation so that they can continuously participate in the innovation process. In two situations, including a single motivation and multiple motivations of the solver, this paper analyzed the impact of a few factors on the initiator’s profit and the incentive coefficient for the solver based on the Principal–Agent Model. From the model and simulation results, the solver’s incentive coefficient is positively correlated to the solver’s work quality and negatively correlated to the uncertainty of the enterprise operation, the solver’s Effort Cost, the solver’s degree of risk aversion, etc. If the initiator is more sensitive to the benefits of the solver’s intrinsic motivation, the monetary incentive will be higher. The research results provide a theoretical basis to quantify the initiator’s expected profit and design a proper incentive plan for the solver. Finally, the conclusions offer practical guidance for enterprise to execute incentive plans for sustainable crowdsourcing from the perspective of the solver’s motivation.

Multi-skill aware task assignment in real-time spatial crowdsourcing

With the development of mobile Internet and the prevalence of sharing economy, spatial crowdsourcing (SC) is becoming more and more popular and attracts attention from both academia and industry. A fundamental issue in SC is assigning tasks to suitable workers to obtain different global objectives. Existing works often assume that the tasks in SC are micro and can be completed by any single worker. However, there also exist macro tasks which need a group of workers with different kinds of skills to complete collaboratively. Although there have been a few works on macro task assignment, they neglect the dynamics of SC and assume that the information of the tasks and workers can be known in advance. This is not practical as in reality tasks and workers appear dynamically and task assignment should be performed in real time according to partial information. In this paper, we study the multi-skill aware task assignment problem in real-time SC, whose offline version is proven to be NP-hard. To solve the problem effectively, we first propose the Online-Exact algorithm, which always computes the optimal assignment for the newly appearing tasks or workers. Because of Online-Exact’s high time complexity which may limit its feasibility in real time, we propose the Online-Greedy algorithm, which iteratively tries to assign workers who can cover more skills with less cost to a task until the task can be completed. We finally demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our solutions via experiments conducted on both synthetic and real datasets.

Data Flow and Human Tasks in Business Process Models

Abstract In contrast with the traditional view that represents business processes as flow charts of tasks, the artifact-centric one stresses the importance of the data flow, as the main responsible for the activation of the tasks. This viewpoint leads to reconsider the interactions between the process and its tasks as well as the execution mode of the tasks. The greatest benefits concern human tasks; they should no longer be considered only as services implemented by people but they may enable their performers to make choices. Two kinds of human choices are considered in this paper: the choice of the inputs to be acted on, and the choice of the course of action to be taken. The execution mode of human tasks is also examined and three categories are illustrated: performer-driven tasks, process-driven tasks and macro tasks. These categories come with a number of patterns, which are exemplified in this paper.

Data Model of the Strategic Action Planning and Scheduling Problem in a Disaster Response Team

Problem:Strategic action planning and scheduling (SAP) in the coordination of a disaster response team involves selecting and decomposing an objective into sub-goals, grouping available units into coalitions and assigning them to the sub-goals, allocating units to tasks, and adjusting the decisions that have been made. The primary responsibility of a team’s incident commander (IC) in SAP is to coordinate the actions of operational units in disaster crisis/emergency response management by making macro/strategic decisions.Objective:In this paper, we completely model a real-world problem and present data related to the SAP problem. This data model is used to support the design and development of an appropriate approach to SAP.Method:The employed methodology is to analyze and study the SAP problem, which is composed of six essential dimensions: the problem domain, geographic information, geospatial-temporal macro tasks, strategic action planning, strategic action scheduling, and team structure.Result:The contribution of this paper is the SAP problem data model. It is designed as a unified modeling language (UML) class diagram consisting of entity types, attributes, and relationships associated with SAP problem data modeling.Conclusion:To evaluate the quality of SAP data modeling, the SAP problem data model is used to propose and develop an intelligent assistant software system to assist and collaborate with incident commanders in SAP. The study makes five novel contributions: 1) a complete data model for SAP problem modeling, 2) a presentation and aggregation of task information in geographic objects, 3) the expression and encoding of human intuition as human high-level strategy guidance for SAP, 4) the formulation of a strategic action plan, and 5) the integration of strategic action schedule information with other entities.

Dynamic Assignment of Geospatial-Temporal Macro Tasks to Agents under Human Strategic Decisions for Centralized Scheduling in Multi-Agent Systems

Dynamic Assignment of Geospatial-Temporal Macro Tasks to Agents under Human Strategic Decisions for Centralized Scheduling in Multi-Agent Systems

External music examiners: micro–macro tasks in quality assurance practices

External music examiners play a significant role in assessing, verifying and maintaining musical standards. Educational output endorsed by external examiners serves to verify, modify and legitimise internal behaviour. This article examines some of the ‘inside practices’ of external music examiners in the context of quality assurance. It compares the different tasks of music examiners in specific authentic scenarios and evaluates the significance of such micro–macro tasks with regard to their impact on and contribution to best practices. It distinguished the various levels of participation occupied by external music examiners and classified them as public examiners, specialist examiners and institutional moderators. It advocates for specialised training being accorded to external examiners in recognition of their transformative roles undertaken in the advancement of music teaching and learning within the framework of good practice.

Language Support for Multi-Paradigm and Multi-Grain Parallelism on Smp-Cluster

The characteristics of large-scale parallel applications are multi-paradigm and multi-grain parallel in essence. The key factor in improving the performance of parallel application systems is to determine suitable parallel paradigms and grains according to the nature of the practical problem. Therefore, it is necessary to provide multi-paradigm and multi-grain parallel programming interface for development of large-scale parallel application systems. This paper proposes a multi-paradigm and multi-grain parallel execution model integrated coarse-grain parallelism (paralleled by macro tasks), mid-grain parallelism (paralleled by basic program blocks), and fine-grain parallelism (paralleled in repetition blocks). This model also supports the task parallel, data parallel, and sequential executing. In this paper we also discuss the programming mechanism of this model by extended OpenMP specification. The extensions include computing resource partition, defining different grain task groups, mapping from task groups to the respective processor groups, out-of-core computing, asynchronous parallel I/O , and definition of sequential relationship of tasks. We compare the performance of different implementations of benchmark, using the same numerical algorithm but employing different programming approaches, including MPI, MPI+OpenMP, and our extended OpenMP. We also discuss a case based on SMP-Cluster and network storage architecture.

Current practice in measuring usability: Challenges to usability studies and research

How to measure usability is an important question in HCI research and user interface evaluation. We review current practice in measuring usability by categorizing and discussing usability measures from 180 studies published in core HCI journals and proceedings. The discussion distinguish several problems with the measures, including whether they actually measure usability, if they cover usability broadly, how they are reasoned about, and if they meet recommendations on how to measure usability. In many studies, the choice of and reasoning about usability measures fall short of a valid and reliable account of usability as quality-in-use of the user interface being studied. Based on the review, we discuss challenges for studies of usability and for research into how to measure usability. The challenges are to distinguish and empirically compare subjective and objective measures of usability; to focus on developing and employing measures of learning and retention; to study long-term use and usability; to extend measures of satisfaction beyond post-use questionnaires; to validate and standardize the host of subjective satisfaction questionnaires used; to study correlations between usability measures as a means for validation; and to use both micro and macro tasks and corresponding measures of usability. In conclusion, we argue that increased attention to the problems identified and challenges discussed may strengthen studies of usability and usability research.