Foregrounding the “I” in IS Research : A Plea for Research on Computer-mediated Human Information Behaviour

Starting in the mid of the 20th century, the emergence of contemporary information technologies has dramatically changed the way information is disseminated and absorbed in organizational and private contexts. Recent advances in information technology make information ubiquitously available with the help of novel hardware and software, like mobile devices, corporate social networks or microblogging services. They enable organizational actors and private users to access information from multiple sources across a multitude of different computer-based channels. However, today’s abundance of information does not only result in higher organizational productivity and an enrichment of its recipients’ lives in general. It also introduces new challenges as the mental information processing capabilities of human IS users improve not at the same speed as hardware and software technologies do, being constrained by cognitive limitations and evolutionary-shaped behavioural patterns guiding the absorption and use of information. Hence, it appears to be paramount to consider the aforementioned limitations as one important facet of human information behaviour with respect to a more human-centric use and design of information systems. Faster and more intelligent data processing capabilities, which recently have often been expressed with the term "big data", does not automatically lead to a better understanding of mental information processing capabilities of humans. Thus, we propose to focus on the processes and states that occur when humans process information in their brain as well. The entity “information” is a constituent of the Information Systems discipline, thus underlining the field’s focus on the development and use of technologies that support humans in gathering and processing information that are required in various business and private contexts. Unfortunately, however, the analysis and explanation of the relationship between human technology users and the entity information has never been the discipline’s core research in3 terest. In fact, research on the behaviour of human beings when interacting with information in computer-based contexts is largely fragmented and frequently generates conflicting results. Consequently, the goal of this paper is twofold. First, it reviews existing research with respect to information or information related behaviours. Second, based on the findings of the review, it intend to demonstrate how the research on computer-mediated information behaviours could significantly enrich IS research. Thus, we provide a profound and structured overview of extant research on the relationship between human beings and the entity information in the IS domain. Then, the article aims at creating intertextual coherence by harmonizing fragmented pieces of research as well as to identify fundamental research gaps that motivate promising future research trajectories. The latter will be exemplified with the yet under-researched phenomena of channel-dependent information seeking, information stopping, and information avoidance behaviour. Toward this end, the IS literature on information behaviours is analyzed using a conceptual framework developed based upon a synthesis and extenbsion of previous work on human information behaviour. Where appropriate, articles from non-IS journals are integrated into the analysis to complement and extend the findings. The result is a review article centred around organizing our existing knowledge of human behaviour in relation to the entity information in computer-based contexts with the overarching goal of advancing theory development

Robotic Deployment of Extraterrestrial Seismic Networks

Manual installation of seismic networks in extraterrestrial environments is risky, expensive and error-prone. A more reliable alternative is the automated deposition with a light-weight robot manipulator. However, inserting a spiked sensor into soil is a challenging task for a robot since the soil parameters are variable and difficult to estimate. Therefore, we investigate an approach to accurate insertion and positioning of geophones using a Cartesian impedance controller with a feed-forward force term. The feed-forward force component of the controller is either estimated using the Fundamental Earth-Moving Equation, the Discrete Element Method or empirically. For the first time, both the geological aspects of the problem as well as the aspects of robotic control are considered. Based on this consideration, the control approach is enhanced by predicting the resistance force of the soil. Experiments with the humanoid robot Rollin’ Justin inserting a geophone into three different soil samples validate the proposed method

Context-aware Mission Control for Astronaut-Robot Collaboration

Space robot assistants are envisaged as semi-autonomous co-workers deployed to lighten the workload of astronauts in cumbersome and dangerous situations. In view of this, this work considers the prospects on the technology requirements for future space robot operations, by presenting a novel mission control concept for close astronaut-robot collaboration. A decentralized approach is proposed, in which an astronaut is put in charge of commanding the robot, and a mission control center on Earth maintains a list of authorized robot actions by applying symbolic, geometric, and context-specific filters. The concept is applied to actual space robot operations within the METERON SUPVIS Justin experiment. In particular, it is shown how the concept is utilized to guide an astronaut aboard the ISS in its mission to survey and maintain a solar panel farm in a simulated Mars environment

An Optimal Control Framework to Address the Relationship between Water Resource Management and Water-Borne Health Impacts: Focus on the Texas Lower Rio Grande Valley

The objective of this study is develop a theoretical model that can evaluate two types of public health expenditures on water-borne health risks: water-related municipal services, an ex ante preventative measure against water-borne contamination, and medical treatment, an ex post treatment of the water-borne pollutant’s harmful effects on human health. The modeled community can allocate resources in either centralized-municipal water-services, point-of-use water-services, or medical intervention, with expenditures subject to a budget constraint. The movement of a water-borne illness through the community is modeled with a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) disease framework. An optimization framework is developed, including a statement of the problem’s Hamiltonian and first-order-conditions. The first-order-conditions are discussed. Future work includes obtaining a numerical solution to the optimization problem.water, public health, rural development, dynamic optimization, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Cross-lingual Question Answering with QED

We present improvements and modifications of the QED open-domain question answering system developed for TREC-2003 to make it cross-lingual for participation in the CrossLinguistic Evaluation Forum (CLEF) Question Answering Track 2004 for the source languages French and German and the target language English. We use rule-based question translation extended with surface pattern-oriented pre- and post-processing rules for question reformulation to create and English query from its French or German original. Our system uses deep processing for the question and answers, which requires efficient and radical prior search space pruning. For answering factoid questions, we report an accuracy of 16% (German to English) and 20% (French to English), respectively

Genome Sequence of AvianEscherichia coliStrain IHIT25637, an Extraintestinal PathogenicE. coliStrain of ST131 Encoding Colistin Resistance Determinant MCR-1

Sequence type 131 (ST131) is one of the predominant Escherichia coli lineages among extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) that causes a variety of diseases in humans and animals and frequently shows multidrug resistance. Here, we report the first genome sequence of an ST131-ExPEC strain from poultry carrying the plasmid-encoded colistin resistance gene mcr-1

Seawater Desalination for Municipal Water Production

This paper examines the optimal allocation of several inputs in the context of seawater desalination by reverse osmosis (RO) as a source of municipal (or commercial or industrial) water. A cost-minimization model is developed, a production function is estimated, and sensitivity analyses are conducted using the optimization model to investigate the effect of environmental conditions and economic factors on the optimal input portfolio and the cost of operating a modeled seawater desalination facility. The objectives of this paper are to better understand the effect on the seawater desalination facility’s costs and input portfolio from changes in water quality, membrane lifespan, daily operations schedule, and energy prices. Findings include that lower total facility costs are associated with warm-weather water quality parameters, longer membrane life, and mid-range daily operations schedule (14.265 hours/day). Under most conditions, an interruptible power supply regime reduces facility costs. Exceptions include when the interruptible power supply regime implies significant reductions in operating hours and the associated reduction in energy price is very small.water, production, seawater desalination, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Classifying Compliant Manipulation Tasks for Automated Planning in Robotics

Many household chores and industrial manufacturing tasks require a certain compliant behavior to make deliberate physical contact with the environment. This compliant behavior can be implemented by modern robotic manipulators. However, in order to plan the task execution, a robot requires generic process models of these tasks which can be adapted to different domains and varying environmental conditions. In this work we propose a classification of compliant manipulation tasks meeting these requirements, to derive related actions for automated planning. We also present a classification for the sub-category of wiping tasks, which are most common and of great importance in service robotics. We categorize actions from an object-centric perspective to make them independent of any specific robot kinematics. The aim of the proposed taxonomy is to guide robotic programmers to develop generic actions for any kind of robotic systems in arbitrary domains