Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Fox, Mark


Semantic Computing for Organizational Effectiveness: From Organization Theory to Practice through Semantics-Based Modelling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

A critical function of an organization is to foster the level of integration (coordination and cooperation) necessary to achieve its objectives. The need to coordinate and motivation to cooperate emerges from the myriad dependencies between an organization's members and their work. Therefore, to reason about solutions to coordination and cooperation problems requires a robust representation that includes the underlying dependencies. We find that such a representation remains missing from formal organizational models, and we leverage semantics to bridge this gap. Drawing on well-established organizational research and our extensive fieldwork with one of North America's largest municipalities, (1) we introduce an ontology, formalized in first-order logic, that operationalizes concepts like outcome, reward, and epistemic dependence, and their links to potential integration risks; and (2) present real-world applications of this ontology to analyze and support integration in complex government infrastructure projects. Our ontology is implemented and validated in both Z3 and OWL. Key features of our model include inferable dependencies, explainable coordination and cooperation risks, and actionable insights on how dependency structures within an organization can be altered to mitigate the risks. Conceptualizing real-world challenges like incentive misalignment, free-riding, and subgoal optimization in terms of dependency structures, our semantics-based approach represents a novel method for modelling and enhancing coordination and cooperation. Integrated within a decision-support system, our model may serve as an impactful aid for organizational design and effectiveness. More broadly, our approach underscores the transformative potential of semantics in deriving tangible, real-world value from existing organization theory.


Reports of the AAAI 2014 Conference Workshops

AI Magazine

The AAAI-14 Workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 27–28, 2012, at the Québec City Convention Centre in Québec, Canada. The AAAI-14 workshop program included fifteen workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were AI and Robotics; Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments; Cognitive Computing for Augmented Human Intelligence; Computer Poker and Imperfect Information; Discovery Informatics; Incentives and Trust in Electronic Communities; Intelligent Cinematography and Editing; Machine Learning for Interactive Systems: Bridging the Gap between Perception, Action and Communication; Modern Artificial Intelligence for Health Analytics; Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination; Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling; Semantic Cities -- Beyond Open Data to Models, Standards and Reasoning; Sequential Decision Making with Big Data; Statistical Relational AI; and The World Wide Web and Public Health Intelligence. This article presents short summaries of those events.


Reports of the AAAI 2014 Conference Workshops

AI Magazine

The AAAI-14 Workshop program was held Sunday and Monday, July 27–28, 2012, at the Québec City Convention Centre in Québec, Canada. Canada. The AAAI-14 workshop program included fifteen workshops covering a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence. The titles of the workshops were AI and Robotics; Artificial Intelligence Applied to Assistive Technologies and Smart Environments; Cognitive Computing for Augmented Human Intelligence; Computer Poker and Imperfect Information; Discovery Informatics; Incentives and Trust in Electronic Communities; Intelligent Cinematography and Editing; Machine Learning for Interactive Systems: Bridging the Gap between Perception, Action and Communication; Modern Artificial Intelligence for Health Analytics; Multiagent Interaction without Prior Coordination; Multidisciplinary Workshop on Advances in Preference Handling; Semantic Cities — Beyond Open Data to Models, Standards and Reasoning; Sequential Decision Making with Big Data; Statistical Relational AI; and The World Wide Web and Public Health Intelligence. This article presents short summaries of those events.