tacit knowledge
Documenting SME Processes with Conversational AI: From Tacit Knowledge to BPMN
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) still depend heavily on tacit, experience-based know-how that rarely makes its way into formal documentation. This paper introduces a large-language-model (LLM)-driven conversational assistant that captures such knowledge on the shop floor and converts it incrementally and interactively into standards-compliant Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 diagrams. Powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro and delivered through a lightweight Gradio front-end with client-side bpmn-js visualisation, the assistant conducts an interview-style dialogue: it elicits process details, supports clarifying dialogue and on-demand analysis, and renders live diagrams that users can refine in real time. A proof-of-concept evaluation in an equipment-maintenance scenario shows that the chatbot produced an accurate "AS-IS" model, flagged issues via on-diagram annotations, and generated an improved "TO-BE" variant, all within about 12-minutes, while keeping API costs within an SME-friendly budget. The study analyses latency sources, model-selection trade-offs, and the challenges of enforcing strict XML schemas, then outlines a roadmap toward agentic and multimodal deployments. The results demonstrate that conversational LLMs can potentially be used to lower the skill and cost barriers to rigorous process documentation, helping SMEs preserve institutional knowledge, enhance operational transparency, and accelerate continuous-improvement efforts.
Why Can't A.I. Manage My E-Mails?
Chatbots can pass the Turing test--but they can't yet handle an office worker's inbox. One morning last month, I decided to try artificial intelligence on a dire problem: my inbox. In the past twenty years, the e-mail address I use for writing projects has been discovered by a staggering number of P.R. firms, scammers, and strangers with eccentric requests. On this particular day, I had eight hundred and twenty-nine messages. Of the fifty most recent e-mails, the majority were dreck, but about eight were of actual interest, suggesting a hit rate of sixteen per cent--just enough that I had to worry about missing something important.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Tacit Knowledge Discovery in Organizational Contexts
Zuin, Gianlucca, Mastelini, Saulo, Loures, Túlio, Veloso, Adriano
Documenting tacit knowledge in organizations can be a challenging task due to incomplete initial information, difficulty in identifying knowledgeable individuals, the interplay of formal hierarchies and informal networks, and the need to ask the right questions. To address this, we propose an agent-based framework leveraging large language models (LLMs) to iteratively reconstruct dataset descriptions through interactions with employees. Modeling knowledge dissemination as a Susceptible-Infectious (SI) process with waning infectivity, we conduct 864 simulations across various synthetic company structures and different dissemination parameters. Our results show that the agent achieves 94.9% full-knowledge recall, with self-critical feedback scores strongly correlating with external literature critic scores. We analyze how each simulation parameter affects the knowledge retrieval process for the agent. In particular, we find that our approach is able to recover information without needing to access directly the only domain specialist. These findings highlight the agent's ability to navigate organizational complexity and capture fragmented knowledge that would otherwise remain inaccessible.
Contemporary AI foundation models increase biological weapons risk
Brent, Roger, McKelvey, T. Greg Jr
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence has raised concerns about its potential to facilitate biological weapons development. We argue existing safety assessments of contemporary foundation AI models underestimate this risk, largely due to flawed assumptions and inadequate evaluation methods. First, assessments mistakenly assume biological weapons development requires tacit knowledge, or skills gained through hands-on experience that cannot be easily verbalized. Second, they rely on imperfect benchmarks that overlook how AI can uplift both nonexperts and already-skilled individuals. To challenge the tacit knowledge assumption, we examine cases where individuals without formal expertise, including a 2011 Norwegian ultranationalist who synthesized explosives, successfully carried out complex technical tasks. We also review efforts to document pathogen construction processes, highlighting how such tasks can be conveyed in text. We identify "elements of success" for biological weapons development that large language models can describe in words, including steps such as acquiring materials and performing technical procedures. Applying this framework, we find that advanced AI models Llama 3.1 405B, ChatGPT-4o, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet can accurately guide users through the recovery of live poliovirus from commercially obtained synthetic DNA, challenging recent claims that current models pose minimal biosecurity risk. We advocate for improved benchmarks, while acknowledging the window for meaningful implementation may have already closed.
Towards AI-Driven Human-Machine Co-Teaming for Adaptive and Agile Cyber Security Operation Centers
Albanese, Massimiliano, Ou, Xinming, Lybarger, Kevin, Lende, Daniel, Goldgof, Dmitry
Security Operations Centers (SOCs) face growing challenges in managing cybersecurity threats due to an overwhelming volume of alerts, a shortage of skilled analysts, and poorly integrated tools. Human-AI collaboration offers a promising path to augment the capabilities of SOC analysts while reducing their cognitive overload. To this end, we introduce an AI-driven human-machine co-teaming paradigm that leverages large language models (LLMs) to enhance threat intelligence, alert triage, and incident response workflows. We present a vision in which LLM-based AI agents learn from human analysts the tacit knowledge embedded in SOC operations, enabling the AI agents to improve their performance on SOC tasks through this co-teaming. We invite SOCs to collaborate with us to further develop this process and uncover replicable patterns where human-AI co-teaming yields measurable improvements in SOC productivity.
What Do Large Language Models Know? Tacit Knowledge as a Potential Causal-Explanatory Structure
It is sometimes assumed that Large Language Models (LLMs) know language, or for example that they know that Paris is the capital of France. But what -- if anything -- do LLMs actually know? In this paper, I argue that LLMs can acquire tacit knowledge as defined by Martin Davies (1990). Whereas Davies himself denies that neural networks can acquire tacit knowledge, I demonstrate that certain architectural features of LLMs satisfy the constraints of semantic description, syntactic structure, and causal systematicity. Thus, tacit knowledge may serve as a conceptual framework for describing, explaining, and intervening on LLMs and their behavior.
Logic Augmented Generation
Gangemi, Aldo, Nuzzolese, Andrea Giovanni
Semantic Knowledge Graphs (SKG) face challenges with scalability, flexibility, contextual understanding, and handling unstructured or ambiguous information. However, they offer formal and structured knowledge enabling highly interpretable and reliable results by means of reasoning and querying. Large Language Models (LLMs) overcome those limitations making them suitable in open-ended tasks and unstructured environments. Nevertheless, LLMs are neither interpretable nor reliable. To solve the dichotomy between LLMs and SKGs we envision Logic Augmented Generation (LAG) that combines the benefits of the two worlds. LAG uses LLMs as Reactive Continuous Knowledge Graphs that can generate potentially infinite relations and tacit knowledge on-demand. SKGs are key for injecting a discrete heuristic dimension with clear logical and factual boundaries. We exemplify LAG in two tasks of collective intelligence, i.e., medical diagnostics and climate projections. Understanding the properties and limitations of LAG, which are still mostly unknown, is of utmost importance for enabling a variety of tasks involving tacit knowledge in order to provide interpretable and effective results.
Research on color recipe recommendation based on unstructured data using TENN
Jhang, Seongsu, Yoo, Donghwi, Kown, Jaeyong
Recently, services and business models based on large language models, such as OpenAI Chatgpt, Google BARD, and Microsoft copilot, have been introduced, and the applications utilizing natural language processing with deep learning are increasing, and it is one of the natural language preprocessing methods. Conversion to machine language through tokenization and processing of unstructured data are increasing. Although algorithms that can understand and apply human language are becoming increasingly sophisticated, it is difficult to apply them to processes that rely on human emotions and senses in industries that still mainly deal with standardized data. In particular, in processes where brightness, saturation, and color information are essential, such as painting and injection molding, most small and medium-sized companies, excluding large corporations, rely on the tacit knowledge and sensibility of color mixers, and even customer companies often present non-standardized requirements. . In this paper, we proposed TENN to infer color recipe based on unstructured data with emotional natural language, and demonstrated it.
ML-Based Teaching Systems: A Conceptual Framework
Spitzer, Philipp, Kühl, Niklas, Heinz, Daniel, Satzger, Gerhard
As the shortage of skilled workers continues to be a pressing issue, exacerbated by demographic change, it is becoming a critical challenge for organizations to preserve the knowledge of retiring experts and to pass it on to novices. While this knowledge transfer has traditionally taken place through personal interaction, it lacks scalability and requires significant resources and time. IT-based teaching systems have addressed this scalability issue, but their development is still tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we investigate the potential of machine learning (ML) models to facilitate knowledge transfer in an organizational context, leading to more cost-effective IT-based teaching systems. Through a systematic literature review, we examine key concepts, themes, and dimensions to better understand and design ML-based teaching systems. To do so, we capture and consolidate the capabilities of ML models in IT-based teaching systems, inductively analyze relevant concepts in this context, and determine their interrelationships. We present our findings in the form of a review of the key concepts, themes, and dimensions to understand and inform on ML-based teaching systems. Building on these results, our work contributes to research on computer-supported cooperative work by conceptualizing how ML-based teaching systems can preserve expert knowledge and facilitate its transfer from SMEs to human novices. In this way, we shed light on this emerging subfield of human-computer interaction and serve to build an interdisciplinary research agenda.
Toward Human-AI Co-creation to Accelerate Material Discovery
Zubarev, Dmitry, Mendes, Carlos Raoni, Brazil, Emilio Vital, Cerqueira, Renato, Schmidt, Kristin, Segura, Vinicius, Ferreira, Juliana Jansen, Sanders, Dan
There is an increasing need in our society to achieve faster advances in Science to tackle urgent problems, such as climate changes, environmental hazards, sustainable energy systems, pandemics, among others. In certain domains like chemistry, scientific discovery carries the extra burden of assessing risks of the proposed novel solutions before moving to the experimental stage. Despite several recent advances in Machine Learning and AI to address some of these challenges, there is still a gap in technologies to support end-to-end discovery applications, integrating the myriad of available technologies into a coherent, orchestrated, yet flexible discovery process. Such applications need to handle complex knowledge management at scale, enabling knowledge consumption and production in a timely and efficient way for subject matter experts (SMEs). Furthermore, the discovery of novel functional materials strongly relies on the development of exploration strategies in the chemical space. For instance, generative models have gained attention within the scientific community due to their ability to generate enormous volumes of novel molecules across material domains. These models exhibit extreme creativity that often translates in low viability of the generated candidates. In this work, we propose a workbench framework that aims at enabling the human-AI co-creation to reduce the time until the first discovery and the opportunity costs involved. This framework relies on a knowledge base with domain and process knowledge, and user-interaction components to acquire knowledge and advise the SMEs. Currently,the framework supports four main activities: generative modeling, dataset triage, molecule adjudication, and risk assessment.