Towards Ad-Hoc and Collaborative Business Intelligence

Author(s):  
Henrike Berthold ◽  
Philipp Rösch ◽  
Stefan Zöller ◽  
Felix Wortmann ◽  
Alessio Carenini ◽  
...  

The success of organizations and business networks depends on fast and well-founded decisions taken by the relevant people in their specific area of responsibility. To enable timely and well-founded decisions, it is often necessary to perform ad-hoc analyses in a collaborative manner involving domain experts, line-of-business managers, key suppliers, or customers. Current Business Intelligence (BI) solutions fail to meet the challenges of ad-hoc and collaborative decision support, thus slowing down and hurting organizations. To move towards ad-hoc and collaborative BI, we envision a highly scalable and flexible BI platform. The main building blocks of this platform are a flexible and efficient concept for the management of business context information, an intuitive and powerful methodology for the configuration of a BI system, a concept of an information self-service for business users over data sources within and across organizations, a collaborative decision making environment, and an architecture for the whole system that complements current BI systems.

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Barner

Perceptual representations – e.g., of objects or approximate magnitudes –are often invoked as building blocks that children combine with linguisticsymbols when they acquire the positive integers. Systems of numericalperception are either assumed to contain the logical foundations ofarithmetic innately, or to supply the basis for their induction. Here Ipropose an alternative to this general framework, and argue that theintegers are not learned from perceptual systems, but instead arise toexplain perception as part of language acquisition. Drawing oncross-linguistic data and developmental data, I show that small numbers(1-4) and large numbers (~5+) arise both historically and in individualchildren via entirely distinct mechanisms, constituting independentlearning problems, neither of which begins with perceptual building blocks.Specifically, I propose that children begin by learning small numbers(i.e., *one, two, three*) using the same logical resources that supportother linguistic markers of number (e.g., singular, plural). Several yearslater, children discover the logic of counting by inferring the logicalrelations between larger number words from their roles in blind countingprocedures, and only incidentally associate number words with perception ofapproximate magnitudes, in an *ad hoc* and highly malleable fashion.Counting provides a form of explanation for perception but is not causallyderived from perceptual systems.


2021 ◽  
pp. 019251212110192
Author(s):  
Trix van Mierlo

Oftentimes, democracy is not spread out evenly over the territory of a country. Instead, pockets of authoritarianism can persist within a democratic system. A growing body of literature questions how such subnational authoritarian enclaves can be democratized. Despite fascinating insights, all existing pathways rely on the actions of elites and are therefore top-down. This article seeks to kick-start the discussion on a bottom-up pathway to subnational democratization, by proposing the attrition mechanism. This mechanism consists of four parts and is the product of abductive inference through theory-building causal process tracing. The building blocks consist of subnational democratization literature, social movement theory, and original empirical data gathered during extensive field research. This case study focuses on the ‘Dynasty Slayer’ in the province of Isabela, the Philippines, where civil society actors used the attrition mechanism to facilitate subnational democratization. This study implies that civil society actors in subnational authoritarian enclaves have agency.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugenio Redolfi Riva ◽  
Silvestro Micera

AbstractNeural interfaces are bioelectronic devices capable of stimulating a population of neurons or nerve fascicles and recording electrical signals in a specific area. Despite their success in restoring sensory-motor functions in people with disabilities, their long-term exploitation is still limited by poor biocompatibility, mechanical mismatch between the device and neural tissue and the risk of a chronic inflammatory response upon implantation.In this context, the use of nature-derived materials can help address these issues. Examples of these materials, such as extracellular matrix proteins, peptides, lipids and polysaccharides, have been employed for decades in biomedical science. Their excellent biocompatibility, biodegradability in the absence of toxic compound release, physiochemical properties that are similar to those of human tissues and reduced immunogenicity make them outstanding candidates to improve neural interface biocompatibility and long-term implantation safety. The objective of this review is to highlight progress and challenges concerning the impact of nature-derived materials on neural interface design. The use of these materials as biocompatible coatings and as building blocks of insulation materials for use in implantable neural interfaces is discussed. Moreover, future perspectives are presented to show the increasingly important uses of these materials for neural interface fabrication and their possible use for other applications in the framework of neural engineering.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 66-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Abelló ◽  
Jérôme Darmont ◽  
Lorena Etcheverry ◽  
Matteo Golfarelli ◽  
Jose-Norberto Mazón ◽  
...  

Self-service business intelligence is about enabling non-expert users to make well-informed decisions by enriching the decision process with situational data, i.e., data that have a narrow focus on a specific business problem and, typically, a short lifespan for a small group of users. Often, these data are not owned and controlled by the decision maker; their search, extraction, integration, and storage for reuse or sharing should be accomplished by decision makers without any intervention by designers or programmers. The goal of this paper is to present the framework we envision to support self-service business intelligence and the related research challenges; the underlying core idea is the notion of fusion cubes, i.e., multidimensional cubes that can be dynamically extended both in their schema and their instances, and in which situational data and metadata are associated with quality and provenance annotations.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 65-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Daradkeh ◽  
Radwan Moh'd Al-Dwairi

Despite the growing popularity of self-service business intelligence (SSBI) tools, empirical research that investigates their acceptance by business professionals is still scarce. This paper presents and tests an integrated model of the antecedents of users' acceptance of SSBI tools in business enterprises. The proposed model is developed based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and incorporating information and system quality from DeLone and McLean IS success model. It also includes an important factor from the business intelligence literature called analysis quality. To test the model, data were collected through a questionnaire survey from 331 business users working in a variety of industries in Jordan. Data were analysed using structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques. The results demonstrated that the three quality factors– information quality, system quality and analysis quality – are key antecedents of perceived usefulness and ease of use, which in turn were found to be strong predictors of users' intention to use SSBI tools. The findings of this study provide several implications for research and practice, and thus should help in the design and deployment of more user-accepted SSBI tools.


2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (04) ◽  
pp. 1340011 ◽  
Author(s):  
FAISAL SHAHZAD ◽  
MARKUS WITTMANN ◽  
MORITZ KREUTZER ◽  
THOMAS ZEISER ◽  
GEORG HAGER ◽  
...  

The road to exascale computing poses many challenges for the High Performance Computing (HPC) community. Each step on the exascale path is mainly the result of a higher level of parallelism of the basic building blocks (i.e., CPUs, memory units, networking components, etc.). The reliability of each of these basic components does not increase at the same rate as the rate of hardware parallelism. This results in a reduction of the mean time to failure (MTTF) of the whole system. A fault tolerance environment is thus indispensable to run large applications on such clusters. Checkpoint/Restart (C/R) is the classic and most popular method to minimize failure damage. Its ease of implementation makes it useful, but typically it introduces significant overhead to the application. Several efforts have been made to reduce the C/R overhead. In this paper we compare various C/R techniques for their overheads by implementing them on two different categories of applications. These approaches are based on parallel-file-system (PFS)-level checkpoints (synchronous/asynchronous) and node-level checkpoints. We utilize the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) library for the comparison of node-level checkpoints. For asynchronous PFS-level checkpoints, we use the Damaris library, the SCR asynchronous feature, and application-based checkpointing via dedicated threads. Our baseline for overhead comparison is the naïve application-based synchronous PFS-level checkpointing method. A 3D lattice-Boltzmann (LBM) flow solver and a Lanczos eigenvalue solver are used as prototypical applications in which all the techniques considered here may be applied.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qingqing Chen ◽  
Ate Poorthuis

Identifying meaningful locations, such as home or work, from human mobility data has become an increasingly common prerequisite for geographic research. Although location-based services (LBS) and other mobile technology have rapidly grown in recent years, it can be challenging to infer meaningful places from such data, which - compared to conventional datasets – can be devoid of context. Existing approaches are often developed ad-hoc and can lack transparency and reproducibility. To address this, we introduce an R software package for inferring home locations from LBS data. The package implements pre-existing algorithms and provides building blocks to make writing algorithmic ‘recipes’ more convenient. We evaluate this approach by analyzing a de-identified LBS dataset from Singapore that aims to balance ethics and privacy with the research goal of identifying meaningful locations. We show that ensemble approaches, combining multiple algorithms, can be especially valuable in this regard as the resulting patterns of inferred home locations closely correlate with the distribution of residential population. We hope this package, and others like it, will contribute to an increase in use and sharing of comparable algorithms, research code and data. This will increase transparency and reproducibility in mobility analyses and further the ongoing discourse around ethical big data research.


Author(s):  
Tanmayee Parbat

Abstract: Self-service Business Intelligence (SSBI) is an emerging topic for many companies. Casual users should be enabled to independently build their own analyses and reports. This accelerates and simplifies the decision-making processes. Although recent studies began to discuss parts of a self-service environment, none of these present a comprehensive architecture. Following a design science research approach, this study proposes a new self-service oriented BI architecture in order to address this gap. Starting from an in-depth literature review, an initial model was developed and improved by qualitative data analysis from interviews with 18 BI and IT specialists form companies across different industries. The proposed architecture model demonstrates the interaction between introduced self-service elements with each other and with traditional BI components. For example, we look at the integration of collaboration rooms and a self-learning knowledge database that aims to be a source for a report recommender. Keywords: Business Intelligence, Big Data, Architecture, Self-Service, Analytics


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document