Computer Society 2010: Innovation, Leadership, Community, and Careers

The Computer Society's business is to help members access the right resources and technical information, support them in their careers, and facilitate relationships with like-minded professionals that offer opportunities for mentoring and collaboration.     

Hypertext Writing Profiles and Visualisation

University students increasingly use hypertextto write their assignments. To employ hypertexteffectively, more information about thehypertext authoring process is needed. Thereare features of hypertext which are notreflected in traditional theories ofcomposition, especially the possibility tostructure information visually. Our studyindicates that graphical overview maps whichcan be edited are a rather attractive featureof hypertext authoring systems. Nevertheless,not all students profit from such features.Students employ different writing styles whenthey create hypertext documents. The majorityof students experiments with hypertext's newfeatures but others are still influenced by themodel of the book.     

Effectiveness of old, new, and future motor-car lighting

In this article results have been reported from experiments carried out by the Traffic Safety Research Group, University of Uppsala, Sweden. The philosophy behind the research was to try to adapt the lighting conditions in night driving to human visual characteristics.     

机器视觉技术及其应用概况

介绍了机器视觉的系统组成及工作原理、相对于人类视觉优势所在,阐述了机器视觉在我国工业、农业、医学、机器人导航、卫星遥感等领域的应用,指出了机器视觉的未来走向.     

Offsets of Two-Dimensional Profiles

An offset capability for planar curves and profiles in a solid modeler leads to the solution of some practical design problems.     

Leadership in R&D Projects

This article describes the results of an empirical study regarding a suitable style of R&D project leadership, especially what tasks project leaders should perform by themselves and what tasks they should delegate, what personal characteristics they should be endowed with and what kind of relationships they should have with their team. Fifty interviews were held in German institutions short‐listed for an award for their innovative products by the Saxon government. In contrast to the assumption of the Social Identity Theory, in these institutions good R&D project leaders are not the ‘prototype’ of their team, but successfully balance the interests of the company and the R&D project team.     

DOMpro: Protein Domain Prediction Using Profiles, Secondary Structure, Relative Solvent Accessibility, and Recursive Neural Networks

Protein domains are the structural and functional units of proteins. The ability to parse protein chains into different domains is important for protein classification and for understanding protein structure, function, and evolution. Here we use machine learning algorithms, in the form of recursive neural networks, to develop a protein domain predictor called DOMpro. DOMpro predicts protein domains using a combination of evolutionary information in the form of profiles, predicted secondary structure, and predicted relative solvent accessibility. DOMpro is trained and tested on a curated dataset derived from the CATH database. DOMpro correctly predicts the number of domains for 69% of the combined dataset of single and multi-domain chains. DOMpro achieves a sensitivity of 76% and specificity of 85% with respect to the single-domain proteins and sensitivity of 59% and specificity of 38% with respect to the two-domain proteins. DOMpro also achieved a sensitivity and specificity of 71% and 71% respectively in the Critical Assessment of Fully Automated Structure Prediction 4 (CAFASP-4) (Fisher et al., 1999; Saini and Fischer, 2005) and was ranked among the top ab initio domain predictors. The DOMpro server, software, and dataset are available at http://www.igb.uci.edu/servers/psss.html.     

Creativity and Innovativeness through Reflective Project Leadership

The potential contribution of reflection to leadership at the project level is explored by building upon theories of reflection, and by presenting a case describing reflective leadership in practice. Reflective leadership refers to the process by which leaders reflect on their own leader behaviour in order to understand how it affects the behaviour of others. A means of facilitating leaders in their development of reflective skills is described. The evidence supports the proposition that reflective leadership can be enhanced to the benefit of innovative climate in projects.     

Issues,Responsibilities and Identities: A Distributed Leadership Perspective on Biotechnology R&D Management

The aim of the research reported here is to contribute to the ongoing development of R&D project leadership studies by applying a distributed leadership perspective in the analysis of a product development project in a small biotechnology venture. A distributed leadership perspective implies that leadership is studied as a process of social interaction, involving several individuals who continuously construct leadership activities together. From a case study of a bio‐tech venture, we conclude that leadership work in R&D projects implies construction of issues, responsibilities and identities. That is, what people do – seen from this perspective – when performing leadership activities in this project is that they gradually move the project and the organization forward by processing issues, resolving ambiguities concerning responsibility, and develop their understandings on the identity bases involved.     

Computational Aspects of Uncertainty Profiles and Angel-Daemon Games

We analyze the complexity of equilibria problems for a class of strategic zero-sum games, called angel-daemon games. Those games were introduced to asses the performance of the execution of a web orchestration on a moderate faulty or under stress environment. Angel-daemon games are a natural example of zero-sum games whose representation is naturally succinct. We show that the problems of deciding the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium or of a dominant strategy for a given player are ${\Sigma}^{p}_{2}$ -complete. Furthermore, computing the value of an angel-daemon game is EXP-complete. Thus, our results match the already known classification of the corresponding problems for the generic families of succinctly represented games with exponential number of actions.     

A Leadership Challenge in 2009

The IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors remains focused on continuing the transformation of the Society so that we can provide increasing value to our membership.     

New Information Technologies,Job Profiles,and External Workload as Predictors of Subjectively Experienced Stress and Dissatisfaction at Work

Implementation cycles of information technologies in modern workplaces have become shorter, and employees have to constantly adapt to changing work situations. Presented here are preliminary results from a comprehensive research project. The 2nd Vienna Implementation Study, which investigated the effects on workers of continuous implementations, that is, the implementations of new information technologies on workplaces already equipped with computers. In a longitudinal research design, strain and dissatisfaction of 466 employees in 10 different companies are investigated. In each company, an implementation of a new information technology occurs during a specified time period. Seven measurements are taken over a 22-month period. Contextual factors postulated to moderate employee reactions to the new information technology include the following: type of implementation, implementation style (e.g., implementation management, participation) job profiles, external workload of employees, and personality factors. Preliminary analyses of the first two measurements of subjectively experienced stress and dissatisfaction (2 subscales representing strain and job satisfaction) in 9 companies are presented here. Compared to a control sample (the first 2 measurements in companies in which the implementation has not occurred), employees in the implementation sample had an increase in subjectively experienced stress and no changes in dissatisfaction shortly after the implementation. Both preimplementation values and changes in subjectively experienced stress and dissatisfaction seemed to be highly influenced by contextual factors at an organizational level. Regarding job characteristics (decision latitude) and external workload (e.g., family, children, and household responsibilities), employees with low decision latitude at their workplaces and a high external workload showed the strongest increases in subjectively experienced stress after the implementation....     

Social Network Profiles as Taste Performances

This study examines how a social network profile's lists of interests—music, books, movies, television shows, etc.—can function as an expressive arena for taste performance. By composing interest tokens around a theme, profile users craft their "taste statements." First, socioeconomic and aesthetic influences on taste are considered, and the expressivity of interest tokens is analyzed using a semiotic framework. Then, a grounded theory approach is taken to identify four types of taste statements—those that convey prestige, differentiation, authenticity, and theatrical persona. The semantics of taste and taste statements are further investigated through a statistical analysis of 127,477 profiles collected from the MySpace social network site between November 2006 and January 2007. The major findings of the analysis include statistical evidence for prestige and differentiation taste statements and an interpretation of the taste semantics underlying the MySpace community—its motifs, paradigms, and demographic structures.