Abstracts:

Jay E. Aronson
Department of Management Information Systems, Terry College of Business, The University of Georgia, Athens, USA jaronson@terry.uga.edu

Robert M. Myers and  Robert B. Wharton
Rinker School of Business, Palm Beach Atlantic College, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA myerssr@pbac.edu

One important task in the decision making process in an organization is that of brainstorming. In a Group Support System (GSS) environment, electronic brainstorming is enabled by special hardware and software that introduces both task gains and losses; and process gains and losses. The impacts of time pressure on task completion and task quality are important concerns for managers. Specifically, we focus on the impacts of time pressure on electronic brainstorming in terms of idea quantity per unit time (idea generation rate) and idea quality (creativity). One hundred and two undergraduate business students were subjects in an experiment examining the impacts of time pressure on: (a) the rate of ideas generated; and (b) the quality (creativity) of the generated ideas. In the treatments, we varied the amount of time available for working on an electronic brainstorming task over time. Social Entrainment Theory indicates that there will be a lasting effect as the length of time to perform a task over several treatments is varied. We hypothesize that the impacts explained by Social Entrainment Theory will occur in the GSS setting. Our results support the research hypotheses that the mean rate of: (a) idea generation, and (b) the creativity of the ideas is unequal in groups operating under different time pressure conditions.

Keywords: Group Support Systems, Electronic Brainstorming, Electronic Meeetings, Collaborative Computing

James Suleiman
University of Colorado, College of Business, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA  jsuleima@mail.uccs.edu

Roberto Evaristo
University of Denver, Daniels College of Business, Information Technology and Electronic Commerce Department, Denver, Colorado,USA evaristo@du.edu

Gigi G. Kelly
The College of William & Mary, School of Business Administration, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA, ggkell@business.wm.edu

Virtual teams have become a fixture of organizations in the 90s.  Part of the reason for the creation of virtual teams is the existence of limited resources or need for people to share knowledge concurrently over long distances.  Software development is not an exception to this problem, and it is likely to become even more of a distributed process in the near future.  In this paper we address the problems that are likely to be found in distributed Joint Application Design (JAD) efforts.  We then propose an interpretivistic study to perform a more complete analysis of the key issues in distributed JAD.  Important applications to practice are raised.

Keywords: Information systems, Joint applications development, facilitation, coordination, distributed work environments, group processes

Wm. Benjamin Martz, Jr.
Department of Accounting and Information Systems, College of Business, California State University, Chico, USA   bmartz@cschico.edu

Morgan M. Shepherd
College of Business, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, USA   mshepher@mail.uccs.edu

Nowadays, telecommunication networks are passing through a rapid evolution. The introduction of novel services in high-speed networks such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) requires different handling of connections. While real-time applications usually require low end-to-end delay and delay jitters, and are not very sensitive to loss within an acceptable range, there exist applications that require very low loss rates but are not concerned of delay or delay jitters. The concept of designing Multistage Interconnection Network (MIN) capable of operating with and without cell loss and cell delay sensitiveness can be a reasonable alternative. This paper is divided into two subjects. In the first a new switch architecture is depicted. Our proposed switching architecture and protocol handles connections' different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements with different mechanisms. We introduce four cell types that can be mapped to the existing ATM services. The investigation of such a complicated system as an ATM switch, requires lot of simulation time in any conservative simulation environment. To achieve shorter simulation time, our simulation platform was designed for Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) environment. The extended features and
mechanisms of our MIN involves individual solutions during interaction among processes, which are addressed in the second part of the article.

Keywords:  ATM switching, QoS, performance evaluation, parallel modeling

Marion G. Sobol
Southern Methodist University, E.L. Cox School of Business, Dallas, Texas 75275, USA msobol@mail.cox.edu

Mary Anne Winniford
Enterprise Management Associates, 5398 Manhattan Circle, Boulder, Colorado 80303, USA  winniford@enterprisemanagement.com

This survey reports on corporate use of groupware, specifically Lotus' Notes, Novell's Groupwise and Microsoft's Exchange.  Out of 71 businesses that responded, 82% use groupware.  The functions ranked most important and most common still focus on traditional communication such as knowledge sharing, remote access and e-mail.  Newer functions, such as customer service, launching a website or E-commerce platform, reported much lower importance ranking and usage.  Overall, groupware received high ratings, including overall satisfaction, product satisfaction and increasing productivity.  The respondents included both IT managers and end-users, who responded similarly, except that managers were somewhat more critical of the groupware.  The MIS department led the adoption process in terms of where the respondents learned about groupware, proposals for adoption of groupware, and sponsorship  of groupware adoption.  Some differences were found in software adoption by sponsor:  top management preferred Lotus' Notes, and sponsored larger installations.

Keywords: binary tree, binary space partitioning, kd-tree, cache, spatial locality

Morgan M. Shepherd
University of Colorado,Colorado Springs, USA. mshepher@mail.uccs.edu

This research was concerned with determining the major factors that affect the diffusion of GSS (specifically GroupSystems) in organizations.  The variables that had the most significant effects were the size of the work groups within the organization, the hourly rate charged to use the technology, the amount of money initially spent on the technology and the role of the facilitator.  But the existing models have some gaps, and some suggestions for improving diffusion research are discussed.

Keywords: Group Support Systems, Diffusion, Work Groups, Facilitator

Miroslav Kubat
Center for Advanced Computer Studies University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, LA 70504-4330, U.S.A.
and Department of Computer Science Southern University in Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge
mkubat@cacs.usl.edut

A decision tree's classification performance can drop if the tree is used in a changed context such as different accent in speach recognition. This brittleness can partially be rectified by the use of a cheap second tier implemented as a linear classifier. The transfer of the tree to a novel context is accomplished by re-inducing  the second tier, without the need to re-induce the more expensive first tier. Experiments reported in this paper indicate that quick adaptation to the target context can indeed be achieved.

Keywords: decision trees, context, second tier

C.H. Ang, S.T. Tan, and T.C. Tan
Department of Computer Science, School of Computing National University of Singapore, Republic of Singapore, 117543 angch@comp.nus.edu.sg, tanst@comp.nus.edu.sg, tantc@comp.nus.edu.sg

Bitmap R-tree is a variant of R-tree in which bitmaps are used for the description of the internal and the external regions of the objects in addition to the use of minimum bounding rectangles. The proposed scheme increases the chance of trivial acceptance and rejection of data objeCTS, and reduces unnecessary disk accesses in query processing. It has been shown that with the bitmaps as filters, the reference to the object data file can be cut down by as much as 60%.

Keywords: spatial data structures, R-tree

Andrzej Czygrinow
Department of Mathematics, ASU, Tempe, AZ  andrzej@math.la.asu.edu

Michal Karonski
Faculty of Math and CS, AMU, Poznan, Poland
and
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30033, USA
karonski@amu.edu.pl
michal@mathcs.emory.edu

Vaidy  Sunderam
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30033, USA  vss@mathcs.emory.edu

We describe a distributed computing primitive termed polling that is both a means of synchronization and communication in distributed or concurrent systems. The polling operation involves the collection of messages from nodes in an interconnection network, in response to a query. We define the semantics of polling, and present algorithms for implementing the operation on complete and hypercube networks. Time and message lower bounds are presented, and are followed by an analysis of the number of operations performed at each node for every algorithm. We show that polling in a complete graph on 2^n vertices can be completed in 2n rounds using 2^n+2^{n-3}
+\lceil \frac{2^{n-3}+1}{3}\rceil -1$ messages. In case of n-cube, we show that polling in 2n rounds requires $\lceil 2^n+\frac{1}{3} 2^{n-1} + \frac{1}{6} \sqrt{2^n} - \frac{4}{3} \rceil$ messages and we present an algorithm that completes polling in 2n rounds and sends $2^n +3 \cdot2^{n-4}-1$ messages.

Keywords: distributed computing, polling, hypercube

Andrej Kovacic, Ales Groznik, Jurij Jaklic, Mojca Indihar Stemberger, Talib Damij, Janez Grad, Miro Gradisar and Tomaz Turk
University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Economics,Kardeljeva ploscad 17, SI-1000 Ljubljana, Slovenia andrej.kovacic@uni-lj.si

In recent years there has been a dramatic change in business environment resulting in reengineering of key business activities and processes. Among others, the role of information system (IS) has significantly increased as organisations have employed information technology (IT) to improve the capture, processing and distribution of information. Information became an important asset to the company, which is carefully monitored, planned and upraised. The paper presents the results of a survey on the strategic IS planning practices of Slovene companies. It highlights the participation, critical success factors and main benefits of strategic IS planning. The results show that comparing to similar studies very low number (50%) of responding companies were performing strategic IS planning. It is also interesting that in Slovene companies the leading initiator is top management (36%) whereas the role of IS management is surprisingly modest (23%). Main benefits of strategic IS planning from the Slovene business perspective are improved internal co-ordination, efficient and effective management of IS resources and improved productivity.

Keywords: strategic information system planning, business information systems, survey, questionnaire

Prithwish Kangsabanik, R. Mall and A.K. Majumdar
Dept. of Computer Science and Engg. I.I.T Kharagpur, India prith@cse.iitkgp.ernet.in, rajib@cse.iitkgp.ernet.in, akmj@cse.iitkgp.ernet.in

In this paper, we survey some of the recent developments in application modeling and concurrency control in Active DBMS (ADBMS). We first review the evolution of Active DBMS and different application areas of ADBMSs. Application modeling techniques for ADBMS applications have been surveyed after that. Then we discuss about the execution modeling and concurrency control in active DBMS -- which is one of the most challenging areas in active database research. Several important active database research projects are also reviewed with mention of their contributions and current research directions pointed out by these projects.

Keywords:  Active database, Concurrency control, Object oriented systems

Gregor Papa and Jurij Silc
Computer Systems Department, Jozef Stefan Institute, Jamova 39, 1001 Ljubljana, Slovenia gregor.papa@ijs.si, jurij.silc@ijs.si

Frequently used problems of linear algebra, such as the solution of linear systems, triangular decomposition and matrix multiplication, are computationally extensive. To increase the speed, those problems should be solved with systolic structures, where many processors are used concurrently to compute the result. Since two-dimensional array of processors is very consumptive, considering space and resources, it is better to use one-dimensional array of processors. This leads to the operation reallocation and causes unequalutilization of processors, but it is much easier to implement since there is only one linear array of processors.

Keywords:  systolic array, QR, LU, decomposition, Gauss elimination, matrix multiplication

Csaba Lukovszki, Robert Szabo and Tamas Henk
High Speed Networks Laboratory, Department of Telecommunication and Telematics Technical University of Budapest, Pazmany P. setany 1/D, Budapest, H-1117 Hungary  lcsaba@ttt-atm.ttt.bme.hu, szabor@ttt-atm.ttt.bme.hu, henk@ttt-atm.ttt.bme.hu

Nowadays, telecommunication networks are passing through a rapid evolution. The introduction of novel services in high-speed networks such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) requires different handling of connections. While real-time applications usually require low end-to-end delay and delay jitters, and are not very sensitive to loss within an acceptable range, there exist applications that require very low loss rates but are not concerned of delay or delay jitters. The concept of designing Multistage Interconnection Network (MIN) capable of operating with and without cell loss and cell delay sensitiveness can be a reasonable alternative. This paper is divided into two subjects. In the first a new switch architecture is depicted. Our proposed switching architecture and protocol handles connections' different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements with different mechanisms. We introduce four cell types that can be mapped to the existing ATM services. The investigation of such a complicated system as an ATM switch, requires lot of simulation time in any conservative simulation environment. To achieve shorter simulation time, our simulation platform was designed for Parallel Discrete Event Simulation (PDES) environment. The extended features and mechanisms of our MIN involves individual solutions during interaction among processes, which are addressed in the second part of the article.

Keywords: ATM switching, QoS, performance evaluation, parallel modeling
 

Imants Barušs
King’s College, 266 Epworth Avenue, London, ON, Canada N6A 2M3 baruss@uwo.ca

The purpose of this paper is to orient the reader to the contemporary scientific study of consciousness. One of the most noticeable features of research concerning consciousness is that there are three domains of discourse, the physiological, computational and experiential, each with its own methodology and concerns. While confusion is often expressed about what it is that one is discussing, there are four main categories of definitions of the term consciousness: consciousness1 is the registration, processing and acting on information; behavioural consciousness is the explicit knowledge of one’s situation, mental states or actions as demonstrated by one’s behaviour; subjective consciousness is the subjective stream of thoughts, feelings and sensations that occur for a person; and consciousness is the sense of existence of the subject of mental acts. There are also disparate views concerning consciousness that surveys have revealed to be correlated with investigators’ beliefs about the nature of reality along a material-transcendent dimension. Those with materialist views tend to think that only that which is physical is real and that consciousness is an emergent property of neural or information-processing systems; those with conservatively transcendent views think that there is more to reality than that which is physical and emphasize subjective aspects of consciousness; while the extraordinarily transcendent conceptualize consciousness as ontologically primitive and place importance on self-transformation. An investigator’s contention that she has had anomalous experiences appears to incline her toward a transcendent position. The presence of these correlations indicates that research programs concerning consciousness proceed, not in an unbiased manner, but on the basis of personal beliefs about the nature of reality. Can beliefs change in the course of the educational process? Data from 129 undergraduate students indicates that beliefs about consciousness and reality can move in a transcendent direction in classes with an instructor with extraordinarily transcendent beliefs..

Keywords:  consciouness, academia, science, experience, reality, beliefs, materialism, transcendentalism, anomalies, education

Jeremy Horne
15 Copper Hill Ct. Durham, NC 27713  jhorne1@cris.com

Any discrete (closed) binary, or Boolean, space is recursive.  That is, if the outputs of functions are repeatedly forward-fed into those functions, those outputs will present themselves again for processing.   That is, the full functionality of an operator reproduces itself.  Each of the 16 operators, or functions, in a two variable system is a self- maintaining (homeostatic) automaton in logical space.  The homeostatic character of the function is displayed by that recursion.  As larger binary spaces are comprised of the functions (partial or complete), functional recursion may open the way to analysing basins of attraction in spaces produced by the random concatenation of operators to reveal the character of pattern generation.  Further, recursion of binary logical operators may have correlates in biological neural networks.

Keywords: logic, recursion, operators, order