1,721,083 research outputs found
Exploiting the collective knowledge of communities of experts: The case of conference ranking
No full textIn this paper, we discuss the concept of tacit collective knowledge and focus on how to externalize it to inform discussion and reflective thinking within a community of expert practitioners about their own distributed practices. We draw our approach by outlining the one we undertook in the domain of a scholarly community: how to assess the quality of scientific conferences in the broad area of computer science and IT study. Results show the feasibility and scalability of the approach adopted to externalize tacit collective knowledge
From Care for Design to Becoming Matters: New perspectives for the development of socio-technical systems
No full textIn this paper, we start by deconstructing the widely-mentioned concept of care in the IS literature, to unveil its inherent shortcomings and ambiguities, and find opportunities to go beyond it while preserving its value for the development of better socio-technical systems. We find an important strand in the feminist studies tradition, and in particular in the contributions related to the so called "new materialism". Notwithstanding their differences, these contrarian and often neglected voices point to the importance of relational thinking and material engagement with our technological objects. For this reason, in continuing the path indicated by Ciborra with his idea of care, we advocate a new shift from this step to the next one, where becoming matters more than being, and the caring about matter is more important than design abstractions
Questionnaires in the design and evaluation of community-oriented technologies
No full textStimulated by the maturity and ease-of-use of online psychometric questionnaire platforms, in this paper we discuss their exploitation as tools to gather representative indications, collect preferences and elicit requirements from the members of online communities for the design of their web-based technologies. To this practical aim, we suggest an alternative vision to the traditional way of considering questionnaires as part of the quantitative researcher toolbox, or worse yet, a trivial way to collect opinions with no design-oriented value. Rather, we advocate for a qualitative turn in questionnaire design and for the interpretation of the responses collected from even massive communities of prospective users. In particular, we propose to see questionnaires as valuable tools for two related tasks: the collection of preferences for the prioritisation of features and requirements of prospective web-based systems; and the evaluation of the impact of these systems on the communities that adopt them. In particular, this impact is addressed on a multidimensional perspective, including community values such as trust, sense of reciprocity, sense of community and social capital. In both cases, questionnaires are lightweight, feasible and cost-effective tools to enable the incremental improvement of community-oriented technologies according to the direct feedback collected from the community members
"Made with knowledge": Disentangling the IT knowledge artifact by a qualitative literature review
No full textKnowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct by which analysts, researchers and designers from different disciplines usually denote those material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by providing a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the heterogeneous contributions on this concept in the specialist literature. From our survey of the main contributions to the definition of this concept, we outline a spectrum of stances laying between two theoretical extremes: we denote one pole "representational", as it is grounded on the idea that knowledge can be an "object per se"; and the other pole "socially situated", as it builds on the viewpoint seeing knowledge as a social practice, that is an epiphenomenon of a situated, context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with "objects of knowing". In proposing a unifying model to gather complementary dimensions of knowledge together, our aim is to shed light on the multiple ways these ideas can inform the "reification" of knowledge into particular IT artifacts, which we call IT Knowledge Artifact (ITKA), and on how seemingly irreconcilable positions can contribute in the design of these computational artifact supporting knowledge work in organizations
3D printing objects as knowledge artifacts for a do-it-yourself approach in clinical practice: A questionnaire-based user study in the orthopaedics domain
No full textPurpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the phenomenon of the digital do-it-yourself (DiDIY) in the medical domain. In particular, the main contribution of the paper is the analysis and discussion of a questionnaire-based user study focused on 3D printing (3DP) technology, which was conducted among clinicians of one of the most important research hospital group in Lombardy, Italy. Design/methodology/approach: A general reflection on the notion of knowledge artifacts (KAs) and on the use of 3DP in medicine is followed by the research questions and by a more detailed analysis of the specialist literature on the usage of 3DP technology for diagnostic, training and surgical planning activities for clinicians and patients. The questionnaire-based user study design is then emerging from the conceptual framework for DiDIY in healthcare. To help focus on the main actors and assets composing the 3DP innovation roles in healthcare, the authors model: the DiDIY-er as the main initiator of the practice innovation; the available technology allowing the envisioning of new practices; the specific activities gaining benefits from the innovative techniques introduced; and the knowledge community continuously supporting and evolving knowledge practices. Findings: The authors discuss the results of the user study in the light of the four main components of our DiDIY framework and on the notion of KA. There are differences between high expertise, or senior, medical doctors (MDs) and relatively lower expertise MDs, or younger MDs, regarding the willing to acquire 3DP competences; those who have seen other colleagues using 3DP are significantly more in favor of 3DP adoption in medical practices, and those who wish to acquire 3DP competence and do-by-themselves are significantly more interested in the making of custom-made patient-specific tools, such as cutting guides and templates; there are many recurrent themes regarding how 3DP usage and application may improve medical practice. In each of the free-text questions, there were comments regarding the impact of 3DP on medical knowledge practices, such as surgical rehearsal, surgery, pathology comprehension, patient-physician communication and teaching. Originality/value: The 3DP adoption in healthcare is seen favorably and advocated by most of the respondents. In this domain, 3DP objects can be considered KAs legitimately. They can support knowledgeable practices, promote knowledge sharing and circulation in the healthcare community, as well as contribute to their improvement by the introduction of a new DiDIY mindset in the everyday work of MDs
Mapping the knowledge artifact terrain: A quantitative resource for qualitative research
No full textIn this paper, we present a method by which to build a metaphorical map of a portion of the scholarly literature along conceptual dimensions that have been previously characterized in terms of positive, negative and neutral terms. The method allows to "locate" scholarly works in this space, according to multiple criteria, like the definitions that they contain; the relevant concepts that can be extracted by means of a content analysis; and relevant passages that researchers can extract in studying their content. The resulting maps are not representational, nor trying to extract any objective essence of a scientific contribution. Rather, they are resources for the qualitative research, review and interpretation of literature sources. As such, these maps are "knowledge artifacts" in themselves, as they visualize, so to say, the interpretation of a set of works by qualitative researchers, and allow to build a visual comprehension of topological and qualitative relationships between the considered literature contributions. We applied the method to the case of the "knowledge artifact" literature and report the main results in this paper
Exploiting collective knowledge with three-way decision theory: Cases from the questionnaire-based research
No full textTwo methods are proposed for collective knowledge extraction from questionnaires with ordinal scales and dichotomous questions. Both methods are based on a three-way decision procedure and a statistical method aimed at attaining statistical significance of the above decision. One method is aimed at giving an (absolute) assessment of “objects” according to a given “criterion” and the other one at producing a relative ranking of the “objects”. A criterion can be related to one or more questionnaire items (usually questions or statements). In this latter case a method to compose ordinal items in aggregate scores is also given. The paper also presents two various case studies that illustrate the methods and give motivations for their application in different domains where the knowledge of a community or any distributed group of experts can be externalized (in terms of users' perceptions, attitudes, opinions, choices) with a structured closed-ended questionnaire
How accurate do you want it? Defining minimum required accuracy for medical artificial intelligence
Full text linkArtificial intelligence (AI) is becoming a more and more common component of biomedical engineering solutions, and these latter systems are getting promising results in terms of diagnostic and prognostic accuracy. Medical AI (MAI) is then reaching the maturity level for its appropriate use in clinical practice, but to this end, its efficacy needs to be demonstrated first. Currently, this efficacy is proven in terms of the reported accuracy of the algorithm, especially for diagnostic tasks. But also in this case, how much accurate is "enough" accurate? To address this question means to define the minimum required accuracy for a system to be valid, that is fit to its intended use. To this aim, we propose a risk-based approach to the definition of adequate accuracy, in accordance with a risk-based regulatory classification. We investigated whether the current state of the art is already compliant with this standard-based approach, by performing a literature review in four application domains, one for each of the four risk classes we identified: the diagnosis of psoriasis, of knee osteoarthritis, the screening of breast cancer screening, and the detection of influenza outbreaks. The evaluation of the literature review highlighted that this approach is still not widely adopted, but that there is a partial presence of an implicit, conventional scheme that is similar to our proposal, especially in the high-impact literature. We also provide some guideline to assess the minimum required accuracy but also sheds light on the need for further official guidelines that ensure the wider application of the regulatory risk-based approach by the scholarly community of MAI
PROs in the wild: Assessing the validity of patient reported outcomes in an electronic registry
Full text linkBackground and objectives: Collecting Patient-Reported Outcomes (PROs) is an important way to get first-hand information by patients on the outcome of treatments and surgical procedure they have undergone, and hence about the quality of the care provided. However, the quality of PRO data cannot be given for granted and cannot be traced back to the dimensions of timeliness and completeness only. While the reliability of these data can be guaranteed by adopting standard and validated questionnaires that are used across different health care facilities all over the world, these facilities must take responsibility to assess, monitor and ensure the validity of PROs that are collected from their patients. Validity is affected by biases that are hidden in the data collected. This contribution is then aimed at measuring bias in PRO data, for the impact that these data can have on clinical research and post-marketing surveillance. Methods: We considered the main biases that can affect PRO validity: Response bias, in terms of Acquiescence bias and Fatigue bias; and Non-Response bias. To assess Acquiescence bias, phone interviews and online surveys were compared, adjusted by age. To assess Fatigue bias, we proposed a specific item about session length and compared PROs scores stratifying according to the responses to this item. We also calculated the intra-patient agreement by conceiving an intra-interview test-retest. To assess Non-Response bias, we considered patients who participated after the saturation of the response-rate curve as proxy of potential non respondents and compared the outcomes in these two strata. All methods encompassed common statistical techniques and are cost-effective at any facility collecting PRO data. Results: Acquiescence bias resulted in significantly different scores between patients reached by either phone or email. In regard to Fatigue bias, stratification by perceived fatigue resulted in contrasting results. A relevant difference was found in intra-patient agreement and an increasing difference in average scores as a function of interview length (or completion time). In regard to Non-Response bias, we found non-significant differences both in scores and variance. Conclusions: In this paper, we present a set of cost-effective techniques to assess the validity of retrospective PROs data and share some lessons learnt from their application at a large teaching hospital specialized in musculoskeletal disorders that collects PRO data in the follow-up phase of surgery performed therein. The main finding suggests that response bias can affect the PRO validity. Further research on the effectiveness of simple and cost-effective solutions is necessary to mitigate these biases and improve the validity of PRO data
“Made with knowledge”: Reporting a qualitative literature review on the concept of the it knowledge artifact
No full textKnowledge Artifact (KA) is an analytical construct denoting material objects that in organizations regard the creation, use, sharing and representation of knowledge. This paper aims to fill a gap in the existing literature by providing a conceptual framework for the interpretation of the heterogeneous scholar contributions proposed on this concept so far. After a comprehensive literature review we define one pole as “representational”, grounded on the idea that knowledge can be an “object per se”; and another pole as “socially situated”, where knowledge is seen as a social practice, that is a situated, context-dependent and performative interaction of human actors through and with “objects of knowing”. We propose a unifying view of the dimensions of knowledge, and, in so doing, we try to shed light on the multiple ways these can inform the “reification” of knowledge into specific IT artifacts, which we call IT Knowledge Artifact (ITKA). Our model can contribute to the design of computational artifacts supporting knowledge work in organizations
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