Research group on digital government in North America: developing a comparative and transnational agenda
This poster describes the second year's progress of the research group on Comparative and Transnational Digital Government in North America. This group was formed in 2007 to advance electronic government research across geographic and political boundaries in the region, with the support of the National Science Foundation Digital Government Research Program and the home institutions of the members in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. During the second year of activities, the group members joined their expertise and interests in two face-to-face meetings in Canada. During the second year of work, group members advanced research proposals and developed preliminary products on two topical areas as well as a first draft of a Research Agenda for North America. The group members will continue the discussion of this research agenda in Cholula, Mexico as part of the activities of the 10th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research (dg.o 2009).

title: The Effect of Organizational/Technological Factors and the Nature of Knowledge on Knowledge Sharing
abstract: This study investigates the dynamics of a knowledge sharing effort in New York State government that involved multiple organizations, divisions, and geographically separated offices in the development of the Multi- Using a case study approach, we address the question of how multiple organizational and technological factors — distributed leadership, alignment of issues and incentives, coordination of a number and variety of groups, trust, technology, and implementation strategy — interact with the nature of knowledge to influence the knowledge sharing process. A major contribution of this study is that it uses a multi-dimensional view of knowledge, examining the interactive impact of the nature of knowledge with multiple organizational and technological factors in public sector knowledge management research.

title: Minitrack: E-Government Information and Knowledge Management
abstract: The public sector realizes the strategic importance of methods, tools and concepts applied to the efficient and effective Information and Knowledge resource Management (IKM). Because governments and public administrations deal with vast amounts of information and knowledge, it is particularly important to leverage research agendas that advance tenets related to the management of these resources. For example, much of the work of public authorities and governments is related to the collection, processing, interpretation, and use of data, information and knowledge on citizens, businesses, governments themselves, the society, the market, the environment, laws, politics, etc.

title: The nature of knowledge and its influence on knowledge sharing practice: experiences from building the MACROS system
abstract: This study investigates how the interactive influences of the nature of knowledge and multiple organizational and technological factors - trust, leadership, incentives and issues, group size and variety, implementation strategy, and technology - facilitated and/or impeded the knowledge sharing processes. Using a case study approach, the research focuses on the modifying effects of four characteristics of knowledge- codifiability, context-embeddedness, practice-embeddedness, and dynamics- on the processes and outcomes of knowledge sharing in a case of building the multi-purpose access for customer relations & operational support (MACROS) system involving multiple organizations, divisions, and geographically separated offices. The case results suggest that modifying effects occurred along at least three dimensions- codifiability, context-embeddedness, and practice-embeddedness. The levels of codifiability appeared to dictate the implementation strategy; reduced context-embeddedness allowed for more effective group coordination; reduced context-embeddedness also enhanced trust; codified knowledge is more effective than uncodified knowledge in demonstrating concrete incentives; and technology interacts with context-embeddedness and practice-embeddedness. The results of this study have theoretical and practical implications for a larger set of problems encountered in sizable organizations. More specifically, even though the relevance of the nature of knowledge has been widely acknowledged by I. Nonaka, et. al. (2001), it is not always clear how it comes into play. This study conceptualized the nature of knowledge as a modifying variable, and the results provide a new and more comprehensive framework for investigating the relevance of the nature of knowledge in knowledge management research.

title: Information Strategies to Support Full Information Product Pricing: the Role of Trust
abstract: In this paper, we report the importance of trust in the development and operation of distribution networks that attach non-price information to products to mitigate market dynamics introduced by information asymmetries. Often this non-price information is transmitted from producers to consumers through trusting networks or under certifiable labels such as Organic or Fair Trade. We are calling such networks Full Information Product Pricing (FIPP) Networks. This study is part of a larger project aimed at understanding the characteristics of FIPP networks. This initial exploration on four cases in Canada and Latin America indicated that trust, in the forms of institutional trust, calculative trust, and relational trust, plays key roles in FIPP operations and expansion. It is critical for building collaboration, coordinating network activities, and mitigating the risks associated with information asymmetry.

title: Detection of potential positive regulatory motifs of transcription in yeast introns by comparative analysis of oligonucleotide frequencies
abstract: We conducted a comparative statistical analysis of tetra- through hexanucleotide frequencies in two sets of introns of yeast genes. The first set consisted of introns of genes that have transcription rates higher than 30 mRNAs/h while the second set contained introns of genes whose transcription rates were lower than or equal to 10 mRNAs/h. Some oligonucleotides whose occurrence frequencies in the first set of introns are significantly higher than those in the second set of introns were detected. The frequencies of occurrence of most of these detected oligonucleotides are also significantly higher than those in the exons flanking the introns of the first set. Interestingly some of these detected oligonucleotides are the same as well known "signature" sequences of transcriptional regulatory elements. This could imply the existence of potential positive regulatory motifs of transcription in yeast introns.

title: Gait Planning Of Quadruped Robot Based On Third-Order Spline Interpolation
abstract: This paper presented a brief description for the gait planning of quadruped robot named Aibo ERS-7 which is a standard platform in the RoboCup 4-legged league. We approach a spline shaped locus to reduce the dimension of the parameter optimizing space and solve the problem of the significant bias between the planned locus and the real one. The result shows that the spline shaped locus is effective in finding the optimized locus shape in a short time. Finally, the robot achieves a gait faster than any previously known learned gait for Aibo

title: A Novel Dimensionality Reduction Technique Based on Independent Component Analysis for Modeling Microarray Gene Expression Data
abstract: DNA microarray experiments generating thousands of gene 
expression measurements, are being used to gather information from tissue and cell samples regarding gene expression differences that will be useful in diagnosing disease. But one challenge of microarray studies is the fact that the number n of samples collected is relatively small compared to the number p of genes per sample which are usually in thousands. In statistical terms this very large number of predictors compared to a small number of samples or observations makes the classification problem difficult. This is known as the ”curse of dimensionality problem”. An efficient way to solve this problem is by using dimensionality reduction techniques. Principle Component Analysis(PCA) is a leading method for dimensionality reduction of gene expression data which is optimal in the sense of least square error. In this paper we propose a new dimensionality reduction technique for specific bioinformatics applications based on Independent component Analysis(ICA). Being able to exploit higher order statistics to identify a linear model result, this ICA based dimensionality reduction technique 
outperforms PCA from both statistical and biological 
significance aspects. We present experiments on NCI 60 
dataset to show this result.

title: Supporting software evolution through model-driven program transformation
abstract: Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) techniques are being adopted with more frequency in the engineering of computer based systems, especially in the area of distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems. This brief summary presents two research objectives for supporting software evolution in MDSD. First, the concept of model-driven program transformation is introduced to support evolution of large legacy software systems. The second research objective that is presented involves the application of a mature program transformation engine to automate model interpreter evolution in the presence of meta-model schema changes.

title: The Design of a New Context-Aware Policy Model for Autonomic Networking
abstract: This paper describes a new version of the DEN-ng context model, and how this model in conjunction with the DEN-ng policy model can be used for more effective and flexible context management. Both are part of the FOCALE autonomic network architecture. Context selects policies, which select roles that can be used, which in turn define allowed functionality for that particular context.