Variations on a Theme—Practice Improvisation

The Improvisation Effect: A Case Study of User Improvisation and Its Effects on Information System Evolution

Few studies have examined interactions between IT change and organizational change during information systems evolution (ISE). We propose a dynamic model of ISE where change dynamics are captured in four dimensions: planned change, improvised change, organizational change and IT change. This inductively-generated model yields a rich account of ISE and its drivers by integrating the four change ...

Improvisation as a Creative Dialogue

Directed Improvisation

We introduce "directed improvisation," a new paradigm for human-computer interaction (HCI). Users direct computer "characters" with abstract instructions and constraints. The characters improvise behaviors that follow the directions, express their personal styles, and meet other objectives. We illustrate directed improvisation with our current testbed application, a Computer-Animated Improvisat...

Control Improvisation

We formalize and analyze a new automata-theoretic problem termed control improvisation. Given an automaton, the problem is to produce an improviser, a probabilistic algorithm that randomly generates words in its language, subject to two additional constraints: the satisfaction of an admissibility predicate, and the exhibition of a specified amount of randomness. Control improvisation has multip...

Variations on a theme.

A ring satisfying x = x is necessarily commutative. We consider a variety of weaker forms of this condition and show that many but not all of them imply commutativity. We also present a variety of elementary proofs of the fact that x = x implies commutativity.