For several years, the National Academies has been engaged in a systemic study of the quality and cost of health care in the United States (IOM, 2000, 2001; National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine, 2005). Clearly, substantial improvements in the delivery of health care are needed and, many have argued, achievable, via value-based competition (e.g., Porter and Teisberg, 2006). ...

The web continues to grow at a phenomenal rate, and the amount of information on the web is overwhelming. Finding the relevant information remains a big challenge. Due to its wide distribution, its openness and high dynamics, the web is a complex system, for which we have to imagine mechanisms of content maintaining, filtering and organizing that are able to deal with its evolving dynamics and ...

This research has two aims: (1) to bridge a gap in blended learning research — the lack of a systems approach to the understanding of blended learning research and practice, and (2) to promote a more comprehensive understanding of what has been achieved and what needs to be achieved in blended learning research and practice. To achieve these aims, we first assess the strengths and limitations i...

The paper stresses the need to emphasize social relationships in system design especially in systems that cross enterprise boundaries in a changing environment. The paper describes these systems as a new class of systems – complex adaptive systems. It describes ways to model collaboration networks in such systems both as the drivers of change and as indicators of knowledge requirements. The pap...

Computer algebra systems (CASs) and automated theorem provers (ATPs) exhibit complementary abilities. CASs focus on ee-ciently solving domain-speciic problems. ATPs are designed to allow for the formalization and solution of wide classes of problems within some logical framework. Integrating CASs and ATPs allows for the solution of problems of a higher complexity than those confronted by each c...

this paper deals with leader-following and leaderless consensus problems of high-order multi-input/multi-output (mimo) multi-agent systems with unknown nonlinear dynamics in the presence of uncertain external disturbances. the agents may have different dynamics and communicate together under a directed graph. a distributed adaptive method is designed for both cases. the structures of the contro...

1Department of Desalination and Water Treatment, Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Sede-Boqer Campus 84990, Israel 2Argonne National Laboratories, Energy Systems Division, 9700 S Cass Avenue, Lemont, IL 3Argonne National Laboratory, BioSciences Division, 9700 S Cass Avenue, Lemont, IL, University of Chica...

Abstract The usual interpretation of the person and task variables in between‐persons measurement models such as item response theory (IRT) is attributes persons tasks, respectively. They can be viewed instead ensemble descriptors patterns interactions among situations that arise from sociocognitive complex adaptive system (CASs). This view offers insights for interpreting using connecting with...

A “Women in Circuits and Systems” (WiCAS) event took place during the 29th IEEE International Conference on Electronics Systems (ICECS), flagship conference for Region 8 of Society (CASS). The WiCAS events traditionally aim to inspire motivate students, young professionals researchers domain circuits systems have efficient roles their professions, by meeting successful female engineers professo...