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(in reverse chronological order)
 ESD-WP-2009-18
Financial Development, Gender and Entrepreneurship
Fernanda Llussá
Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia,
Universidade Nova de Lisboa
and Visiting Researcher, MIT Portugal, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
Female entrepreneurs are much
less frequent than male entrepreneurs. In this paper we investigate
a possible culprit: access to financial services. We use a dataset
with entrepreneurship rates by opportunity and by need from the
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and indicators of financial institutions
from Beck, Demirgüç-Kunt and Levine (2000) for 41
developed and developing countries from 2001 to 2004. Our conclusions
are that financial development, though generally encouraging entrepreneurial
activity, is unlikely, by itself, to contribute to bring male
and female entrepreneurship rates closer together. Moreover, our
results suggest that it is entrepreneurship by need that is most
affected by financial development, suggesting that the possible
more complex aspects of evaluating projects associated with market
or technological opportunities are not overcome by aggregate financial
development and need more specific measures.
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ESD-WP-2009-17
Experiences and Challenges with using CERT Data to Analyze
Stuart Madnick
Sloan School of Management and Engineering
Systems Division, MIT
Xitong Li
Sloan School of Management, MIT
Nazli Choucri
Political Science Department, MIT
With the increasing interconnection
of computer networks and sophistication of cyber attacks, it is
important to understand the dynamics of such situations, especially
in regards to cyber international relations. The Explorations
in Cyber International Relations (ECIR) Data Dashboard Project
is an initiative to gather worldwide cybersecurity data publicly
provided by nation-level Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTs)
and to provide a set of tools to analyze the cybersecurity data.
The unique contributions of this paper are: (1) an evaluation
of the current state of the diverse nation-level CERT cybersecurity
data sources, (2) a description of the Data Dashboard tool developed
and some interesting analyses from using our tool, and (3) a summary
of some challenges with the CERT data availability and usability
uncovered in our
research.
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ESD-WP-2009-16
A Framework for Technology Forecasting and Visualization
Wei Lee Woon
Masdar Institute of Science and Technology
Andreas Henschel
Masdar Institute of Science and Technology
Stuart Madnick
Sloan School of Management and Engineering
Systems Division, MIT
This paper presents a novel
framework for supporting the development of well-informed research
policies and plans. The proposed methodology is based on the use
of bibliometrics; i.e., analysis is conducted using information
regarding trends and patterns of publication. Information thus
obtained is analyzed to predict probable future developments in
the technological fields being studied. While using bibliometric
techniques to study science and technology is not a new idea,
the proposed approach extends previous studies in a number of
important ways. Firstly, instead of being purely exploratory,
the focus of our research has been on developing techniques for
detecting technologies that are in the early growth phase, characterized
by a rapid increase in the number of relevant publications. Secondly,
to increase the reliability of the forecasting effort, we propose
the use of automatically generated keyword taxonomies, allowing
the growth potentials of subordinate technologies to aggregated
into the overall potential of larger technology categories. As
a demonstration, a proof-of-concept implementation of each component
of the framework is presented, and is used to study the domain
of renewable energy technologies. Results from this analysis are
presented and discussed.
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ESD-WP-2009-15
Approach and Preliminary Results for Early Growth Technology Analysis
Blaine Ziegler
Masters Candidate, Electrical Eng. & Computer
Sci., MIT
Ayse Kaya Firat
Masters Candidate, Engineering Systems (TPP),
MIT
Stuart Madnick
Sloan School of Management and Engineering
Systems Division, MIT
Wei Lee Woon
Masdar Institute of Science and Technology
Steven Camina
Masters Candidate, Electrical Eng. & Computer
Sci., MIT
Xuying (Clare) Li
Undergraduate Candidate, School of Science,
MIT
Erik Fogg
MIT Affiliate
Even experts cannot be fully
aware of all the promising developments in broad and complex fields
of technology, such as renewable energy. Fortunately, there exist
many diverse sources of information that report new technological
developments, such as journal publications, news stories, and
blogs. However, the volume of data contained in these sources
is enormous; it would be difficult for a human to read and digest
all of this information – especially in a timely manner.
This paper describes a novel
application of technology mining techniques to these diverse information
sources to study, visualize, and identify the evolution of promising
new technologies – a challenge we call “early growth
technology analysis”. For the work reported herein, we use
as inputs information about millions of published documents contained
in sources such as SCIRCUS, Inspec, and Compendex.
We accomplish this analysis
through the use of bibliometric analysis, consisting of three
key steps:
1. Extract related keywords
(from keywords in articles)
2. Determine the annual occurrence frequencies of these keywords
3. Identify those exhibiting rapid growth, particularly if starting
from a low bas
To provide a focus for the experiments
and subsequent discussions, a pilot study was conducted in the
area of “renewable energy,” though the techniques
and methods developed are neutral to the domain of study. Preliminary
results and conclusions from the case study are presented and
are discussed in the context of the effectiveness of the proposed
methodology.
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ESD-WP-2009-14 Engineering
Responses to Pandemics
Richard C. Larson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Karima R. Nigmatulina
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Focusing on pandemic influenza,
this chapter approaches the planning for and
response to such a major worldwide health event as a complex engineering
systems problem. Action-oriented analysis of pandemics requires
a broad inclusion of academic disciplines since no one domain
can cover a significant fraction of the problem. Numerous research
papers and action plans have treated pandemics as purely medical
happenings, focusing on hospitals, health care professionals,
creation and distribution of vaccines and anti-virals, etc. But
human behavior with regard to hygiene and social distancing constitutes
a first-order partial brake or control of the spread and intensity
of infection. Such behavioral options are “non-pharmaceutical
interventions.” (NPIs) The chapter employs simple mathematical
models to study alternative controls of infection, addressing
a well-known parameter in epidemiology, R0, the “reproductive
number,” defined as the mean number of new infections generated
by an index case. Values of R0 greater than 1.0 usually indicate
that the infection begins with exponential growth, the generation-to-generation
growth rate being R0. R0 is broken down into constituent parts
related to the frequency and intensity of human contacts, both
partially under our control. It is suggested that any numerical
value for R0 has little meaning outside the social context to
which it pertains. Difference equation models are then employed
to study the effects of heterogeneity of population social contact
rates, the analysis showing that the disease tends to be driven
by high frequency individuals. Related analyses show the futility
of trying geographically to isolate the disease. Finally, the
models are operated under a variety of assumptions related to
social distancing and changes in hygienic behavior. The results
are promising in terms of potentially reducing the total impact
of the pandemic.
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ESD-WP-2009-13 ESD and Health
Care Systems: some strategic considerations
Alain de Weck, M.D.
University of Bern, Switzerland (Emeritus)
University of Navarra, Pamplona, Spain
Proper health care delivery
to a growing but aging population is becoming one of the most
challenging tasks of our time. It becomes also one of the most
complex. Although many tools are at hand, grand designs and implementation
systems are mostly lacking. In the industrialized countries, requests
for optimal medical care and the demographic evolution towards
longer life have led to different health care systems but all
of them may be characterized as more or less dysfunctional (see
below). In many developing countries, the gaps caused by the lack
of health care infrastructure and education and by economic backwardness
are becoming increasingly apparent.
On the other hand, the relatively
new approach of engineering for solution and optimization of various
complex problems, such as energy, infrastructures, transportation,
manufacturing or environmental protection leads
us to ask whether the logical and analytical tools developed in
complex systems engineering could also be applied to the whole
or parts of the health care field. A brief discussion of
that issue is the purpose of this memorandum.
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ESD-WP-2009-12
COIM: An Object-Process Based Method for Analyzing Architectures
of Complex, Interconnected, Large-Scale Socio-Technical Systems
Carlos A. Osorio
Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez
Dov Dori
Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and
MIT
Joseph Sussman
MIT
There is growing evidence of
the relevance of human behavioral factors in the success of development
of new products, processes and services. The evidence is even
clearer when the forces affecting the development and evolution
of longlived, large, and open complex socio-technical systems
are researched. Methods that study the architecture of such types
of systems can help scholars and practitioners to better understand,
manage, and develop socio-technical systems. We propose an approach
and a method to address these needs that is grounded in the theory
of systems architecture and builds on the strengths of Object
Process Methodology (OPM) and the process for representing Complex
Large-scale Interconnected Open Socio-technical (CLIOS) systems.
We do so by integrating these methods into the CLIOS-OPM Integrated
Method (COIM). COIM is conducive to studying a system’s
architecture and its evolution, as it is enhanced by a set of
qualitative methods for answering questions about the reasons
(why) and process (how)
of change in human-made systems over time.
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ESD-WP-2009-11
Use of Collaborative Technologies and Knowledge Sharing in Co-located
and Distributed Teams: Towards the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory
Amar Gupta (Corresponding
Author)
University of Arizona and MIT
Elisa Mattarelli
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia
Satwik Seshasai
MIT and IBM
Joseph Broschak
University of Arizona
The relocation of knowledge
work to emerging countries is leading to an increasing use of
Globally Distributed Teams (GDT) engaged in complex tasks. In
the present study, we investigate a particular type of GDT working
‘around the clock’: the 24 hours knowledge factory
(Gupta, 2008). Adopting the productivity perspective on knowledge
sharing (Haas and Hansen, 2005, 2007), we develop 11 hypotheses
to compare technology use, knowledge sharing processes, and performance
of a 24 hours knowledge factory with a co-located team. We conducted
a quasi-experiment in IBM and collected both quantitative and
qualitative data, over a period of 12 months, on a GDT and a co-located
team. Both teams were composed of the same number of professionals,
provided with the same technologies, engaged in similar tasks,
and given similar deadlines. We found that they differed in their
use of technologies and in knowledge sharing processes, but not
in efficiency and quality of outcomes. We show how the co-located
team and the GDT enacted a knowledge codification strategy and
a personalization strategy respectively; in each case, they grafted
elements of the other strategy in order to attain both knowledge
re-use and creativity. We conclude by discussing theoretical contributions
to knowledge sharing and GDT literatures, and by highlighting
managerial implications to those organizations interested in developing
a fully functional 24 hour knowledge factory.
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ESD-WP-2009-10
The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory Paradigm: The Evolving Model for
Offshoring based on Strategic, Economic, Legal, Health, Technical,
and Other Considerations
Amar Gupta
University of Arizona and MIT
The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory
paradigm involves 3 (or more) collaborating centers, each located
in a different continent. Individuals at each center work from
9 am to 5 pm in that country, and then pass the work-in-progress
to the next collaborating center to enable round-theclock performance
in a manner somewhat akin to the deployment of three shifts in
the manufacturing sector.
The 24-Hour Knowledge Factory
is relevant for structured and semi-structured applications in
many knowledge-based industries including accounting, legal, design,
and development. There is a growing array of examples from healthcare
and other domains where off-site professionals have been able
to provide better results than on-site professionals, thereby
validating that many tasks can be more effectively performed using
the 24-Hour Knowledge Factory approach.
The gradual adoption of this
paradigm is motivated by several considerations. In 2007, the
World Health Organization concluded that working at night is a
probable cause of breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in
men. Attempts by US state governments and even the federal government
to discourage outsourcing are unlikely to succeed for multiple
reasons, and the notion of “hybrid outsourcing” will
gain momentum over time. Plus there are the advantages of developing
products and services in a shorter timeframe; furthermore, these
products and services can command broader appeal in the global
marketplace.
A detailed study was conducted
at IBM to compare the performance of a co-located team and a distributed
team, and the performance of the latter team exceeded initial
expectations. The key results from this study will be discussed
in this session.
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ESD-WP-2009-09 Towards quantification
of the Role of Materials
Innovation in overall Technological Development
Christopher L. Magee
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This report develops a method
for quantitatively assessing the role of materials
innovation in overall technological development. The report demonstrates
the method for one specific case and defines the key requirements
to use it in a number of other cases. The new method involves
the comparative examination of overall technical capability metrics
with performance metrics at more detailed levels of progress where
materials and process innovation dominates the progress. This
analysis is supplemented by exploration of the specific technical
capabilities utilized in technological development areas of interest.
It is specifically found that
about 2/3 of the total progress in computation over the past 40
years has been due to materials/process innovations. It is also
found that making reasonably reliable estimates in other functional
areas such as energy storage, information transmission, etc. could
be possible if more attention were paid to the development and
collection of technical progress metrics at the level of materials
and processes (such as Moore’s Law has done for information
transformation). Examination of what is known leads to three other
key (but more speculative) findings: 1) Materials/process innovation
contributes at least 20% of the progress in all areas examined;
2) The contribution of materials/process innovations in energy
storage are possibly 80% or higher; 3) The relative contribution
of materials/process innovation to overall technological progress
has grown in the past few decades.
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ESD-WP-2009-08
A New Model Of Cascades On Random Networks With A Threshold Rule
Fundamentals
Daniel E. Whitney
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Percolation or cascades on random
networks are typically analyzed using generating functions. This
approach requires that the network be assumed infinite and weakly
connected. These assumptions are not obeyed by real or simulated
networks on which this theory is often used. In this paper we
offer a theory that assumes a finite network with arbitrary average
nodal degree and apply it to the case where cascades follow a
threshold rule, that is, that a node will change state (“flip”)
only if a fraction, exceeding a given threshold, of its neighbors
has changed state previously. The model is a dynamic Markov model
whose state transition matrix, recalculated after each step, records
the probability that a node of degree k
has i flipped neighbors after j
steps in the cascade’s evolution. The model reproduces a
number of previously unreported behaviors observed in simulations.
These include the ability to create cascades in a domain previously
predicted to forbid cascades as well as a “near death”
behavior in which cascades initially appear about to die but later
explode. Cascades in the “no cascades” region require
a sufficiently large seed of initially flipped nodes or else the
cascade will die out. The model and simulations are compared with
a foundational paper by Watts which used the generating function
theory.
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ESD-WP-2009-07
White Paper On Novel H1N1: Prepared for the MIT Center for Engineering
Systems Fundamentals (Revised
July 27, 2009)
John M. Barry
Distinguished Scholar, Tulane University Center
for Bioenvironmental Research
Member, Advisory Board, MIT Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals
This paper is an historical
and policy primer for one to prepare for a severe flu pandemic
- which is virtually guaranteed to happen at some time in the
future. The paper provides actionable knowledge, gleaned from
past flu pandemics and from recent science, to reduce the chance
of you and your loved ones from contracting the flu. The paper
discusses both the new novel H1N1 flu virus and the more lethal
H5 N1 ("bird flu") virus. In discussing the future of
H1N1, the author says, "Three of the preceding four pandemics,
1889, 1918, and 1957, show clear evidence of some fairly intense
but sporadic initial local outbreaks scattered around the world.
The novel H1N1 virus seems thus far to be following the pattern
of those three pandemics, and it seems highly likely that it will
return in full flower." The author projects that a full fledged
global pandemic could cut global GDP by up to 4 to 6 percent,
and that companies must now prepare for supply chain disruptions,
even if only the milder H1N1 becomes the prevalent flu. An individual's
behavioral changes with social distancing and hygienic steps can
dramatically reduce the chance of contracting the flu.
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ESD-WP-2009-06
Measuring and Understanding Hierarchy as an Architectural Element
in Industry Sectors
Jianxi Luo
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Daniel E. Whitney
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Carliss Y. Baldwin
Harvard Business School
Christopher L. Magee
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Hierarchy is a generic structure
in which levels are asymmetrically ordered. In an industry setting,
classic supply chains display strict hierarchy, whereas clusters
of firms have linkages going in many different directions. Previous
theory has often assumed the existence of the hierarchical relationships
among firms and empirical work has focused on a single level of
an industry or bilateral relationships. However, quantitative
evidence on the deep hierarchy in large industrial sectors is
lacking. In this paper, we develop metrics and methods to define
and measure the degree of hierarchy in transactional relationships
among firms, and apply the methods to two large industrial sectors
in Japan: automotive and electronics. We compiled the networks
of firms connected by transactional relationships. Our empirical
analysis shows that the automotive sector exhibits a higher degree
of hierarchy than the electronics sector. We further analyze the
differences in hierarchy using a simulation model based on transaction
breadth and transaction specificity. The empirical measurement
and model analysis together indicate that it is the low transaction
specificity that drives down the degree of hierarchy in the electronics
sector. Differences in transaction patterns in turn may result
from the differences in the power level of underlying technologies,
which affect product specificity and asset specificity. Thus,
the degree of hierarchy in an industry sector may be traced back
to fundamental properties of the underlying technologies.
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ESD-WP-2009-05
Framework for the Analysis of the Adaptability, Extensibility,
and Scalability of Semantic Information Integration and the Context
Mediation Approach
by Thomas Gannon
MITRE Corporation
Stuart Madnick
Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division,
MIT
Allen Moulton
Sloan School of Management, MIT
Michael Siegel
Sloan School of Management, MIT
Marwan Sabbouh
MITRE Corporation
Hongwei Zhu
Old Dominion University
Technological advances such
as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have increased the feasibility
and importance of effectively integrating information from an
ever widening number of systems within and across enterprises.
A key difficulty of achieving this goal comes from the pervasive
heterogeneity in all levels of information systems. A robust solution
to this problem needs to be adaptable, extensible, and scalable.
In this paper, we identify the deficiencies of traditional semantic
integration approaches. The COntext INterchange (COIN) approach
overcomes these deficiencies by declaratively representing data
semantics and using a mediator to create the necessary conversion
programs from a small number of conversion rules. The capabilities
of COIN is demonstrated using an example with 150 data sources,
where COIN can automatically generate the over 22,000 conversion
programs needed to enable semantic interoperability using only
six parametizable conversion rules. This paper presents a framework
for evaluating adaptability, extensibility, and scalability of
semantic integration approaches. The application of the framework
is demonstrated with a systematic evaluation of COIN and other
commonly practiced approaches.
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ESD-WP-2009-04
Technology Forecasting Using Data Mining and Semantics: First
Annual Report
by Wei Lee Woon
Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates
Stuart Madnick
Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division,
MIT
Ayse Firat
Doctoral Candidate, Engineering Systems, MIT
Blaine Ziegler
Doctoral Candidate, Electrical Eng. & Computer Sci.,
MIT
Satwik Seshasai
Doctoral Candidate, Engineering Systems, MIT
The planning and management
of research and development is a challenging process which is
compounded by the large amounts of information which is available.
The goal of this project is to mine science and technology databases
for patterns and trends which facilitate the formation of research
strategies. Examples of the types of information sources which
we exploit are diverse and include academic journals, patents,
blogs and news stories. The intended outputs of the project include
growth forecasts for various technological sectors (with an emphasis
on sustainable energy), an improved understanding of the underlying
research landscape, as well as the identification of influential
researchers or research groups.
This paper focuses on the development
of techniques to both organize and visualize the data in a way
which reflects the semantic relationships between keywords. We
studied the use of the joint term frequencies of pairs of keywords,
as a means of characterizing this semantic relationship –
this is based on the intuition that terms which frequently appear
together are more likely to be closely related. Some of the results
reported herein describe: (1) Using appropriate tools and methods,
exploitable patterns and information can certainly be extracted
from publicly available databases, (2) Adaptation of the Normalized
Google Distance (NGD) formalism can provide measures of keyword
distances that facilitate keyword clustering and hierarchical
visualization, (3) Further adaptation of the NGD formalism can
be used to provide an asymmetric measure of keyword distances
to allow the automatic creation of a keyword taxonomy, and (4)
Adaptation of the Latent Semantic Approach (LSA) can be used to
identify concepts underlying collections of keywords.
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ESD-WP-2009-03
Reconciliation of temporal semantic heterogeneity in evolving
information systems
by Hongwei Zhu
College Business and Public Administration, Old Dominion
University
Stuart Madnick
Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division,
MIT
The change in meaning of data
over time poses significant challenges for the use of that data.
These challenges exist in the use of an individual data source
and are further compounded with the integration of multiple sources.
In this paper, we identify three types of temporal semantic heterogeneity.
We propose a solution based on extensions to the Context Interchange
framework, which has mechanisms for capturing semantics using
ontology and temporal context. It also provides a mediation service
that automatically reconciles semantic conflicts. We show the
feasibility of this approach with a prototype that implements
a subset of the proposed extensions.
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ESD-WP-2009-02
Preventing Accidents and Building a Culture of Safety: Insights
from a Simulation Model
by John Lyneis
Sloan School of Management, MIT
Stuart Madnick
Sloan School of Management and Engineering Systems Division,
MIT
Research has approached the
topic of safety in organizations from a number of different perspectives.
On the one hand, psychological research on safety climate gives
evidence for a range of organizational factors that predict safety
across organizations. On the other hand, organizational learning
theorists view safety as a dynamic problem in which organizations
must learn from mistakes. Here, we synthesize these two streams
of research by incorporating key organizational factors from the
safety climate literature into a dynamic simulation model that
also includes the possibility for learning. Analysis of simulation
results sheds insight into the nature of reliability and confirms
the dangers of over-reliance on ‘single loop learning’
as a mechanism for controlling safety behaviors. Special emphasis
is placed on strategies that managers might use to encourage learning
and prevent erosion in safety behaviors over time.
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ESD-WP-2009-01 Does Geographic
Clustering Still Benefit High Tech New Ventures? The Case of the
Cambridge/Boston Biotech Cluster
by Thomas J. Allen
MIT Engineering Systems Division
Ornit Raz
Research Affiliate, MIT Engineering Systems Division
Peter Gloor
Research Scientist, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
An empirical study of scientific
communication among biotechnology companies supports the belief
that geographic clustering does produce increased scientific exchange
among companies. A comparison of companies within a constrained
geographic area with those more dispersed shows a significantly
higher level of scientific communication among the former. Scientific
communication declines rapidly with plupical separation.
Critical of the formation of
cluster – based scientific communication networks is the
presence of both universities and large firms from the same industry.
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