Abstract:
Expertise locator systems (ELS) are a special type of knowledge management systems that are used to help locate intellectual capital. ELS aim to catalog knowledge competencies across an organization in such a way, that it can later be queried to identify .who knows what. in the organization. ELS are knowledge sharing systems that point to those that have knowledge of the domain, rather than to the knowledge content itself, which is the subject of knowledge repositories. This presentation describes two such ELS: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.s Expert Seeker and the Searchable Answer-Generating Environment (SAGE), an expertise locator system that was developed to identify experts in the state of Florida. From a system designer.s perspective, the infrastructure or context of an ELS can determine both the choices of ELS structure and knowledge acquisition mechanism. This presentation also describes an application of the actor model of computation to the development of expertise locator systems (ELS). The actor model describes an approach to modeling intelligence in terms of a society of communicating knowledge-based problem experts where each expert may in turn be viewed as a society of primitive actors. A conceptual implementation for SAGE, and ELS in general, based on the actor model as a design paradigm is described. Practical applications for an actor-model based ELS are also discussed.

Bio:
Dr. Irma Becerra-Fernandez is the Knight Ridder Research Professor at Florida International University College of Business Administration, Decision Sciences and Information Systems department. Her research focuses on knowledge management (KM), KM systems, artificial intelligence, enterprise systems, and disaster management. She has studied and advised organizations, in particular NASA, about KM practices. She founded the FIU Knowledge Management Lab eight years ago, and has obtained funding as principal investigator for over $1.7 M from the National Science Foundation, NASA (Kennedy, Ames, and Goddard Space Flight Center), and the Air Force Research Lab to develop innovative KM systems. She has published extensively in leading journals including the Journal of MIS, Decision Sciences, Communications of the ACM, European Journal of Operational Research, IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Knowledge Based Systems, International Journal of Expert Systems Research & Applications, and others. Dr. Becerra-Fernandez is an author of the book Knowledge Management: Challenges, Solutions, and Technologies (Prentice Hall, 2004). She has delivered many invited presentations at many NASA Centers, the NAVY Research Lab, universities around the world, and many international conferences with both an academic and a practitioner focus. Dr. Becerra-Fernandez was the recipient of the 2004 Outstanding Faculty Torch Award, presented by the FIU Alumni Association, the 2006 FIU Faculty Teaching Award and the 2001 FIU Faculty Research Award . She is also the faculty director for the Masters in MIS, and serves in the editorial board of the International Journal of Knowledge and Learning and the International Journal of Mobile Learning and Organisation. Dr. Becerra-Fernandez earned her Ph.D. from Florida International University in 1994 in Electrical Engineering, and her Masters and Bachelors also in Electrical Engineering from University of Miami.