he runs research groups on virtual communities, e-health, and ubiquitous/mobile computing and manages several publicly funded research projects. his teaching and research areas include It innovation management, service science, ubiquitous and mobile computing, collaboration engineering, e-health, online communities, and It management. MichaeL huber is a researcher at the chair for Information Systems, technische universität München since he graduated from there with an M.S. in computer Science in 2007. his research interests include community engineering, virtual communities, communities for innovations, It support of collaborative activities, and humancomputer interaction. he is engaged in the research project GENIE, a project that supports customer-driven development of innovations for software companies, funded by the German Federal Ministry of research and Education. he also runs the research project SaPiens-an Internet-based ideas competition for students and scholars, collaboratively developing innovations. uLrich bretschneider is a researcher at the chair for Information Systems, technische universität München, Munich, Germany. he graduated in business administration (majoring in Information Systems) at the university of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany. his current research experiences and interests include virtual communities as well as open innovation, especially ideas competitions and ideas communities. he runs the research project GENIE, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and research. he is also engaged in the research project SaPiens.

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Enabled by Internet-based technologies, users are increasingly participating and collaborating in idea generation in online innovation communities. Beyond increasing the quantity of ideas contributed by users, firms are looking to obtain innovation ideas of better quality. However, with the limited understanding of the phenomenon, few studies have focused on investigating what determines the quality of collaboratively generated user ideas in online innovation communities. This study aims to address this knowledge gap by investigating the antecedents of the quality of user generated ideas from a knowledge collaboration perspective. Based on this perspective, we propose that idea creation effort, peer co-production, and peer feedback will directly and interactively influence the quality of user generated ideas. The model was tested with archival data from the SAPien's innovation community as well as idea quality rating data from experts. The results reveal that idea creation effort and peer feedback affect the quality of user generated idea. Further, idea creation effort negatively moderates the relationship between peer co-production and the quality of user generated ideas.

This paper presents a research project called GENIE. It aims at developing a concept for integrating external stakeholders into a company's innovation management through a virtual community. This novel instrument for opening up a company's innovation process to external stakeholders enables collaborative creation and implementation of innovations along the entire innovation process. We focus on software companies and aim at developing and testing this approach in several real-world settings.

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.

Enterprise Search (ES) is different from traditional IR due to a number of reasons, among which the high level of ambiguity of terms in queries and documents and existence of graph-structured enterprise data (ontologies) that describe the concepts of interest and their relationships to each other, are the most important ones.Our method identifies concepts from the enterprise ontology in the query and corpus. We propose a ranking scheme for ontology sub-graphs on top of approximately matched token q-grams. The ranking leverages the graph-structure of the ontology to incorporate not explicitly mentioned concepts. It improves previous solutions by using a fine-grained ranking function that is specifically designed to cope with high levels of ambiguity. This method is able to capture much more of the semantics of queries and documents than previous techniques. We prove this claim by an evaluation of our method in three real-life scenarios from two different domains, and found it to consistently be superior both in terms of precision and recall.

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This paper describes a physical laboratory model to study two‐dimensional transient water and solute transport in unsaturated soil, including water uptake by roots. It features an automatic two‐dimensional gamma ray attenuation scanner for measuring soil water content. Automation is obtained with a simple closed loop control circuit. After a gamma count is transmitted to the teletypewriter, a signal is sent to the hydraulically moved scanner to search for the next grid point. Upon arrival the scanner sends a signal back to initiate another data acquisition sequence, and so on. In this way, synchronization between counter and scanner is assured independent of counting time, travel time, configuration of grid points, temporary slowdown, etc. It also eliminates dead time between grid points for any recording pattern. Grid points are established by an array of holes that trap the core of a solenoid actuator. The configuration of grid points can be changed easily by opening and closing the desired holes. This mechanical trapping was found to be simpler and more accurate than a potentiometric control. The soil water flow model is constructed in modules. It can be used as one unit of 3.15 by 1.07 by 0.178 m and inclined up to 30°, or it can be subdivided into up to eight compartments, each with its own drainage filter tubes. The front glass walls allow visual observations of soil packing, wetting fronts, root distribution, etc. The back aluminum walls allow installation of instruments, such as tensiometers, salinity sensors, and psychrometers.