Time to sum up the process. Since updating my page at
the institute is so cumbersome, I can as well do it in my blog. My PhD thesis is about knowledge: what it is, how it's represented and how to measure it. It is also about how knowledge influences performance and how knowledge overlap in groups affects group performance. I don't really have a catchy title yet but it will be something like 'structural knowledge assessment and knowledge-related determinants of performance in complex problem solving' or something similar. It basically consists of the following parts:
1. What is knowledge and how is it conceptualized in the field of knowledge management? I've written
a paper with
Kozo Sugiyama on this, it will appear in the February issue of the
Journal of Knowledge Management. One of its core assumptions is that unconscious access to structural knowledge is part of individual implicit memory.
2. Based on that assumption, I developed a computer-based psychometric test, the association structure test, that derives a knowledge graph for a given stimulus based on free term associations and reaction times. Unfortunately, it doesn't work quite as good as I expected as I explain in
a paper that I successfully submitted to the
WM2007 conference. I am also co-chairing the
workshop on new approaches for implicit knowledge in knowledge management (NAIK2007) with Wolfgang Scholl at WM2007.
3. Based on structural assumptions from (1), I have developed a similarity algorithm for the
skillMap. The skillMap started as a Knowledge Management System envisioned by
Dr. Sarah Spiekermann and I have contributed to its actual design and development. There is an
own post on that project, but the algorithm calculates a similarity measure between persons based on their knowledge self-assessment. That seems to work pretty good, but I currently cannot publish anything on this as we're trying to spin off a company and sell the technology.
4.
Prof. Scholl, the supervisor of my PhD, formulated some theories on how knowledge overlap inside teams influences their performance. Hy says that there is a second-order polynomial connection between cognitive similarities of team members, knowledge increase and performance. I was able to validate his claim with an experiment I conducted in summer 2006. The paper on this is completed and I am currently waiting on his feedback prior to submitting it.
I hope to turn it in in June...
Labels: knowledge, knowledge management, PhD, psychology, skillMap, thesis
