Nicole Radziwill

• PhD Technology Management & Quality Systems
• SVP/CxO at Industry

The technology landscape is richer and more promising than ever before. In many ways, cloud computing, big data, virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), blockchain, additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) all repres...

Efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations has been ongoing for over a century, starting with the “scientific management” approach of Frederick Taylor and the “functions and principles” approach of Henri Fayol that gained popularity in the first two decades of the 1900s. More recently, the notion of sustainability—that is,...

In recent years, hype surrounding the proliferation of blockchain-based technology has been significant. Apart from the creation of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it has been difficult to determine what practical utility might lie in the adoption of blockchain, mainly because there are so few in existence at present. Even so, interest in the t...

Efforts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of organizations has been ongoing for over a century, starting with the “scientific management” approach of Frederick Taylor and the “functions and principles” approach of Henri Fayol that gained popularity in the first two decades of the 1900s. More recently, the notion of sustainability -- that...

There is no standard yet for measuring and controlling the costs associated with implementing cybersecurity programs. To advance research and practice towards this end, we develop a mapping using the well-known concept of quality costs and the Framework Core within the Cybersecurity Framework produced by the National Institute of Standards and Tech...

Designing quality in is a cornerstone of modern quality management philosophies. Design for X (DfX) techniques provide guidelines, heuristics, and metrics to ensure that a particular quality attribute exists in a design. Although hundreds of papers have been published on DfX approaches, few researchers have explored systematically applying multiple...

Chatbots are one class of intelligent, conversational software agents activated by natural language input (which can be in the form of text, voice, or both). They provide conversational output in response, and if commanded, can sometimes also execute tasks. Although chatbot technologies have existed since the 1960s and have influenced user interfac...

Declarative styles such as functional programming (FP) are rapidly gaining ground on their imperative cousins, including procedural and object-oriented programming. The shift is subtle because it is happening within the context of multiparadigm programming languages such as JavaScript. FP is better suited to modern processes like test-driven develo...

This exploratory study used the R Statistical Software to perform Monte Carlo simulation of time maps, which characterize events based on the elapsed time since the last event and the time that will transpire until the next event, and compare them to time maps from real Twitter users. Time maps are used to explore differences in the interarrival pa...

Poor software quality can adversely affect application security by increasing the potential for a malicious breach of a system. Because computer security and cybersecurity are becoming such relevant topics for practicing software engineers, the need for educational opportunities in this area is steadily increasing. Universities and colleges have re...

Ensuring high-quality software requires considering the social climate within which the applications will be deployed and used. This can be done by designing quality goals and objectives that are consistent with changing social and ethical landscapes. Using principles of technological determinism, this article presents three cases that illustrate w...

Although involvement in art and design have been shown to play an essential role in catalyzing STEM research, true integration is still an area of active research. The realization of STEM education via STEAM lends itself to interactive and participatory dialogic art; this juncture provides a nonjudgmental space to cultivate the question-making aspe...

We report here on the software Hack Day organised at the 2014 SPIE conference on Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation in Montreal. The first ever Hack Day to take place at an SPIE event, the aim of the day was to bring together developers to collaborate on innovative solutions to problems of their choice. Such events have proliferated in the...

This article examines W. Edwards Deming's 14 points constituting his theory of management, in light of key forces shaping the future of quality in the early 20th century. To do this, the authors explore the philosophy of the Burning Man event, an annual gathering of approximately 50,00 people in the desert of northwestern Nevada. In 2004, founder L...

GBTIDL is an interactive package for reduction and analysis of spectral line data taken with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The package, written entirely in IDL, consists of straightforward yet flexible calibration, averaging, and analysis procedures (the "GUIDE layer") modeled after the UniPOPS and CLASS data reduction philosophies...

The Quality Management Journal (QMJ) was established in 1993 to stimulate dialogue between academics studying quality and business leaders actively working to improve it, when the literature on quality management contained primarily empirical studies with a narrow focus and lack of rigor. QMJ was conceived to fill this gap, and to serve as a forum...

When the Agile Organizing Framework (AOF) is examined through the lens of the social constructivist pedagogy, principles and practices that define an agile learning environment emerge. This paper presents a translation of the AOF to fit the context of instruction in higher education based on the social constructivist perspective, and is not limited...

In 1987, the U.S. Congress created the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), a program that rewards businesses and nonprofits that demonstrate effective, efficient operations. Underlying the MBNQA are criteria to help organizations integrate seven key areas of operations, including: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, informa...

The NRAO faced performance and usability issues after releasing a single-search-box ("Google-like") web application to query data across all NRAO telescope archives. Running queries with several relations across multiple databases proved to be very expensive in compute resources. An investigation for a better platform led to Solr and Blacklight, a...

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is a metric from management accounting that helps expose both the direct and indirect costs of a business decision. However, TCO can sometimes be too simplistic for "make vs. buy" decisions (or even choosing between competing design alternatives) when value and extensibility are more critical than total cost. A three-d...

We have developed a prototype web service that brings the wealth of Virtual Observatory image data to the Google Sky desktop client. The web service, "KML Now!," presents the user with a simple web interface and requires no specialized knowledge of image conversion, coordinate system conversion, or Google Sky's KML metadata format. KML Now! makes u...

Knowledge management requires people to synthesize and interpret information, and technologies to organize, make sense of, and draw conclusions from the collection of knowledge. Together, these people and technologies shape part of a sociotechnical system. The relationships between them make the sociotechnical system behave as a network, where comm...

A rule-based approach to data quality provides for efficient and extensible solutions in validating data sets. A working prototype proves that CLIPS, a trusted rules engine, can integrate with existing data processing libraries through PyCLIPS, resulting in a system which isolates data quality rules from programming logic to allow for parallel deve...

The Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), has been collecting interferometric data (visibilities) since the late 1970's. Converting visibility data into images requires careful calibration of the data, fast Fourier transform processing, and deconvolution methods. To make VLA data access...

In 2006 NRAO launched a formal organization, the Office of End to End Operations (OEO), to broaden access to its instruments (VLA/EVLA, VLBA, GBT and ALMA) in the most cost-effective ways possible. The VLA, VLBA and GBT are mature instruments, and the EVLA and ALMA are currently under construction, which presents unique challenges for integrating s...

A community of practice (CoP) unites individuals with shared interests and shared or complementary competencies to interact on a regular basis, advancing communal learning and knowledge. By facilitating increased, relevant interactions between people, CoPs often improve organizational effectiveness. They can be initiated as a performance-improvemen...

The Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), has been collecting radio interferometry data (visibilities) since the late 1970's. The VLA data archive is a huge resource for radio images of astronomical sources. However, an in-depth knowledge of radio astronomy techniques is needed to obtai...

As the demand for more sophisticated facilities increases, the complexity of the technical and organizational challenges faced by operational space and ground-based telescopes also increases. In many organizations, funding tends not to be proportional to this trend, and steps must be taken to cultivate a lean environment both in development and ope...

To improve operational availability (the proportion of time that a telescope is able to accomplish what a visiting observer wants at the time the observation is scheduled), response time to faults must be minimized. One way this can be accomplished is by characterizing the relationships and interdependencies between components in a control system,...

Since 2003, the monitor and control software systems for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have been substantially redesigned to make the telescope easier to use. The result is the release of the Astronomer's Integrated Desktop (Astrid), an observation management platform used to create and submit scheduling blocks, monitor their progre...

Since 2003, the monitor and control software systems for the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT) have been redesigned to make the telescope easier to use. The result is the release of the Astronomer's integrated desktop (Astrid), an observation management platform used to create and submit scheduling blocks, monitor their progress on the tele...

Whether an astronomer performs his or her own observations, or uses previously observed data extracted from an archive, the question "Can I meet my scientific objectives using this data?" must be answered. To do this, four categories of quality should be evaluated: observing system quality, observability, raw data quality and derived data quality....

GBTIDL {http://gbtidl.sourceforge.net} is an interactive package for the reduction and analysis of spectral line data taken with the Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The software is written entirely in IDL. The top level user interface (the GUIDE layer) consists of a set of straightforward and flexible calibration, averaging, and analysis procedures mod...

The emergence of the Virtual Observatory as a new model for doing science means that the value of a facility instrument is no longer limited to its own lifetime. Instead, value becomes the net effect of optimizing observational throughput, the quality and quantity of data in the archive, and the applicability of the data that can survive and be use...

This study describes the goals, foundational work, and early returns associated with establishing a pilot quality cost program at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). Quality costs provide a means to communicate the results of process improvement efforts in the universal language of project management: money. This scheme stratifies preven...

The costs of making incorrect scientific inferences based on faulty data can be substantial and far-reaching: errors can be subtle, inappropriate conclusions can go unchallenged for years in the literature, and follow-on research may be critically jeopardized. Because most scientific research in the United States is federally funded, the propagatio...

At the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's (NRAO) Science Center in Green Bank, W. Va., visitors curious about radio astronomy and the observatory's history and operations will discover an educational, entertaining experience. Employees also visit the science center, but their thoughts are more on afternoon snacks rather than distant galaxies. T...

The enterprise architecture presents a view of how software utilities and applications are related to one another under unifying rules and principles of development. By constructing an enterprise architecture, an organization will be able to manage the components of its systems within a solid conceptual framework. This largely prevents duplication...

The software development process in Green Bank is managed in six-week development cycles, where two cycles fall within one quarter. Each cycle, a Plan of Record is devised which outlines the team's commitments, deliverables, technical leads and scientific sponsors. To be productive and efficient, the team must not only be able to track its progress...

The Green Bank Telescope (GBT) currently outputs its raw data as a suite of binary FITS files, approximately one per component device on the telescope, which are then consolidated and pre-processed before being written into an AIPS++ Measurement Set for more extensive analysis. This design decision by the GBT project had essentially restricted astr...

The Green Bank Telescope currently produces its raw data as a suite of FITS files, which are then consolidated and pre-processed before being packaged into a Measurement Set (the data structure understood by AIPS++). The separation of data adds to the complexity of data analysis, and we would like to reduce the artificial complexity involved in rea...