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Knowledge is recognised as a valuable resource for organizational growth and sustained competitive advantage, especially for organizations operating in uncertain and challenging environments such as construction. Within the construction industry, communities of practice (CoP) have not been effectively embraced as a strategic tool for knowledge creation and sharing within and between organizations. Accordingly, this paper aims to review CoP and present a pragmatic approach for their utilisation.

A review of the literature on CoPs is provided and examples from the authors' experience are provided to demonstrate their usefulness in addressing problems that are being confronted within the construction industry.

The construction industry is sceptical about adopting “management fads” and gimmick technologies that provide no strategic competitive advantage. Evidence of this can be seen with the industry's reluctance, particularly in Australia, to embrace re‐engineering and concepts associated with lean construction. The industry has been informally using CoP, or aspects thereof, for many years but it has not been formally recognised as a performance improvement tool. Organizations may find it difficult to build, sustain and integrate CoP within their organization, especially when staff are geographically spread over numerous remote locations. It is suggested that the underlying concept of CoP can create and sustain learning and knowing in projects.

The challenge for construction organizations is not necessarily to use intra‐organizational forms of CoP, but to learn how they can use them within the project environment within which they operate. A proposal for using communities of practice, namely “champions of practice” (CoPE), at an inter‐organizational level is proposed in this paper. This hybrid form of CoP is dependent on the sharing of knowledge within and across organizational boundaries. For this to happen effectively within a project environment, the right set of communication tools, incentives, motivation, organizational and managerial mechanisms need to be in place for “best practice” to be formalised and shared in a meaningful and reflective way.

This paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful innovator and leader regarding the challenges of bringing technological discoveries to fruition. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Robin R. Murphy, Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University; Co-lead, Emergency Informatics EDGE Innovation Network Center, Texas A&M, Director of the Humanitarian Robotics and AI Laboratory and Vice President of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) http://crasar.org. In this interview, Dr Murphy provides answers to questions regarding her pioneering experiences in rescue robotics.

As a child, Dr Murphy knew she wanted to be a mechanical engineer and obtained her BME degree from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). While working in industry after her BME, she fell in love with computer science and received an MS and PhD in Computer Science at Georgia Tech where she was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. In the mid-1990s, while teaching at the Colorado School of Mines, she pioneered rescue robots after one of her graduate students returned from the Oklahoma City bombing and suggested that small rescue robots should be developed for future disasters. The National Science Foundation awarded Murphy and her students the first grant for search-and-rescue robots. She has since assisted in responses at more than 20 worldwide disasters, including Hurricane Katrina, the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse, the Tohoku Tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.

The response to the World Trade Center attacks after September 11, 2001 by Dr Murphy’s team from the University of South Florida (the only academic institution), along with four other teams brought together by CRASAR, marked the first recorded use of a rescue robot at a disaster site. In addition to being a founder in the field of rescue robots, she is also a founder in the field of human–robot interaction and the Roboticists Without Borders. She has written over 100 publications and three books: the best-selling textbook, Introduction to AI Robotics, Disaster Robotics and Robotics-Through-Science-Fiction: Artificial Intelligence Explained Six Classic Robot Short Stories. Dr Murphy has received approximately 20 national awards and honors including: the AUVSI’s Al Aube Outstanding Contributor Award, the Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics, CMU Field Robotics Institute “Pioneer in Field Robotics” and TIME Magazine, Innovators in Artificial Intelligence. She is an IEEE Fellow.

The following paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry engineer-turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to market while overseeing a company. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Melonee Wise, an entrepreneur and veteran robot designer. In this interview, Wise candidly discusses her career journey, including the successes and lessons learned in the transitioning from an engineer to the CEO of two robotic start-up companies in just six years.

Melonee Wise had a love for building mechanical things since childhood. At the age of eight, she built and programmed a plotter out of Legos. Wise received BS degrees in mechanical engineering and physics engineering, and an MS degree in mechanical engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While in school, Wise spent her summers interning at Alcoa, DaimlerChrysler and Honeywell Aerospace. She was able to parlay her passion of building robots when she had the opportunity to work on the DARPA Urban Challenge through her university. From there, Wise joined the start-up Willow Garage as a Senior Engineer in 2007. In 2013, she left her position as Manager of Robot Development at Willow to co-found Unbounded Robotics. When Unbounded unexpectedly shut down 18 months later, Ms Wise gave birth to Fetch Robotics, a manufacturer of autonomous and affordable robots for the warehouse and logistics industries.

Melonee Wise is an ambitious robot engineer-turned-entrepreneur in pursuit of fast-paced career and personal growth, and taking on unprecedented challenges. After interning at three large US manufacturing companies, Wise decided to pursue her PhD until the right company and opportunity came along. In 2007, she was asked by a Willow Garage co-founder to leave her PhD studies and join them as their second employee. Willow Garage, the creator of Robot Operating System (ROS) open source software and the PR2 hardware platforms, would go on to become one of the most significant robot incubators of the decade. Wise was one of the co-creators of TurtleBot, a consumer robotics product developed in nine months, and she helped with the design of the PR2 and ROS. Additionally, while at Willow Garage, Wise created the Intern Program, increasing the number of interns from one to over 60. Melonee Wise spun-off Unbounded Robotics in 2013 and headed Fetch Robotics in 2014. Wise and Fetch recently raised more than US$20 million in Series A funding. Wise holds the patent for a steering column lock assembly and has been honored with the prestigious awards: MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators under 35; The 2014 Business Insider’s 15 Most Important People Working in Robotics; and Robohub’s 2013 25 Women in Robotics you need to know about.

The following article is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD and inventor regarding his pioneering efforts and the commercialization of bringing a technological invention to market. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Raffaello D’Andrea, a highly successful entrepreneur and proven business leader and one of the world’s foremost leaders in robotics and machine learning. D’Andrea is Founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board at Verity, the world’s leading autonomous indoor drone company, as well as a Professor of Dynamic Systems and Control at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. D’Andrea is also one of the co-founders and advisors of Robo-Global, an index and research company focused on investments in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence. In this interview, D’Andrea shares some of his business and personal experiences of working in industry and academia and his criteria for turning his ideas into successful working systems.

Raffaello D’Andrea’s entire career is built on his ability to bridge theory and practice. D’Andrea combined his love for science with his need to create and received a BS degree in engineering science at the University of Toronto, where he was awarded the Wilson Medal as the top graduating student in 1991. He obtained both his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering at Caltech, and then he joined the Cornell faculty as an assistant professor. While on leave from Cornell, from 2003 to 2007, he co-founded the disruptive warehouse automation company Kiva Systems, where he led the systems architecture, robot design, robot navigation and coordination, and control algorithms efforts. In 2014, D’Andrea took robotics technology into the air and founded Verity, the world’s first company to deliver a fully integrated autonomous, indoor drone-based system solution.

Raffaello D’Andrea combines academia, business and the arts to reinvent autonomous systems. D’Andrea was a founding member of the Systems Engineering Program at Cornell, where he established robot soccer as the flagship, multidisciplinary team project. In addition to pioneering the use of semi-definite programming for the design of distributed control systems, he went on to lead the Cornell Robot Soccer Team to win four world international RoboCup championships. Kiva Systems, co-founded by D’Andrea and acquired by Amazon in 2012, helped the re-branded Amazon Robotics to disrupt the entire warehousing and logistics systems industry. Additionally, D’Andrea is an internationally-exhibited new media artist, best known for the Robotic Chair (Ars Electronica, ARCO, London Art Fair, National Gallery of Canada) and Flight Assembled Architecture (FRAC Centre). With his team at Verity, he created the drone design and choreography for Cirque Du Soleil’s Paramour on Broadway, Metallica’s WorldWired Tour and Céline Dion’s Courage Tour. Other D’Andrea creations include the Flying Machine Arena, where flying robots perform aerial acrobatics, juggle balls, balance poles and cooperate to build structures; the Distributed Flight Array, a flying platform consisting of multiple autonomous single propeller vehicles that are able to drive, dock with their peers and fly in a coordinated fashion; the Balancing Cube, a dynamic sculpture that can balance on any of its edges or corners and its little brother Cubli, a small cube that can jump up, balance and walk; Blind Juggling Machines that can juggle balls without seeing them, and without catching them. D’Andrea is also collaborating with scientists, engineers, and wingsuit pilots to create an actively controlled suit that will allow humans to take off and land at will, to gain altitude, even to perch, while preserving the intimacy of wingsuit flight. D’Andrea has received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award, the Engelberger Robotics Award, the IEEE/IFR Invention and Entrepreneurship Award in Robotics and Automation and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. In 2020, he was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame and elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

The purpose of this paper is to present a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry PhD-turned entrepreneur regarding the evolution, commercialization and challenges of bringing a technological invention to market.

The interviewee is Dr Aaron Edsinger, a proven entrepreneur and inventor in the field of human-collaborative robotics. Dr Edsinger shares his journey that led him from developing humanoids at Rodney Brooks’ Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, to cofounding four companies, two of which got purchased by Google.

Dr Edsinger received a BS degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford, an MS in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a PhD in Computer Science from MIT and did post-doctorate research in the Humanoid Robotics Group at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. He co-founded his first company Meka Robotics in 2007 and that same year, he started his second company, HStar Technologies. In 2011, he cofounded Redwood Robotics, and in 2013, he sold Meka and Redwood to Google. From 2013 to 2017, he was a Robotics Director at Google. In August of 2017, he cofounded Hello Robot Inc.

Dr Edsinger’s work in robotics grew out of the San Francisco robotic art scene in the 1990s. Since then, he has collaborated and built over a dozen research and artistic robot platforms and has been granted 28 patents. His world-class robotic systems encompass Dr Edsinger’s innovative research in dexterous manipulation in unstructured environments, force controlled compliant actuation, human safe robotics, integrated mechatronic engineering and the design of humanoid robots. Domo, the humanoid robot he built, was named one of Time magazine’s Best Inventions of the Year for 2007. Out of the eight robot companies Google purchased in 2013, two were cofounded by Dr Edsinger. In 2017, Dr Edsinger left Google to cofound his new company, Hello Robot Inc, a stealth mode consumer robot company.

The following paper is a “Q&A interview” conducted by Joanne Pransky of Industrial Robot Journal as a method to impart the combined technological, business and personal experience of a prominent, robotic industry turned successful business leader, regarding the commercialization and challenges of bringing technological inventions to market while overseeing a company. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

The interviewee is Dr Gary Guthart, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Intuitive Surgical, Inc., and a member of the Board of Directors, both roles he has held since 2010. Guthart discusses his journey to becoming the CEO and also shares some of his lessons learned and challenges faced.

Guthart received a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from California, Berkeley. He earned an MS and a PhD in engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Guthart’s first scientific experience came early in his career in a Human Factors Lab at NASA, supporting a team studying human performance assessment of pilots. Guthart was then part of the core team developing foundational technology for computer-enhanced surgery at SRI International. While at SRI, he also developed algorithms for vibration and acoustic control of large-scale systems. Guthart joined Intuitive Surgical as part of the first engineering team in 1996 as a Control Systems Analyst. He was promoted to Vice President of Engineering in 2002 and was appointed President and Chief Operating Officer in 2008.

Under Dr Gary Guthart’s leadership and his more than 25 years of medical technology, engineering, scientific and management experience, Intuitive Surgical, Inc., the world’s most successful medical robotics company, has grown to: more than 8,000 employees; nearly 6,000 da Vinci systems sold; more than 8.5 million procedures performed and an increase in stock (NASDAQ: ISRG) of more than 600%. Guthart is also on the Board of Directors for Illumina, Inc., and a member of the Board of Directors for the Silicon Leadership Group.

Purpose – The transition into motherhood is a major life course event for most women, and is one that can be fraught with difficulties due to the uncertainty and instability which accompanies it. Previous research has explored what factors interplay within this transition with identity changes being considered a key attribute. By using assemblage theory, this study aims to undertake an innovative approach to conceptualising identity. Assemblage theory permitted an exploration of how an identity comes to be assembled and embodied through a mother’s relationality with the social world around her as opposed to merely exploring identity as a static entity of a fixed, organic whole as has predominantly been done previously. Assemblage theory is premised upon understanding processes of becoming as opposed to states of being and as such takes a machinic approach to understanding wholes. Rather than being organic totalities, they are conceptualised as being transient and fluid entities comprising an amalgamation of interchangeable components which collectively stabilise to make up the whole. At times of change, an individual’s ties to an identity undergo deterritorialisation, or weaken, as their sense of self and identity readjusts before then experiencing reterritorialisation once they (re)established their ties to a new identity or role. By conceptualising the mothers as assemblages in this manner, it became possible to understand how the women reconstructed their selves and identities through the situated practices and experiences in their everyday lives as they established ties to their new role as a mother.

Methodology/Approach – Results are presented from biographical narrative interviews with 10 mothers each at different stages in motherhood. The interviews focussed on inducing uninterrupted narratives detailing the lived experiences of these women as they transitioned into and across motherhood. These interviews highlighted key stages in the transition into motherhood where a woman’s identity and sense of self would become destabilised and reformulated as a result of changes in her everyday lived experiences and routines.

Findings – Transitioning into motherhood proved to be a multifaceted process that comprises numerous stages where the new mothers identities would become unstable and deterritorialise as they faced new routines in their everyday life as they became a mother and settled into the role. Four dominant themes emerged during data analysis; emotional turmoil, the reconstruction of relationships, getting comfortable with their baby as well as rediscovering the self. The women largely experienced emotional turmoil as their identities became deterritorialised and reported that the relationships they held with others around them often changed or broke down entirely. It was not until they became comfortable with their baby and their role as a mother that they were able to rediscover their ‘self’ beyond simply being a mother. Once they reached this stage in the transition their identity was able to reterritorialise, becoming more stable as a result.

Originality/Value – This study not only presents an innovative method for conceptualising identity but also demonstrates the value of assemblage theory for conceptualising identity formulation and capturing the fluid and emergent nature of such processes. It demonstrates how assemblage theory can be utilised to further understandings of the multifaceted and ongoing nature of life course transitions. This study sheds light on the potential for assemblage theory to be utilised across a range of sociological topics relating to identity formulation, with such studies having the potential to really broaden the scope of sociological understandings of identity formation and life course transitions.

Education is essential, reading is fundamental, and education is freedom. These are not just hollow clichés, but truisms, probably more so today than ever. Education is freedom, in author's opinion, genuinely reflects the lives of Blacks in this society. The author believes there is no more noble profession than being a dedicated educator but given its current relatively modest status, lives such as Douglass' can emphasize to present and future educators how important their dedication is to the liberation of our youth, particularly youth who are subjugated and possibly experience special needs. The structural obstructions in this society are very real, but the author found the greatest obstacles were psychological, e.g., learning to reject the stereotypes and to pursue her goals, despite the subtle as well as explicit efforts to sabotage. The author shares her early development, which helped shape some personal strategies especially helpful for remaining on course. The author learned the important role of love and passion to enhance her work. The author learned to minimize the negativity, to recruit assistance as needed, to enjoy her students, and to grasp opportunities that presented itself. The author also learned to seek and appreciate the many valuable sources of goodness. Most of the author's battles were within rather than against perceived adversaries, but author did learn to take a stand when external forces appeared to jeopardize the essence of her educational purpose and the constituency, the author was most committed to serve.