Mary Herman is currently the Executive Director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation.
Early life and career
Mary G. Herman was born in Fort Worth, Texas and graduated in 1968 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Education.
Prior to this appointment, Herman was the Deputy Director of Development for the Foundation, where she was responsible for all fund-raising activities and guided strategic planning for the LBJ Foundation, the LBJ Library and Museum, and the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
From 2004-2008, Herman served as Executive Director of the Texas Book Festival.
Early life and career
Mary G. Herman was born in Fort Worth, Texas and graduated in 1968 from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Education.
Prior to this appointment, Herman was the Deputy Director of Development for the Foundation, where she was responsible for all fund-raising activities and guided strategic planning for the LBJ Foundation, the LBJ Library and Museum, and the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
From 2004-2008, Herman served as Executive Director of the Texas Book Festival.
Be Informed
Be Informed is a software vendor headquartered in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. The company has offices in the United States, United Kingdom and Turkey; and is represented in Scandinavia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Market position
Throughout its development, the product, called Be Informed business process platform, has grown from a business rules engine to a business process management suite, and is now an example of what analyst firm Gartner labeled a model-driven application. In Gartner's definition of a model-driven application, "changes to solution behavior are made by altering the metadata model, rather than by changing code, turning switches on or off, or using tables or configuration files." In other words, model-driven applications store all business logic in a model, instead of making it part of the application itself.
The Be Informed business process platform is not process-centric, but uses an approach called advanced case management, or as analyst firm Forrester calls it, dynamic case management. Forrester defines dynamic case management as "a highly structured, but also collaborative, dynamic and information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling the case. Examples of case folders include a patient record, a lawsuit, an insurance claim, or a contract, and the case folder would include all the documents, data, collaboration artefacts, policies, rules, analytics and other information needed to process and manage the case."
Technology
Be Informed does not predefine processes and roles, sequence and workflow. Instead it derives a dynamic activity plan in real-time from a central model. This model, called a target operating model (TOM), contains all aspects of stakeholders, communication channels, activities, decision rules and registrations that are relevant to the business. This approach allows any combination or permutation of elements in a TOM to exist, as described in the model, bringing mass customization to administrative processes.
In order to be able to continuously recalculate and update the dynamic activity plan, the Be Informed inferencing engine is backward chaining. It starts with the goal of the process in mind, and words backwards through all possible activities to see what needs to be completed in order to reach the goal. Be Informed uses pre and post conditions to specify flexible business processes, a USPTO patent-pending approach.
The Be Informed model containing all the business logic to execute the business process is built using Semantic Web technology. It uses a notation that follows Web Ontology Language (OWL), to describe meaningful relations between the individual concepts in the model. The Be Informed server does not generate any code, it directly executes the model, directly taking any changes into account.
Be Informed is an industry partner in several European Union-sponsored research projects, such as SEAL, Monnet and Molto. SEAL provides stakeholders of legislative processes with a supporting environment that enables the construction of legal documents. According to the Monnet website, the project develops a solution to the cross-language information access problem by using a novel combination of Machine Translation and Semantic Web Technology.. According to the Molto website, Molto's goal is to develop a set of tools for translating texts between multiple languages in real time with high quality. As its main technique, MOLTO uses domain-specific semantic grammars and ontology-based interlinguas. These components are implemented in GF (Grammatical Framework), which is a grammar formalism where multiple languages are related by a common abstract syntax.
Recognition
Be Informed has received coverage from the main analyst firms.
* Gartner called Be Informed a “cool vendor” in 2009 and wrote “Organizations that require ways to manage, improve, control and support their unstructured, knowledge-intensive processes should take a serious look at the innovations that Be Informed is bringing to this underexploited area of BPM.”
* Forrester dedicated a Vendor Snapshot to Be Informed in 2011 and wrote “Netherlands-based Be Informed has developed something truly new in the marketplace. Rather unusually, this radically different approach has developed a remarkable track record of success in a variety of large scale implementations.”
* Ovum Ltd. published an “On the Radar” report on Be Informed in 2012, saying “Be Informed delivers a next-generation business process platform that has substantial references in complex enterprise environments. Be Informed’s solutions have the potential to be a disruptive technology . Tangible results are measured in weeks and months, rather than quarters and years.”
The Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure & Environment published that the WABO act, supported by a Be Informed application, saves the country over 130 million euro per year.
Be Informed customers have won several awards. Dutch Immigration Service won the NAF Architecture Award 2009 and the iCMG Award in 2011. Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation won the NAF Architecture Award in 2010.
Be Informed is a software vendor headquartered in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands. The company has offices in the United States, United Kingdom and Turkey; and is represented in Scandinavia, Latin America and the Caribbean.
Market position
Throughout its development, the product, called Be Informed business process platform, has grown from a business rules engine to a business process management suite, and is now an example of what analyst firm Gartner labeled a model-driven application. In Gartner's definition of a model-driven application, "changes to solution behavior are made by altering the metadata model, rather than by changing code, turning switches on or off, or using tables or configuration files." In other words, model-driven applications store all business logic in a model, instead of making it part of the application itself.
The Be Informed business process platform is not process-centric, but uses an approach called advanced case management, or as analyst firm Forrester calls it, dynamic case management. Forrester defines dynamic case management as "a highly structured, but also collaborative, dynamic and information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling the case. Examples of case folders include a patient record, a lawsuit, an insurance claim, or a contract, and the case folder would include all the documents, data, collaboration artefacts, policies, rules, analytics and other information needed to process and manage the case."
Technology
Be Informed does not predefine processes and roles, sequence and workflow. Instead it derives a dynamic activity plan in real-time from a central model. This model, called a target operating model (TOM), contains all aspects of stakeholders, communication channels, activities, decision rules and registrations that are relevant to the business. This approach allows any combination or permutation of elements in a TOM to exist, as described in the model, bringing mass customization to administrative processes.
In order to be able to continuously recalculate and update the dynamic activity plan, the Be Informed inferencing engine is backward chaining. It starts with the goal of the process in mind, and words backwards through all possible activities to see what needs to be completed in order to reach the goal. Be Informed uses pre and post conditions to specify flexible business processes, a USPTO patent-pending approach.
The Be Informed model containing all the business logic to execute the business process is built using Semantic Web technology. It uses a notation that follows Web Ontology Language (OWL), to describe meaningful relations between the individual concepts in the model. The Be Informed server does not generate any code, it directly executes the model, directly taking any changes into account.
Be Informed is an industry partner in several European Union-sponsored research projects, such as SEAL, Monnet and Molto. SEAL provides stakeholders of legislative processes with a supporting environment that enables the construction of legal documents. According to the Monnet website, the project develops a solution to the cross-language information access problem by using a novel combination of Machine Translation and Semantic Web Technology.. According to the Molto website, Molto's goal is to develop a set of tools for translating texts between multiple languages in real time with high quality. As its main technique, MOLTO uses domain-specific semantic grammars and ontology-based interlinguas. These components are implemented in GF (Grammatical Framework), which is a grammar formalism where multiple languages are related by a common abstract syntax.
Recognition
Be Informed has received coverage from the main analyst firms.
* Gartner called Be Informed a “cool vendor” in 2009 and wrote “Organizations that require ways to manage, improve, control and support their unstructured, knowledge-intensive processes should take a serious look at the innovations that Be Informed is bringing to this underexploited area of BPM.”
* Forrester dedicated a Vendor Snapshot to Be Informed in 2011 and wrote “Netherlands-based Be Informed has developed something truly new in the marketplace. Rather unusually, this radically different approach has developed a remarkable track record of success in a variety of large scale implementations.”
* Ovum Ltd. published an “On the Radar” report on Be Informed in 2012, saying “Be Informed delivers a next-generation business process platform that has substantial references in complex enterprise environments. Be Informed’s solutions have the potential to be a disruptive technology . Tangible results are measured in weeks and months, rather than quarters and years.”
The Dutch Ministry for Infrastructure & Environment published that the WABO act, supported by a Be Informed application, saves the country over 130 million euro per year.
Be Informed customers have won several awards. Dutch Immigration Service won the NAF Architecture Award 2009 and the iCMG Award in 2011. Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation won the NAF Architecture Award in 2010.
A phantom radio station was, in the early days of radio, one which did not own or operate a radio transmitter and was licensed to broadcast only over an existing physical station from which it leased time. The phantom's licensee's call letters were used only during the period of time where the facilities of the physical station were leased.
In Canada, the Canadian National Railway radio network, based in Toronto and known as "CPRY," with initials standing for "Canadian Pacific Royal York", operated out of studios at CP's Royal York Hotel and leased time on CFRB and CKGW until the network was disbanded in 1932.
In Canada, the Canadian National Railway radio network, based in Toronto and known as "CPRY," with initials standing for "Canadian Pacific Royal York", operated out of studios at CP's Royal York Hotel and leased time on CFRB and CKGW until the network was disbanded in 1932.
Urban Mimics (composition from the English to mimic + suffix “-s”) is a group of photographic artists whose primary goal is to become connected the world around us though the blending of the human body with the urban landscape. This leads to the visual integration or camouflage of a subject with his/her environment. Influenced by visual artists such as Liu Bolin and Emma Hack, Urban Mimics have adopted this form of artistic camouflage in creating a new vision of the way we interact with our surroundings.
Influences from the visual arts
The work of Chinese artist Liu Bolin can be seen to adopt the similar artistic principles as by Urban Mimics, who in turn has been influenced by his work. By painting the clothes of his human subject, he makes them visually disappear into the environment. In doing so he creates an almost surreal blending of the subject within his/her surroundings, which he captures through photography. Central to his work is the perfect visual merging of the urban landscape with the subject, and in doing so shares the common philosophy associated with the Urban Minic’s artistic movement.
Desiree Palmen, a Dutch artist who creates cotton suits designed for subjects to literally disappear into the environment.
Emma Hack, she has taken bodypainting to another level. She uses the human body as a canvas and by incorporating the background gives the illusion of a flat surface in which the subject is camouflaged by the wallpaper.
Influence from the movies
The Urban Mimic art form has also been influenced by the classic cinematic technique used to camouflage a subject within their environment, usually for the purpose of going unseen in order to avoid a potential danger or to plan a surprise attack. This can be achieved through the use of camouflaged clothing or mimicking the surroundings in order to become a natural extension of the environment, tricking the intended victim and sometimes also the cinema audience.
A good example can be seen in The Mummy Returns, where the protagonists are attacked by mummified pygmies.
In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) deceives the audience through bodypaint to give the illusion that his eyes are open.
In the movie Garden State, Urban Mimicking is used as a design element.
Urban Mimics as an urban trend phenomenon
Urban Mimics is an artistic movement, similar to other movements such as cultural jamming or cultural hacking, which also aim to artificially transform the environment around us and promoted using modern social media networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.
Urban Mimics in the press
* National German Newspaper Die Zeit published an article featuring photos from the Urban Mimics.
* National Austrian Newspaper The Gap published an article about Urban Mimics and artists who practice it.
Influences from the visual arts
The work of Chinese artist Liu Bolin can be seen to adopt the similar artistic principles as by Urban Mimics, who in turn has been influenced by his work. By painting the clothes of his human subject, he makes them visually disappear into the environment. In doing so he creates an almost surreal blending of the subject within his/her surroundings, which he captures through photography. Central to his work is the perfect visual merging of the urban landscape with the subject, and in doing so shares the common philosophy associated with the Urban Minic’s artistic movement.
Desiree Palmen, a Dutch artist who creates cotton suits designed for subjects to literally disappear into the environment.
Emma Hack, she has taken bodypainting to another level. She uses the human body as a canvas and by incorporating the background gives the illusion of a flat surface in which the subject is camouflaged by the wallpaper.
Influence from the movies
The Urban Mimic art form has also been influenced by the classic cinematic technique used to camouflage a subject within their environment, usually for the purpose of going unseen in order to avoid a potential danger or to plan a surprise attack. This can be achieved through the use of camouflaged clothing or mimicking the surroundings in order to become a natural extension of the environment, tricking the intended victim and sometimes also the cinema audience.
A good example can be seen in The Mummy Returns, where the protagonists are attacked by mummified pygmies.
In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) deceives the audience through bodypaint to give the illusion that his eyes are open.
In the movie Garden State, Urban Mimicking is used as a design element.
Urban Mimics as an urban trend phenomenon
Urban Mimics is an artistic movement, similar to other movements such as cultural jamming or cultural hacking, which also aim to artificially transform the environment around us and promoted using modern social media networking sites such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter.
Urban Mimics in the press
* National German Newspaper Die Zeit published an article featuring photos from the Urban Mimics.
* National Austrian Newspaper The Gap published an article about Urban Mimics and artists who practice it.