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Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a vocational communication skill from the helping professions. Verbal skills in MI are summarized under the acronyms OARS and EARS (open-ended questions/elaborating, affirmations, reflections, and summaries). The purpose of this paper is to outline how MI provides important skills for engineers, and demonstrate skill assessment by using an observation-based scientific approach.

Totally, 25 engineering students took part in a skill-based MI training. Quality assurance of the training was assessed by using a repeated measurement design with multiple measures: systematic observations from recorded interactions and self-reported and standardized performance measures. Two external observers reliably coded the recorded conversations using the MI skill code.

Trainees showed a significant increase of verbal skills in MI. Directive-confrontational behaviors decreased after training. Self-reported and performance measures indicated significant increases in MI post training. Conversational partners in the post-training condition showed significantly more motivation in comparison to partners before the training.

The main limitation of the study is the small sample size. However, training effect sizes showed large effects on verbal skills.

Communication skills in MI can be taught effectively for a technical population. This study suggests that MI is effective within the higher education of technical professions who have to deal with motivational issues. Observational measures can be used for quality assurance purposes, but also serve as a feedback instrument for work-based learning purposes.

This is the first study to evaluate training in MI for engineers using a multi-method approach with observational measures.

The Software Engineering Applications Laboratory (SEAL) is a university‐based research enterprise with project activity in the areas of software quality management and the development of specialized engineering applications. The SEAL was awarded a third party ISO 9001 certification for software development in July 1995. Reviews the motivation for developing an ISO 9001 compliant quality management system (QMS). Examines some of the special challenges which had to be faced while developing the QMS. Considers benefits which have accrued from this experience.

This study seeks insights into the engineering undergraduates’ knowledge of problem-solving process, teamwork characteristics and communication skills.

The data for the study were collected through consecutive sampling technique from 78 engineering undergraduates at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Pilani Campus, India on a five-point Likert scale-based questionnaire.

Exploratory factor analysis results traced three stages of the problem-solving process. However, the results of teamwork characteristics and communication skills validated the literature-based results. An important finding was that all the three skills were correlated. This means that one skill can be used to develop and promote other skills. The paired sample t-test demonstrated that all the three skills were perceived with a difference, which indicates that these skills worked in collaboration without losing their individuality.

This study supports that there is a need to engage learners in an active and collaborative environment to improve the engineering undergraduates’ knowledge of skills.

The conscious effort to make the engineering undergraduates aware would reduce the gap between the graduating engineers skills currently possessed in academia and the required skills at workplace.

With the increasing spread of ontologies in various domains, units have gradually become an essential part of ontologies and units ontologies have been developed to offer a better expression ability for the practical usage. From the perspectives of architecture, comparison and reuse, the purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive survey on four mainstream units ontologies: quantity-unit-dimension-type, quantities, units, dimensions and values, ontology of units of measure and units ontology (UO) of the open biomedical ontologies, in order to address well the state of the art and the reuse strategies of the UO.

An architecture of units ontologies is presented, in which the relations between key factors (i.e. units of measure, quantity and dimension) are discussed. The criteria for comparing units ontologies are developed from the perspectives of organizational structure, pattern design and application scenario. Then, the authors compare four typical units ontologies based on the proposed comparison criteria. Furthermore, how to reuse these units ontologies is discussed in materials science domain by utilizing two reuse strategies of partial reference and complete reference.

Units ontologies have attracted high attention in the scientific domain. Based on the comparison of four popular units ontologies, this paper finds that different units ontologies have different design features from the perspectives of basis structure, units conversion and axioms design; a UO is better to be applied to the application areas that satisfy its design features; and many challenges remain to be done in the future research of the UO.

This paper makes an extensive review on units ontologies, by defining the comparison criteria and discussing the reuse strategies in the materials domain. Based on this investigation, guidelines are summarized for the selection and reuse of units ontologies.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to a transdisciplinary understanding of the nature of information.

The work draws from previous work done on information in several disciplines and contexts, and proposes a new framework for describing and understanding information. It applies the framework to several different situations involving information, explores the insights revealed by the use of the framework and discusses some of the implications.

Information is usefully described as a situated event that extracts or generates meaning, with the distinction between extracting or generating meaning corresponding to the distinction between semantic and environmental information. A diagrammatic convention based on communications theory and making use of hierarchies of levels is found to provide a powerful means of conveying many of the aspects of the nature of information, and of understanding the role of information in a wide range of applications. An additional specific finding of the work is that information is inherently provisional.

The diagrammatic framework is a new way of presenting, describing and understanding information, and the suggestion that information is inherently provisional is believed to be new.

This paper aims to design a dual mode X-band substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) bandpass filter in the conventional SIW structure. A pair of back-to-back square and split ring resonator is introduced in the single-layer SIW bandpass filter. The various coupling configurations of SIW bandpass filter using split square ring slot resonator is designed to obtain dual resonant mode in the passband. It is shown that the measured results agree with the simulated results to meet compact size, lower the transmission coefficient, better reflection coefficient, sharp sideband rejection and minimal group delay.

A spurious suppression of wideband response is suppressed using an open stub in the transmission line. The width and length of the stub are tuned to suppress the wideband spurs in the stopband. The measured 3 dB bandwidth is from 8.76 to 14.24 GHz with a fractional bandwidth of 48.04% at a center frequency of 11.63 GHz, 12.59 GHz. The structure is analyzed using the equivalent circuit model, and the simulated analysis is based on an advanced design system software.

This paper discusses the characteristics of resonator below the waveguide cut-off frequency with their working principles and applications. Considering the difficulties in combining the resonators with a metallic waveguide, a new guided wave structure – the SIW is designed, which is synthesized on a planar substrate with linear periodic arrays of metallized via based on the printed circuit board.

This study has investigated the wave propagation problem of the SIW loaded by square ring slot-loaded resonator. The electric dipole nature of the resonator has been used to achieve a forward passband in a waveguide environment. The proposed filters have numerous advantages such as high-quality factor, low insertion loss, easy to integrate with the other planar circuits and, most importantly, compact size.

Integrating sustainability into an undergraduate engineering program at the University of Technology, Sydney has been a challenging project. The authors of this paper have been participant observers of the integration process. In this paper, they have attempted an analysis of that process, focussing on the dynamics of the network of people and interests, which have shaped the process. Actor network theory was used to provide an analytical framework for the analysis. The interests and experiences of the authors in the process necessarily influence the analysis. All three authors have been active in positioning sustainability as a central theme for the critique and practice of engineering. Paul Bryce and Stephen Johnston have had long‐standing involvement in technology transfer projects in development. Both have published on engineering as a social activity, critiquing the undue emphasis in engineering education on engineering science, at the expense of attention to engineering practice. Their experience and scholarship have given credibility to their efforts in the faculty to press for a new paradigm of engineering practice. Keiko Yasukawa is an educational developer in the faculty who has been working with staff and students to help them reflect on their idea of what engineering is about in their teaching and learning. She has taken a leading role in shaping the new curriculum.

This study explores the effects of interdisciplinary education on engineering students by observing students' competencies before and after the programme.

The effects of interdisciplinary education were studied over three years through the use of a survey to test the social competencies of organisational life and the interdisciplinary competencies of college students. A total of 5,185 responses were collected from engineering students who took part in interdisciplinary education programmes. The survey was conducted during weeks 3 and 14 of each semester, and a comparison test was used to reveal any changes.

Among the 12 competencies developed or adapted, leadership significantly improved during all six semesters. Analytical thinking, interpersonal competency, professional attitude, global-mindedness, and creative attitudes also improved in some of the semesters.

It was not possible to control for the effect of classes that students were attending in addition to the targeted interdisciplinary class. However, this study was able to examine empirically the improvement of competencies for future engineers, and its findings provide a basis for future researchers to elaborate on other competencies as well.

The study recommends competencies needed by engineers working in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, examining the effects of interdisciplinary education on competency development. It contributes to strengthening the current trend in universities that seek to reform interdisciplinary education by empirically verifying its effectiveness.

Dynamic knowledge interaction is interaction that brings about mutual understanding and knowledge evolution in a community. Proposes a communication medium called conversational medium that provides the user with a means for interacting with the content in a conversational fashion, and presents a traveling conversation model in which the community knowledge process is modeled as circulation of conversational contents that represent small talks in a community. Shows several pilot systems based on these ideas, including the public opinion channel which is an interactive broadcasting system that collects small talks and broadcasts stories reorganized from the archive of small talks; EgoChat which is a system based on a talking‐virtualized‐egos metaphor; Voice Café which is a system consisting of a physical object and a conversational agent that allows artifacts to make conversation with people or other artifacts; and embodiment communication for communicating more vivid information by introducing non‐verbal communication facilities.

Using total interpretive structural modelling (TISM), this paper aims to “identify”, “analyse” and “categorise” the sustainable-resilience readiness factors for healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic.

To obtain the data, a closed-ended questionnaire was used in addition to a scheduled interview with each respondent. To identify how the factors interact, the TISM approach was employed and the cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to a classification method was used to rank and categorise the sustainable-resilience readiness factors.

This study identified ten sustainable-resilience readiness factors for healthcare during the Covid-19 pandemic. The study states that the major factors are environmental scanning, awareness and preparedness, team empowerment and working, transparent communication system, learning culture, ability to respond and monitor, organisational culture, resilience engineering, personal and professional resources and technology capability.

The study focused primarily on sustainable-resilience readiness characteristics for the healthcare sector.

This research will aid key stakeholders and academics in better understanding the factors that contribute to sustainable-resilience in healthcare.

This study proposes the TISM technique for healthcare, which is a novel attempt in the subject of readiness for sustainable-resilience in this sector. The paper proposes a framework including a mixture of factors for sustainability and resilience in the healthcare sector for operations.