Urban development with dynamic digital twins in Helsinki city

A dynamic digital twin is a feasible solution that can be employed to build real‐time connectivity between virtual and physical objects. Industries like manufacturing, aerospace and healthcare utilise dynamic digital twins for simulation, monitoring and control purposes, but recently, this nascent technology has also attracted the interest of urban designers. Due to the novelty of the dynamic digital twin in urban design, this research study addresses the concept of digital twin technology and investigates its applicability in so‐called smart city settings. Drawing on results from research interviews and examples from the Digital Twin project in Helsinki city, the research illustrates that solid data infrastructure forms the foundation for urban digital twins and the development of future smart city applications and services. Furthermore, data‐enriched digital twins evidently accelerate smart city experimentations and strengthen both learning and knowledge‐based decision‐making. Digital twins have also proved that they offer an environment in which smart city practitioners can bridge multi‐stakeholder urban design teams through one digital platform.© 2021 The Authors. IET Smart Cities published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of The Institution of Engineering and Technology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Specific Electronic Platform to Test the Influence of Hypervisors on the Performance of Embedded Systems

[EN] Some complex digital circuits must host various operating systems in a single electronic platform to make real-time and not-real-time tasks compatible or assign different priorities to current applications. For this purpose, some hardware–software techniques—called virtualization—must be integrated to run the operating systems independently, as isolated in different processors: virtual machines. These are monitored and managed by a software tool named hypervisor, which is in charge of allowing each operating system to take control of the hardware resources. Therefore, the hypervisor determines the effectiveness of the system when reacting to events. To measure, estimate or compare the performance of different ways to configure the virtualization, our research team has designed and implemented a specific testbench: an electronic system, based on a complex System on Chip with a processing system and programmable logic, to configure the hardware–software partition and show merit figures, to evaluate the performance of the different options, a field that has received insufficient attention so far. In this way, the fabric of the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can be exploited for measurements and instrumentation. The platform has been validated with two hypervisors, Xen and Jailhouse, in a multiprocessor System-on-Chip, by executing real-time operating systems and application programs in different contexts.This work has been supported by the Basque Government within the project HAZITEK ZE-2020/00022 as well as the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain through the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) within the project IDI-20201264 and FEDER fund

Context-Aware Telco Outdoor Localization

Recent years have witnessed the fast growth in telecommunication (Telco) techniques from 2G to upcoming 5G. Precise outdoor localization is important for Telco operators to manage, operate and optimize Telco networks. Differing from GPS, Telco localization is a technique employed by Telco operators to localize outdoor mobile devices by using measurement report (MR) data. When given MR samples containing noisy signals (e.g., caused by Telco signal interference and attenuation), Telco localization often suffers from high errors. To this end, the main focus of this paper is how to improve Telco localization accuracy via the algorithms to detect and repair outlier positions with high errors. Specifically, we propose a context-aware Telco localization technique, namely RLoc, which consists of three main components: a machine-learning-based localization algorithm, a detection algorithm to find flawed samples, and a repair algorithm to replace outlier localization results by better ones (ideally ground truth positions). Unlike most existing works to detect and repair every flawed MR sample independently, we instead take into account spatio-temporal locality of MR locations and exploit trajectory context to detect and repair flawed positions. Our experiments on the real MR data sets from 2G GSM and 4G LTE Telco networks verify that our work RLoc can greatly improve Telco location accuracy. For example, RLoc on a large 4G MR data set can achieve 32.2 meters of median errors, around 17.4 percent better than state-of-the-art.Peer reviewe

Smart city : How smart is it actually?

The global megatrends of population growth and fast urbanisation are negatively impacting the life in the cities. Smart city is the high-level concept by which the cities try to address the need to improve their social, economic and environmental sustainability. This thesis studies how the smart city concept is defined, what are the underlying hypotheses and assumptions on which the smart city research is based on, what are the latest results and innovations of the smart city research, how the smart city initiatives are meeting their objectives, and how the hypotheses and assumptions may vary between the smart city initiatives. The objective of this study is to critically review the smart city research paradigm to find possible pitfalls, conflicting results and topics for further study and improvement. This research is conducted as a traditional critical literature review, covering the current academic literature on the smart city topic, the websites presenting the smart city initiatives around the world, and the latest popular literature for contrasting views. A qualitative comparison of the smart city initiatives in selected cities – Helsinki, Singapore and London – complements the literature review. The research strategy in this study approximates the grounded theory, utilising inductive reasoning to generate arguments and conclusions about the form, validity and future of the smart city. This study produced the following key findings: there are many different and overlapping definitions of smart city; the smart city development is mostly seen as the responsibility of smart ICT implementations, while simultaneously demanding for a more focused human viewpoint; the smart city initiatives form complex, multidisciplinary platforms that require holistic evaluation; the current evaluation methods and rankings of the smart cities vary considerably, making the evaluation of the success of the smart cities difficult; some of the existing smart city elements and proposed solutions are ineffective or even counterproductive for the smart city objectives. The main conclusions of this study were that the complex nature of the smart city initiatives and the conflicts and interdependencies of the smart city objectives are not fully addressed in the current smart city research, and that the current smart city research is not adequately multidisciplinary in nature. For the future, this research argues for the increased utilisation of research methods used in information systems science for their ability to address socio-technical and multidisciplinary problems. Also, the need for a future research on the efficacy of the multidisciplinary research of smart cities is identified.Väestönkasvu, siitä aiheutuva muuttoliike ja nopea kaupungistuminen ovat maailmanlaajuisia megatrendejä, jotka usein vaikuttavat kielteisesti elämisen ja asumisen laatuun kaupungeissa. Älykaupunki on ylemmän tason konsepti, jonka avulla kaupungit yrittävät muokata sosiaalista, taloudellista ja ympäristönsä kehitystä kestävämmälle pohjalle. Tässä tutkielmassa tarkastellaan, miten älykaupungin konsepti on määritelty, mitkä ovat ne taustaolettamukset ja perusteet, joiden varaan älykaupunkien tieteellinen tutkimus pohjautuu, mitkä ovat älykaupunkitutkimuksen viimeisimmät tulokset ja innovaatiot, miten älykaupunkihankkeet saavuttavat tavoitteensa ja miten niiden perusteet ja taustaolettamukset vaihtelevat älykaupunkien välillä. Tämän tutkimuksen tavoitteena on kriittisesti tarkastella älykaupunkien tutkimusparadigmaa ja löytää mahdollisia sudenkuoppia sekä ristiriitaisia tutkimusaiheita ja -tuloksia, joita voitaisiin käyttää älykaupunkien jatkotutkimukseen ja -kehittämiseen tulevaisuudessa. Tämä tutkimus on toteutettu perinteisenä kriittisenä kirjallisuustutkimuksena. Lähdeaineistona on käytetty älykaupunkien viimeisimpiä akateemisia tutkimustuloksia ja julkaisuja, älykaupunkihankkeiden omia nettisivustoja ympäri maailman sekä kontrastin vuoksi myös viimeisimpiä populaarin lähdekirjallisuuden käsittelemiä aiheita ja ilmiöitä. Kirjallisuustutkimusta on täydennetty kvalitatiivisella älykaupunkivertailulla, jossa Helsingin, Singaporen ja Lontoon älykaupunkihankkeita on vertailtu keskenään. Työn tutkimusstrategia muistuttaa ankkuroitua teoriaa, jossa induktiivisen päättelyn avulla pyritään lähdeaineistosta löytämään ja luomaan väitteitä, perusteluja ja johtopäätöksiä älykaupunkien muodosta, olemassaolon oikeellisuudesta ja tulevaisuudesta. Tutkimuksessa havaittiin seuraavat pääkohdat: älykaupunki voidaan määritellä usealla, myöskin samanaikaisesti päällekkäisellä tavalla; älykaupunkien kehittäminen nähdään yleensä tieto- ja viestintäteknologisten innovaatioiden kehittämisenä, vaikka samanaikaisesti usein vaaditaan myös inhimillisemmän näkökulman korostamista; älykaupunkihankkeet muodostavat monitahoisia, monia tieteenaloja koskettavia alustoja, jotka vaativat nykyistä kokonaisvaltaisempaa tarkastelua ja arvi-ointia; nykyiset älykaupunkien menestyksen mittarit ja arviointitavat vaihtelevat huomattavasti, jolloin älykaupunkien älykkyyden ja onnistumisen yhteismitallinen arviointi on vaikeaa; jotkut havaituista älykaupunkien ominaisuuksista ja ratkaisuista ovat tehottomia tai jopa kielteisesti älykaupunkien tavoitteisiin vaikuttavia. Tässä tutkimuksessa päädyttiin seuraaviin johtopäätöksiin: älykaupunkihankkeiden monimutkaisen ja ristiriitaisen luonteen takia nykyinen älykaupunkitutkimus- ja kehitys ei täysin pysty vastaamaan näiden ristiriitaisuuksien ja keskinäisriippuvuuksien tuomiin haasteisiin; nykyinen älykaupunkitutkimus ei myöskään ole tieteellisesti riittävän monialaista. Tämän tutkimuksen pohjalta voidaan suositella, että tulevaisuudessa älykaupunkien kehitys voisi pohjautua enemmän tietojärjestelmätieteiden tutkimusmetodologioiden hyödyntämiseen, jolloin älykaupunkien vaatimat sosiotekniset ja monitieteelliset näkökulmat saataisiin paremmin havaittua, katettua ja arvioitua tutkimustuloksissa. Tulevaisuudessa tarvitaan myös tutkimusta siitä, kuinka tehokkaasti monitieteellinen älykaupunkitutkimus onnistuu

On top management support for software cost estimation

Inaccurate software cost estimates continue causing project overruns and hurting firms’ economy. This thesis addresses the problem by focusing on top management role in applying estimation methodologies successfully in organisations. The research questions are 1) How does top management support software cost estimation, and 2) What are the impacts of top management support for creating a good cost estimate for a software project? Three empirical studies, one quantitative and two qualitative, were conducted to address the research questions. The studies identified practices, through which top management is involved in cost estimation, and collected evidence on the impact of practices on estimation success. The quantitative study is based on views of 114 Finnish software professionals, and the quantitative studies are based on in-depth findings from three Finnish software producing companies and projects. The results show that top management support for estimation is mostly indirect. Management focuses on creating a successful environment for estimation instead of hands-on participation.The key factors of top management support include adequate resources, demonstrating the importance of estimation and seeking realism. This indirect role is enough for successful estimation.On the other hand, the results provide evidence that top management may negatively impact estimation. For example, unclear expectations may cause the project team to aim for the wrong outcome, expressed expectations may bias estimation and interpreting estimates as commitments may decrease estimators’ motivation and cause them to give high estimates. The practical implication is that top management should avoid direct participation in software estimation and focus on sustaining a supportive and unbiased environment. By doing this, many projects should be able to avoid failures hurting firms’ competitiveness. From the research perspective, the results provide evidence that people-related perspectives are an important factor in software estimation, implying that a shifting focus from methodologies toward managerial topics is justified.Epätarkat ohjelmistoprojektien kustannusarviot johtavat suunnitelmien ylittymiseen ja rasittavat yritysten taloutta. Tämä väitöskirja keskittyy ylimmän johdon rooliin arviointimenetelmien menestyksekkäässä soveltamisessa organisaatioissa. Väitöskirjan tutkimuskysymykset ovat 1) kuinka ylin johto tukee ohjelmistojen kustannusarviointia ja 2) mitä vaikutuksia johdon tuella hyvän kustannusarvion laatimiseksi on ohjelmistoprojektille? Väitöskirjan tulokset perustuvat yhteen määrälliseen ja kahteen laadulliseen tutkimukseen. Tutkimukset tunnistivat tapoja, joilla johto osallistui kustannusarviointiin sekä keräsi näyttöä osallistumiskäytänteiden vaikutuksista arvioinnin onnistumiseen. Määrällinen tutkimus pohjautuu 114 suomalaisen ohjelmistoammattilaisen näkemyksiin, kun taas laadulliset tutkimukset pohjautuvat löydöksiin kolmen suomalaisen ohjelmistoyrityksen toteuttamista kolmesta ohjelmistoprojektista. Tulokset osoittavat, että ylimmän johdon tuki arvioinnille on pääasiallisesti epäsuoraa. Johto keskittyy hyvien edellytysten luomiseen sen sijaan, että osallistuisi arviointiin henkilökohtaisesti. Tärkeimpiin tapoihin tukea arviointia kuuluvat mm. riittävien resurssien varmistaminen ja realististen arvioiden tavoittelu. Yllä kuvattu epäsuora osallistuminen on riittävää arvioinnin onnistumiseksi. Toisaalta johdon toimet voivat myös vaikuttaa arviointiin negatiivisesti. Esimerkiksi epäselvät tavoitteet saattavat johtaa väärien asioiden tavoitteluun, johdon esittämät odotukset voivat vääristää arvioinnin tuloksia ja arvioiden tulkitseminen lupauksiksi voi laskea arvioitsijoiden motivaatiota ja johtaa perusteettoman korkeiden arvioiden antamiseen. Esitettyjen tulosten perusteella johdon pitäisi välttää suoraa osallistumista arviointiin ja keskittyä arviointia tukevan ilmapiirin luomiseen. Näillä toimilla useat projektit voisivat todennäköisesti välttää yrityksille vahingolliset epäonnistumiset. Tutkimusnäkökulmasta tulokset osoittavat, että inhimilliset tekijät ovat merkittävässä roolissa kustannusarvioinnissa, ja lisäpanostukset johtamisnäkökulmien tutkimiseen ovat perusteltuja

Design for energy-efficient and reliable fog-assisted healthcare IoT systems

Cardiovascular disease and diabetes are two of the most dangerous diseases as they are the leading causes of death in all ages. Unfortunately, they cannot be completely cured with the current knowledge and existing technologies. However, they can be effectively managed by applying methods of continuous health monitoring. Nonetheless, it is difficult to achieve a high quality of healthcare with the current health monitoring systems which often have several limitations such as non-mobility support, energy inefficiency, and an insufficiency of advanced services. Therefore, this thesis presents a Fog computing approach focusing on four main tracks, and proposes it as a solution to the existing limitations. In the first track, the main goal is to introduce Fog computing and Fog services into remote health monitoring systems in order to enhance the quality of healthcare. In the second track, a Fog approach providing mobility support in a real-time health monitoring IoT system is proposed. The handover mechanism run by Fog-assisted smart gateways helps to maintain the connection between sensor nodes and the gateways with a minimized latency. Results show that the handover latency of the proposed Fog approach is 10%-50% less than other state-of-the-art mobility support approaches. In the third track, the designs of four energy-efficient health monitoring IoT systems are discussed and developed. Each energy-efficient system and its sensor nodes are designed to serve a specific purpose such as glucose monitoring, ECG monitoring, or fall detection; with the exception of the fourth system which is an advanced and combined system for simultaneously monitoring many diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Results show that these sensor nodes can continuously work, depending on the application, up to 70-155 hours when using a 1000 mAh lithium battery. The fourth track mentioned above, provides a Fog-assisted remote health monitoring IoT system for diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease. Via several proposed algorithms such as QT interval extraction, activity status categorization, and fall detection algorithms, the system can process data and detect abnormalities in real-time. Results show that the proposed system using Fog services is a promising approach for improving the treatment of diabetic patients with cardiovascular disease

A UX model for the evaluation of learners' experience on lms platforms over time

Although user experience (UX) is dynamic and evolves over time, prior research reported that the learners' experience models developed so far were only for the static evaluation of learners' experiences. So far, no model has been developed for the dynamic summative evaluation of the UX of LMS platforms over time. The objective of this study is to build a UX model that will be used to evaluate learners' experience on LMS over time. The study reviewed relevant literature with the goal of conceptualizing a theoretical model. The Stimuli-Organism-Response (SOR) framework was deployed to model the experience engineering process. To verify the model, 6 UX experts were involved. The model was also validated using a quasi-experimental design involving 900 students. The evaluation was conducted in four time points, once a week for four weeks. From the review, a conceptual UX model was developed for the evaluation of learners' experience with LMS design over time. The outcome of the model verification shows that the experts agreed that the model is adequate for the evaluation of learners' experience on LMS. The results of the model validation indicate that the model was highly statistically significant over time (Week 1: x2(276) = 273 I 9.339, Week2: x2(276) = 23419.626, Week3: x2(276) =18941.900, Week4: x2(276) = 27580.397, p=000<0.01). Each design quality had strong positive effects on the learners' cognitive, sensorimotor and affective states respectively. Furthermore, each of the three organismic states: cognitive, sensorimotor, and affective, had strong positive influence on learners' overall learning experience. These results imply that the experience engineering process was successful. The study fills a significant gap in knowledge by contributing a novel UX model for the evaluation of learners' experience on LMS platforms over time. UX quality assurance practitioners can also utilize the model in the verification and validation of learner experience over tim

INNOVATIVE DIGITAL START-UPS AND THEIR VENTURE CREATION PROCESS WITH ENABLING DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Start-ups have gained media attention since Google, Facebook and Amazon were launched in the 1990s. The book Lean Start-up, published in 2011, was another important milestone for digital start-up literature. As unicorn companies emerge around the world, topics highlighted in the news include the vast amount of capital that digital start-ups are raising, the ways in which these digital ventures are disrupting industries, and their global impact on digital economy. However, digital start-ups, digital venture ideas, and their venture creation process lack a unified venture creation model, as there is a gap in the re-search on entrepreneurial processes in a digital context. This research is an explorative study of the venture creation process of innovative digital start-ups that examines what is missing from entrepreneurial process models in a digital technology context and investi-gates how early stage digital start-ups conduct the venture creation process, starting with the pre-phase of antecedents and ending with the launch and scaling of the venture. The research proposes a novel process model of innovative digital start-up venture crea-tion and describes the nature and patterns of the process. A conceptual model was devel-oped based on the entrepreneurship, information systems, and digital innovation litera-ture and empirically assessed with a multi-method qualitative research design. The data collected from semi-structured interviews, internet sources, and observation field notes covered 34 innovative digital start-ups and their founders. Interviews were conducted in-ternationally in high-ranking start-up ecosystems, and the data were analysed with the-matic analysis and fact-checked by triangulating internet data sources. The contribution to entrepreneurship theory is a new illustrative model of the venture creation process of innovative digital start-ups, including the emergent outcome of the process having a digi-tal artefact at its core (e.g., mobile apps, web-based solutions, digital platforms, software solutions, and digital ecosystems). Digital platforms and their multiple roles in the process are presented, as well as the role of critical events as moderators of the process which trigger new development cycles. During the venture creation process, the recombining of digital technologies, modules, and components enabled by digital infrastructures, plat-forms, and ecosystem partners represent digital technology affordances. This recombina-tion provides opportunities for asset-free development of digital venture ideas