Intelligent negotiation mechanism for supporting the interoperability within the sensing enterprise

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the European Commission through the funding of the UNITE, MSEE and IMAGINE FP7 projects, and the European Space Agency - Concurrent Design Facility (ESA-CDF) for their support in the development of the business case presented in this paper.The Sensing Enterprise is a novel concept that refers to an enterprise anticipating future decisions by using multi-dimensional information captured through physical and virtual objects. The Sensing Enterprise concept is shifting focus towards a borderless enterprise, having at its core the collaboration and continuous interactions among smart objects and systems. But in the actual competitive and global business context, the maintenance of the collaboration environment through the interoperation among heterogeneous smart virtual and physical objects in a collaborative organizational environment becomes difficult to achieve. Therefore, in a dynamic context a change in any component of the networked partners affects the others, creating difficulties to sustain operating networked environment. In this respect, this paper proposes an intelligent negotiation framework as a key mechanism to achieve and maintain the interoperability between the organisations' smart objects and applications, and its validation in an industrial scenario. To allow a sustainable, flexible and generic approach towards the infrastructure implementation in global scale, a cloud-based platform is proposed for setting of the Sensing Enterprise framework.publishersversionpublishe

Child Exploitation and the FIFA World Cup: A review of risks and protective interventions

This review was commissioned by the Child Abuse Programme (CAP) of Oak Foundation, a large international philanthropic organisation. It forms part of CAP’s effort to win societal rejection of practices such as the sexual exploitation of children and adolescents around major sporting events (MSEs), and to embed prevention and protection from exploitation as a permanent concern for global sports-related bodies. This review is intended to inform action in countries that host MSEs and to provide some suggestions on how hosting countries can avoid past pitfalls and mistakes in relation to child exploitation, especially economic and sexual exploitation. Importantly, it also acts as a call to action by those responsible for commissioning and staging MSEs, such as FIFA and the IOC, to anticipate, prepare for and adopt risk mitigation strategies and interventions. Positive leadership from these culturally powerful bodies could prove decisive in shifting hearts, minds and actions in the direction of improved safety for children

Crowd sourcing challenges assessment index for disaster management

Emergency agencies (EA) rely on inter-agency approaches to information management during disasters. EA have shown a significant interest in the use of cloud-based social media such as Twitter and Facebook for crowd-sourcing and distribution of disaster information. While the intentions are clear, the question of what are its major challenges are not. EA have a need to recognise the challenges in the use of social media under their local circumstances. This paper analysed the recent literature, 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2010-11 Queensland flood cases and developed a crowd sourcing challenges assessment index construct specific to EA areas of interest. We argue that, this assessment index, as a part of our large conceptual framework of context aware cloud adaptation (CACA), can be useful for the facilitation of citizens, NGOs and government agencies in a strategy for use of social media for crowd sourcing, in preventing, preparing for, responding to and recovering from disasters. © (2012) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved

Socializing in emergencies—A review of the use of social media in emergency situations

AbstractSocial media tools are integrated in most parts of our daily lives, as citizens, netizens, researchers or emergency responders. Lessons learnt from disasters and emergencies that occurred globally in the last few years have shown that social media tools may serve as an integral and significant component of crisis response. Communication is one of the fundamental tools of emergency management. It becomes crucial when there are dozens of agencies and organizations responding to a disaster. Regardless of the type of emergency, whether a terrorist attack, a hurricane or an earthquake, communication lines may be overloaded and cellular networks overwhelmed as too many people attempt to use them to access information. Social scientists have presented that post-disaster active public participation was largely altruistic, including activities such as search and rescue, first aid treatment, victim evacuation, and on-line help. Social media provides opportunities for engaging citizens in the emergency management by both disseminating information to the public and accessing information from them. During emergency events, individuals are exposed to large quantities of information without being aware of their validity or risk of misinformation, but users are usually swift to correct them, thus making the social media “self-regulating”

Scholarly Activity 2013-2015

Kwantlen authorsKwantlen Polytechnic University publicationsscholarly publishingThe Office of Research and Scholarship at KPU publishes an annual bibliography of faculty scholarly activity. The research and scholarly activity profiled in this publication illustrates the variety of topics and methods by which KPU is enhancing its reputation as an applied polytechnic university. There is a growing body of thematic and individually inspired research that we believe can be characterized as - driven by demand; informed by science; and transformed by impac

The technological growth in eHealth services

The infusion of information communication technology (ICT) into health services is emerging as an active area of research. It has several advantages but perhaps the most important one is providing medical benefits to one and all irrespective of geographic boundaries in a cost effective manner, providing global expertise and holistic services, in a time bound manner. This paper provides a systematic review of technological growth in eHealth services. The present study reviews and analyzes the role of four important technologies, namely, satellite, internet, mobile, and cloud for providing health services.Web of Scienceart. no. 89417

Organizational justice, role stressors job satisfaction and turnover intention among IT professions in Thailand's ICT industry

Although turnover intention has been studied widely in Western countries, such studies are still small in number in Asia countries like Thailand. The aims of this quantitative research were: to empirically determine the significant predictors of organizational justice (distributive justice and procedural justice) and role stressors (role ambiguity, role conflict, work-overload and work-family conflict); to examine the mediating effect of job satisfaction on the relationship between predictors and turnover intention, and to investigate the applicability of the Social Exchange Theory (SET) in explaining turnover intention in Thailand. A survey was conducted among 342 IT professionals in 21 ICT organizations located in Thailand‟s ICT industry‟s four sub-sector (Computer Hardware, Computer Software, Technology Information (IT) Services and Communication). Data were analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Out of the 13 hypotheses regarding turnover intention, seven had significant direct effects (distributive justice, procedural justice, role ambiguity, role conflict, work-overload to job satisfaction; job satisfaction to turnover intention). The finding of this study revealed that there is a positive significant relationship between distributive justice and procedural justice with job satisfaction. This study also revealed that there is a negative significant relationship between role ambiguity, role conflict, work-overload and work-family conflict with job satisfaction. This study found a statistically negative significant relationship between job satisfaction and turnover intention. The study also found that job satisfaction was a full mediator of the relationship between distributive justice, procedural justice, role conflict and work-family conflict with turnover intention. Finally, job satisfaction partially mediated the relationship of role ambiguity and work-family conflict with turnover intention. The present study also highlighted the implications of the study, future research work as well as its limitations