Global Impacts Report 2017

Our fifth Global Impacts Report reflects on the progress of the MSC over the past 20 years, examines the sustainability performance of certified fisheries around the world and highlights areas of future interest

Federated Robust Embedded Systems: Concepts and Challenges

The development within the area of embedded systems (ESs) is moving rapidly, not least due to falling costs of computation and communication equipment. It is believed that increased communication opportunities will lead to the future ESs no longer being parts of isolated products, but rather parts of larger communities or federations of ESs, within which information is exchanged for the benefit of all participants. This vision is asserted by a number of interrelated research topics, such as the internet of things, cyber-physical systems, systems of systems, and multi-agent systems. In this work, the focus is primarily on ESs, with their specific real-time and safety requirements. While the vision of interconnected ESs is quite promising, it also brings great challenges to the development of future systems in an efficient, safe, and reliable way. In this work, a pre-study has been carried out in order to gain a better understanding about common concepts and challenges that naturally arise in federations of ESs. The work was organized around a series of workshops, with contributions from both academic participants and industrial partners with a strong experience in ES development. During the workshops, a portfolio of possible ES federation scenarios was collected, and a number of application examples were discussed more thoroughly on different abstraction levels, starting from screening the nature of interactions on the federation level and proceeding down to the implementation details within each ES. These discussions led to a better understanding of what can be expected in the future federated ESs. In this report, the discussed applications are summarized, together with their characteristics, challenges, and necessary solution elements, providing a ground for the future research within the area of communicating ESs

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Cognitive Hyperconnected Digital Transformation

Cognitive Hyperconnected Digital Transformation provides an overview of the current Internet of Things (IoT) landscape, ranging from research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies in a global context. It is intended as a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC-Internet of Things European Research Cluster, including both research and technological innovation, validation and deployment. The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European Research Cluster, the IoT European Platform Initiative (IoT-EPI) and the IoT European Large-Scale Pilots Programme, presenting global views and state-of-the-art results regarding the challenges facing IoT research, innovation, development and deployment in the next years. Hyperconnected environments integrating industrial/business/consumer IoT technologies and applications require new IoT open systems architectures integrated with network architecture (a knowledge-centric network for IoT), IoT system design and open, horizontal and interoperable platforms managing things that are digital, automated and connected and that function in real-time with remote access and control based on Internet-enabled tools. The IoT is bridging the physical world with the virtual world by combining augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to support the physical-digital integrations in the Internet of mobile things based on sensors/actuators, communication, analytics technologies, cyber-physical systems, software, cognitive systems and IoT platforms with multiple functionalities. These IoT systems have the potential to understand, learn, predict, adapt and operate autonomously. They can change future behaviour, while the combination of extensive parallel processing power, advanced algorithms and data sets feed the cognitive algorithms that allow the IoT systems to develop new services and propose new solutions. IoT technologies are moving into the industrial space and enhancing traditional industrial platforms with solutions that break free of device-, operating system- and protocol-dependency. Secure edge computing solutions replace local networks, web services replace software, and devices with networked programmable logic controllers (NPLCs) based on Internet protocols replace devices that use proprietary protocols. Information captured by edge devices on the factory floor is secure and accessible from any location in real time, opening the communication gateway both vertically (connecting machines across the factory and enabling the instant availability of data to stakeholders within operational silos) and horizontally (with one framework for the entire supply chain, across departments, business units, global factory locations and other markets). End-to-end security and privacy solutions in IoT space require agile, context-aware and scalable components with mechanisms that are both fluid and adaptive. The convergence of IT (information technology) and OT (operational technology) makes security and privacy by default a new important element where security is addressed at the architecture level, across applications and domains, using multi-layered distributed security measures. Blockchain is transforming industry operating models by adding trust to untrusted environments, providing distributed security mechanisms and transparent access to the information in the chain. Digital technology platforms are evolving, with IoT platforms integrating complex information systems, customer experience, analytics and intelligence to enable new capabilities and business models for digital business

The Digitalisation of African Agriculture Report 2018-2019

An inclusive, digitally-enabled agricultural transformation could help achieve meaningful livelihood improvements for Africa’s smallholder farmers and pastoralists. It could drive greater engagement in agriculture from women and youth and create employment opportunities along the value chain. At CTA we staked a claim on this power of digitalisation to more systematically transform agriculture early on. Digitalisation, focusing on not individual ICTs but the application of these technologies to entire value chains, is a theme that cuts across all of our work. In youth entrepreneurship, we are fostering a new breed of young ICT ‘agripreneurs’. In climate-smart agriculture multiple projects provide information that can help towards building resilience for smallholder farmers. And in women empowerment we are supporting digital platforms to drive greater inclusion for women entrepreneurs in agricultural value chains

Launching the Grand Challenges for Ocean Conservation

The ten most pressing Grand Challenges in Oceans Conservation were identified at the Oceans Big Think and described in a detailed working document:A Blue Revolution for Oceans: Reengineering Aquaculture for SustainabilityEnding and Recovering from Marine DebrisTransparency and Traceability from Sea to Shore:  Ending OverfishingProtecting Critical Ocean Habitats: New Tools for Marine ProtectionEngineering Ecological Resilience in Near Shore and Coastal AreasReducing the Ecological Footprint of Fishing through Smarter GearArresting the Alien Invasion: Combating Invasive SpeciesCombatting the Effects of Ocean AcidificationEnding Marine Wildlife TraffickingReviving Dead Zones: Combating Ocean Deoxygenation and Nutrient Runof

A Systematic Mapping Study on Requirements Engineering in Software Ecosystems

Software ecosystems (SECOs) and open innovation processes have been claimed as a way forward for the software industry. A proper understanding of requirements is as important for these IT-systems as for more traditional ones. This paper presents a mapping study on the issues of requirements engineering and quality aspects in SECOs and analyzes emerging ideas. Our findings indicate that among the various phases or subtasks of requirements engineering, most of the SECO specific research has been accomplished on elicitation, analysis, and modeling. On the other hand, requirements selection, prioritization, verification, and traceability has attracted few published studies. Among the various quality attributes, most of the SECOs research has been performed on security, performance and testability. On the other hand, reliability, safety, maintainability, transparency, usability attracted few published studies. The paper provides a review of the academic literature about SECO-related requirements engineering activities, modeling approaches, and quality attributes, positions the source publications in a taxonomy of issues and identifies gaps where there has been little research.Comment: Journal of Information Technology Research (JITR) 11(1

The Partner Ecosystem Evolution from On-premises Software to Cloud Services: a case study of SAP

The application software enterprise market is facing a fundamental change from onpremises software products to cloud-installed services based on ‘pay-per-use’ subscriptions. We propose a novel conceptual framework to analyze this transformation from an ecosystem perspective. Through a case study of SAP, we demonstrate that the cloud platform ecosystem differs from the on-premises software product ecosystem, with changed roles, responsibilities, patterns, and key stakeholder relationships. The findings suggest that the traditional product platform ecosystem has evolved in three directions: 1) the structures of partner ecosystems are changing, with partners and platform leaders forming a new micro-ecosystem as a basic unit to interact with customers; 2) the role and function of the traditional distribution channel have been eroded and weakened; and 3) the growing importance of platforms has changed the value relationships amongst stakeholders. Based on these findings, we discuss the managerial implications for the stakeholders in the cloud platform

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops

This open access book constitutes papers from the 5 research workshops, the poster presentations, as well as two panel discussions which were presented at XP 2021, the 22nd International Conference on Agile Software Development, which was held online during June 14-18, 2021. XP is the premier agile software development conference combining research and practice. It is a unique forum where agile researchers, practitioners, thought leaders, coaches, and trainers get together to present and discuss their most recent innovations, research results, experiences, concerns, challenges, and trends. XP conferences provide an informal environment to learn and trigger discussions and welcome both people new to agile and seasoned agile practitioners. The 18 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from overall 37 submissions. They stem from the following workshops: 3rd International Workshop on Agile Transformation 9th International Workshop on Large-Scale Agile Development 1st International Workshop on Agile Sustainability 4th International Workshop on Software-Intensive Business 2nd International Workshop on Agility with Microservices Programmin