515 research outputs found
Digitalization and Development
This book examines the diffusion of digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies in Malaysia by focusing on the ecosystem critical for its expansion. The chapters examine the digital proliferation in major sectors of agriculture, manufacturing, e-commerce and services, as well as the intermediary organizations essential for the orderly performance of socioeconomic agents.
The book incisively reviews policy instruments critical for the effective and orderly development of the embedding organizations, and the regulatory framework needed to quicken the appropriation of socioeconomic synergies from digitalization and Industry 4.0 technologies. It highlights the importance of collaboration between government, academic and industry partners, as well as makes key recommendations on how to encourage adoption of IR4.0 technologies in the short- and long-term.
This book bridges the concepts and applications of digitalization and Industry 4.0 and will be a must-read for policy makers seeking to quicken the adoption of its technologies
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume
LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum
Digital Innovations for a Circular Plastic Economy in Africa
Plastic pollution is one of the biggest challenges of the twenty-first century that requires innovative and varied solutions. Focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, this book brings together interdisciplinary, multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder perspectives exploring challenges and opportunities for utilising digital innovations to manage and accelerate the transition to a circular plastic economy (CPE).
This book is organised into three sections bringing together discussion of environmental conditions, operational dimensions and country case studies of digital transformation towards the circular plastic economy. It explores the environment for digitisation in the circular economy, bringing together perspectives from practitioners in academia, innovation, policy, civil society and government agencies. The book also highlights specific country case studies in relation to the development and implementation of different innovative ideas to drive the circular plastic economy across the three sub-Saharan African regions. Finally, the book interrogates the policy dimensions and practitioner perspectives towards a digitally enabled circular plastic economy.
Written for a wide range of readers across academia, policy and practice, including researchers, students, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), digital entrepreneurs, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and multilateral agencies, policymakers and public officials, this book offers unique insights into complex, multilayered issues relating to the production and management of plastic waste and highlights how digital innovations can drive the transition to the circular plastic economy in Africa.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license
Differences in well-being:the biological and environmental causes, related phenotypes, and real-time assessment
Well-being is a complex, and multifaceted construct that includes feeling good and functioning well. There is a growing global recognition of well-being as an important research topic and public policy goal. Well-being is related to less behavioral and emotional problems, and is associated with many positive aspects of daily life, including longevity, higher educational achievement, happier marriage, and more productivity at work. People differ in their levels of well-being, i.e., some people are in general happier or more satisfied with their lives than others. These individual differences in well-being can arise from many different factors, including biological (genetic) influences and environmental influences. To enhance the development of future mental health prevention and intervention strategies to increase well-being, more knowledge about these determinants and factors underlying well-being is needed. In this dissertation, I aimed to increase the understanding of the etiology in a series of studies using different methods, including systematic reviews, meta-analyses, twin designs, and molecular genetic designs. In part I, we brought together all published studies on the neural and physiological factors underlying well-being. This overview allowed us to critically investigate the claims made about the biology involved in well-being. The number of studies on the neural and physiological factors underlying well-being is increasing and the results point towards potential correlates of well-being. However, samples are often still small, and studies focus mostly on a single biomarker. Therefore, more well-powered, data-driven, and integrative studies across biological categories are needed to better understand the neural and physiological pathways that play a role in well-being. In part II, we investigated the overlap between well-being and a range of other phenotypes to learn more about the etiology of well-being. We report a large overlap with phenotypes including optimism, resilience, and depressive symptoms. Furthermore, when removing the genetic overlap between well-being and depressive symptoms, we showed that well-being has unique genetic associations with a range of phenotypes, independently from depressive symptoms. These results can be helpful in designing more effective interventions to increase well-being, taking into account the overlap and possible causality with other phenotypes. In part III, we used the extreme environmental change during the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate individual differences in the effects of such environmental changes on well-being. On average, we found a negative effect of the pandemic on different aspects of well-being, especially further into the pandemic. Whereas most previous studies only looked at this average negative effect of the pandemic on well-being, we focused on the individual differences as well. We reported large individual differences in the effects of the pandemic on well-being in both chapters. This indicates that one-size-fits-all preventions or interventions to maintain or increase well-being during the pandemic or lockdowns will not be successful for the whole population. Further research is needed for the identification of protective factors and resilience mechanisms to prevent further inequality during extreme environmental situations. In part IV, we looked at the real-time assessment of well-being, investigating the feasibility and results of previous studies. The real-time assessment of well-being, related variables, and the environment can lead to new insights about well-being, i.e., results that we cannot capture with traditional survey research. The real-time assessment of well-being is therefore a promising area for future research to unravel the dynamic nature of well-being fluctuations and the interaction with the environment in daily life. Integrating all results in this dissertation confirmed that well-being is a complex human trait that is influenced by many interrelated and interacting factors. Future directions to understand individual differences in well-being will be a data-driven approach to investigate the complex interplay of neural, physiological, genetic, and environmental factors in well-being
Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries
This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Let’s Plays. I build on Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant “others” and, on the other, simulate one’s own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up one’s offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique.
This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the user’s individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention.
Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben Flüchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the user’s political inaction and surveillant modes of looking.
Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmates’ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming “outside” places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the user’s supposed distance from this mode of state regulation.
Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be “normal” people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of one’s individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets.
Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (Joël Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Émilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligent™ (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance
The regulation of digital platforms: the case of pagoPA
How can EU regulation affect innovation. Digital revolution: How big data have changed the world and the legal landscape. The regulation of digital platforms in Europe. Digital revolution: How distributed ledger technologies are changing the world and the legal landscape. Regulation of digital payments: the case of pagopa
An empirical evaluation of m-health service users’ behaviours: A case of Bangladesh
A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.Mobile health (m-health) services are revolutionising healthcare in the developing world by improving accessibility, affordability, and availability. Although these services are revolutionising healthcare in various ways, there are growing concerns regarding users' service quality perceptions and overall influence on satisfaction and usage behaviours. In developing countries, access to healthcare and low healthcare costs are insufficient if users lack confidence in healthcare service quality.
Bangladesh's Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS) provides the only government-sponsored m-health service available to the entire population. DGHS's m-health service, available since 2009, is yet to be evaluated in terms of users' perceptions of the quality of service and its impact on satisfaction and usage. Hence, this study developed a conceptual model for evaluating the associations between overall DGHS m-health service quality, satisfaction, and usage behaviours. This study operationalised overall m-health service quality as a higher-order construct with three dimensions- platform quality, information quality, and outcome quality, and nine corresponding subdimensions-privacy, systems availability, systems reliability, systems efficiency, responsiveness, empathy, assurance, emotional benefit, and functional benefit.
Moreover, researchers in various service domains, including- healthcare, marketing, environmental protection, and information systems, evaluated and confirmed the influence of social and personal norms on satisfaction and behavioural outcomes like- intention to use. Despite this, no research has been conducted to determine whether these normative components affect m-health users' service satisfaction and usage behaviours. As a result, this study included social and personal norms along with overall service quality into the conceptual model to assess the influence of these variables on users' satisfaction and m-health service usage behaviours. Data was collected from two districts in Bangladesh- Dhaka and Rajshahi, utilising the online survey approach. A total of 417 usable questionnaires were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling to investigate the relationships between the constructs in Warp PLS.
The study confirms that all three dimensions of service quality and their corresponding subdimensions influence users' overall perceptions of DGHS m-health service quality. Moreover, overall DGHS m-health service quality has a significant direct association with satisfaction and an indirect association with usage behaviours through satisfaction. While social norms do not influence satisfaction and usage behaviours within the DGHS m-health context, personal norms directly influence users' satisfaction and indirectly influence usage behaviours through satisfaction. Theoretically, the study contributes by framing the influence of users' overall m-health service quality perceptions, social and personal norms on their actual usage behaviours rather than the intention to use. It also extends the existing knowledge by assessing and comparing m-health users' continuous and discontinuous behaviours. Methodologically this study confirms the usefulness of partial least squares structural equational modelling to analyse a complex model including a higher order construct (i.e., overall perceived service quality). Practically, the study demonstrates the importance of users' satisfaction in addition to service quality, as service quality only affects usage behaviours through satisfaction in the current study context. Additionally, knowing that personal norms significantly influence service satisfaction motivates providers of m-health services to strive to enhance users' personal norms toward m-health service to enhance service satisfaction and usage. Overall, the study will help enhance patient outcomes and m-health service usage
Virtual and Augmented Reality for Environmental Sustainability: A Systematic Review
In recent years, extended reality (XR) technology has seen a rise in use in environmental subjects, i.e., climate change or biodiversity loss, as a potential tool to inform and engage the public with current and future environmental issues. However, research on the potential of XR technology for environmental sustainability is still in the early stages, and there is no clear synthesis of the methods studied in this field. To provide a clearer view of existing approaches and research objectives, we systematically reviewed current literature dealing with XR use in environmental topics. Although the results indicate that the volume of literature exploring XR in environmental applications is increasing, empirical evidence of its impact is limited, hindering the possibility of presently drawing significant conclusions on its potential benefits. Based on our analyses, we identified thematic, theoretical, and methodological knowledge gaps and provide a guideline to aid future research in the field.Peer reviewe
Dependability for declarative mechanisms: neural networks in autonomous vehicles decision making.
Despite being introduced in 1958, neural networks appeared in numerous applications of different fields in the last decade. This change was possible thanks to the reduced costs of computing power required for deep neural networks, and increasing available data that provide examples for training sets. The 2012 ImageNet image classification competition is often used as a example to describe how neural networks became at this time good candidates for applications: during this competition a neural network based solution won for the first time. In the following editions, all winning solutions were based on neural networks. Since then, neural networks have shown great results in several non critical applications (image recognition, sound recognition, text analysis, etc...). There is a growing interest to use them in critical applications as their ability to generalize makes them good candidates for applications such as autonomous vehicles, but standards do not allow that yet.
Autonomous driving functions are currently researched by the industry with the final objective of producing in the near future fully autonomous vehicles, as defined by the fifth level of the SAE international (Society of Automotive Engineers) classification. Autonomous driving process is usually decomposed into four different parts: the where sensors get information from the environment, the where the data from the different sensors is merged into one representation of the environment, the that uses the representation of the environment to decide what should be the vehicles behavior and the commands to send to the actuators and finally the part that implements these commands. In this thesis, following the interest of the company Stellantis, we will focus on the decision part of this process, considering neural network based solution.
Automotive being a safety critical application, it is required to implement and ensure the dependability of the systems, and this is why neural networks use is not allowed at the moment: their lack of safety forbid their use in such applications. Dependability methods for classical software systems are well known, but neural networks do not have yet similar dependable mechanisms to guarantee their trust. This problem is due to several reasons, among them the difficulty to test applications with a quasi-infinite operational domain and whose functions are hard to define exhaustively in the specifications. Here we can find the motivation of this thesis: how can we ensure the dependability of neural networks in the context of decision for autonomous vehicles?
Research is now being conducted on the topic of dependability and safety of neural networks with several approaches being considered and our research is motivated by the great potential in safety critical applications mentioned above. In this thesis, we will focus on one category of method that seems to be a good candidate to ensure the dependability of neural networks by solving some of the problems of testing: the formal verification for neural networks. These methods aim to prove that a neural network respects a safety property on an entire range of its input and output domains. Formal verification is already used in other domains and is seen as a trusted method to give confidence in a system, but it remains for the moment a research topic for neural networks with currently no industrial applications.
The main contributions of this thesis are the following: a proposal of a characterization of neural network from a software development perspective, and a corresponding classification of their faults, errors and failures, the identification of a potential threat to the use of formal verification. This threat is the erroneous neural network model problem, that may lead to trust a formally validated safety property that does not hold in real life, the realization of an experiment that implements a formal verification for neural networks in an autonomous driving application that is to the best of our knowledge the closest to industrial use. For this application, we chose to work with an ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control) function, which is an autonomous driving function that performs the longitudinal control of a vehicle. The experiment is conducted with the use of a simulator and a neural network formal verification tool. The other contributions of the thesis are the following: theoretical example of the erroneous neural network model problem and a practical example in our autonomous driving experiment, a proposal of detection and recovery mechanisms as a solution to the erroneous model problem mentioned above, an implementation of these detection and recovery mechanisms in our autonomous driving experiment and a discussion about difficulties and possible processes for the implementation of formal verification for neural networks that we developed during our experiments
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