37,250 research outputs found
Ethical and Social Aspects of Self-Driving Cars
As an envisaged future of transportation, self-driving cars are being
discussed from various perspectives, including social, economical, engineering,
computer science, design, and ethics. On the one hand, self-driving cars
present new engineering problems that are being gradually successfully solved.
On the other hand, social and ethical problems are typically being presented in
the form of an idealized unsolvable decision-making problem, the so-called
trolley problem, which is grossly misleading. We argue that an applied
engineering ethical approach for the development of new technology is what is
needed; the approach should be applied, meaning that it should focus on the
analysis of complex real-world engineering problems. Software plays a crucial
role for the control of self-driving cars; therefore, software engineering
solutions should seriously handle ethical and social considerations. In this
paper we take a closer look at the regulative instruments, standards, design,
and implementations of components, systems, and services and we present
practical social and ethical challenges that have to be met, as well as novel
expectations for software engineering.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 2 table
Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey
The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services
provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human
and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart
environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of
connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have
been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data.
In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as
Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to
enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be
considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most
important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects.
This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware
sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for
communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and
architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware
technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and
characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and
service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT
based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of
CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268,
Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017
Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey
The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services
provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human
and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart
environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of
connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have
been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data.
In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as
Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to
enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be
considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most
important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects.
This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware
sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for
communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and
architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware
technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and
characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and
service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT
based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of
CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268,
Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017
Recommended from our members
Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions
The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions
Towards a generic platform for developing CSCL applications using Grid infrastructure
The goal of this paper is to explore the possibility of using CSCL component-based software under a Grid infrastructure. The merge of these technologies represents an attractive, but probably quite laborious enterprise if we consider not only the benefits but also the barriers that we have to overcome. This work presents an attempt toward this direction by developing a generic platform of CSCL components and discussing the advantages that we could obtain if we adapted it to the Grid. We then propose a means that could make this adjustment possible due to the high degree of genericity that our library component is endowed with by being based on the generic programming paradigm. Finally, an application of our library is proposed both for validating the adequacy of the platform which it is based on and for indicating the possibilities gained by using it under the Grid.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
The Mirroring Hypothesis: Theory, Evidence and Exceptions
The mirroring hypothesis predicts that the organizational patterns of a development project (e.g. communication links, geographic collocation, team and firm co-membership) will correspond to the technical patterns of dependency in the system under development. Scholars in a range of disciplines have argued that mirroring is either necessary or a highly desirable feature of development projects, but evidence pertaining to the hypothesis is widely scattered across fields, research sites, and methodologies. In this paper, we formally define the mirroring hypothesis and review 102 empirical studies spanning three levels of organization: within a single firm, across firms, and in open community-based development projects. The hypothesis was supported in 69% of the cases. Support for the hypothesis was strongest in the within-firm sample, less strong in the across-firm sample, and relatively weak in the open collaborative sample. Based on a detailed analysis of the cases in which the mirroring hypothesis was not supported, we introduce the concept of actionable transparency as a means of achieving coordination without mirroring. We present examples from practice and describe the more complex organizational patterns that emerge when actionable transparency allows designers to 'break the mirror.'Modularity, innovation, product and process development, organization design, design structure, organizational structure, organizational ties
Transdisciplinarity seen through Information, Communication, Computation, (Inter-)Action and Cognition
Similar to oil that acted as a basic raw material and key driving force of
industrial society, information acts as a raw material and principal mover of
knowledge society in the knowledge production, propagation and application. New
developments in information processing and information communication
technologies allow increasingly complex and accurate descriptions,
representations and models, which are often multi-parameter, multi-perspective,
multi-level and multidimensional. This leads to the necessity of collaborative
work between different domains with corresponding specialist competences,
sciences and research traditions. We present several major transdisciplinary
unification projects for information and knowledge, which proceed on the
descriptive, logical and the level of generative mechanisms. Parallel process
of boundary crossing and transdisciplinary activity is going on in the applied
domains. Technological artifacts are becoming increasingly complex and their
design is strongly user-centered, which brings in not only the function and
various technological qualities but also other aspects including esthetic, user
experience, ethics and sustainability with social and environmental dimensions.
When integrating knowledge from a variety of fields, with contributions from
different groups of stakeholders, numerous challenges are met in establishing
common view and common course of action. In this context, information is our
environment, and informational ecology determines both epistemology and spaces
for action. We present some insights into the current state of the art of
transdisciplinary theory and practice of information studies and informatics.
We depict different facets of transdisciplinarity as we see it from our
different research fields that include information studies, computability,
human-computer interaction, multi-operating-systems environments and
philosophy.Comment: Chapter in a forthcoming book: Information Studies and the Quest for
Transdisciplinarity - Forthcoming book in World Scientific. Mark Burgin and
Wolfgang Hofkirchner, Editor
- …