An experience of collaboration using a PaaS for the smarter university model

In this paper we continue our previous research on the development of the current model of higher education, which pointed out that the labor market is looking for people with competencies and skills reflecting a T-shape model. As a consequence, universities should include a wider mix of disciplines in the curricula of their courses. Hence, to overcome existing criticisms and to provide some suggestions on how to enhance universities' performances, we thought of education as a process with inputs, outputs, and relevant dependencies. We called such a university a “smarter university” in which knowledge is a common heritage of teachers and students. In our research the smarter university model is based on a smart-city-like model, due to the fact that next generation networks and relevant services are going to be more and more integrated with existing infrastructure and information management systems. Thus, it is mandatory that smart solutions are the most prominent assets of modern university environments to improve the effectiveness of higher education. In this paper, we report the experimental results from a specific case study of collaboration between industry and university, which could be used as a refer- ence for the definition of patterns to be applied in the redesign of the current education systems, even though the experiment refers to a technological application scenario

Teaching Computer Programming Through Hands-on Labs on Cognitive Computing

In this work we report the experience of a long-lasting educational project that we have been carrying since a couple of years. In particular, we summarize the results achieved by students in the last year, when they were put to work on the collaborative development of small, yet full featured, software projects. At the same time, based on more recent findings, we seek to lay the foundations to build a pragmatic model to teach cognitive computing programming. The experience was carried on in a Programming course at the Universities of Naples “Federico II” and Genoa, in Italy, and fostered the use of a PaaS (Platform as a Service) environment for a cooperative learning activity, used to disseminate theoretical concepts acquired within the course, also by means of cognitive computing tools. The project, from its inception, has involved a relevant number of students. Initially, the experiment had to be concluded in one year but, instead, has continued evolving with new projects, as new tools and services were made available, carrying new opportunities. The evolution has led, in the most recent release, to using the IBM Bluemix platform with its wide range of components, including Watson. This work goes in the direction of developing the smart university model, by using innovative and intelligent services to help develop a new generation of applications, but also to promote and disseminate a new way for designing and building them

Cognitive computing in education

Cognitive computing is the new wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI), relying on traditional techniques based on expert systems and also exploiting statistics and mathematical model. In particular, cognitive computing systems can be regarded as a "more human" artificial intelligence. In fact, they mimic human reasoning methodologies, showing special capabilities in dealing with uncertainties and in solving problems that typically entail computation consuming processes. Moreover, they can evolve, exploiting the accumulated experience to learn from the past, both from errors and from successful findings. From a theoretical point of view, cognitive computing could replace existing calculators in many fields of application but hardware requirements are still high, even if the cloud infrastructure, which is expected to uphold its rapid growth in the very next future, can support their diffusion and ease the penetration of such a novel variety of systems, fostering new services as well as changes in many settled paradigms. In this paper, we focus on benefits that this technology can bring when applied in the education field and we make a short review of relevant experiences

The role of telecommunication companies in Internet of things

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementInternet of Things is pervading the enterprise and consumer worlds. This technological concept is leading towards pervasive connectivity and encompasses everything connected to the Internet, being used for defining objects that ‘talk’ with one another. As stated by many reports, it is expected to generate a huge amount of added value through applications and the resulting services. Telecommunication companies with their central role, and their well established ability to connect millions of devices, are in a distinctive situation brought by the opportunity of new revenue streams and new challenges resulting from this revolution of connectivity. Their share of the added value market that is generated by the IoT is going to be dependent on the role they are going to play in the value chain. The purpose of this work is to investigate the impact Internet of Things will have on the telecommunications industry and to identify and analyse the possible directions for telecommunication companies as they take their role in IoT. In addition the IoT value chain is examined, possible business models for telecommunication companies in IoT are identified, and technology and business related challanges are elaborated. Furthermore in this work, a case study on Makedonski Telekom AD is presented. Telecommunication companies, being in the process of planning and/or implementing IoT have several business models to consider. The ones that will position themselves highly on the value chain, will have to play smart in order not to focus too heavily on industry specific solutions and balance in adding highly differentiated vertical offers where feasible on one hand, and facilitate third‐party vertical solutions where differentiation is more difficult and the investment is too great on the other, so they do not underplay their hand in the connectivity and life cycle management layer

The Impact of Cloud Computing on Academic Libraries

With the introduction of computers and other forms of communication technology, library services have undergone a significant transformation. Libraries have been automated, networked, and are currently being converted into virtual or paperless libraries. This article is dedicated to many aspects of cloud computing, including different kinds and applications. There is a discussion about the advantages and drawbacks of cloud computing in academic libraries. The article also includes recommendations for professional librarians and academic libraries across the globe on how to take advantage of cloud computing resources. This article may be of use in the development of cloud-based services for university libraries. The article claims that cloud providers\u27 high quality of service, the expansion of Internet bandwidth, and the rapid transfer of information should all contribute to improving academic library services in the future. Cloud computing is essential for today\u27s information innovation, and it is vital for university libraries

Design and implementation cloud computing (TOC, Abstract, chapter 1 and Reference only)

Cloud computing is a new technology can be described as the next generation of Information Technology for the educational technical institute in Malaysia. With the rapidly growing needs of the information technology and the current financial crisis, most of the higher education institutes including the technical institute are facing the problem to provide the ICT infrastructure, education and development activities. However, cloud computing implementation in a technical institute in Malaysia is in the beginning stage. This research aim is to design and implement of Cloud Computing at ILP Selandar in learning and teaching environment also to allow the management, reducing the cost to purchase the expensive computer, licensed software and program that using during the learning process. This research also proposed to deploy a Hybrid Cloud Computing model where is the combination of existing local infrastructure with the public Cloud. The information is gathered by the interviewing IT Team and senior lecturer, they recommend the implementation of Cloud Computing at ILP Selandar. (ABSTRACT BY AUTHOR

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS: A CASE STUDY OF ABU DHABI MUNICIPALITY TRANSPORT DEPARTMENT

The new generation is rapidly adapting to the digital era, where government and private services are being transformed into electronic services, commonly known as Eservices. Cities are leveraging digitalization to streamline their business processes and business services. This digitalization has improved service delivery time and quality for individuals. With digitalization, business processes align with technology, enhancing performance and customer satisfaction. However, there are challenges associated with digitalization, particularly people working in various municipality departments who find it challenging to adapt to digitization. Employees may take time to adjust to the new techniques and technologies, which may hamper the actions of the municipality departments. Therefore, the main objective of this research proposal is to investigate the benefits of digital transformation in different departments of local municipalities. In this research, we will use qualitative and quantitative methods for data collection through surveys. The study will be conducted in the Transport Department of Abu Dhabi Municipality, targeting the employees and customers in the Abu Dhabi and Al Ain centers. The results indicate that around 86% of the respondents believe that service delivery has improved due to digital transformation, with 96% of the participants considering digital transformation essential. Customer satisfaction is closely linked to the development of online service, and a considerable percentage of respondents confirm that service delivery time and efficiency have significantly improved due to digital transformation. Finally, a reference framework for digital transformation will be presented, and discuss the result outcomes based on this reference framework

Smart Learning

Artificial intelligence applied to the educational field has a vast potential, especially after the e ects worldwide of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online or blended educational modes are needed to respond to the health situation we are living in. The tutorial e ort is higher than in the traditional face-to-face approach. Thus, educational systems are claiming smarter learning technologies that do not pretend to substitute the faculty but make their teaching activities easy. This Special Issue is oriented to present a collection of papers of original advances in educational applications and services propelled by artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and deep learning

Focus on: New trends, challenges and perspectives on healthcare cognitive computing: from information extraction to healthcare analytics

The focus of this special issue is cognitive computing in healthcare, due to the ever-increasing interest it is gaining for both research purposes and clinical applications. Indeed, cognitive computing is a challenging technology in many fields of application (Banavar, 2016) such as, e.g., medicine, education or eco- nomics (Coccoli et al., 2016) especially for the management of huge quantities of information where cognitive computing techniques push applications based on the use of big data (Coccoli et al., 2017). An unprecedented amount of data is made available from a heterogeneous variety of sources and this is true also in the case of health data, which can be exploited in many ways by means of sophisticated cognitive computing solutions and related technologies, such as, e.g., information extraction, natural language processing, and analytics. Also, from the point of view of programming they set challenging issues (see, e.g., Coccoli et al., 2015). In fact, the amount of healthcare that is now available and, potentially useful to care teams, reached 150 Exabytes worldwide and about 80% of this huge volume of data is in an unstructured form, being thus somehow invisible to systems. Hence, it is clear that cognitive computing and data analytics are the two key factors we have for make use – at least partially – of such a big volume of data. This can lead to personalized health solutions and healthcare systems that are more reliable, effective and efficient also re- ducing their expenditures. Healthcare will have a big impact on industry and research. However, this field, which seems to be a new era for our society, requires many scientific endeavours. Just to name a few, you need to create a hybrid and secure cloud to guarantee the security and confidentiality of health data, especially when smartphones or similar devices are used with specific app (see, e.g., Mazurczyk & Caviglione, 2015). Beside the cloud, you also need to consider novel ar- chitectures and data platforms that shall be different from the existing ones,because 90% of health and biomedical data are images and also because 80% of health data in the world is not available on the Web. This special issue wants to review state-of-the-art of issues and solutions of cognitive computing, focusing also on the current challenges and perspecti- ves and includes a heterogeneous collection of papers covering the following topics: information extraction in healthcare applications, semantic analysis in medicine, data analytics in healthcare, machine learning and cognitive com- puting, data architecture for healthcare, data platform for healthcare, hybrid cloud for healthcare