Beyond interactions: INTERACT 2019 IFIP TC 13 workshops, Paphos, Cyprus, September 2–6, 2019, revised selected papers

This book contains revised selected papers presented at 3 workshops held at the 17th IFIP TC 13 International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, INTERACT 2019, which was held in September 2019 in Paphos, Cyprus. The workshops are: - Beyond Computers: Wearables, Humans, And Things - WHAT! - User Experiences and Wellbeing at Work (UX@Work) - Workshop on Handling Security, Usability, User Experience and Reliability in User-Centered Development Processes. The 12 papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They show advances in the field of HCI dealing with topics such as wearables, user experience and wellbeing at work, security, usability, user experience and reliability in user-centered development processes

Studies of Digital Solutions Supporting Societal Participation of Youths

Democracy and societal participation are dynamic and transforming concepts and are affected by the ongoing technological transitions such as digitalization. Simultaneously, young people are required to operate in complex and rapidly changing environments and to navigate through realities that are distorted with misinformation and disinformation. One way to enhance societal participation for youths is to enable taking part in societal and democratic processes. This can be conducted through providing digital services that are safe, offer access to information, and by integration to governmental processes and recognition by the officials, enable having an actual effect on policies and decisions. Although various eParticipation services have been developed and studied, thorough investigations of young people's conceptualisations, and user needs and requirements for eParticipation are missing. Moreover, the specific mechanisms through which the successful eParticipation services support young people's societal participation are unexplored. The main scientific fields that this thesis contributes are computer science and social science. More specifically, in computer science, this thesis links to the research tradition of human-technology interaction (HTI), and in social science to the research of societal participation. This thesis applies quantitative and qualitative research approaches HTI, psychometrics and applied psychology, and studies on political behaviour. The studies included in this thesis were conducted in ALL-YOUTH research project (2018-2023) funded by the Strategic Research Council of Finland. Furthermore, an eParticipation platform prototype entitled Virtual Council (Digiraati in Finnish) was simultaneously developed in the project and used as an object of the research. This thesis is composed of five publications. Four publications are based on four separate empirical studies and one publication is theoretical. Altogether 467 young Finnish people participated in the studies that took place between 2018 and 2021. Surveys were conducted among 360 participants and 107 people took part in interviews. The first study aimed to provide an understanding of the young people’s conceptions of digital participation and obstacles for participation. The second study explored the user needs of young people in regard to eParticipation. In the third study, field tests of an eParticipation service prototype were conducted. Fourth study explores the significance of digital solutions in relation to societal participation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This thesis provides theoretical and practical contributions through answering the research questions: 1. What are the youths’ conceptions regarding digital societal participation? 2. What are youths’ user needs regarding digital societal Participation? 3. How can digital solutions support societal participation of youths? In theoretical perspective, this thesis elaborates on the conceptualisation of digital and societal participation and proposes a novel model entitled Citizen-centric socio-cognitive model for participation. On a more practical level, this thesis provides a set of young people’s user needs and requirements for eParticipation services: Safe discussion environments, interesting and relevant topics, enabling reciprocal interactions with officials, feedback loops, and high level of integration to governmental processes. Moreover, feature-level solutions such as easy-to-use search tools, customisable notifications and recommendations, informative dashboards and impact representations, and anonymity were considered as solutions that may enable responding to the user needs and requirements. Additionally, as a further practical contribution, this thesis presents the Virtual Council prototype. This thesis elaborates on how eParticipation services can enable and advance the societal participation of young people by lowering the threshold to participate through various activities, and by increasing the societal participation related self-efficacy of young people. Finally, this thesis explores how digitality has supported young people during COVID-19 related lockdowns by enabling working, studying, socialising, and societal participation, and how ICT skills have been a valuable factor in sustaining coping. The results enable design and development of more inclusive and enticing eParticipation services that provide for the sustainable development of societies. The model can be utilised as a framework for research of (e)Participation and applied in public and third-sector activities planning and impact assessment. Moreover, the results further advance the theoretical and empirical research in HTI, especially in the contexts of societal participation

Telecommunication Economics

This book constitutes a collaborative and selected documentation of the scientific outcome of the European COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel "A Telecommunications Economics COST Network" which run from October 2007 to October 2011. Involving experts from around 20 European countries, the goal of Econ@Tel was to develop a strategic research and training network among key people and organizations in order to enhance Europe's competence in the field of telecommunications economics. Reflecting the organization of the COST Action IS0605 Econ@Tel in working groups the following four major research areas are addressed: - evolution and regulation of communication ecosystems; - social and policy implications of communication technologies; - economics and governance of future networks; - future networks management architectures and mechanisms

An Unexpected Journey: Towards Runtime Verification of Multiagent Systems and Beyond

The Trace Expression formalism derives from works started in 2012 and is mainly used to specify and verify interaction protocols at runtime, but other applications have been devised. More specically, this thesis describes how to extend and apply such formalism in the engineering process of distributed articial intelligence systems (such as Multiagent systems). This thesis extends the state of the art through four dierent contributions: 1. Theoretical: the thesis extends the original formalism in order to represent also parametric and probabilistic specications (parametric trace expressions and probabilistic trace expressions respectively). 2. Algorithmic: the thesis proposes algorithms for verifying trace expressions at runtime in a decentralized way. The algorithms have been designed to be as general as possible, but their implementation and experimentation address scenarios where the modelled and observed events are communicative events (interactions) inside a multiagent system. 3. Application: the thesis analyzes the relations between runtime and static verication (e.g. model checking) proposing hybrid integrations in both directions. First of all, the thesis proposes a trace expression model checking approach where it shows how to statically verify LTL property on a trace expression specication. After that, the thesis presents a novel approach for supporting static verication through the addition of monitors at runtime (post-process). 4. Implementation: the thesis presents RIVERtools, a tool supporting the writing, the syntactic analysis and the decentralization of trace expressions

A method for developing Reference Enterprise Architectures

Industrial change forces enterprises to constantly adjust their organizational structures in order to stay competitive. In this regard, research acknowledges the potential of Reference Enterprise Architectures (REA). This thesis proposes REAM - a method for developing REAs. After contrasting organizations' needs with approaches available in the current knowledge base, this work identifies the absence of method support for REA development. Proposing REAM, the author aims to close this research gap and evaluates the method's utility by applying REAM in different naturalistic settings

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse