How Do You Shift From a Siloed System to Portfolio Solutions?

As a result of the costs associated with the Affordable Care Act, hospitals have changed the way they operate. This in turn has caused companies across the healthcare and devices sector to adapt their business models to cope with this change, resulting in changes to the organizational structure with an emphasis on improved collaboration across verticals, advancing innovative solutions faster and finding new markets for products. We believe technology and improving the diversity within R&D teams can help transform organizations, and help them achieve their business goals

Human-agent collectives

We live in a world where a host of computer systems, distributed throughout our physical and information environments, are increasingly implicated in our everyday actions. Computer technologies impact all aspects of our lives and our relationship with the digital has fundamentally altered as computers have moved out of the workplace and away from the desktop. Networked computers, tablets, phones and personal devices are now commonplace, as are an increasingly diverse set of digital devices built into the world around us. Data and information is generated at unprecedented speeds and volumes from an increasingly diverse range of sources. It is then combined in unforeseen ways, limited only by human imagination. People’s activities and collaborations are becoming ever more dependent upon and intertwined with this ubiquitous information substrate. As these trends continue apace, it is becoming apparent that many endeavours involve the symbiotic interleaving of humans and computers. Moreover, the emergence of these close-knit partnerships is inducing profound change. Rather than issuing instructions to passive machines that wait until they are asked before doing anything, we will work in tandem with highly inter-connected computational components that act autonomously and intelligently (aka agents). As a consequence, greater attention needs to be given to the balance of control between people and machines. In many situations, humans will be in charge and agents will predominantly act in a supporting role. In other cases, however, the agents will be in control and humans will play the supporting role. We term this emerging class of systems human-agent collectives (HACs) to reflect the close partnership and the flexible social interactions between the humans and the computers. As well as exhibiting increased autonomy, such systems will be inherently open and social. This means the participants will need to continually and flexibly establish and manage a range of social relationships. Thus, depending on the task at hand, different constellations of people, resources, and information will need to come together, operate in a coordinated fashion, and then disband. The openness and presence of many distinct stakeholders means participation will be motivated by a broad range of incentives rather than diktat. This article outlines the key research challenges involved in developing a comprehensive understanding of HACs. To illuminate this agenda, a nascent application in the domain of disaster response is presented

Swamp Sistas: Beth McKee and a socio-musical swamp revival online and real time

AbstractBeth McKee, the singer/songwriter known for her Mississippi roots and music- recording career created a community of mostly American women known as the Swamp Sistas. Although the network was developed to energize McKee’s female fan base, it quickly became a virtual and real-time social fabric, where artists, authors, colleagues and friends weave an ongoing tapestry of tradition and renewal. McKee’s performances, tours, merchandise and albums ground the artistic and social reper- toire of the Swamp Sistas. The message of sharing with and supporting one another served as a powerful and creative vehicle for McKee’s musical presentations to new audiences. Her collaborations with educators, authors and artists fuelled the shared socio-musical trend, along with the performance venue she created in collabora- tion with the Swamp Sistas called the ‘La La’. The Swamp Sistas phenomenon is about fans who became co-creators. They inspired song lyrics, planned, staged and performed with McKee or in other groups at La Las, changing a musician and her audience into a community, complete with shared values and social engagement. This article describes the Swamp Sistas based on research in the field that included online and real time musical and social participant observation. Lessons from the swamp include emphasis on the participatory and co-creative culture of Swamp Sistas and implications for building community in music education settings

MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy