The Impact of Investment in IT on Economic Performance: Implications for Developing Countries

This paper reviews quantitative and qualitative evidence on the impact of IT on economic performance in developed and developing countries. Two strands of this literature are considered: the IT-productivity connection and the effects of IT on labor composition and the work environment. Policy implications for developing countries are considered.

Digital twin in industrial applications: how model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and asset administration shell (AAS) complement each other

In the development, production and usage of cyber-physical systems, the number of stakeholders, involved interfaces and volatile environmental conditions is constantly rising. In addition, use cases require more consideration of the entire system life cycle. This significantly increases the administration effort and forms a barrier for the digital transformation of industrial companies. While model-based systems engineering (MBSE) addresses internal challenges within the product development and Asset Administration Shell (AAS) addresses vendor independent information exchange and interoperability, both approaches need to be coupled to address today’s challenges. In this publication typical tasks within product development are discussed: “search the right information”, “integrate the right information” and “provide the right information”. It is shown how they were approached today, without the alignment of MBSE and AAS, what technological concepts exists to address the challenges and how the tasks are realized by an alignment of MBSE and AAS

Bridging prehistory and history in the archaeology of cities

Archaeology is ideally suited for examining the deep roots of urbanism, its materialization and physicality, and the commonalities and variability in urban experiences cross-culturally and temporally. We propose that the significant advances archaeologists have made in situating the discipline within broader urban studies could be furthered through increased dialog between scholars working on urbanism during prehistoric and historical periods, as a means of bridging concerns in the study of the past and present. We review some major themes in urban studies by presenting archaeological cases from two areas of the Americas: central Mexico and Atlantic North America. Our cases span premodern and early modern periods, and three of the four covered in greatest depth live on as cities of today. Comparison of the cases highlights the complementarity of their primary datasets: the long developmental trajectories and relatively intact urban plans offered by many prehistoric cities, and the rich documentary sources offered by historic cities

Rethinking consumers\u27 data sharing decisions with the emergence of multi-party computation: an experimental design for evaluation

Consumers are increasingly reluctant to share their personal data with businesses due to mounting concerns over privacy and control. Emerging privacy-enhancing technologies like multi-party computation (MPC), which allows generating insights while consumers retain data control, are challenging the current understanding of why consumers share their data. In this research-in-progress paper, we develop and evaluate an instrument and experimental design to investigate the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data and its antecedents. Preliminary analysis from a pre-study (N=300) indicates a good fit for our model. Also, MPC enhances consumers’ control and trust while reducing privacy concerns and risk, ultimately increasing data sharing willingness. The findings suggest that privacy-enhancing technologies significantly affect both the willingness to share data itself and its typical antecedents. The next step will conduct a large-scale online experiment using the developed instruments to evaluate further the impact of MPC on consumers’ willingness to share data

A statistical examination of utilization trends in decentralized applications

Decentralized applications (dApp) have proliferated in recent years, but their long-term viability is a topic of debate. However, for dApps to be sustainable, and suitable for integration into a larger service networks, they need to attract users and promise reliable availability. Therefore, assessing their longevity is crucial. Analyzing the utilization trajectory of a service is, however, challenging due to several factors, such as demand spikes, noise, autocorrelation, and non-stationarity. In this study, we employ robust statistical techniques to identify trends in currently popular dApps. Our findings demonstrate that a significant proportion of dApps, across a range of categories, exhibit statistically significant positive overall trends, indicating that success in decentralized computing can be sustainable and transcends specific fields. However, there is also a substantial number of dApps showing negative trends, with a disproportionately high number from the decentralized finance (DeFi) category. Furthermore, a more detailed inspection of time series segments shows a clearly diminishing proportion of positive trends from mid-2021 to the present. In summary, we conclude that the dApp economy might have lost some momentum, and that there is a strong element of uncertainty regarding its future significance

Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open-sourced Ontologies and Crowd-sourced Workers

The Museum of the City of New York has undertaken a long-term project to digitize its collection of 1.5 million objects, annotate them with metadata, and make them publicly available via the Internet. At present, Museum staff annotate images using a traditional lexicon assembled from authority sources such as the Library of Congress and the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus, but with limited resources the Museum cannot scale to meet its goal of providing the highest levels of accessibility and discoverability of collections to researchers as well as to the general public. This project offers a cost-effective, scalable solution that 1) consolidates the current lexicon with linked open data sources by generating alignments and reconciling semantically equivalent elements, creating a super-set lexicon, and 2) divides the work of annotating into micro-tasks that can be completed by huge labor pools available through crowd-sourced marketplaces

Bridge-market: connecting the in-between: the marketplace as an articulator of public space

The marketplace has been throughout history a powerful promotor of public space, from the beginning when trade and dealings between people were done in these special designated places it quickly became a necessity of everyday life. With the passing of time and the arrival of modernity our cities have changed, and so the way we approach the market as an everyday aspect of our lives; markets today are losing ground to more convenient ways of shopping like the supermarket or convenience store, the cultural exchange that the market provides to a community is being replaced by fast and lifeless methods of buying. The market must evolve in order to survive these changes, it has to bring more to the city than a place to buy and sell, it needs to become a new centrality where public and private spaces meet. The hybrid-building typologies have provided us with new ways of designing the city, where mixed use is key in order to promote the use of space in different ways, this diversity creates possibilities for the city to adapt and to move. In this thesis I explore the role of the hybrid space and how it can be applied to the market, taking special emphasis on the bridge-building structure and how it can create a relationship with the public and private realms and provide in-between spaces for the contemporary life. The proposal acts literally as a bridge that links a system of housing, co-working areas, commerce and public space with the Fira II building, and at its core the marketplace serves as the articulating piece for the whole project

Access to Information in the Developing World: The Role of Mobile Telephony in Economic Development

Classical theory suggests that economies operate efficiently when agents have open and symmetric access to market information such as the price, quality, and availability of goods and services. Emerging economies often lack the infrastructure and institutional framework necessary to facilitate this fluid transmission of information, and are subsequently defined by informational divides that sustain systemic structural impediments to development. The recent proliferation of mobile telephone services in the developing world, however, has created new possibilities for information-sharing among the globe’s poorest populations, and has introduced the potential for development that is both economically sustainable and inherently “bottom up.” This paper considers the role of mobile telephony for development through an empirical examination of agricultural markets in one of the world’s poorest countries—Mozambique. Using established methods of analysis in conjunction with a novel geospatial approach, we find that while the introduction of cellular technology has a discernible impact on agricultural price behavior in our sample, the overall the estimated effect of mobiles falls short of our expectations. This study therefore draws upon an alternative theory on price dispersion and connects it with the current empirical research on mobiles phones for development. In total, we conclude that while mobiles are an influential force in Mozambique’s staple food markets, additional constraints such as trade discontinuities between markets are the primary source of persistent price dispersion and inefficiency. This paper considers the role of mobile telephony for development through an empirical examination of agricultural markets in one of the world’s poorest countries—Mozambique. Using established methods of analysis in conjunction with a novel geospatial approach, we find that while the introduction of cellular technology has a discernible impact on agricultural price behavior in our sample, the overall the estimated effect of mobiles falls short of our expectations. This study therefore draws upon an alternative theory on price dispersion and connects it with the current empirical research on mobiles phones for development. In total, we conclude that while mobiles are an influential force in Mozambique’s staple food markets, additional constraints such as trade discontinuities between markets are the primary source of persistent price dispersion and inefficiency