Perceptions of gender balance of IS journal editorial positions

An analysis of 18,854 editorial positions on IS journals was undertaken to examine the perceived gender balance of those positions as an indication of their contribution towards a positive role model for females considering an IS academic career. The nature and extent of perceived gender balance is examined in terms of overall composition of editorial positions, journal prestige and the specific area within IS covered by a journal. The results indicate that perceived gender balance of editorial positions reflects that of ICT academia generally, and that female representation appears to be concentrated in journals covering areas that are traditionally seen as female occupations, e.g., health, education, librarianship. As such, little or no encouragement is given to females considering an IS academic career.<br /

A Review on the Application of Natural Computing in Environmental Informatics

Natural computing offers new opportunities to understand, model and analyze the complexity of the physical and human-created environment. This paper examines the application of natural computing in environmental informatics, by investigating related work in this research field. Various nature-inspired techniques are presented, which have been employed to solve different relevant problems. Advantages and disadvantages of these techniques are discussed, together with analysis of how natural computing is generally used in environmental research.Comment: Proc. of EnviroInfo 201

Biofeedback systems for stress reduction: Towards a Bright Future for a Revitalized Field

Stress has recently been baptized as the black death of the 21st century, which illustrates its threat to current health standards. This article proposes biofeedback systems as a means to reduce stress. A concise state-ofthe-art introduction on biofeedback systems is given. The field of mental health informatics is introduced. A compact state-of-the-art introduction on stress (reduction) is provided. A pragmatic solution for the pressing societal problem of illness due to chronic stress is provided in terms of closed loop biofeedback systems. A concise set of such biofeedback systems for stress reduction is presented. We end with the identification of several development phases and ethical concerns

Route Planning in Transportation Networks

We survey recent advances in algorithms for route planning in transportation networks. For road networks, we show that one can compute driving directions in milliseconds or less even at continental scale. A variety of techniques provide different trade-offs between preprocessing effort, space requirements, and query time. Some algorithms can answer queries in a fraction of a microsecond, while others can deal efficiently with real-time traffic. Journey planning on public transportation systems, although conceptually similar, is a significantly harder problem due to its inherent time-dependent and multicriteria nature. Although exact algorithms are fast enough for interactive queries on metropolitan transit systems, dealing with continent-sized instances requires simplifications or heavy preprocessing. The multimodal route planning problem, which seeks journeys combining schedule-based transportation (buses, trains) with unrestricted modes (walking, driving), is even harder, relying on approximate solutions even for metropolitan inputs.Comment: This is an updated version of the technical report MSR-TR-2014-4, previously published by Microsoft Research. This work was mostly done while the authors Daniel Delling, Andrew Goldberg, and Renato F. Werneck were at Microsoft Research Silicon Valle

Exploiting connectedness in the informatics curriculum

The power of modern communication technology gives us an opportunity, as Informatics educators, to enhance our ability to develop our students' skills in virtual teamworking. We discuss why virtual teamworking is as relevant for students in traditional campus-based universities as it is in a distance learning context. We highlight some of the questions to be answered, and some of the problems to be overcome, in the context of our experiences in designing and delivering a virtual teamworking course at the UK Open University