European Perspectives on the Information Society: Annual Monitoring Synthesis and Emerging Trend Updates

This report is one of the outcomes of the EPIS06 Project ¿ European Perspectives on the Information Society ¿ carried out by the ETEPS (European Techno-Economic Policy Support) network in cooperation with the Joint Research Centre Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC IPTS) with the aim of providing strategic intelligence to policy makers by taking a prospective view on the evolution of ICT. This report combines the Annual Monitoring Synthesis (AMS) Report and five Emerging Trend Updates (ETU). It forms one of the main building blocks of the project, establishing an observatory of trends in technology and business evolutions of ICT. More particularly, the Annual Monitoring Synthesis Report (AMS Report) aims to identify new ICT-related developments likely to have a significant impact on the future of the Information Society, both in terms of growth and jobs for Europe and R&D policy prioritisation. By scanning and monitoring recent major foresight exercises and industrial technology roadmaps, as well as other future-oriented analysis and policy papers, the AMS attempts to detect early signals and possible disruptive forces so as to enable timely policy responses and anticipate potential challenges for policy makers. The AMS is structured along six main themes which emerged as a result of the analysis: - Convergence of infrastructures, - Human-computer convergence ¿ technologies for direct human computer interaction, - Pervasive or ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence, - The future of the Internet, - Citizens¿ concerns, - Working life. A structured overview with a summary of each of the foresights, roadmaps and other sources studied is presented in the AMS report annex. In addition, five Emerging Trends Updates (ETU) present the results of focused briefs on emerging themes of interest for policy making, covering the following topics: - ETU1 on the state-of-the-art of the creative content sector, - ETU2 on ICT and the offshoring of services, - ETU3 on ICT and the role of ICTs as enablers for energy efficiency, - ETU4 on ICT tools and services in intelligent domestic and personal environments, - ETU5 on ICT and privacy in the Knowledge Society ¿ the case of search engines.JRC.J.4-Information Societ

Artificial Intelligence in a Main Warehouse in Panasonic: Los Indios, Texas

The Panasonic Company warehouse is located in Los Indios Texas. The warehouse presents the limitation of the great distances between its headquarters and the Main Warehouse for supplying the branches and main customers, which requires a considerable amount of time to maintain effective communication in the inventory area. In addition, during an online review, it can be confirmed that the website is disabled, contradicting its corporate policy. The structure of the thesis proposal is arranged in four chapters from the Introduction, Statement of the Problem and Purposes; Previous Studies and Definition of the literature; the Research Methodology and the resources for data collection, the results, the proposal, and the conclusions. This paper ends with a list of references from different substantial sources that facilitated the research

Information-seeking on the Web with Trusted Social Networks - from Theory to Systems

This research investigates how synergies between the Web and social networks can enhance the process of obtaining relevant and trustworthy information. A review of literature on personalised search, social search, recommender systems, social networks and trust propagation reveals limitations of existing technology in areas such as relevance, collaboration, task-adaptivity and trust. In response to these limitations I present a Web-based approach to information-seeking using social networks. This approach takes a source-centric perspective on the information-seeking process, aiming to identify trustworthy sources of relevant information from within the user's social network. An empirical study of source-selection decisions in information- and recommendation-seeking identified five factors that influence the choice of source, and its perceived trustworthiness. The priority given to each of these factors was found to vary according to the criticality and subjectivity of the task. A series of algorithms have been developed that operationalise three of these factors (expertise, experience, affinity) and generate from various data sources a number of trust metrics for use in social network-based information seeking. The most significant of these data sources is Revyu.com, a reviewing and rating Web site implemented as part of this research, that takes input from regular users and makes it available on the Semantic Web for easy re-use by the implemented algorithms. Output of the algorithms is used in Hoonoh.com, a Semantic Web-based system that has been developed to support users in identifying relevant and trustworthy information sources within their social networks. Evaluation of this system's ability to predict source selections showed more promising results for the experience factor than for expertise or affinity. This may be attributed to the greater demands these two factors place in terms of input data. Limitations of the work and opportunities for future research are discussed