Critical reflections on designing product service systems

In response to unsustainability and the prospect of resource scarcity, lifestyles dominated by resource throughput are being challenged. This paper focuses on a design experiment that sought to introduce alternative resource consumption pathways in the form of product service systems (PSS) to satisfy household demand and reduce consumer durable household waste. In contrast to many other PSS examples this project did not begin with sustainability benefits, rather the preferences of supply and demand actors and the bounded geographical locations represented by two UK housing developments. The paper addresses the process through which the concept PSS were designed, selected and evaluated, alongside the practical and commercial parameters of the project. It proposes the need for a shift to further emphasize the importance of the design imperative in creating different PSS outcomes that reorganize relationships between people, resources and the environment

Ecodriving and Carbon Footprinting: Understanding How Public Education Can Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Fuel Use

Ecodriving is a collection of changes to driving behavior and vehicle maintenance designed to impact fuel consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in existing vehicles. Because of its promise to improve fuel economy within the existing fleet, ecodriving has gained increased attention in North America. One strategy to improve ecodriving is through public education with information on how to ecodrive. This report provides a review and study of ecodriving from several angles. The report offers a literature review of previous work and programs in ecodriving across the world. In addition, researchers completed interviews with experts in the field of public relations and public message campaigns to ascertain best practices for public campaigns. Further, the study also completed a set of focus groups evaluating consumer response to a series of websites that displayed ecodriving information. Finally, researchers conducted a set of surveys, including a controlled stated-response study conducted with approximately 100 University of California, Berkeley faculty, staff, and students, assessing the effectiveness of static ecodriving web-based information as well as an intercept clipboard survey in the San Francisco Bay Area. The stated-response study consisted of a comparison of the experimental and control groups. It found that exposure to ecodriving information influenced people’s driving behavior and some maintenance practices. The experimental group’s distributional shift was statistically significant, particularly for key practices including: lower highway cruising speed, driving behavior adjustment, and proper tire inflation. Within the experimental group (N = 51), fewer respondents significantly changed their maintenance practices (16%) than the majority that altered some driving practices (71%). This suggests intentionally altering driving behavior is easier than planning better maintenance practices. While it was evident that not everyone modifies their behavior as a result of reviewing the ecodriving website, even small shifts in behavior due to inexpensive information dissemination could be deemed cost effective in reducing fuel consumption and emissions

LINVIEW: Incremental View Maintenance for Complex Analytical Queries

Many analytics tasks and machine learning problems can be naturally expressed by iterative linear algebra programs. In this paper, we study the incremental view maintenance problem for such complex analytical queries. We develop a framework, called LINVIEW, for capturing deltas of linear algebra programs and understanding their computational cost. Linear algebra operations tend to cause an avalanche effect where even very local changes to the input matrices spread out and infect all of the intermediate results and the final view, causing incremental view maintenance to lose its performance benefit over re-evaluation. We develop techniques based on matrix factorizations to contain such epidemics of change. As a consequence, our techniques make incremental view maintenance of linear algebra practical and usually substantially cheaper than re-evaluation. We show, both analytically and experimentally, the usefulness of these techniques when applied to standard analytics tasks. Our evaluation demonstrates the efficiency of LINVIEW in generating parallel incremental programs that outperform re-evaluation techniques by more than an order of magnitude.Comment: 14 pages, SIGMO

Asset management and governance: an analysis of fleet management process issues in an asset-intensive organization

Efficient asset management is a key performance driver for asset-intensive organizations. Achieving high utilization and return on investment on physical assets are central corporate objectives for public and private organisations alike. Current approaches on asset management include the engineering and governance perspectives. Both perspectives offer valuable but incomplete insights on the management of asset performance: experience demonstrates that an exclusive focus on one or the other may lead to sub-optimal asset and organizational performance. In this paper, we investigate how an integrated approach to asset management can be constructed in the context of vehicle fleets. Beginning with an analysis of how the asset management process is operated through the asset lifecycle, we identify key engineering and organizational factors influencing asset performance. The relationships between factors are analyzed to provide an integrated fleet asset management approach

The essence of P2P: A reference architecture for overlay networks

The success of the P2P idea has created a huge diversity of approaches, among which overlay networks, for example, Gnutella, Kazaa, Chord, Pastry, Tapestry, P-Grid, or DKS, have received specific attention from both developers and researchers. A wide variety of algorithms, data structures, and architectures have been proposed. The terminologies and abstractions used, however, have become quite inconsistent since the P2P paradigm has attracted people from many different communities, e.g., networking, databases, distributed systems, graph theory, complexity theory, biology, etc. In this paper we propose a reference model for overlay networks which is capable of modeling different approaches in this domain in a generic manner. It is intended to allow researchers and users to assess the properties of concrete systems, to establish a common vocabulary for scientific discussion, to facilitate the qualitative comparison of the systems, and to serve as the basis for defining a standardized API to make overlay networks interoperable

Dialectics of Efficient Change Management in the Regional Social Systems

The research has placed emphasis on the role of the social infrastructure sectors, providing social services, which facilitate human potential development in a modern state. Theoretical positions of the scientist considering the nature of social benefits and necessity of the government support for the social sphere has been summarized in the article. The state of the Russian social infrastructure sectors has been considered and the analysis of their performance compared to these of the social infrastructure sectors in other countries has been conducted in the research work. Taking into consideration the performance ratings of the effectiveness of the national education systems, the countries around the world concerning the effectiveness of the health system, the countries around the world concerning the social development level in 2014, the authors have proposed the conceptual approach that makes it possible to consider the correlation and interrelation of the level of the government financing of the social sphere and the dynamics of the contribution of social infrastructure sectors in the development of the human capital, ensuring the gross domestic product increase. The necessity of making innovative changes in the socio-economic systems of the social infrastructure sectors, to improve their performance, taking into account the results obtained, in the first place, in health care, has been wellgrounded and theoretical approaches to the changes management in the socio-economic systems has been studied in the article. The theoretical approaches to the changes management in the socio-economic systems have been studied by the authors. Based on the conducted studies and the formed theoretical basis for improving the level of changes management in open socio-economic systems, for the purpose of development of the theoretical and methodological approaches to changes management as applied to health care sphere, optimization model of management of health care organizations by way of ranking of manageable and unmanageable changes has been proposed. The possibility of using management optimization by way of ranking of manageable and unmanageable changes in the health care management at different levels has been confirmed with high-performance indicators at the micro-, meso- and macro levels in the sector, by the example of implementation of the national project “Health” and innovative organizational changes facilitating the return to work of patients of the working age, which are involved in the gross domestic product formation in the city of Yekaterinburg.The article has been prepared with the support of the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 14-18-00456 “Support of geoecosocioeconomic approach to development of strategic nature resources capacity of the low-studied northern territories within the investment project “Arctic — Central Asia”

Big Data and the Internet of Things

Advances in sensing and computing capabilities are making it possible to embed increasing computing power in small devices. This has enabled the sensing devices not just to passively capture data at very high resolution but also to take sophisticated actions in response. Combined with advances in communication, this is resulting in an ecosystem of highly interconnected devices referred to as the Internet of Things - IoT. In conjunction, the advances in machine learning have allowed building models on this ever increasing amounts of data. Consequently, devices all the way from heavy assets such as aircraft engines to wearables such as health monitors can all now not only generate massive amounts of data but can draw back on aggregate analytics to "improve" their performance over time. Big data analytics has been identified as a key enabler for the IoT. In this chapter, we discuss various avenues of the IoT where big data analytics either is already making a significant impact or is on the cusp of doing so. We also discuss social implications and areas of concern.Comment: 33 pages. draft of upcoming book chapter in Japkowicz and Stefanowski (eds.) Big Data Analysis: New algorithms for a new society, Springer Series on Studies in Big Data, to appea