Collaborative Networks as a Mechanism for Strengthening Competitiveness: Small and Medium Enterprises and Non-state Actors in Tanzania as Cases

Industrial organizations are increasingly facing more challenges in the market and society. These challenges include the scarcity of resources, short delivery time requirement, frequent emergence of new technologies, demand for wide variety of competencies, and limited availability of up-to-date experts. Coping with these challenges requires continuous restructuring and managing changes in organizations. However, only large organizations can afford to institute these changes. It also requires continuous innovation in deployment of emerging technologies and management concepts. Thus, due to their small size, lack of competitive capital and inability to acquire complex opportunities, majority of SMEs and non state actors (NSA) find it difficult to cope with the required speed of change. However, both research and practice have shown that dynamic time/cost-effective and fluid creation of temporary collaborative networks wrought by ICTs is an enabler for the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and NSAs in quest of enhancing competitiveness in the marketplace. This article contributes to the understanding of the challenges related to the establishment of collaborative networks of organizations in developing economies and proposes a customizable model for establishing those networks.   Key Terms: Collaborative networks, developing economies, ICTs, SMEs, non state actors, collaborative capital &#160

Cyber Threat Actors for the Factory of the Future

The increasing degree of connectivity in factory of the future (FoF) environments, with systems that were never designed for a networked environment in terms of their technical security nature, is accompanied by a number of security risks that must be considered. This leads to the necessity of relying on risk assessment-based approaches to reach a sufficiently mature cyber security management level. However, the lack of common definitions of cyber threat actors (CTA) poses challenges in untested environments such as the FoF. This paper analyses policy papers and reports from expert organizations to identify common definitions of CTAs. A significant consensus exists only on two common CTAs, while other CTAs are often either ignored or overestimated in their importance. The identified motivations of CTAs are contrasted with the specific characteristics of FoF environments to determine the most likely CTAs targeting FoF environments. Special emphasis is given to corporate competitors, as FoF environments probably provide better opportunities than ever for industrial espionage if they are not sufficiently secured. In this context, the study aims to draw attention to the research gaps in this area

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Intelligence Augmentation: Towards Building Human-Machine Symbiotic Relationship

Artificial intelligence, which people originally modeled after human intelligence, has made significant advances in recent years. These advances have caused many to fear that machines will surpass human intelligence and dominate humans. Intelligence augmentation (IA) has the potential to turn the tension between the two intelligence types into a symbiotic one. Although IA has not gained momentum until recent years, the idea that machines can amplify human abilities has existed for many decades. Expanded from a panel discussion on Intelligence Augmentation at the 2020 International Conference of Information Systems (ICIS), we define IA in light of its history and evolution and classify IA based on its capabilities, roles, and responsibilities. Based on reviewing the IA literature in terms of research themes, enabling technology, and applications, we identify key research issues, challenges, and future opportunities