Interoperable services based on activity monitoring in ambient assisted living environments

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is considered as the main technological solution that will enable the aged and people in recovery to maintain their independence and a consequent high quality of life for a longer period of time than would otherwise be the case. This goal is achieved by monitoring human’s activities and deploying the appropriate collection of services to set environmental features and satisfy user preferences in a given context. However, both human monitoring and services deployment are particularly hard to accomplish due to the uncertainty and ambiguity characterising human actions, and heterogeneity of hardware devices composed in an AAL system. This research addresses both the aforementioned challenges by introducing 1) an innovative system, based on Self Organising Feature Map (SOFM), for automatically classifying the resting location of a moving object in an indoor environment and 2) a strategy able to generate context-aware based Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) services in order to maximize the users’ comfort and hardware interoperability level. The overall system runs on a distributed embedded platform with a specialised ceiling- mounted video sensor for intelligent activity monitoring. The system has the ability to learn resting locations, to measure overall activity levels, to detect specific events such as potential falls and to deploy the right sequence of fuzzy services modelled through FML for supporting people in that particular context. Experimental results show less than 20% classification error in monitoring human activities and providing the right set of services, showing the robustness of our approach over others in literature with minimal power consumption

Multinationals in the pandemic context: The case of Brazilian companies and China

The COVID-19 public health crisis and policy efforts to combat it have led to significant economic and commercial consequences (Evenett, 2020). Multinational enterprises had to strive to respond to the new reality (Van Assche & Lundan, 2020), particularly companies doing business with China (Chen et al., 2021). The role of China as a manufacturing hub and as Brazil´s main trading partner disrupted several companies in the Latin American country. The closing of borders and confinement measures made trade difficult and more expensive (Morgan et al., 2021); together with the economic slowdown, the international business in Brazil faced undeniable challenges. Thus, two research questions were raised to investigate the main challenges faced and the strategies used by Multinationals in Brazil to overcome the COVID-19 crisis. In this exploratory study, we used a literature review, questionnaires, and interviews directed at specific professionals in Brazil who deal with China. The key findings reflect the main challenges of Brazilian international companies in their business with China and the strategies they have implemented to overcome them. This study shows how companies in the same context could reanalyze their operational planning and avoid future disruptions.A crise de saúde pública do COVID-19 e os esforços políticos para combatê-la levaram a consequências econômicas e comerciais significativas (Evenett, 2020). As empresas multinacionais tiveram que se esforçar para responder à nova realidade (Van Assche & Lundan, 2020), principalmente as empresas que fazem negócios com a China (Chen et al., 2021). O papel da China como polo fabril e principal parceiro comercial do Brasil gerou disrupção para diversas empresas do país latino-americano. O fechamento das fronteiras e as medidas de confinamento tornaram o comércio complicado e mais caro (Morgan et al., 2021), e junto com os resultados da desaceleração econômica, os negócios internacionais no Brasil tiveram desafios inegáveis a enfrentar. Desta forma, foram levantadas duas perguntas de partida para investigar os principais desafios enfrentados e as estratégias utilizadas pelas Multinacionais no Brasil para superar a crise do COVID-19. Este estudo exploratório foi realizado por meio de revisão de literatura, além de questionários e entrevistas direcionados a profissionais específicos no Brasil que lidam com a China. Os principais resultados retidos são os principais desafios das empresas brasileiras internacionais em seus negócios com a China e as estratégias por elas implementadas. Assim, este estudo permite que empresas no mesmo contexto reanalisem seu planejamento operacional e evitem futuras disrupções

Anthropology and business: reflections on the business applications of cultural anthropology.

Today's business have international and intercultural dimensions. The complexity of market, organizational climate and culture and the management of human resources demand interdisciplinary and intercultural approach which are available in anthropological researches and methods. The consumer world has its own developments, diversifications and psycho-cultural fermentation. These changes pose new challenges for the designers and suppliers of products, services, systems and processes. Many changes in the economic and social spheres are beyond the range of conventional number-led, straight-line anaysis and planning. Rapid discontinuous changes defy all straight-line forecasting and conventional plannings. Qualitative and open-ended researches, scenario planning and brainstorming sessions, which skilled anthropologists are able to provide, are necessary to face such challenges.

See No Evil - Climate change risk governance at three municipal tourist offices in Sweden

Climate change is expected to bring about severe changes to the world’s ecosystems and to challenge mobility patterns on all geographical levels. For tourism these changes have worrying implications. This study deals with the link between tourism and climate change on the municipal level in Sweden. Viewing tourism and climate change as an issue for risk governance, the risk governance practices at three municipal tourist offices are explored. The research develops along the questions how employees at municipal tourist offices construct risks from climate change for their operations, how these risk constructions are translated into practice and how the tourist offices collaborate on climate change with the municipal climate adaptation coordinators (CAC) and the risk and vulnerability coordinators (RVC). The risk governance perspective is chosen to enable a practice-near approach to tourism and climate change. In the data generation semi-structured interviews and participant observations are applied. The main findings of the study are that the respondents from the tourist offices frame risks from climate change on two levels: the interview level and the work-practice level. It is noted that the tourist offices do not explicitly deal with climate change in their operations. Further, the collaboration between the tourist offices and the CACs and RVCs is found to be modest. It is concluded that the municipal tourist offices do not carry out any proactive climate change risk governance as the prevailing practices for acquiring organizational value are not set out for renegotiation in the light of climate change

Player Relationships as Mediated Through Sound in Immersive Multi-player Computer Games

This essay examines the relationship between player and diegetic sound FX in immersive computer game environments and how this relationship leads, in large part, to the contextualization of the player within the virtual world of the game. This contextualization presupposes a primarily sonically-based perception of objects and events in the world and, in a multi-player game, this ultimately leads to communication between players through the medium of diegetic sound. The players’ engagement with, and immersion in, the game’s acoustic environment is the result of a relationship with sound that is technologically mediated. The game engine, for example, produces a range of environmental or ambient sounds and almost every player action has a corresponding sound. A variety of relevant theories and disciplines are assessed for the methodological basis of the points raised, such as film sound theory and sonification, and, throughout, the First-Person Shooter sub-genre is used as an exemplar. Such games include the «Doom» and «Quake» series, the «Half-Life» series and derivatives and later games such as «Left 4 Dead». The combination of the acoustic environment, the interactive placement of the player – as embodied by his virtual, prosthetic arms – in the environment and the sonic relationships between players produces the acoustic ecology. An exposition of this multi-player communication and the resultant acoustic ecology and player immersion, is the main objective of the essay

Understanding Coordination in the Information Systems Domain: Conceptualization and Implications

In this paper, we suggest a new conceptualization of coordination in the information systems (IS) domain. The conceptualization builds on neurobiological predispositions for coordinating actions. We assume that human evolution has led to the development of a neurobiological substrate that enables individuals to coordinate everyday actions. At heart, we discuss six activity modalities: contextualization, objectivation, spatialization, temporalization, stabilization, and transition. Specifically, we discuss that these modalities need to collectively function for successful coordination. To illustrate as much, we apply our conceptualization to important IS research areas, including project management and interface design. Generally, our new conceptualization holds value for coordination research on all four levels of analysis that we identified based on reviewing the IS literature (i.e., group, intra-organization, inter-organization, and IT artifact). In this way, our new approach, grounded in neurobiological findings, provides a high-level theory to explain coordination success or coordination failure and, hence, is independent from a specific level of analysis. From a practitioner’s perspective, the conceptualization provides a guideline for designing organizational interventions and IT artifacts. Because social initiatives are essential in multiple IS domains (e.g., software development, implementation of enterprise systems) and because the design of collaborative software tools is an important IS topic, this paper contributes to a fundamental phenomenon in the IS domain and does so from a new conceptual perspective