The Mundane Computer: Non-Technical Design Challenges Facing Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence

Interdisciplinary collaboration, to include those who are not natural scientists, engineers and computer scientists, is inherent in the idea of ubiquitous computing, as formulated by Mark Weiser in the late 1980s and early 1990s. However, ubiquitous computing has remained largely a computer science and engineering concept, and its non-technical side remains relatively underdeveloped. The aim of the article is, first, to clarify the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration envisaged by Weiser. Second, the difficulties of understanding the everyday and weaving ubiquitous technologies into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it, as conceived by Weiser, are explored. The contributions of Anne Galloway, Paul Dourish and Philip Agre to creating an understanding of everyday life relevant to the development of ubiquitous computing are discussed, focusing on the notions of performative practice, embodied interaction and contextualisation. Third, it is argued that with the shift to the notion of ambient intelligence, the larger scale socio-economic and socio-political dimensions of context become more explicit, in contrast to the focus on the smaller scale anthropological study of social (mainly workplace) practices inherent in the concept of ubiquitous computing. This can be seen in the adoption of the concept of ambient intelligence within the European Union and in the focus on rebalancing (personal) privacy protection and (state) security in the wake of 11 September 2001. Fourth, the importance of adopting a futures-oriented approach to discussing the issues arising from the notions of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence is stressed, while the difficulty of trying to achieve societal foresight is acknowledged

Digital Twins

Progression of the field depends on convergence of information technology, operational technology and protocol-agnostic telecommunications. Making sense of the data, ability to curate data and perform data analytics at the edge (or mist rather than in the fog or cloud) is key to value. Delivering engines to the edge are crucial for analytics at the edge when latency is critical. The confluence of these and other factors may chart the future path for Digital Twins. The number of unknown unknowns and the known unknowns in this process makes it imperative to create global infrastructures and organize groups to pursue the development of fundamental building blocks and new ideas through research.Multiple forms of digital transformation are imminent. Digital Twins represent one concept. It is gaining momentum because it may offer real-time transparency. Rapid diffusion of digital duplicates faces hurdles due to lack of semantic interoperability between architectures, standards and ontologies. The technologies necessary for automated discovery are in short supply

Current trends on ICT technologies for enterprise information s²ystems

The proposed paper discusses the current trends on ICT technologies for Enterprise Information Systems. The paper starts by defining four big challenges of the next generation of information systems: (1) Data Value Chain Management; (2) Context Awareness; (3) Interaction and Visualization; and (4) Human Learning. The major contributions towards the next generation of information systems are elaborated based on the work and experience of the authors and their teams. This includes: (1) Ontology based solutions for semantic interoperability; (2) Context aware infrastructures; (3) Product Avatar based interactions; and (4) Human learning. Finally the current state of research is discussed highlighting the impact of these solutions on the economic and social landscape

Digital Innovation towards a Service-Dominant Business: A Clinical Inquiry into Georgia Pacific\u27s Connected Restroom Initiative

The rapid and pervasive digitalization of businesses has spawned value creation by changing the nature and structure of products and services. At the same time, organizations have been challenged to cope with dynamic business landscapes as they apply digital technologies to renew their competitive positions. In this context, we aim to explore how organizations develop digital innovation initiatives to transform a traditional product-dominant business towards a service-dominant one and how the initiatives are constituted and entangled within and across the initiative stages. Based on close collaboration with Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products Professional Division (GP PRO), we explore the path trajectory of the organization’s strategic connected restroom initiative through four stages: (idea-focus) initiation, (technology-focus) experimentation, (customer-focus) commercialization, and (process-focus) organization. Drawing on a clinical inquiry approach, we investigate the digital innovation initiative as combinations of strategic moves (co-evolution, reconfiguration, and renewal) and architectural moves (sensing usage, analyzing traces, and co-creating services). As a result, the dissertation contributes to the literature by adding new knowledge about the role of digital innovation in transforming incumbent product-oriented organizations towards a service-dominant focus as well as to practitioners by providing insights into the key challenges and opportunities they encounter in such initiatives

Open source software ecosystems : a systematic mapping

Context: Open source software (OSS) and software ecosystems (SECOs) are two consolidated research areas in software engineering. OSS influences the way organizations develop, acquire, use and commercialize software. SECOs have emerged as a paradigm to understand dynamics and heterogeneity in collaborative software development. For this reason, SECOs appear as a valid instrument to analyze OSS systems. However, there are few studies that blend both topics together. Objective: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the current state of the art in OSS ecosystems (OSSECOs) research, specifically: (a) what the most relevant definitions related to OSSECOs are; (b) what the particularities of this type of SECO are; and (c) how the knowledge about OSSECO is represented. Method: We conducted a systematic mapping following recommended practices. We applied automatic and manual searches on different sources and used a rigorous method to elicit the keywords from the research questions and selection criteria to retrieve the final papers. As a result, 82 papers were selected and evaluated. Threats to validity were identified and mitigated whenever possible. Results: The analysis allowed us to answer the research questions. Most notably, we did the following: (a) identified 64 terms related to the OSSECO and arranged them into a taxonomy; (b) built a genealogical tree to understand the genesis of the OSSECO term from related definitions; (c) analyzed the available definitions of SECO in the context of OSS; and (d) classified the existing modelling and analysis techniques of OSSECOs. Conclusion: As a summary of the systematic mapping, we conclude that existing research on several topics related to OSSECOs is still scarce (e.g., modelling and analysis techniques, quality models, standard definitions, etc.). This situation calls for further investigation efforts on how organizations and OSS communities actually understand OSSECOs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft