Journal of Internet Services and Applications manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Middleware for Social Computing: A

Abstract Social computing broadly refers to supporting social behaviours using computational systems. In the last decade, the advent of Web 2.0 and its social networking services, wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking has revolutionised social computing, creating new online contexts within which people interact socially (social networking). With the pervasiveness of mobile devices and embedded sensors, we stand at the brink of another major revolution, where the boundary between online and offline social behaviours blurs, providing opportunities for (re)defining social conventions and contexts once again. But opportunities come with challenges: can middleware foster the engineering of social software? We identify three societal grand challenges that are likely to drive future research in social computing and elaborate on how the middleware community can help address them

When decision support systems fail: insights for strategic information systems from Formula

Decision support systems (DSS) are sophisticated tools that increasingly take advantage of big data and are used to design and implement individual - and organization - level strategic decisions . Yet, when organizations excessively rely on their potential the outcome may be decision - making failure, particularly when such tools are applied under high pressure and turbulent conditions. Partial understanding and unidimensional interpretation can prevent learning from failure. Building on a practice perspective, we study an iconic case of strategic failure in Formula 1 racing. Our approach, which integrates the decision maker as well as the organizational and material context , identifies three interrelated sources of strategic failure that are worth investigation for decision - makers using DSS and big data: (1) t he situated nature and affordances of decision - making ; (2) t he distributed nature of cognition in decision - making; and (3) the performativity of the DSS. We outline specific research questions and their implications for firm performance and competitive advantage. Finally, we advance an agenda that can help close timely gaps in strategic IS research

Socio-digital experiences

The experiences emerging from interacting with digital technology need to be understood, designed and engineered. This is quintessential for ensuring that related systems and services have a purpose and value for their users, helping them achieve their aspirations and desires. Rooted in this human-experience centered perspective, we explore ambient intelligence technologies, where computation and communication are embedded in our physical and social environment, adapting to users and their context. The overarching motivation is to create novel socio-digital experiences that address societal needs, like staying connected with dear ones, children’s outdoor play, achieving desirable behavior change, supporting independent living, and rehabilitation. Looking to the future, two grand challenges concern us. First is to design technologies that people can shape to meet idiosyncratic and dynamically emerging requirements, known as meta-design. Second is endowing ambient intelligence technologies with aspects of social intelligence

Futures of a Complex World : Proceedings of the Conference “Futures of a Complex World”, 12–13 June 2017, Turku, Finland

”Futures of a Complex World” conference 2017 was a success by all standards. We got record amount of participants - 330 experts from 29 countries - with fascinating array of topics from future of agriculture to new modeling tools. This publication, based on papers presented in the conference, is a token of the fascinating variety of approaches we can adopt while penetrating the future with the tools of our research. As such, it also represents in a splendid way the complexity of our world, embedded with grand challenges as well as fascinating new developments. Complexity science itself proves us that we need particularly two capacities to thrive in the ever more complex world: on the one hand we need to build more resilience into our systems, on the other, we should create new capacities to transform, if necessary. Both aspects are well represented in the articles of this publications

Supporting excellence in engaged research

This paper reviews the purposes, definitions and criteria designed to embed ‘engaged research’ as a strategic priority with universities, and explores some of the challenges of implementation. Surveys of academics have shown various understandings of, and attitudes to, the practices of engaged research, but also impediments to realising the aspirations it expresses. Drawing on the experience as the academic lead for engaged research at the Open University, the author explores questions of professionalisation, for example, through training, support mechanisms and measures of recognition for engaged research. He concludes by arguing that, if done well, engaged research can promote epistemic justice

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research