Territorial Patterns of Innovation in Europe

This paper investigates over the way in which regions innovate. The conceptual framework departs from the simple idea that scientific activities equates knowledge, assuming that the presence of local knowledge produced by research centers, universities and firms was a necessary and sufficient condition for increasing the innovative capacities in local firms, fed by local spillovers. In particular, the paradigmatic jump in interpreting regional innovation processes lies in a conceptual framework interpreting not a single phase of the innovation process, but the different modes of performing the different phases of the innovation process, highlighting the context conditions (internal and external to the region) that accompany each innovation pattern. The paper conceptually identifies different territorial patterns of innovation, and empirically test their existence in Europe. Interesting results emerge from the European territory, witnessing the existence of large differences in the territorial patterns of innovation. These results strongly support normative suggestions towards thematically/regionally focused innovation policies.

Environmental Sensing by Wearable Device for Indoor Activity and Location Estimation

We present results from a set of experiments in this pilot study to investigate the causal influence of user activity on various environmental parameters monitored by occupant carried multi-purpose sensors. Hypotheses with respect to each type of measurements are verified, including temperature, humidity, and light level collected during eight typical activities: sitting in lab / cubicle, indoor walking / running, resting after physical activity, climbing stairs, taking elevators, and outdoor walking. Our main contribution is the development of features for activity and location recognition based on environmental measurements, which exploit location- and activity-specific characteristics and capture the trends resulted from the underlying physiological process. The features are statistically shown to have good separability and are also information-rich. Fusing environmental sensing together with acceleration is shown to achieve classification accuracy as high as 99.13%. For building applications, this study motivates a sensor fusion paradigm for learning individualized activity, location, and environmental preferences for energy management and user comfort.Comment: submitted to the 40th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON

Context Aware Computing for The Internet of Things: A Survey

As we are moving towards the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of sensors deployed around the world is growing at a rapid pace. Market research has shown a significant growth of sensor deployments over the past decade and has predicted a significant increment of the growth rate in the future. These sensors continuously generate enormous amounts of data. However, in order to add value to raw sensor data we need to understand it. Collection, modelling, reasoning, and distribution of context in relation to sensor data plays critical role in this challenge. Context-aware computing has proven to be successful in understanding sensor data. In this paper, we survey context awareness from an IoT perspective. We present the necessary background by introducing the IoT paradigm and context-aware fundamentals at the beginning. Then we provide an in-depth analysis of context life cycle. We evaluate a subset of projects (50) which represent the majority of research and commercial solutions proposed in the field of context-aware computing conducted over the last decade (2001-2011) based on our own taxonomy. Finally, based on our evaluation, we highlight the lessons to be learnt from the past and some possible directions for future research. The survey addresses a broad range of techniques, methods, models, functionalities, systems, applications, and middleware solutions related to context awareness and IoT. Our goal is not only to analyse, compare and consolidate past research work but also to appreciate their findings and discuss their applicability towards the IoT.Comment: IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials Journal, 201

Utilization of e-Logistics in multinational companies to overcome difficulties of today’s economic environment

As the incredible growth of the Internet is changing the way corporations conduct their business. Logistics service providers must consider changing their traditional logistics system into an e-Logistics system in order to accommodate to the dynamic changes in the commercial world. The purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of how organizations utilize e-Logistics within their supply chain and how to create a competitive advantage during the economic crisis so that losses be limited if not eliminated. To reach this purpose, two research questions are stated (two multinational companies), focusing the factors that influence the e-Logistics system. From the in-depth interviews and used to collect data, the findings show that the e-Logistics system can be described as a network creating value process. The findings further indicate that reliability factors, maintainability factors, software factors and facility, transportation and handling factors, all influence the e-Logistics system. On the other hand, availability factors, economic factors, organizational factors and test and support equipment factors are of low-level importance for e-logistics system. The second part of the paper focuses on how e-logistics will change the multinational traditional logistics systems and how we can measure (Key Performance Indicators) these changes.competitively, e-logistics, economic crises, measure (key Performance Indicators).

A Role-Based Approach for Orchestrating Emergent Configurations in the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is envisioned as a global network of connected things enabling ubiquitous machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. With estimations of billions of sensors and devices to be connected in the coming years, the IoT has been advocated as having a great potential to impact the way we live, but also how we work. However, the connectivity aspect in itself only accounts for the underlying M2M infrastructure. In order to properly support engineering IoT systems and applications, it is key to orchestrate heterogeneous 'things' in a seamless, adaptive and dynamic manner, such that the system can exhibit a goal-directed behaviour and take appropriate actions. Yet, this form of interaction between things needs to take a user-centric approach and by no means elude the users' requirements. To this end, contextualisation is an important feature of the system, allowing it to infer user activities and prompt the user with relevant information and interactions even in the absence of intentional commands. In this work we propose a role-based model for emergent configurations of connected systems as a means to model, manage, and reason about IoT systems including the user's interaction with them. We put a special focus on integrating the user perspective in order to guide the emergent configurations such that systems goals are aligned with the users' intentions. We discuss related scientific and technical challenges and provide several uses cases outlining the concept of emergent configurations.Comment: In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on the Internet of Agents @AAMAS201