A qualitative study of stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment

Over two billion people are using the Internet at present, assisted by the mediating activities of software agents which deal with the diversity and complexity of information. There are, however, ethical issues due to the monitoring-and-surveillance, data mining and autonomous nature of software agents. Considering the context, this study aims to comprehend stakeholders' perspectives on the social network service environment in order to identify the main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services in the near future. Twenty-one stakeholders, belonging to three key stakeholder groups, were recruited using a purposive sampling strategy for unstandardised semi-structured e-mail interviews. The interview data were analysed using a qualitative content analysis method. It was possible to identify three main considerations for the design of software agents in social network services, which were classified into the following categories: comprehensive understanding of users' perception of privacy, user type recognition algorithms for software agent development and existing software agents enhancement

On the road to personalised and precision geomedicine: medical geology and a renewed call for interdisciplinarity

Our health depends on where we currently live, as well as on where we have lived in the past and for how long in each place. An individual’s place history is particularly relevant in conditions with long latency between exposures and clinical manifestations, as is the case in many types of cancer and chronic conditions. A patient’s geographic history should routinely be considered by physicians when diagnosing and treating individual patients. It can provide useful contextual environmental information (and the corresponding health risks) about the patient, and should thus form an essential part of every electronic patient/health record. Medical geology investigations, in their attempt to document the complex relationships between the environment and human health, typically involve a multitude of disciplines and expertise. Arguably, the spatial component is the one factor that ties in all these disciplines together in medical geology studies. In a general sense, epidemiology, statistical genetics, geoscience, geomedical engineering and public and environmental health informatics tend to study data in terms of populations, whereas medicine (including personalised and precision geomedicine, and lifestyle medicine), genetics, genomics, toxicology and biomedical/health informatics more likely work on individuals or some individual mechanism describing disease. This article introduces with examples the core concepts of medical geology and geomedicine. The ultimate goals of prediction, prevention and personalised treatment in the case of geology-dependent disease can only be realised through an intensive multiple-disciplinary approach, where the various relevant disciplines collaborate together and complement each other in additive (multidisciplinary), interactive (interdisciplinary) and holistic (transdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary) manners

Personalisation and its implications for work and employment in the voluntary sector

This report assesses the impact of personalisation on social care, particularly focussing on implications for the workforce. Personalisation is often presented as being transformative in the manner in which it empowers both people who use services and employees. The report considers the latter aspect in particular by assessing some of the workforce implications of personalisation. It reports research drawn from policymakers and three voluntary organisations, with interviews with managers, employees and people who use services. The main findings from the research are: Policymakers were enthusiastic about the potential benefits of personalisation with regard to the opportunities for the independence of people who receive services and enhancement of workforce skills. Policymakers feared the impact of public spending cuts and recognised the cultural and operational barriers within local authorities to the implementation of personalisation. Policymakers were enthusiastic about the role of the voluntary sector and its workforce in terms of its contribution to delivering personalised services, whilst recognising concerns about skills gaps among employees and the impact of deteriorating terms and conditions of employment on worker morale. Management in the three organisations largely embraced the principles of personalisation, whilst also recognising the pressure from local authorities to use the personalisation agenda to cut costs. Employees in the main understood the principles of personalisation but revealed limited awareness of the implications for the changes in service budgets. Organisations were changing their approach to staff recruitment in order to develop a better fit between the interests of people receiving services and employees delivering them. Management anticipated significant changes to the working hours of employees providing personalised services, which was met with a degree of anxiety among some employees. Management recognised the need to address skills gaps among employees in areas such as risk enablement, decision-making and community connecting. Employees generally welcomed the potential enhancement of their skills through personalisation. Job security concerns were apparent among the majority of front-line employees as a consequence of personalisation. Organisations were balancing the move towards risk enablement and cutting costs with the need to protect service user and worker health and safety, particularly in relation to managing challenging behavior. Personalisation brings with it the potential to fragment pay and conditions away from collective terms towards linking them more closely to the value of individual service budgets. People who receive services revealed limited awareness of changes to service budgets, their choices over the service provider, choices over who provides their services and there was limited evidence of empowerment and greater choice

Transformational government and assistive web base technologies

Transformational government has been on the European agenda for several years. However, progress towards realising the full potential of ICT to transform public services for older adults with age related cognitive impairments has been very limited. Highlighting such limitations this paper demonstrates how assistive web base technologies can be developed to improve the public services for older adults with age related cognitive impairments. However the paper argues that these transformations can be obstructed if there is no strong leadership and political commitment from people at many levels in public sectors and governments

Designing ambient intelligent scenarios to promote discussion of human values

Ambient technology evokes a near future in which humans will be surrounded by ‘always-on’, unobtrusive, interconnected intelligent objects. Always connected raises concern over human values. This study uses a privacy and trust framework to evaluate two Aml scenarios one health related and the other to the everyday task of shopping. Findings are discussed in relation to dimensions of trust, privacy and the impact upon human values

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given

How dangerous is your life? Personalising Government open crime data

This paper discusses the use of Government Open Data and how public services based on this data can and should encourage data personalisation. We present our case study Fearsquare, an application that allows people to interact with public UK crime statistics in a way that is specific to their own, individual, everyday life by leveraging the popular social media service FourSquare. This service is used as an example of how Open Data can be tailored for used in the field of personal informatics. Results suggest that the ability to personalise Government Open Crime Data using Foursquare user location history data provides an added value to an already publically available dataset

Living Arrangement Options for People with Intellectual Disabilities: A Scoping Review

This is one of a pair of reports prepared for the Moving Ahead Project. Its partner policy review, Mapping the National Intellectual Disability Landscape (Linehan et al., 2014), outlines current disability services, practices and policies in Ireland. This rapid scoping review provides a brief overview of national and international research exploring living arrangement options for people with intellectual disabilities

Big data analytics:Computational intelligence techniques and application areas

Big Data has significant impact in developing functional smart cities and supporting modern societies. In this paper, we investigate the importance of Big Data in modern life and economy, and discuss challenges arising from Big Data utilization. Different computational intelligence techniques have been considered as tools for Big Data analytics. We also explore the powerful combination of Big Data and Computational Intelligence (CI) and identify a number of areas, where novel applications in real world smart city problems can be developed by utilizing these powerful tools and techniques. We present a case study for intelligent transportation in the context of a smart city, and a novel data modelling methodology based on a biologically inspired universal generative modelling approach called Hierarchical Spatial-Temporal State Machine (HSTSM). We further discuss various implications of policy, protection, valuation and commercialization related to Big Data, its applications and deployment