Otis College Report on the Creative Economy (2023)

The Otis College Report on the Creative Economy, commissioned annually by Otis College of Art and Design since 2007 focuses on the ways in which California's creative industries form an essential part of its overall economy. The report highlights five creative industries and eight regional snapshots with a spotlight on Los Angeles. The Otis College Report is an invaluable tool to assess the tremendous impact and influence of the creative sector on the state and regional economy

The Influence of Message Framing on Engagement with a Mobile Application for Motivating Exercise

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 21).Mobile phone personal health monitoring software is designed to help people monitor and change their behavior. Exercise applications may measure heart rate, temperature, distance traveled, and movement. Although some of these programs incorporate behavioral theories to motivate engagement and behavior change, it is not yet clear that the devices can maintain engagement long term for individuals who are not strongly inclined to exercise already. If people do not use health apps for long periods of time - weeks, months or years instead of days - there are unlikely to be long-term health benefits. This paper describes a new mobile health application designed to motivate exercise via brisk walking: MyWalk. MyWalk delivers timely, tailored feedback messages intended to persuade additional brisk walking. An experiment was conducted to explore how message framing impacts application usage using participants who downloaded the application from an online app store. Author Keywords: Engagement, Health, Mobile, Phone, Pervasive Technology, Reinforcement, Personal Health Informatics, Design, Human-Computer Interaction. ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.by Anh Dang-Viet Nguyen.M.Eng

Digitalisation For Sustainable Infrastructure: The Road Ahead

In today’s tumultuous and fast-changing times, digitalisation and technology are game changers in a wide range of sectors and have a tremendous impact on infrastructure. Roads, railways, electricity grids, aviation, and maritime transport are deeply affected by the digital and technological transition, with gains in terms of competitiveness, cost-reduction, and safety. Digitalisation is also a key tool for fostering global commitment towards sustainability, but the race for digital infrastructure is also a geopolitical one. As the world’s largest economies are starting to adopt competitive strategies, a level playing field appears far from being agreed upon. Why are digitalisation and technology the core domains of global geopolitical competition? How are they changing the way infrastructure is built, operated, and maintained? To what extent will road, rail, air, and maritime transport change by virtue of digitalisation, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things? How to enhance cyber protection for critical infrastructure? What are the EU’s, US’ and China’s digital strategies?Publishe

Parallel programming paradigms and frameworks in big data era

With Cloud Computing emerging as a promising new approach for ad-hoc parallel data processing, major companies have started to integrate frameworks for parallel data processing in their product portfolio, making it easy for customers to access these services and to deploy their programs. We have entered the Era of Big Data. The explosion and profusion of available data in a wide range of application domains rise up new challenges and opportunities in a plethora of disciplines-ranging from science and engineering to biology and business. One major challenge is how to take advantage of the unprecedented scale of data-typically of heterogeneous nature-in order to acquire further insights and knowledge for improving the quality of the offered services. To exploit this new resource, we need to scale up and scale out both our infrastructures and standard techniques. Our society is already data-rich, but the question remains whether or not we have the conceptual tools to handle it. In this paper we discuss and analyze opportunities and challenges for efficient parallel data processing. Big Data is the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity, and many solutions continue to appear, partly supported by the considerable enthusiasm around the MapReduce paradigm for large-scale data analysis. We review various parallel and distributed programming paradigms, analyzing how they fit into the Big Data era, and present modern emerging paradigms and frameworks. To better support practitioners interesting in this domain, we end with an analysis of on-going research challenges towards the truly fourth generation data-intensive science.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Probabilistic Value-Centric Optimization Design for Fractionated Spacecrafts Based on Unscented Transformation

Fractionated spacecrafts are of particular interest for pointing-intensive missions because of their ability to decouple physically the satellite bus and some imaging payloads, which possess a lesser lifecycle cost than a comparable monolithic spacecraft. Considering the probabilistic uncertainties during the mission lifecycle, the cost assessment or architecture optimization is essentially a stochastic problem. Thus, this research seeks to quantitatively assess different spacecraft architecture strategies for remote-sensing missions. A dynamical lifecycle simulation and parametric models are developed to evaluate the lifecycle costs, while the mass, propellant usage, and some other constraints on spacecraft are assessed using nonparametric, physics-based computer models. Compared with the traditional Monte Carlo simulation to produce uncertain distributions during the lifecycle, the unscented transformation is employed to reduce the computational overhead, just as it does in improving the extended Kalman filter. Furthermore, the genetic algorithm is applied to optimize the fractionated architecture based on the probabilistic value-centric assessments developed in this paper

Digital Transformation of the Italian Public Administration: A Case Study

This case study looks at the Italian Public Administration’s digital transformation. With 60 million people, 8,000 municipalities, and 23,000 local administrations, this digital transformation case highlights how a digital renaissance prefaces innovative disruption challenges. The digital transformation case uses Italy as the backdrop and Team Digitale, a team of talented individuals embarked on building public administration efficiencies and rebooting Italy’s digital innovation footprint, as the protagonist. Digital transformation is rarely, if ever, a technical solution. Instead, digital transformation is a socio-technical and socio-political solution, especially in large and complex democracies or companies with diverse, contending stakeholders. In the process, the case surfaces best practices and challenges faced when trying to tackle a mega-project across an entire economy. The case offers digital transformation recommendations that one can generalize across any global democracy. This case surfaces best practices and challenges faced when trying to tackle a mega-project across an entire economy

Investing in Long-Term Europe: re-launching Fixed, Network and Social Infrastructure

This Volume collects contributions on the critical link between investment and growth in Europe. It aims at documenting the fundamental shift in policy concepts that took place in the EU around 2015. This period was defined by the critical transition under way: from recession to recovery, from inward-looking interrogations to pressure for action and delivery, from depression to market volatility and uncertainty; from one European legislature to the next. Financial markets have been at the centre of this transition. "Finance for growth" encapsulated this change of sentiment. The contributions, representing a variety of points of view and perspectives, illustrate the meaning and value of "finance for growth", and how and why this concept can been applied, and has been applied, to the most prominent items in the European economic policy agenda