From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

UPTAKE ICT: A NETWORK OF STAKEHOLDERS AGAINST DIGITAL ILLITERACY

#Uptake_ICT2life-cycle: digital literacy and inclusion to learners with disadvantaged background# is an Erasmus + project that aims at enhancing digital literacy among adults with disadvantaged backgrounds. The partners have produced didactic materials and pedagogical guidelines to meet this aim. Based on these materials, and their didactical exploitation, a network of stakeholders was formed and trained in order to subsequently be able to teach citizens that both have disadvantaged backgrounds and are digitally illiterate or quasi-illiterate. This paper relates how this experience was undertaken in Portugal in what concerns the creation of the Stakeholders' network and presents its results. The reality that has boosted the creation of this project was the shocking situation portrayed in 2013 Eurostat statistics, according to which one in every three Portuguese had never used the Internet. Uptake ICT was then conceived and designed in order to engage synergies to counter this problem, aiming at a variety of focus groups (but paying special attention to learners of various ages that have never used Internet, like adults with disadvantaged backgrounds), in line with the transversal priorities for education, training and youth of the European Commission and seeking to assist in the meeting of the aims of Europe 2020. To add up, it also intended to enhance and to develop ideas that answer to the Societal Challenges’ needs, by sharing and creating scientific, social, technological and policies impact. The main aspects that the project focused on were digital literacy inclusion, re-qualification and employability of disadvantaged citizens, in order to help them to face the present process of civilizational change (social, political, economic, and cultural). The addressed priorities were to contribute towards a reduction of the number of low-skilled adults (re-skilling and up-skilling of adults thanks to lifelong-learning and training), and to strengthen the links between education and employment in the area of ICT | New technologies | digital literacy and digital competences | basic skills. After having identified both the most preeminent needs and ways of integrating ICT in daily life, and a set of good practices already tested in the areas of digital literacy, inclusion and employability, the project team has built a number of educational contents addressing the issues that were considered most relevant in three main levels of knowledge (Basic, Intermediate, and advanced) , and in the four languages of the project (Portuguese, Italian, English and German). The decision to work on the three levels was due to the fact that in the various partner countries there were groups of target audiences that were positioned differently with respect to their level of digital expertise. The teachinglearning materials that were conceived were afterwards reworked in order to fit in a variety of contexts and formats (e-modules, ebook, MOOC). This option for multi-format was taken having in mind different learning profiles, and the need to provide flexible and attractive materials in order to avoid any kind of rejection. Finally, a number of didactical guidelines were produced in order to provide an interface of suggestions to the stakeholders that would use these materials in their classes or workshop sessions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

New Trends in Development of Services in the Modern Economy

The services sector strategic development unites a multitude of economic and managerial aspects and is one of the most important problems of economic management. Many researches devoted to this industry study are available. Most of them are performed in the traditional aspect of the voluminous calendar approach to strategic management, characteristic of the national scientific school. Such an approach seems archaic, forming false strategic benchmarks. The services sector is of special scientific interest in this context due to the fact that the social production structure to the services development model attraction in many countries suggests transition to postindustrial economy type where the services sector is a system-supporting sector of the economy. Actively influencing the economy, the services sector in the developed countries dominates in the GDP formation, primary capital accumulation, labor, households final consumption and, finally, citizens comfort of living. However, a clear understanding of the services sector as a hyper-sector permeating all spheres of human activity has not yet been fully developed, although interest in this issue continues to grow among many authors. Target of strategic management of the industry development setting requires substantive content and the services sector target value assessment

The Digital Economy and North American Economic Growth: A U.S.-Canadian Dialogue on the Internet's Impact on Competition, Innovation, and Opportunity

The spread of digital network technologies, the Internet in particular, is rapidly transforming commercial relationships and economic opportunities. Faster and easier exchange of global information should intensify competition, foster market economies, expand choice and opportunity, improve productivity, and raise global education levels and living standards. Canada, the United States, and other nations must facilitate the deployment and acceptance of these network technologies in order to reap the substantial gains they offer. This cross-border dialogue focuses on key e-commerce policy issues that will shape the future not only for the digital economy, but for virtually all forms of economic activity

Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

Survey and Analysis of Production Distributed Computing Infrastructures

This report has two objectives. First, we describe a set of the production distributed infrastructures currently available, so that the reader has a basic understanding of them. This includes explaining why each infrastructure was created and made available and how it has succeeded and failed. The set is not complete, but we believe it is representative. Second, we describe the infrastructures in terms of their use, which is a combination of how they were designed to be used and how users have found ways to use them. Applications are often designed and created with specific infrastructures in mind, with both an appreciation of the existing capabilities provided by those infrastructures and an anticipation of their future capabilities. Here, the infrastructures we discuss were often designed and created with specific applications in mind, or at least specific types of applications. The reader should understand how the interplay between the infrastructure providers and the users leads to such usages, which we call usage modalities. These usage modalities are really abstractions that exist between the infrastructures and the applications; they influence the infrastructures by representing the applications, and they influence the ap- plications by representing the infrastructures

Innovation Policy and Development in the ICT Paradigm: Regional and Theoretical Perspectives

Innovation policy forms a foundation, and probably the most important one, of economic development in any society, especially in today’s society driven by information and communication technologies (ICT). The Schumpeterian processes of creative destruction need stewardship – creative destruction management – and this paper aims to explore some key aspects of innovation policies from the perspective of the current ICT paradigm. The basic feature of the latter is the trend towards globalisation, towards facilitation of heterogeneity, diversity, and adaptability, which leads to market segmentation and niche proliferation as well as to production disaggregation and segment relocation. Analysis of innovation policies of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries shows that their current national innovation system based innovation policies are lacking several crucial features. First, one of the central arguments of creative-destruction management is paradigm-based, activity-specific priority-setting, but such wide-scale selection mechanisms have been and are still missing, and currently innovation policies by themselves can not lead to economic restructuring. Second, the whole concept of innovation systems has to a large extent focused on activities related to the production and use of codified scientific and technical knowledge leading to the situation where existing policies have essentially nothing to do with the average companies. Third, the current paradigm is characterised by globalised and open financial markets which, in case of the CEE countries, have enforced speculative economic growth, fuelled by domestic consumption and based on foreign borrowing. Finally, while the state is generally considered an important factor influencing how concrete innovation systems develop, linkages to policymaking itself and administrative capacities are quite missing and need to be revived, including the reconsideration of governance.innovation, economic development, innovation policy, ICT Paradigm, open innovation, governance, dissertations,

Chasing Sustainability on the Net : International research on 69 journalistic pure players and their business models

This report outlines how online-based journalistic startups have created their economical locker in the evolving media ecology. The research introduces the ways that startups have found sustainability in the markets of ten countries. The work is based on 69 case studies from Europe, USA and Japan. The case analysis shows that business models can be divided into two groups. The storytelling-oriented business models are still prevalent in our findings. These are the online journalistic outlets that produce original content – news and stories for audiences. But the other group, service-oriented business models, seems to be growing. This group consists of sites that don’t try to monetize the journalistic content as such but rather focus on carving out new functionality. The project was able to identify several revenue sources: advertising, paying for content, affiliate marketing, donations, selling data or services, organizing events, freelancing and training or selling merchandise. Where it was hard to evidence entirely new revenue sources, it was however possible to find new ways in which revenue sources have been combined or reconfigured. The report also offers practical advice for those who are planning to start their own journalistic site

The European Union Innovation Performance in View of the Lisbon Strategy

The paper is divided into four parts. First deals with the characteristics of the role of knowledge-based economy and innovativeness of the economic system in Lisbon Strategy. Second is devoted to the issue of innovativeness of the EU economies as compared to the US and Japan. Third presents evaluation of the Lisbon Strategy implementation. Fourth analyses the renewed Lisbon Strategy.Artykuł składa się z wprowadzenia, czterech części i zakończenia. Część pierwsza poświęcona jest prezentacji roli gospodarki opartej na wiedzy i innowacyjności w Strategii Lizbońskiej. Część druga zawiera analizę poziomu innowacyjności gospodarek UE na tle USA i Japonii. W części trzeciej przedstawiono ocenę realizacji głównych celów Strategii Lizbońskiej, a w czwartej założenia nowej wersji owej Strategii