Combining Green Metrics and Digital Twins for Sustainability Planning and Governance of Smart Buildings and Cities

Creating a more sustainable world will require a coordinated effort to address the rise of social, economic, and environmental concerns resulting from the continuous growth of cities. Supporting planners with tools to address them is pivotal, and sustainability is one of the main objectives. Modeling and simulation augmenting digital twins can play an important role to implement these tools. Although various green best practices have been utilized over time and there are related attempts at measuring green success, works in the published literature tend to focus on addressing a single problem (e.g., energy efficiency), and a comprehensive approach that takes the multiple facets of sustainable urban planning into consideration has not yet been identified. This paper begins with a review of recent research efforts in green metrics and digital twins. This leads to developing an approach that evaluates organizational green best practices to derive metrics, which are used for computational decision support by digital twins. Furthermore, it leverages these research results and proposes a metric-driven framework for sustainability planning that understands a city as a sociotechnical complex system. Such a framework allows the practitioner to take advantage of recent developments and provides computational decision support for the complex challenge of sustainability planning at the various levels of urban planning and governance

Clean Power Players: Landing a Job in Clean Energy

A new, first-of-its-kind guidebook by Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) offers practical, how-to advice for young people seeking careers in clean energy

Employing America's Veterans: Perspectives from Businesses

Employment is an important aspect of reintegration into civilian society for many transitioning service members. Despite general American goodwill and intent to support veterans, many companies must emphasize business-related reasons to hire veterans. Thus, any effort to improve veteran employment outcomes must consider employer perspectives and the institutions and processes in place to facilitate and incentivize the hiring of veterans.This report provides empirical data representing the experiences of 69 companies of varying size, location and industry. In this report, the authors discuss to what extent, and for what reasons, employers think it is good business to hire veterans. Additionally, from the experiences of those employers who hesitate or have concerns about hiring veterans, Harrell and Berglass also describe the challenges to veteran employment and make recommendations for policy changes to improve the employment situation of veterans

Startups, SMEs and Institutional Arrangements in the Internet of Things Innovation Ecosystem in Brazil

Startups and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), despite their importance to the local economy, generally have limited resources and face significant barriers to innovate and grow, such as lack of access to knowledge, human resources, and efficient forms of financing. This paper reports preliminary results of a research project that aims to analyze the institutional arrangements in the Brazilian Internet of Things (IoT) innovation ecosystem and how these arrangements support the innovation by startups and SMEs. The research method is a longitudinal case study. The preliminary research results show the main groups of actors and resources involved in the IoT innovation ecosystem in Brazil. The results also suggest that the institutional arrangements in this ecosystem usually favors the big players; several controversies exist regarding key elements of the institutional pillars elements related to the IoT development in the country. Besides, the knowledge diffusion about the IoT and its potential is still needed

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc