Seeing more than reading:The visual mode in utilities' sustainability reports

The analysis of semiotic modes of communication used in corporate reports is very relevant for understanding how meanings are communicated to readers or viewers. But researchers' interest has mainly focused on verbal and numerical modes of communication, and the focus on the visual mode has been very limited. This paper contributes to filling this gap through an explorative analysis of how the visual artefacts are used with the text (verbal and numerical) in utilities' corporate sustainability reports. Results show that visual artefacts are more used for captivating readers' or viewers' attention, spatializing and materializing concepts than infiltrating meanings

Responsible design : a conceptual look at interdependent design–use dynamics

This article investigates the conceptual foundations of technological innovation and development projects that aim to bring ethical and social issues into the design stage. Focusing on the ethics and social impact of technological innovation and development has been somewhat of a trend lately, for instance in ELSA research and in such initiatives as the Dutch Responsible Innovation programme. I argue that in order to succeed in doing social responsible and ethical sound design, a proper understanding of the relation between technology and society is required. I propose to move away from an externalist framework, in which technology and society are depicted as being defined independently, towards an interdependent framework, where technology and society are regarded to be mutually defining. This move is necessary in order for such innovation projects not to reinforce outdated concepts about technology, which in the longer run will prove counterproductive to the actual aims of the projects themselves

Patient-Centric Ethical Frameworks for Privacy, Transparency, and Bias Awareness in Deep Learning-Based Medical Systems

The rapid advancement and deployment of deep learning-enabled medical systems have necessitated the development of robust ethical frameworks to address potential challenges and pitfalls. Based on the foundational principles of medical ethics—non-maleficence, beneficence, respect for patient autonomy, and justice—three ethical frameworks are proposed in this study for the deployment and oversight of deep learning systems in healthcare. This study presents these three distinct yet interconnected ethical frameworks focusing on patient privacy, transparency, and bias mitigation. The patient privacy framework argues for the importance of patient autonomy. It advocates for informed consent, emphasizing the need for patients to be apprised of the system's workings, benefits, potential risks, and alternatives. Consent should be voluntary, devoid of implicit coercion, and patients must retain the right to revoke it without repercussions. The framework also included the principles of transparency, beneficence, privacy, continual consent, accessibility, and accountability. It champions the idea that consent is dynamic, necessitating regular updates, especially when significant system changes occur. Our ethical framework for transparency accentuates the need for full disclosure. Stakeholders should be provided with a general overview of the system's operations, its inputs, and decision-making processes. Performance metrics, including accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, should be transparently communicated. Openness, through open-source initiatives and third-party audits, is promoted. The principles of accountability, data transparency, continuous improvement, inclusivity, and external validation are also made integral to this framework, ensuring that stakeholders are consistently informed and engaged. The bias minimization framework highlights the imperative of awareness. Stakeholders should be educated about potential biases and their ramifications. The system should be regularly evaluated for inherent biases, both overt and subtle. Representation is crucial; training data must reflect diverse populations, considering various demographic factors. This framework also promotes fairness, ensuring equitable system performance across different patient groups. Transparency in bias reporting, accountability in bias correction, continuous monitoring, inclusivity in stakeholder engagement, and collaboration with interdisciplinary teams are also included and discussed

Use of media as an indicator of modern trend of female Pakistani dakwah groups

This study looked into the organized use of modern media technology by female Dakwah (Islamic propagation) groups in Pakistan as an indicator of modern trends prevalent among such groups. The two groups selected for this study were the Women’s Wing Jamaa’at e Islami and Al-Huda International Welfare Foundation. The time period of data is from June 2012 to December 2013. As a predominantly inductive research, this study shows that the ideological ground prepared by Women’s Wing Jama’at-e-Islami in Pakistani Muslim women was utilized by Al-Huda with a selective approach and a progressive use of modern media. It argues that a proactive discourse on status of women in Islam and female religious scholarship can be anticipated by such groups for being independent and pluralist. The study suggests a synergizing of likeminded groups towards women’s empowerment under the rubrics of Islam

Exploring value dilemmas of brain monitoring technology through speculative design scenarios

In the field of brain monitoring, the advancement of more user-friendly wearable and non-invasive devices is introducing new opportunities for application outside the lab and clinical use. Despite the growing importance of responsible innovation, there remains a knowledge gap in addressing the possible impacts of wearable non-invasive brain monitoring technology on mental health and well-being. Addressing this, our main aim was to study the use of speculative design scenarios as a method to describe potential value dilemmas associated with this new technology. Through a qualitative study, we invited participants to engage in discussions regarding three variations of wearable non-invasive brain monitoring technology presented in speculative video scenarios. The study's findings describe how the discussions contribute towards promoting heuristics that can help foster more responsible innovation by identifying norms and value dilemmas through inclusive speculative design practices. This qualitative case study contributes to the literature on responsible innovation by demonstrating how responsible innovation frameworks can benefit from incorporating anticipatory speculative design methods aimed at early identification of potential value dilemmas.publishedVersio

Know your customer:balancing innovation and regulation for financial inclusion

Financial inclusion depends on providing adjusted services for citizens with disclosed vulnerabilities. At the same time, the financial industry needs to adhere to a strict regulatory framework, which is often in conflict with the desire for inclusive, adaptive, and privacy-preserving services. In this article we study how this tension impacts the deployment of privacy-sensitive technologies aimed at financial inclusion. We conduct a qualitative study with banking experts to understand their perspectives on service development for financial inclusion. We build and demonstrate a prototype solution based on open source decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials software and report on feedback from the banking experts on this system. The technology is promising thanks to its selective disclosure of vulnerabilities to the full control of the individual. This supports GDPR requirements, but at the same time, there is a clear tension between introducing these technologies and fulfilling other regulatory requirements, particularly with respect to 'Know Your Customer.' We consider the policy implications stemming from these tensions and provide guidelines for the further design of related technologies.Comment: Published in the Journal Data & Polic

Semantic Query Reasoning in Distributed Environment

Master's thesis in Computer scienceSemantic Web aims to elevate simple data in WWW to semantic layer, so that knowledge, processed by machine, can be shared more easily. Ontology is one of the key technologies to realize Semantic Web. Semantic reasoning is an important step in Semantic technology. For Ontology developers, semantic reasoning finds out collisions in Ontology definition, and optimizes it; for Ontology users, semantic reasoning retrieves implicit knowledge from known knowledge. The main research of this thesis is reasoning of semantic data querying in distributed environment, which tries to get correct results of semantic data querying, given Ontology definition and data. This research studied two methods: data materialization and query rewriting. Using Amazon cloud computing service and LUBM, we compared these two methods, and have concluded that when size of data to be queried scales up, query rewriting is more feasible than data materialization. Also, based on the conclusion, we developed an application, which manages and queries semantic data in a distributed environment. This application can be used as a prototype of similar applications, and a tool for other Semantic Web researches as well

Biggest Failures in Security (Dagstuhl Seminar 19451)

In the present era of ubiquitous digitalization, security is a concern for everyone. Despite enormous efforts, securing IT systems still remains an open challenge for community and industry. One of the main reasons is that the variety and complexity of IT systems keeps increasing, making it practically impossible for security experts to grasp the full system. A further problem is that security has become an interdisciplinary challenge. While interdisciplinary research does exist already, it is mostly restricted to collaborations between two individual disciplines and has been rather bottom-up by focusing on very specific problems. The idea of the Dagstuhl Seminar was to go one step back and to follow a comprehensive top-down approach instead. The goal was to identify the "biggest failures" in security and to get a comprehensive understanding on their overall impact on security. To this end, the Dagstuhl Seminar was roughly divided into two parts. First, experienced experts from different disciplines gave overview talks on the main problems of their field. Based on these, overlapping topics but also common research interests among the participants have been identified. Afterwards, individual working groups have been formed to work on the identified questions