Towards a pragmatic approach for dealing with uncertainties in water management practice

Management of water resources is afflicted with uncertainties. Nowadays it is facing more and new uncertainties since pace and dimension of changes (e.g. climatic, demographic) are accelerating and are likely to increase even more in the future. Hence it is crucial to find pragmatic ways to deal with these uncertainties in water management. So far, decision-making under uncertainty in water management is based on either intuition, heuristics and experience of water managers or on expert assessments all of which are only of limited use for water managers in practice. We argue for an analytical yet pragmatic approach to enable practitioners to deal with uncertainties in a more explicit and systematic way and allow for better informed decisions. Our approach is based on the concept of framing, referring to the different ways in which people make sense of the world and of the uncertainties. We applied and tested recently developed parameters that aim to shed light on the framing of uncertainty in two sub-basins of the Rhine. We present and discuss the results of a series of stakeholder interactions in the two basins aimed at developing strategies for improving dealing with uncertainties. The strategies are synthesized in a cross-checking list based on the uncertainty framing parameters as a hands-on tool for systematically identifying improvement options when dealing with uncertainty in water management practice. We conclude with suggestions for testing the developed check-list as a tool for decision aid in water management practice. Key words: water management, future uncertainties, framing of uncertainties, hands-on decision aid, tools for practice, robust strategies, social learnin

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work

No Grice: Computers that Lie, Deceive and Conceal

In the future our daily life interactions with other people, with computers, robots and smart environments will be recorded and interpreted by computers or embedded intelligence in environments, furniture, robots, displays, and wearables. These sensors record our activities, our behavior, and our interactions. Fusion of such information and reasoning about such information makes it possible, using computational models of human behavior and activities, to provide context- and person-aware interpretations of human behavior and activities, including determination of attitudes, moods, and emotions. Sensors include cameras, microphones, eye trackers, position and proximity sensors, tactile or smell sensors, et cetera. Sensors can be embedded in an environment, but they can also move around, for example, if they are part of a mobile social robot or if they are part of devices we carry around or are embedded in our clothes or body. \ud \ud Our daily life behavior and daily life interactions are recorded and interpreted. How can we use such environments and how can such environments use us? Do we always want to cooperate with these environments; do these environments always want to cooperate with us? In this paper we argue that there are many reasons that users or rather human partners of these environments do want to keep information about their intentions and their emotions hidden from these smart environments. On the other hand, their artificial interaction partner may have similar reasons to not give away all information they have or to treat their human partner as an opponent rather than someone that has to be supported by smart technology.\ud \ud This will be elaborated in this paper. We will survey examples of human-computer interactions where there is not necessarily a goal to be explicit about intentions and feelings. In subsequent sections we will look at (1) the computer as a conversational partner, (2) the computer as a butler or diary companion, (3) the computer as a teacher or a trainer, acting in a virtual training environment (a serious game), (4) sports applications (that are not necessarily different from serious game or education environments), and games and entertainment applications

V-ROOM: a virtual meeting system with intelligent structured summarisation

With the growth of virtual organisations and multinational companies, virtual collaboration tasks are becoming more important for employees. This paper describes the development of a virtual meeting system, called V-ROOM. An exploration of facilities required in such a system has been conducted. The findings highlighted that intelligent systems are needed, especially since information that individuals have to know and process, is vast. The survey results showed that meeting summarisation is one of the most important new features that should be added to virtual meeting systems for enterprises. This paper highlights the innovative methods employed in V-ROOM to produce relevant meeting summaries. V- ROOM's approach is compared to other methods from the literature and it is shown how the use of meta-data provided by parts of the V-ROOM system can improve the quality of summaries produced

Participatory process management

Although the process of public and stakeholder participation continues to be intensively investigated and discussed in academic circles, the implementation of participatory methods in practice remains problematic. This can be attributed to the lack of knowledge transfer on the one hand, and the general underestimation of participatory approaches in planning processes on the other.\ud A possible solution - participatory processmanagement - is introduced in this article. Participatory process management means that all participatory activities are embedded in the overall planning activities of a project. The most significant criteria for a participatory process are identified as ’objectives’, ’constraints’ and ’process’which together forma framework for combining generally applicablemethodswith local constraints and the objectives of a project. Themain elements of the participatory management framework introduced here are levels and classes of participation and a generic process scheme includingmonitoring and evaluation of participatory processes. This work is based upon long-term experiences of consultants and scientists. However, the insights from the InterReg project TRUST are particularly valuable and confirm the hypotheses that different water management projects are comparable in terms of their participatory process performance. The participatory management framework is a step forward in closing the gap between scientific knowledge about participatory methods and their applicability in practice

Assessing framing of uncertainties in water management practice

Dealing with uncertainties in water management is an important issue and is one which will only increase in light of global changes, particularly climate change. So far, uncertainties in water management have mostly been assessed from a scientific point of view, and in quantitative terms. In this paper, we focus on the perspectives from water management practice, adopting a qualitative approach. We consider it important to know how uncertainties are framed in water management practice in order to develop practice relevant strategies for dealing with uncertainties. Framing refers to how people make sense of the world. With the aim of identifying what are important parameters for the framing of uncertainties in water management practice, in this paper we analyze uncertainty situations described by decision-makers in water management. The analysis builds on a series of ¿Uncertainty Dialogues¿ carried out within the NeWater project with water managers in the Rhine, Elbe and Guadiana basins in 2006. During these dialogues, representatives of these river basins were asked what uncertainties they encountered in their professional work life and how they confronted them. Analysing these dialogues we identified several important parameters of how uncertainties get framed. Our assumption is that making framing of uncertainty explicit for water managers will allow for better dealing with the respective uncertainty situations. Keywords Framing - Uncertainty - Water management practic