Dagstuhl News January - December 2008

"Dagstuhl News" is a publication edited especially for the members of the Foundation "Informatikzentrum Schloss Dagstuhl" to thank them for their support. The News give a summary of the scientific work being done in Dagstuhl. Each Dagstuhl Seminar is presented by a small abstract describing the contents and scientific highlights of the seminar as well as the perspectives or challenges of the research topic

Online social networking, order and disorder

Whilst online social networking has been used successfully for many years by all strata of the world’s population, its use to ferment and prevent civil disturbances is a relatively new phenomenon. It is clear that the way in which online social networking sites are being used is evolving, and that changing user perceptions of online privacy may impact on the ability of the law enforcement community to adapt to new methods of monitoring and evidence gathering. This paper focuses primarily on the London riots of August 2011, and as such discusses legal issues from a UK perspective. However, the matters discussed are of relevance worldwide, with reference made to similar events outside the UK, to show that what occurred in London was not an isolated incident, or a quirk of the UK social networking scene. This paper explores what occurred, the platforms that were used and how they were used, and the legal framework in which investigations took place. It examines the use of social networking to organise rioters, support community defence, and shape the response of law enforcement agencies such as the police, government and the courts. It concludes that there is significant potential for problems of this type to occur in the future, which will require the evolution of law enforcement methods and procedures, and could change the way in which the law enforcement community utilise e-Government systems

Digital Innovation towards a Service-Dominant Business: A Clinical Inquiry into Georgia Pacific\u27s Connected Restroom Initiative

The rapid and pervasive digitalization of businesses has spawned value creation by changing the nature and structure of products and services. At the same time, organizations have been challenged to cope with dynamic business landscapes as they apply digital technologies to renew their competitive positions. In this context, we aim to explore how organizations develop digital innovation initiatives to transform a traditional product-dominant business towards a service-dominant one and how the initiatives are constituted and entangled within and across the initiative stages. Based on close collaboration with Georgia-Pacific Consumer Products Professional Division (GP PRO), we explore the path trajectory of the organization’s strategic connected restroom initiative through four stages: (idea-focus) initiation, (technology-focus) experimentation, (customer-focus) commercialization, and (process-focus) organization. Drawing on a clinical inquiry approach, we investigate the digital innovation initiative as combinations of strategic moves (co-evolution, reconfiguration, and renewal) and architectural moves (sensing usage, analyzing traces, and co-creating services). As a result, the dissertation contributes to the literature by adding new knowledge about the role of digital innovation in transforming incumbent product-oriented organizations towards a service-dominant focus as well as to practitioners by providing insights into the key challenges and opportunities they encounter in such initiatives

The new ICT profile for college students : developing essential skills

Comprend des réréfences bibliographiques

Comprehensive review of vision-based fall detection systems

Vision-based fall detection systems have experienced fast development over the last years. To determine the course of its evolution and help new researchers, the main audience of this paper, a comprehensive revision of all published articles in the main scientific databases regarding this area during the last five years has been made. After a selection process, detailed in the Materials and Methods Section, eighty-one systems were thoroughly reviewed. Their characterization and classification techniques were analyzed and categorized. Their performance data were also studied, and comparisons were made to determine which classifying methods best work in this field. The evolution of artificial vision technology, very positively influenced by the incorporation of artificial neural networks, has allowed fall characterization to become more resistant to noise resultant from illumination phenomena or occlusion. The classification has also taken advantage of these networks, and the field starts using robots to make these systems mobile. However, datasets used to train them lack real-world data, raising doubts about their performances facing real elderly falls. In addition, there is no evidence of strong connections between the elderly and the communities of researchers