Governing governance:Collective action and rulemaking in EU agricultural and non-agricultural geographical indications

Geographical Indications (‘GIs’) designate a product whose reputation, characteristics and quality are essentially due to their geographical origin. They are identifiers of ‘origin products’, immersed in a specific local natural and socio-cultural ecosystem. Local tangible and intangible assets and the associated reputation are nurtured over time, but they are also vulnerable to erosion. GIs encourage stakeholders to codify arrangements (product specifications) as a response to this problem. The importance of collective action issues in GIs has been demonstrated by interdisciplinary scholarship. However, it is mostly considered extraneous in the legal discourse and in policy prescriptions at the European level. Through a transdisciplinary approach this work combines comparative legal and case study analyses, illustrating the diversity of the protection and valorisation strategies of French and Italian agricultural and non-agricultural origin products.Inspired by the theory and diagnostic frameworks of Elinor Ostrom’s and colleagues for analysing human cooperation for the sustainable governance of tangible and intangible commons, it explores the potential of the conceptual proximity between GIs and the commons reframing key aspects of GI legal theory and embracing the collective action perspective. The analysis of how actors’ interactions in rulemaking for product specification design affects the outcomes, reveals that the interpretation and implementation of national legal rules at the pre-registration and registration phases are not harmonised in Europe. Empirically grounded findings flag legally relevant collective action issues in GI settings and support suggestions for coherent policy transitions, measuring implementation feasibility and avoiding panaceas

Governing governance:Collective action and rulemaking in EU agricultural and non-agricultural geographical indications

Geographical Indications (‘GIs’) designate a product whose reputation, characteristics and quality are essentially due to their geographical origin. They are identifiers of ‘origin products’, immersed in a specific local natural and socio-cultural ecosystem. Local tangible and intangible assets and the associated reputation are nurtured over time, but they are also vulnerable to erosion. GIs encourage stakeholders to codify arrangements (product specifications) as a response to this problem. The importance of collective action issues in GIs has been demonstrated by interdisciplinary scholarship. However, it is mostly considered extraneous in the legal discourse and in policy prescriptions at the European level. Through a transdisciplinary approach this work combines comparative legal and case study analyses, illustrating the diversity of the protection and valorisation strategies of French and Italian agricultural and non-agricultural origin products.Inspired by the theory and diagnostic frameworks of Elinor Ostrom’s and colleagues for analysing human cooperation for the sustainable governance of tangible and intangible commons, it explores the potential of the conceptual proximity between GIs and the commons reframing key aspects of GI legal theory and embracing the collective action perspective. The analysis of how actors’ interactions in rulemaking for product specification design affects the outcomes, reveals that the interpretation and implementation of national legal rules at the pre-registration and registration phases are not harmonised in Europe. Empirically grounded findings flag legally relevant collective action issues in GI settings and support suggestions for coherent policy transitions, measuring implementation feasibility and avoiding panaceas

Towards an open cloud marketplace: vision and first steps

As one of the most promising, emerging concepts in Information Technology (IT), cloud computing is transforming how IT is consumed and managed; yielding improved cost efficiencies, and delivering flexible, on-demand scalability by reducing computing infrastructures, platforms, and services to commodities acquired and paid-for on-demand through a set of cloud providers. Today, the transition of cloud computing from a subject of research and innovation to a critical infrastructure is proceeding at an incredibly fast pace. A potentially dangerous consequence of this speedy transition to practice is the premature adoption, and ossification, of the models, technologies, and standards underlying this critical infrastructure. This state of affairs is exacerbated by the fact that innovative research on production-scale platforms is becoming the purview of a small number of public cloud providers. Specifically, the academic research communities are effectively excluded from the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the evolution not to mention innovation and healthy mutation of cloud computing technologies. As the dependence on our society and economy on cloud computing increases, so does the realization that the academic research community cannot be shut out from contributing to the design and evolution of this critical infrastructure. In this article we provide an alternative vision that of an Open Cloud eXchange (OCX) a public cloud marketplace, where many stakeholders, rather than just a single cloud provider, participate in implementing and operating the cloud, thus creating an ecosystem that will bring the innovation of a broader community to bear on a much healthier and more efficient cloud marketplace

Coordinating the Design and Management of Heterogeneous Datacenter Resources

<p>Heterogeneous design presents an opportunity to improve energy efficiency but raises a challenge in management. Whereas prior work separates the two, we coordinate heterogeneous design and management. We present a market-based resource allocation mechanism that navigates the performance and power trade-offs of heterogeneous architectures. Given this management framework, we explore a design space of heterogeneous processors and show a 12x reduction in response time violations when equipping a datacenter with three processor types over a homogeneous system that consumes the same power. To better understand trade-offs in large heterogeneous design spaces, we explore dozens of design strategies and present a risk taxonomy that classifies the reasons why a deployed system may underperform relative to design targets. We propose design strategies that explicitly mitigate risk, such as a strategy that minimizes the coefficient of variation in performance. In our experiments, we find that risk-aware design accounts for more than 70% of the strategies that produce systems with the best service quality. We also present a new datacenter management mechanism that fairly allocates processors to latency-sensitive applications. Tasks express value for performance using sophisticated piecewise-linear utility functions. With fairness in market allocations, we show how datacenters can mitigate envy amongst latency-sensitive users. We quantify the price of fairness and detail efficiency-fairness trade-offs. Finally, we extend the market to fairly allocate heterogeneous processors.</p>Dissertatio

VERTICAL COORDINATION IN THE AGRO-FOOD INDUSTRY AND CONTRACT FARMING: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF TURKEY AND THE USA

Agribusiness, Industrial Organization,

Anatomy of Business Networks: Future Internet Enterprise Systems Accelerating Procurement Interoperability

Large Business Networks impose interoperability challenges on Enterprise Systems in the form of ERP and extended ERP, involving many organizations and people. First, the classic document exchange based system connection approach across company borderlines is time-consuming and costly. Second, today’s enterprise systems lack support of the people dimension with specific focus on enabling semi-structured and unstructured activities as part of the entire end-to-end-process. In this paper we present our research-in-progress of a running design science research project focusing on creating a software artifact that addresses the two challenges of significant integration effort and the lack of semi-structured and unstructured process support. We look at these two challenges specifically in the domain of procurement, where many connections between business partner result in high integration effort and involves a large number of semi-structured and unstructured activities

Adaptive power shifting for power-constrained heterogeneous systems

The number and heterogeneity of compute devices, even within a single compute node, has been steadily on the rise. Since all systems must operate under a power cap, the number of discrete devices that can run simultaneously at their highest frequency is limited by the globally-imposed power cap. Current systems incorporate a centralized power management unit that statically controls the distribution of power among the devices within the node. However, such static distribution policies are unaware of the dynamic utilization profile across the devices, which leads to unfair power allocations that end up degrading system throughput performance. The problem is particularly acute in the presence of heterogeneity since type-specific performance-boost capabilities cannot be leveraged via utilization-agnostic static power allocations. This paper proposes Adaptive Power Shifting for multi-accelerator heterogeneous systems (APS), a technique that leverages system utilization information to dynamically allocate and re-distribute power budgets across multiple discrete devices. Democratizing the power allocation based on dynamic needs results in dramatic speedup over a need-agnostic static allocation. We use APS in a real OpenPOWER compute node with 2 CPUs and 4 GPUs to demonstrate the value of on-demand, equitable power allocations. Overall, the proposed solution increases performance with respect to two state-of-the-art techniques by up to 14.9% and 13.8%.This work has been partially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Mont-Blanc 2020 project (grant agreement 779877), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract PID2019-107255GB-C22), by Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272) and by the IBM/BSC Deep Learning Center initiative. Ll. Alvarez has been supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under the Juan de la Cierva Formacion fellowship No. FJCI-2016- 30984. M. Moreto has been supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under Ramon y Cajal fellowship No. RYC-2016-21104.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Accelerator Virtualization in Fog Computing: Moving from the Cloud to the Edge

[EN] Hardware accelerators are available on the cloud for enhanced analytics. Next-generation clouds aim to bring enhanced analytics using accelerators closer to user devices at the edge of the network for improving quality of service (QoS) by minimizing end-to-end latencies and response times. The collective computing model that utilizes resources at the cloud-edge continuum in a multi-tier hierarchy comprising the cloud, edge, and user devices is referred to as fog computing. This article identifies challenges and opportunities in making accelerators accessible at the edge. A holistic view of the fog architecture is key to pursuing meaningful research in this area.Varghese, B.; Reaño González, C.; Silla Jiménez, F. (2018). Accelerator Virtualization in Fog Computing: Moving from the Cloud to the Edge. IEEE Cloud Computing. 5(6):28-37. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCC.2018.064181118S28375