The Hierarchic treatment of marine ecological information from spatial networks of benthic platforms

Measuring biodiversity simultaneously in different locations, at different temporal scales, and over wide spatial scales is of strategic importance for the improvement of our understanding of the functioning of marine ecosystems and for the conservation of their biodiversity. Monitoring networks of cabled observatories, along with other docked autonomous systems (e.g., Remotely Operated Vehicles [ROVs], Autonomous Underwater Vehicles [AUVs], and crawlers), are being conceived and established at a spatial scale capable of tracking energy fluxes across benthic and pelagic compartments, as well as across geographic ecotones. At the same time, optoacoustic imaging is sustaining an unprecedented expansion in marine ecological monitoring, enabling the acquisition of new biological and environmental data at an appropriate spatiotemporal scale. At this stage, one of the main problems for an effective application of these technologies is the processing, storage, and treatment of the acquired complex ecological information. Here, we provide a conceptual overview on the technological developments in the multiparametric generation, storage, and automated hierarchic treatment of biological and environmental information required to capture the spatiotemporal complexity of a marine ecosystem. In doing so, we present a pipeline of ecological data acquisition and processing in different steps and prone to automation. We also give an example of population biomass, community richness and biodiversity data computation (as indicators for ecosystem functionality) with an Internet Operated Vehicle (a mobile crawler). Finally, we discuss the software requirements for that automated data processing at the level of cyber-infrastructures with sensor calibration and control, data banking, and ingestion into large data portals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

M-Commerce Implementation in Nigeria: Trends and Issues

Nigeria was described as the fastest growing telecoms nation in Africa and the third in the World. The country had experienced a phenomenal growth from a teledensity of 0.49 in 2000 to 25.22 in 2007. This trend has brought about a monumental development in the major sectors of the economy, such as banking, telecoms and commerce in general. This paper presents the level of adoption of ICT in the banking sector and investigates the prospects of m-Commerce in Nigeria based on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis. Findings revealed that all banks in Nigeria offer e-Banking services and about 52% of the offer some forms of m-Banking services. The banks and the telecoms operators have enormous potentials and opportunities for m-Commerce but the level of patronage, quality of cell phones, lack of basic infrastructure and security issues pose a major threat to its wide scale implementation

An Autonomous Engine for Services Configuration and Deployment.

The runtime management of the infrastructure providing service-based systems is a complex task, up to the point where manual operation struggles to be cost effective. As the functionality is provided by a set of dynamically composed distributed services, in order to achieve a management objective multiple operations have to be applied over the distributed elements of the managed infrastructure. Moreover, the manager must cope with the highly heterogeneous characteristics and management interfaces of the runtime resources. With this in mind, this paper proposes to support the configuration and deployment of services with an automated closed control loop. The automation is enabled by the definition of a generic information model, which captures all the information relevant to the management of the services with the same abstractions, describing the runtime elements, service dependencies, and business objectives. On top of that, a technique based on satisfiability is described which automatically diagnoses the state of the managed environment and obtains the required changes for correcting it (e.g., installation, service binding, update, or configuration). The results from a set of case studies extracted from the banking domain are provided to validate the feasibility of this propos

Dynamics of banking technology adoption: an application to internet banking

This paper is concerned with examining behaviour of firms (banks) and consumers (banks’ customers) in the event of a new technology (internet banking) introduction. The determinants of consumer adoption of internet banking are characterised using survey data from Korea in both static and dynamic framework. I find evidence that adoption of internet banking is influenced by sex, age, marital status, degree of exposure to internet banking, and the characteristics of the banks. A duration analysis shows no evidence of first mover advantage (order effects) in internet banking whilst the largest bank (rank effects) in commercial banking remains dominant in internet banking. The results imply that the internet banking adoption is dominated by social norm effects