The role of Signal Processing in Meeting Privacy Challenges [an overview]

International audienceWith the increasing growth and sophistication of information technology, personal information is easily accessible electronically. This flood of released personal data raises important privacy concerns. However, electronic data sources exist to be used and have tremendous value (utility) to their users and collectors, leading to a tension between privacy and utility. This article aims to quantify that tension by means of an information-theoretic framework and motivate signal processing approaches to privacy problems. The framework is applied to a number of case studies to illustrate concretely how signal processing can be harnessed to provide data privacy

Spezifikation von Ereignis-Nachrichten im unternehmensübergreifenden Industrie 4.0 Umfeld

Der in diesem Aufsatz dargestellte Föderierte Daten-Spezifizierungs-Prozess (FDSP) unterstützt die Entwicklung von unternehmensübergreifenden Softwaresystemen. Der Prozess ist derart ausgelegt, dass unabhängige Personen erforderliche Systeminformation erhalten und mit nur geringen Einstiegbarrieren Systemkomponenten entwickeln können. Mithilfe des FDSP wird durch die Softwareentwickler des Systems ein systeminterner Datenstandard entwickelt, der entsprechend der Systemanforderungen definiert und stetig weiterentwickelt werden kann

The Two Facets of Collaboration: Cooperation and Coordination in Strategic Alliances

This paper unpacks two underspecified facets of collaboration: cooperation and coordination. Prior research has emphasized cooperation, and specifically the partners' commitment and alignment of interests, as the key determinant of collaborative success. Scholars have paid less attention to the critical role of coordination—the effective alignment and adjustment of the partners' actions. To redress this imbalance, we conceptually disentangle cooperation and coordination in the context of inter-organizational collaboration, and examine how the two phenomena play out in the partner selection, design, and post-formation stages of an alliance's life cycle. As we demonstrate, a coordination perspective helps resolve some empirical puzzles, but it also represents a challenge to received wisdom grounded in the salience of cooperation. To stimulate future research, we discuss alternative conceptualizations of the relationship between cooperation and coordination, and elaborate on their normative implications

A Behavioral Theory of Human Capital Integration

Human capital – the stock of knowledge and abilities possessed by employees – is consistently touted as an integral part of firm survival and success in dynamic environments. Managers must regularly decide how to allocate employees among competing tasks and projects to optimize the utilization of available knowledge, as well as select and implement the required structural mechanisms to support employees as they combine their knowledge to address complex problems on behalf of the firm. The principal motivation of this thesis is to explore how the effectiveness of particular aspects of organizational design in fostering the integration and use of human capital is bounded by individual cognitive limitations that may lead employees to deviate from expected behavior, both individually and in collaboration. The thesis consists of three research papers relying on comprehensive longitudinal project data from a global manufacturing company to investigate the integration of human capital and attendant consequences for firm performance. The first paper measures cognitive load as an outcome of managerial choices on employee allocation, and examines how cognitive load impacts employee choices on the distribution of working time among competing requirements. The second paper builds on these insights to explore how individuals adapt their information processing behavior in team settings based on cognitive load and the observed behavior of other team members, as well as how these adaptive processes and differences in cognitive load aggregate to impact team performance. The third paper investigates geographical and psychological distance between interdependent employees as important organizational design parameters that determine employee behavior and information use, both separately and in conjunction with one another. The overarching contribution of the thesis is to demonstrate, through the combination of psychological and organizational theory, how the ability of firms to properly activate and apply the knowledge held by their employees is fundamentally contingent on the interplay of cognitive limitations and managerial choices on organizational design. Common to the findings in this thesis is their immediate applicability in managerial and organizational settings as recommendations on how to allocate employees between competing uses. In sum, therefore, the thesis sketches the contours of a behavioral theory of human capital integration

A practice-based view of interorganisational collaboration : operationalising integrative mechanisms in ego-networks

Interorganisational Collaboration plays a central role in the production of infrastructure megaprojects. To date, few empirical studies examined how collaborative mechanisms are operationalised in the context of networks delivering complex projects. The objective of this thesis is to explore the operationalisation of integrative mechanisms through the deployment of practices in an ego-network delivering an infrastructure megaproject. An exploratory case study was conducted within the infrastructure industry using a multi-organisational perspective. A retroductive research approach, underlined by Critical realism was adopted. As part of this approach, 41 interviews were conducted, in addition to observations and document analysis. The findings show that collaboration within the ego-network took multiple forms, in accordance with the aims of each relationship. To this end, the findings demonstrate that the collaborative varied in terms of its deployed mechanisms and underlying practices. By going beyond the prevailing prescriptive accounts of the literature, this thesis provides a more nuanced view of how collaboration is operationalised in networks. In particular, it shows that the number, variety and nature of integrative mechanisms, and their underlying practices differed across the different relationships. It is the first known study to adopt a practice-based view of collaboration. Equally important, it provides a framework that captures how organisations learn to collaborate over time by conceptualising the interplay between the recursive, adaptive and emergent nature of collaborative practices. This research is thus one of the first known studies to uncover some of the complexities surrounding the way in which interorganisational collaboration are enacted in a complex project