Friendly-Sharing: Improving the Performance of City Sensoring through Contact-Based Messaging Applications

c 2016 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).[EN] Regular citizens equipped with smart devices are being increasingly used as sensors by Smart Cities applications. Using contacts among users, data in the form of messages is obtained and shared. Contact-based messaging applications are based on establishing a short-range communication directly between mobile devices, and on storing the messages in these devices for subsequent delivery to cloud-based services. An effective way to increase the number of messages that can be shared is to increase the contact duration. We thus introduce the Friendly-Sharing diffusion approach, where, during a contact, the users are aware of the time needed to interchange the messages stored in their buffers, and they can thus decide to wait more time in order to increase the message sharing probability. The performance of this approach is anyway closely related to the size of the buffer in the device. We therefore compare various policies either for the message selection at forwarding times and for message dropping when the buffer is full. We evaluate our proposal with a modified version of the Opportunistic Networking Environment (ONE) simulator and using real human mobility traces.This work was partially supported by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Programa Estatal de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Proyectos I+D+I 2014, Spain, under Grant TEC2014-52690-R, the Generalitat Valenciana, Spain, under Grant AICO/2015/108, the Universidad Laica Eloy Alfaro de Manabi, Ecuador, and SENESCYT, Ecuador.Herrera-Tapia, J.; Manzoni, P.; Hernández Orallo, E.; Tomás Domínguez, AE.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Cano Escribá, JC. (2016). Friendly-Sharing: Improving the Performance of City Sensoring through Contact-Based Messaging Applications. Sensors. 16(9):1-17. https://doi.org/10.3390/s16091523S11716

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications

International Student Projects and Sustainable Development Goals: A Perfect Match

Engineering Education is currently going through a transformation, driven by the need for educating better engineers and more engineers, and largely build on elements such as problem orientation, interdisciplinarity, internationalization, digitalization and sustainability. In 2020, the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership EPIC (Improving Employability Through Internationalization and Collaboration) has combined all these elements, and demonstrated how international and interdisciplinary student projects, focusing on solving real-world problems related to sustainability, can be carried out in a setting where students mainly work together online. A total of 56 students from 7 EU and 2 international universities, with backgrounds ranging from Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering to Textile Technologies and Business Informatics were working on 9 different projects throughout the spring of 2020. The paper presents the experiences from the setup and discusses some general recommendations for setting up this type of projects. The paper goes through the stages of defining and carrying out the projects: Defining the overall framework, identifying problems/project proposals in collaboration with relevant stakeholders, identifying the students and assigning students to projects, preparing students and supervisors, organising the physical kick-off seminar, and supporting the online collaboration. We also discuss evaluation and hand-over of the solutions, to ensure the projects have a lasting impact. We conclude that the sustainable development goals provide a highly motivating framework for interdisciplinary, international student projects based on problem-based learning. We also note that a careful design and execution of the all the preparatory stages are crucial in order for the projects to succeed, and discuss specific recommendations for these.</p

Minding the Gap: Computing Ethics and the Political Economy of Big Tech

In 1988 Michael Mahoney wrote that “[w]hat is truly revolutionary about the computer will become clear only when computing acquires a proper history, one that ties it to other technologies and thus uncovers the precedents that make its innovations significant” (Mahoney, 1988). Today, over thirty years after this quote was written, we are living right in the middle of the information age and computing technology is constantly transforming modern living in revolutionary ways and in such a high degree that is giving rise to many ethical considerations, dilemmas, and social disruption. To explore the myriad of issues associated with the ethical challenges of computers using the lens of political economy it is important to explore the history and development of computer technology

Remote work and new employment models in the post Covid-19 era : a case study of Greece

The expansion of teleworking in the workplace raises issues of inequalities and challenges decision makers. The current research is employed to examine the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has affected local governments in terms of their functions and basic services to the public. It refers to issues of job destruction in the pandemic, expansion of jobs in the pandemic, transformation of employment via telecommunication and telework & analyses the threat of growing inequality and uncertainty of their impact on labour productivity. As methodological approach, a case study is examined via administration of interviews of employees of the Municipality of Ioannina, Greece, and data are discussed via a qualitative analysis. The results show that introduction of teleworking due to the conditions imposed by the covid-19, is a challenge in the postcovid era. The more widespread use of teleworking will require companies to invest in technological infrastructure, to make extensive changes to the organization of work within their own organization, and all of this will need to be combined with a more general regulatory-institutional framework. The costs of introducing and establishing teleworking will require investment in purchasing, installing equipment and starting up teleworking appears to be considerable, and the return on such an investment should be calculated over the medium term. For this reason, companies should develop a coherent strategy for developing technologies and IT and provide the necessary infrastructure for teleworking