66 research outputs found

    Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments

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    This book presents the collection of fifty two papers which were presented on the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY ’08 - Management, Technology and Learning for Individuals, Organisations and Society in Turbulent Environments, held in Ofir, Portugal, from 25th to 27th of June, 2008. The main motive of the meeting was the growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability issue. This importance had emerged from the growing uncertainty of the market behaviour that leads to the characterization of the market, i.e. environment, as turbulent. Actually, the characterization of the environment as uncertain and turbulent reflects the fact that the traditional technocratic and/or socio-technical approaches cannot effectively and efficiently lead with the present situation. In other words, the rise of the sustainability issue means the quest for new instruments to deal with uncertainty and/or turbulence. The sustainability issue has a complex nature and solutions are sought in a wide range of domains and instruments to achieve and manage it. The domains range from environmental sustainability (referring to natural environment) through organisational and business sustainability towards social sustainability. Concerning the instruments for sustainability, they range from traditional engineering and management methodologies towards “soft” instruments such as knowledge, learning, creativity. The papers in this book address virtually whole sustainability problems space in a greater or lesser extent. However, although the uncertainty and/or turbulence, or in other words the dynamic properties, come from coupling of management, technology, learning, individuals, organisations and society, meaning that everything is at the same time effect and cause, we wanted to put the emphasis on business with the intention to address primarily the companies and their businesses. From this reason, the main title of the book is “Business Sustainability” but with the approach of coupling Management, Technology and Learning for individuals, organisations and society in Turbulent Environments. Concerning the First International Conference on BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, its particularity was that it had served primarily as a learning environment in which the papers published in this book were the ground for further individual and collective growth in understanding and perception of sustainability and capacity for building new instruments for business sustainability. In that respect, the methodology of the conference work was basically dialogical, meaning promoting dialog on the papers, but also including formal paper presentations. In this way, the conference presented a rich space for satisfying different authors’ and participants’ needs. Additionally, promoting the widest and global learning environment and participativeness, the Conference Organisation provided the broadcasting over Internet of the Conference sessions, dialogical and formal presentations, for all authors’ and participants’ institutions, as an innovative Conference feature. In these terms, this book could also be understood as a complementary instrument to the Conference authors’ and participants’, but also to the wider readerships’ interested in the sustainability issues. The book brought together 97 authors from 10 countries, namely from Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Serbia, Sweden and United Kingdom. The authors “ranged” from senior and renowned scientists to young researchers providing a rich and learning environment. At the end, the editors hope and would like that this book will be useful, meeting the expectation of the authors and wider readership and serving for enhancing the individual and collective learning, and to incentive further scientific development and creation of new papers. Also, the editors would use this opportunity to announce the intention to continue with new editions of the conference and subsequent editions of accompanying books on the subject of BUSINESS SUSTAINABILITY, the second of which is planned for year 2011.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Machine Medical Ethics

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    In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old, and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity, and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? The essays in this collection by researchers from both humanities and science describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. This collection is the first book to address these 21st-century concerns

    Systematic Approaches for Telemedicine and Data Coordination for COVID-19 in Baja California, Mexico

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    Conference proceedings info: ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologies Raleigh, HI, United States, March 24-26, 2023 Pages 529-542We provide a model for systematic implementation of telemedicine within a large evaluation center for COVID-19 in the area of Baja California, Mexico. Our model is based on human-centric design factors and cross disciplinary collaborations for scalable data-driven enablement of smartphone, cellular, and video Teleconsul-tation technologies to link hospitals, clinics, and emergency medical services for point-of-care assessments of COVID testing, and for subsequent treatment and quar-antine decisions. A multidisciplinary team was rapidly created, in cooperation with different institutions, including: the Autonomous University of Baja California, the Ministry of Health, the Command, Communication and Computer Control Center of the Ministry of the State of Baja California (C4), Colleges of Medicine, and the College of Psychologists. Our objective is to provide information to the public and to evaluate COVID-19 in real time and to track, regional, municipal, and state-wide data in real time that informs supply chains and resource allocation with the anticipation of a surge in COVID-19 cases. RESUMEN Proporcionamos un modelo para la implementación sistemática de la telemedicina dentro de un gran centro de evaluación de COVID-19 en el área de Baja California, México. Nuestro modelo se basa en factores de diseño centrados en el ser humano y colaboraciones interdisciplinarias para la habilitación escalable basada en datos de tecnologías de teleconsulta de teléfonos inteligentes, celulares y video para vincular hospitales, clínicas y servicios médicos de emergencia para evaluaciones de COVID en el punto de atención. pruebas, y para el tratamiento posterior y decisiones de cuarentena. Rápidamente se creó un equipo multidisciplinario, en cooperación con diferentes instituciones, entre ellas: la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, la Secretaría de Salud, el Centro de Comando, Comunicaciones y Control Informático. de la Secretaría del Estado de Baja California (C4), Facultades de Medicina y Colegio de Psicólogos. Nuestro objetivo es proporcionar información al público y evaluar COVID-19 en tiempo real y rastrear datos regionales, municipales y estatales en tiempo real que informan las cadenas de suministro y la asignación de recursos con la anticipación de un aumento de COVID-19. 19 casos.ICICT 2023: 2023 The 6th International Conference on Information and Computer Technologieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-3236-

    Recent Advances in Social Data and Artificial Intelligence 2019

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    The importance and usefulness of subjects and topics involving social data and artificial intelligence are becoming widely recognized. This book contains invited review, expository, and original research articles dealing with, and presenting state-of-the-art accounts pf, the recent advances in the subjects of social data and artificial intelligence, and potentially their links to Cyberspace

    pHealth 2021. Proc. of the 18th Internat. Conf. on Wearable Micro and Nano Technologies for Personalised Health, 8-10 November 2021, Genoa, Italy

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    Smart mobile systems – microsystems, smart textiles, smart implants, sensor-controlled medical devices – together with related body, local and wide-area networks up to cloud services, have become important enablers for telemedicine and the next generation of healthcare services. The multilateral benefits of pHealth technologies offer enormous potential for all stakeholder communities, not only in terms of improvements in medical quality and industrial competitiveness, but also for the management of healthcare costs and, last but not least, the improvement of patient experience. This book presents the proceedings of pHealth 2021, the 18th in a series of conferences on wearable micro and nano technologies for personalized health with personal health management systems, hosted by the University of Genoa, Italy, and held as an online event from 8 – 10 November 2021. The conference focused on digital health ecosystems in the transformation of healthcare towards personalized, participative, preventive, predictive precision medicine (5P medicine). The book contains 46 peer-reviewed papers (1 keynote, 5 invited papers, 33 full papers, and 7 poster papers). Subjects covered include the deployment of mobile technologies, micro-nano-bio smart systems, bio-data management and analytics, autonomous and intelligent systems, the Health Internet of Things (HIoT), as well as potential risks for security and privacy, and the motivation and empowerment of patients in care processes. Providing an overview of current advances in personalized health and health management, the book will be of interest to all those working in the field of healthcare today

    Technology Assessment of Dual-Use ICTs - How to Assess Diffusion, Governance and Design

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    Technologies that can be used in military and civilian applications are referred to as dual-use. The dual-use nature of many information and communications technologies (ICTs) raises new questions for research and development for national, international, and human security. Measures to deal with the risks associated with the various dual-use technologies, including proliferation control, design approaches, and policy measures, vary widely. For example, Autonomous Weapon Systems (AWS) have not yet been regulated, while cryptographic products are subject to export and import controls. Innovations in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, cybersecurity, and automated analysis of publicly available data raise new questions about their respective dual-use risks. Dual-use risks have been systematically discussed so far, especially in the life sciences, which have contributed to the development of methods for assessment and risk management. Dual-use risks arise, among other things, from the fact that safety-critical technologies can be easily disseminated or modified, as well as used as part of a weapon system. Therefore, the development and adaptation of robots and software requires an independent consideration that builds on the insights of related dual-use discourses. Therefore, this dissertation considers the management of such risks in terms of the proliferation, regulation, and design of individual dual-use information technologies. Technology Assessment (TA) is the epistemological framework for this work, bringing together the concepts and approaches of Critical Security Studies (CSS) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to help evaluate and shape dual-use technologies. In order to identify the diffusion of dual-use at an early stage, the dissertation first examines the diffusion of dual-use innovations between civilian and military research in expert networks on LinkedIn, as well as on the basis of AI patents in a patent network. The results show low diffusion and tend to confirm existing studies on diffusion in patent networks. In the following section, the regulation of dual-use technologies is examined in the paper through two case studies. The first study uses a discourse analysis to show the value conflicts with regard to the regulation of autonomous weapons systems using the concept of Meaningful Human Control (MHC), while a second study, as a long-term comparative case study, analyzes the change and consequences of the regulation of strong cryptography in the U.S. as well as the programs of intelligence agencies for mass surveillance. Both cases point to the central role of private companies, both in the production of AWS and as intermediaries for the dissemination of encryption, as well as surveillance intermediaries. Subsequently, the dissertation examines the design of a dual-use technology using an Open Source Intelligence System (OSINT) for cybersecurity. For this purpose, conceptual, empirical, and technical studies are conducted as part of the Value-Sensitive Design (VSD) framework. During the studies, implications for research on and design of OSINT were identified. For example, the representative survey of the German population has shown that transparency of use while reducing mistrust is associated with higher acceptance of such systems. Additionally, it has been shown that data sparsity through the use of expert networks has many positive effects, not only improving the performance of the system, but is also preferable for legal and social reasons. Thus, the work contributes to the understanding of specific dual-use risks of AI, the regulation of AWS and cryptography, and the design of OSINT in cybersecurity. By combining concepts from CSS and participatory design methods in HCI, this work provides an interdisciplinary and multi-method contribution

    Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics

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    This book collects fifteen papers published in s Special Issue of Mathematics titled “Fuzzy Sets in Business Management, Finance, and Economics”, which was published in 2021. These paper cover a wide range of different tools from Fuzzy Set Theory and applications in many areas of Business Management and other connected fields. Specifically, this book contains applications of such instruments as, among others, Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, Neuro-Fuzzy Methods, the Forgotten Effects Algorithm, Expertons Theory, Fuzzy Markov Chains, Fuzzy Arithmetic, Decision Making with OWA Operators and Pythagorean Aggregation Operators, Fuzzy Pattern Recognition, and Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets. The papers in this book tackle a wide variety of problems in areas such as strategic management, sustainable decisions by firms and public organisms, tourism management, accounting and auditing, macroeconomic modelling, the evaluation of public organizations and universities, and actuarial modelling. We hope that this book will be useful not only for business managers, public decision-makers, and researchers in the specific fields of business management, finance, and economics but also in the broader areas of soft mathematics in social sciences. Practitioners will find methods and ideas that could be fruitful in current management issues. Scholars will find novel developments that may inspire further applications in the social sciences
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