Strategic Niche Management (SNM) beyond sustainability. An exploration of key findings of SNM through the lens of ICT and privacy

Recently the governance of socio-technical transitions to sustainability is gaining attention in the field of innovation studies. One particular approach is that of Strategic Niche Management (SNM), which advocates the creation of protected space to experiment with radically new sustainable socio-technical practices. This paper contributes by asking whether this approach is also useful for analysis and governance of other types of socially desirable change. This question is addressed through a review of six key-findings of Strategic Niche Management and an original case study in the field of Near Field Communication (NFC) technologies for mobile payment. The social value at stake in this case is not sustainability but privacy. We draw three main conclusions. First, we find that the key-findings and concepts in SNM for sustainability are helpful to understand and interpret much of the data collected for the NFC case and privacy. However, there are notable differences in each of the key-findings, i.e findings related to a) the local-global distinction in SNM, b) expectations, c) social networks, d) learning, e) protection, and f) niche-regime interactions. Second, in relation to governance, the role of sustainability values (being a promising value to pursue) and privacy values (being a bottom-line value to defend) are notably different. Third, these differences result in different roles of public bodies in niche development. The paper ends with discussing the consequences for SNM for sustainability research and future research topics.Strategic Niche Management, sustainability, NFC, mobile payment, privacy

LODE: Linking Digital Humanities Content to the Web of Data

Numerous digital humanities projects maintain their data collections in the form of text, images, and metadata. While data may be stored in many formats, from plain text to XML to relational databases, the use of the resource description framework (RDF) as a standardized representation has gained considerable traction during the last five years. Almost every digital humanities meeting has at least one session concerned with the topic of digital humanities, RDF, and linked data. While most existing work in linked data has focused on improving algorithms for entity matching, the aim of the LinkedHumanities project is to build digital humanities tools that work "out of the box," enabling their use by humanities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and information scientists alike. With this paper, we report on the Linked Open Data Enhancer (LODE) framework developed as part of the LinkedHumanities project. With LODE we support non-technical users to enrich a local RDF repository with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud. LODE links and enhances the local RDF repository without compromising the quality of the data. In particular, LODE supports the user in the enhancement and linking process by providing intuitive user-interfaces and by suggesting high-quality linking candidates using tailored matching algorithms. We hope that the LODE framework will be useful to digital humanities scholars complementing other digital humanities tools

Improving Link Specifications using Context-Aware Information

There is an increasing interest in publishing data using the Linked Open Data philosophy. To link the RDF datasets, a link discovery task is performed to generate owl:sameAs links. There are two ways to perform this task: by means of a classi er or a link speci cation; we focus in the latter approach. Current link speci cation techniques only use the data properties of the instances that they are linking, and they do not take the context information into account. In this paper, we present a proposal that aims to generate context-aware link speci cations to improve the regular link speci cations, increasing the e ectiveness of the results in several real-world scenarios where the context is crucial. Our context-aware link speci cations are independent from similarity functions, transformations or aggregations. We have evaluated our proposal using two real-world scenarios in which we improve precision and recall with respect to regular link speci cations in 23% and 58%, respectively.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-40848-

Robot Autonomy for Surgery

Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous surgical robots

Financing sustainable energy for all: pay-as-you-go vs. traditional solar finance approaches in Kenya

This paper focuses on finance for Solar Home Systems (SHSs) in Kenya and asks to what extent emerging new finance approaches are likely to address the shortcomings of past approaches. Drawing on the STEPS Pathways Approach we adopt a framing that understands finance within a broader socio-technical context as a necessary but not sufficient component of achieving alternative pathways to sustainable energy access. The paper contributes in four ways. Firstly, it presents a comprehensive overview of past and new emerging approaches to financing SHSs in Kenya and their relative strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, it represents one of the first attempts in the literature to analyse the potential of new, real time monitoring technologies and pay as you go finance models to overcome the barriers faced by conventional consumer finance models for off-grid renewable energy technologies (RETs). Thirdly, by applying for the first time we are aware of a socio-technical approach, via the application of Strategic Niche Management (SNM) theory, to analyse the finance of RETs in developing countries, the analysis considers finance in the context of the social practices poor people seek to fulfil via access to the energy services that off-grid RETs provide, and the ways in which people previously paid for these services (e.g. via kerosene for lighting). This also situates the analysis within the understanding of SHSs as a niche that has to compete with the established regime of energy service provision and its attendant social and political institutional support. The paper therefore also contributes to the small but expanding body of literature that seeks to operationalise socio-technical transitions thinking and SNM within a developing country context

Sustainable energy for whom? Governing pro-poor, low-carbon pathways to development: lessons from solar PV in Kenya

Using a combination of insights from innovation studies, sociotechnical transitions theory and the STEPS pathways approach, this paper analyses the evolution of the Kenyan photovoltaics (PV) market. Considered by many to be an exemplar of private sector led development, the Kenyan PV market has witnessed the adoption of more than 300,000 solar home systems and over 100,000 solar portable lights. The notion of an entrepreneurially driven unsubsidised solar market has proved to be a powerful narrative amongst development actors who, paradoxically, have provided millions of dollars of funding to encourage the market’s development. We argue that this donor support has been critical to the success of the market, but not simply by helping to create an enabling environment in which entrepreneurs can flourish. Donor assistance has been critical in supporting a range of actors to build the elements of a PV innovation system by providing active protection for experimentation, network-building, and the construction of shared visions amongst actors throughout supply chains and amongst users.This analysis gives important clues for designing climate and development policies, with implications for the governance of energy access pathways that are inclusive of poor and marginalised groups in low income countries

COTS DRONE DESIGN: A RAPID EQUIPAGE ALTERNATIVE FOR FORCE RECON COMPANIES

The Force Reconnaissance Group (FRG) of the Philippine Marine Corps (PMC) is a pioneer unit of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) in acquiring and utilizing small unmanned aircraft systems (SUAS) for aerial intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). The sustainment of this ISR equipment, however, largely depends on ample resources that the FRG does not have. This organizational challenge results in an aerial ISR capability gap at the company level. Force Recon Companies (FRCs) do not have organic drones to support their aerial real-time reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition requirements. This study explored an alternative solution to address this capability gap: a low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) drone design specific to the operational needs of FRCs. A systems engineering approach to SUAS design resulted in a micro traditional helicopter drone as the FRC COTS Drone design. The study produced a prototype FRC COTS Drone consisting of a four-part reconnaissance kit that includes a micro helicopter UAV, handheld controller, first person view (FPV) goggles, and FPV monitor. This effort can promote a culture of innovation in small unmanned systems, not just within the PMC, but the AFP as a whole. This study can also serve as a model for security cooperation between the United States and the Philippines through the integration of three fields: Philippine experience, U.S. technical expertise and resources, and the global commercial market.Outstanding ThesisMajor, Philippine Marine CorpsApproved for public release. distribution is unlimite