Measuring the Performance of Livability Programs, MTI Report 12-06

This report analyzes the performance measurement processes adopted by five large “livability” programs throughout the United States. It compares and contrasts these programs by examining existing research in performance measurement methods. The “best practices” of the examined performance measurement methods for each program are explored and analyzed with respect to their key characteristics. The report entails an appropriately comprehensive literature review of the current research on performance measurement methods from the perspective of various stakeholders including the public and government agencies. Additionally, the results of this literature review are used to examine the actual performance measures of the target programs from the perspective of different stakeholders. The goal of the report is to determine what did and did not work in these programs and their measurement methods, while making recommendations based on the results of the analysis for potential future programs

mFish Alpha Pilot: Building a Roadmap for Effective Mobile Technology to Sustain Fisheries and Improve Fisher Livelihoods.

In June 2014 at the Our Ocean Conference in Washington, DC, United States Secretary of State John Kerry announced the ambitious goal of ending overfishing by 2020. To support that goal, the Secretary's Office of Global Partnerships launched mFish, a public-private partnership to harness the power of mobile technology to improve fisher livelihoods and increase the sustainability of fisheries around the world. The US Department of State provided a grant to 50in10 to create a pilot of mFish that would allow for the identification of behaviors and incentives that might drive more fishers to adopt novel technology. In May 2015 50in10 and Future of Fish designed a pilot to evaluate how to improve adoption of a new mobile technology platform aimed at improving fisheries data capture and fisher livelihoods. Full report

Conceptual Foundations of the Balanced Scorecard

David Norton and I introduced the Balanced Scorecard in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). The article was based on a multi-company research project to study performance measurement in companies whose intangible assets played a central role in value creation (Nolan Norton Institute, 1991). Norton and I believed that if companies were to improve the management of their intangible assets, they had to integrate the measurement of intangible assets into their management systems. After publication of the 1992 HBR article, several companies quickly adopted the Balanced Scorecard giving us deeper and broader insights into its power and potential. During the next 15 years, as it was adopted by thousands of private, public, and nonprofit enterprises around the world, we extended and broadened the concept into a management tool for describing, communicating and implementing strategy. This paper describes the roots and motivation for the original Balanced Scorecard article as well as the subsequent innovations that connected it to a larger management literature.

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

A Case Study for Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaaS) to allow two services to work together in the Cloud to achieve a streamline process. We illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in the case study at the University of Southampton. The case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. Advanced techniques are used to demonstrate statistical services and 3D Visualisation services under the remit of RMaaS and Monte Carlo Simulation as a Service behind the design of RAaaS. Computational results are presented with their implications discussed. Different types of risks associated with Cloud adoption can be calculated easily, rapidly and accurately with the use of BIaaS. This case study confirms the benefits of BIaaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management and stakeholders of University of Southampton

Goal-directed planning and plan recognition for the sustainable control of homes

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-92).The goal of this thesis is to design an autonomous control system for the sustainable control of buildings. The control system focusses on satisfying three goals to encourage and facilitate a more sustainable lifestyle for the future: sustainability, comfort, and convenience. First, the system must be sustainable, meaning it controls the home to minimize the energy required to meet the living requirements of the resident. Second, the home must also place the resident's comfort as first priority, and not sacrifice comfort for energy savings. A central challenge facing the goal of comfort is uncertainty. Uncertain weather conditions can result in violations of the resident's comfort if the control system does not explicitly consider these factors. The home must probabilistically guarantee to meet resident comfort and functional requirements even under uncertain conditions. Finally, the system must be convenient and not place undue burden on the resident. To accomplish these goals, we provide three solutions: (1) goal-directed optimal planning, which supports efficiency, (2) risk-sensitive planning, which addresses comfort, and (2) intent recognition, which supports ease of use. Goal-direction improves efficiency by specifying what energy consuming activities the users need and when, and enables peak demand to be reduced by specifying the flexibility that the user has with respect to when activities can be performed. Risk sensitive planning addresses user comfort by explicitly considering uncertain factors and planning to limit the risk of violating resident requirements. This solution uses a recently developed plan-executive called probabilistic Sulu (p-Sulu) that leverages a recent algorithm called iterative risk allocation (IRA) to robustly find an optimal control sequence for the home. The second challenge, plan recognition, accomplishes our third goal of convenience. To facilitate widespread adoption, the control system should require minimal user interaction. Plan recognition solves this problem by predicting a resident's schedule based on observations of the resident. p-Sulu can then optimally control the home according to this schedule to minimize energy use, while ensuring the house is comfortable while the resident is home, and saving energy while the resident is away. We present the concept design of a novel solution to plan recognition over timed concurrent constraint automata (TCCA) that provides the initial capabilities necessary to achieve this goal.by Wesley Graybill.M.Eng