A Study looking at the Governance of Community Safety Partnerships in Scotland

Partnership working within the domain of the UK public sector has been the subject of academic exploration in modern times. Rhodes has written in relation to tensions around governance i.e. the ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Rhodes, 1997), with a loss of government functions limiting its capacity (Weller and Bakvis, 1997), to alternative delivery systems, such as agencies, policy networks, or partnerships involving the public, private and third sector (Rhodes, 1997; James, 2001); arguably leading to a fragmented service delivery (Powell and Exworthy, 2002). Others have argued that while the state may be fragmented it is not incapacitated (Holliday, 2000) as it uses regulatory levers to steer local government (partnerships) towards outcomes favouring central government policy. In Scotland this is achieved through Single Outcome Agreements (SOA) between central and local government set within a prescriptive framework advancing the notion of community empowerment and long term prevention; as advocated by the Christie Commission (Scottish Government, 2011c). This thesis explores the concept of partnership working by looking at the governance of community safety in Scotland; principally through Community Planning/Community Safety Partnerships during a period of significant public sector reform. Using a case study approach - data was obtained during a twelve month period (2013) principally through 50 semi-structured qualitative interviews with key stakeholders and 9 non-participant observations of partnership meetings within three distinct localities; and analysis of secondary data (policy documents). Drawing on theories around governance/partnership working, power and social capital: key themes began to emerge around tensions between central and local policy; power differentials within partnerships – relating to organisational culture and resource dependency; fiscal retrenchment and the de-prioritisation of community safety; Police reform and the impact on localism; and accountability issues relating to participatory democracy, blurred boundaries, and accountability to local communities within the governance of community safety. This thesis concludes that despite the rhetoric of localism within local governance – local communities and local government have less voice/power compared to central government, in relation to the governance of community safety, and in relation to the loss of accountability within local policing

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Recent advances in industrial wireless sensor networks towards efficient management in IoT

With the accelerated development of Internet-of- Things (IoT), wireless sensor networks (WSN) are gaining importance in the continued advancement of information and communication technologies, and have been connected and integrated with Internet in vast industrial applications. However, given the fact that most wireless sensor devices are resource constrained and operate on batteries, the communication overhead and power consumption are therefore important issues for wireless sensor networks design. In order to efficiently manage these wireless sensor devices in a unified manner, the industrial authorities should be able to provide a network infrastructure supporting various WSN applications and services that facilitate the management of sensor-equipped real-world entities. This paper presents an overview of industrial ecosystem, technical architecture, industrial device management standards and our latest research activity in developing a WSN management system. The key approach to enable efficient and reliable management of WSN within such an infrastructure is a cross layer design of lightweight and cloud-based RESTful web service

Cloud Computing as Evolution of Distributed Computing – A Case Study for SlapOS Distributed Cloud Computing Platform

The cloud computing paradigm has been defined from several points of view, the main two directions being either as an evolution of the grid and distributed computing paradigm, or, on the contrary, as a disruptive revolution in the classical paradigms of operating systems, network layers and web applications. This paper presents a distributed cloud computing platform called SlapOS, which unifies technologies and communication protocols into a new technology model for offering any application as a service. Both cloud and distributed computing can be efficient methods for optimizing resources that are aggregated from a grid of standard PCs hosted in homes, offices and small data centers. The paper fills a gap in the existing distributed computing literature by providing a distributed cloud computing model which can be applied for deploying various applications

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

WP3 Policy Mapping, Review and Analysis

This report presents the mapping, review and analysis of the most relevant LLL policies for young adults in Glasgow City Region and Aberdeen/ Aberdeenshire. The report first reviews the national Scottish LLL policies which influence the implementation of LLL for young adults in the two regions under study. This report provides findings and analysis to comply with the H2020 YOUNG_ADULLLT Research Project, Work Package 3 (WP3). We have used the requirements and guidance in the WP3 proposal to select two appropriate Functional Regions (FRs): The Glasgow City Region and Aberdeen/Aberdeenshire. These FRs provide a focus for the WP3 mapping but also frame the other data gathering for the YOUNG_ADULLLT project. The mapping has provided material to facilitate an understanding of the policy landscape, including the different policy sectors of the two FRs set in the national context. The mapping required the selection of three detailed examples of LLL/Skills policies with their associated material actions in each of the two FRs. Currently, we have mapped four in each FR. Our mapping reflects the distinctiveness of Scottish public policy in that national policies provide the main framework for regional and locally devolved enactment and associated actions

Semantic Services for Enterprise Data Exchange

Data exchange between different information systems is a complex issue. Each system, designed for a specific purpose, is defined using a vocabulary of the specific business. While Web services allow interoperations and data communications between multiple systems, the clients of the services must understand the vocabulary of the targeting data resources to select services or to construct queries. In this thesis we explore an ontology-based approach to facilitate clients’ queries in the vocabulary of the clients’ own domain, and to automate the query processing. A governmental inter-department data query process has been used to illustrate the capability of the semantic approach