Proceedings of the 1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020)

1st Doctoral Consortium at the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (DC-ECAI 2020), 29-30 August, 2020 Santiago de Compostela, SpainThe DC-ECAI 2020 provides a unique opportunity for PhD students, who are close to finishing their doctorate research, to interact with experienced researchers in the field. Senior members of the community are assigned as mentors for each group of students based on the student’s research or similarity of research interests. The DC-ECAI 2020, which is held virtually this year, allows students from all over the world to present their research and discuss their ongoing research and career plans with their mentor, to do networking with other participants, and to receive training and mentoring about career planning and career option

A Framework for Prioritizing Opportunities of Improvement in the Context of Business Excellence Model in Healthcare Organization

In today\u27s world, the healthcare sector is facing challenges to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations. More and more improvement projects are being adopted to enhance healthcare services, making it more patient-centric, and enabling better cost control. Healthcare organizations strive to identify and carry out such improvement initiatives to sustain their businesses and gain competitive advantage. Seeking to reach a higher operational level of excellence, healthcare organizations utilize business excellence criteria to conduct assessment and identify organizational strengths and weaknesses. However, while such assessments routinely identify numerous areas for potential improvement, it is not feasible to conduct all improvement projects simultaneously due to limitations in time, capital, and personnel, as well as conflict with other organization\u27s projects or strategic objectives. An effective prioritization and selection approach is valuable in that it can assist the organization to optimize its available resources and outcomes. This study attempts to enable such an approach by developing a framework to prioritize improvement opportunities in healthcare in the context of the business excellence model through the integration of the Fuzzy Delphi Method and Fuzzy Interface System. To carry out the evaluation process, the framework consists of two phases. The first phase utilizes Fuzzy Delphi Method to identify the most significant factors that should be considered in healthcare for electing the improvement projects. The FDM is employed to handle the subjectivity of human assessment. The research identifies potential factors for evaluating projects, then utilizes FDM to capture expertise knowledge. The first round in FDM is intended to validate the identified list of factors from experts; which includes collecting additional factors from experts that the literature might have overlooked. When an acceptable level of consensus has been reached, a second round is conducted to obtain experts\u27 and other related stakeholders\u27 opinions on the appropriate weight of each factor\u27s importance. Finally, FDM analyses eliminate or retain the criteria to produce a final list of critical factors to select improvement projects. The second phase in the framework attempts to prioritize improvement initiatives using the Hierarchical Fuzzy Interface System. The Fuzzy Interface System combines the experts\u27 ratings for each improvement opportunity with respect to the factors deemed critical to compute the priority index. In the process of calculating the priority index, the framework allows the estimation of other intermediate indices including: social, financial impact, strategical, operational feasibility, and managerial indices. These indices bring an insight into the improvement opportunities with respect to each framework\u27s dimensions. The framework allows for a reduction of the bias in the assessment by developing a knowledge based on the perspectives of multiple experts

Game Theory Relaunched

The game is on. Do you know how to play? Game theory sets out to explore what can be said about making decisions which go beyond accepting the rules of a game. Since 1942, a well elaborated mathematical apparatus has been developed to do so; but there is more. During the last three decades game theoretic reasoning has popped up in many other fields as well - from engineering to biology and psychology. New simulation tools and network analysis have made game theory omnipresent these days. This book collects recent research papers in game theory, which come from diverse scientific communities all across the world; they combine many different fields like economics, politics, history, engineering, mathematics, physics, and psychology. All of them have as a common denominator some method of game theory. Enjoy

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

Developing a contextualised framework for culture-led urbansustainable development through creative hub concept(a case study of Iranian free zone)

Regenerating cities and adapting them to contemporary life circumstances is essential for improving cities' economic, social, and cultural situations. In order to regenerate cities, we, therefore, need to pay more attention to the cultural aspects of how they were developed and maintained. The research aims to examine the possible use of the creative hubs, based on their cultural context, to regenerate cities and regions based on social, economic, environmental, and cultural innovations. The creative hub concept aims to build strategies for achieving a new sustainable development model that is consistent with the spirit of the time in response to the following question: How can cities achieve sustainable development through the concept of a creative hub? Moreover, how can we use the interaction between Art & Culture, Knowledge-based organizations, and Community projects in our path to regenerate the economy of our cities? With the increasing share of cultural products, services, and intellectual property in global exchange and the challenges to cultural diversity and cultures raised by contemporary globalisation, the field of culture has gained importance in global development in cities. Furthermore, there is an increasing awareness that cultural understanding and cultural diversity must be preserved and promoted to protect fundamental human rights, democratic freedoms, and genetic and biological diversity. This standpoint is based on the fact that sustainable development can only be accomplished if cultural diversity and social justice, environmental accountability, and economic viability are all in harmony. This study examines culture as the fourth pillar of urban sustainability and its social, economic, and environmental aspects. The thesis examines both the culture of sustainable development in terms of its evolution as a global agenda and how sustainable development can facilitate the cultural arena. This way, the thesis creates a contextualised framework for sustainable urban development through the creative hub concept, allowing developing countries like Iran more policy space and choice. Because of the importance and opportunities that Kish places on the concept of culture in its sustainable growth, this thesis uses Kish (one of Iran's Free Trade Zones) as a case study.This research builds on the relevant literature to demonstrate the importance of the links between local culture and its expectations and the urban sustainable development process. Meanwhile, this thesis looks at a global report to examine the contribution of culture to urban sustainability. Furthermore, Kish Island has been chosen as a case study in this thesis because the emergence of special economic zones (SEZs) and Free Trade Zones (FTZs) has become a significant focus of many developing countries such as Iran for culture-based strategies for achieving sustainable urban development. In this thesis, information is gathered using mixed methods to collect and analyse data in order to develop a contextualised framework for culture-led sustainable urban development in Kish.Culture-led sustainable urban development encompasses multiple steps that may include complementary quantitative and qualitative criteria and multiple decision-makers. Therefore, in this research, a hybrid Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach is used for identifying and choosing alternatives based on the values and preferences of the decision-makers. The MCDM model integrates the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM)", fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), and fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method for identifying the priorities of factors that affecting and challenging sustainable development and meanwhile finding the best strategies to overcome these challenges in Kish Island in Iran as a case study.Following these processes, several key recommendations emerge. These recommendations are based on existing problems and opportunities in Kish. These suggestions demonstrate the importance of strategic planning for long-term development on this Island. They also believe that preserving and fostering culture is a prerequisite for achieving this urban growth.In addition, this study's results provide concrete guidelines for Iranian governments to integrate culture into urban policies as a unique resource for urban regeneration and innovation and social, economic, and environmental development

Project Risk Management in Public-Private Partnerships: An Equitable Risk Allocation Decision Model based on Psychometrics

Public-private partnership (P3) procurement has grown into an internationally acclaimed means of achieving value for money while procuring public infrastructure projects. Unlike conventional infrastructure procurement models, P3s transfer a considerable amount of project risk away from the public sector to the private sector. During a long, methodical procurement phase, public and private partners reach a final risk allocation agreement over forecasted risks regarding a project’s potential design, build, finance, operation, and maintenance. This thesis begins with exploring the P3 procurement phase, highlighting relevant project actors and stages leading up to the signing of a final contract. The concepts of risk and project risk management are studied under the assumption that P3 project partners operate under a principal-agent relationship, where public authorities are tasked with aligning private partner motivations with their own motivations through contractual incentives. A core literature database provides 54 identified P3 project risks along with their suggested sectorial allocations. Exactly half – 27 – of these risks are deemed contentious because they are not unanimously allocated to a given sector within the database. These 27 contentious P3 project risks were subjected to an expert questionnaire asking Canadian practitioners to allocate them to a preferred sector based on a five-point semantic differential scale. The respondent pool was equally comprised of public and private sector practitioners from an array of specialized occupations relevant to P3 project risk management. Expert input was subjected to various quantitative methods that measured: (i) levels of agreement within sectors over risk allocation preferences, (ii) levels of agreement between sectors over risk allocation preferences, and (iii) overall risk allocation preferences based on the five-point semantic differential scale. It is found that: (i) both sectors enjoy strong levels of agreement over risk allocation preferences, (ii) 6 of 27 risks show statistically significant levels of disagreement between sectors over their allocation preferences, and (iii) there are risks that should generally be borne by either the public or private sector pending individual P3 project circumstances. The research findings should enable scholars and practitioners alike to establish more concrete conceptions of where P3 project risks should generally be allocated pending circumstantial conditions unique to different P3 projects. Where risks cannot be broadly allocated due to circumstantial conditions, a review of the study’s final risk allocation model provides contextual considerations that influence their allocation. Concluding sections acknowledge this study’s methodological and theoretical limitations. Recommendations for future studies to consider, both methodological and theoretical, are provided