Unlocking medical leadership’s potential:a multilevel virtuous circle?

Background and aim: Medical leadership (ML) has been introduced in many countries, promising to support healthcare services improvement and help further system reform through effective leadership behaviours. Despite some evidence of its success, such lofty promises remain unfulfilled. Method: Couched in extant international literature, this paper provides a conceptual framework to analyse ML's potential in the context of healthcare's complex, multifaceted setting. Results: We identify four interrelated levels of analysis, or domains, that influence ML's potential to transform healthcare delivery. These are the healthcare ecosystem domain, the professional domain, the organisational domain and the individual doctor domain. We discuss the tensions between the various actors working in and across these domains and argue that greater multilevel and multistakeholder collaborative working in healthcare is necessary to reprofessionalise and transform healthcare ecosystems

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

Values-Based Network Leadership in an Interconnected World

This paper describes values-based network leadership conceptually aligned to systems science, principles of networks, moral and ethical development, and connectivism. Values-based network leadership places importance on a leader\u27s repertoire of skills for stewarding a culture of purpose and calling among distributed teams in a globally interconnected world. Values-based network leadership is applicable for any leader needing to align interdependent effort by networks of teams operating across virtual and physical environments to achieve a collective purpose. An open-learning ecosystem is also described to help leaders address the development of strengths associated with building trust and relationships across networks of teams, aligned under a higher purpose and calling, possessing moral fiber, resilient in the face of complexity, reflectively competent to adapt as interconnected efforts evolve and change within multicultural environments, and able to figure out new ways to do something never done before

A Tale of Two Data-Intensive Paradigms: Applications, Abstractions, and Architectures

Scientific problems that depend on processing large amounts of data require overcoming challenges in multiple areas: managing large-scale data distribution, co-placement and scheduling of data with compute resources, and storing and transferring large volumes of data. We analyze the ecosystems of the two prominent paradigms for data-intensive applications, hereafter referred to as the high-performance computing and the Apache-Hadoop paradigm. We propose a basis, common terminology and functional factors upon which to analyze the two approaches of both paradigms. We discuss the concept of "Big Data Ogres" and their facets as means of understanding and characterizing the most common application workloads found across the two paradigms. We then discuss the salient features of the two paradigms, and compare and contrast the two approaches. Specifically, we examine common implementation/approaches of these paradigms, shed light upon the reasons for their current "architecture" and discuss some typical workloads that utilize them. In spite of the significant software distinctions, we believe there is architectural similarity. We discuss the potential integration of different implementations, across the different levels and components. Our comparison progresses from a fully qualitative examination of the two paradigms, to a semi-quantitative methodology. We use a simple and broadly used Ogre (K-means clustering), characterize its performance on a range of representative platforms, covering several implementations from both paradigms. Our experiments provide an insight into the relative strengths of the two paradigms. We propose that the set of Ogres will serve as a benchmark to evaluate the two paradigms along different dimensions.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

"Internet universality": Human rights and principles for the internet

This paper details proposals by UNESCO to manufacture and draft a concept of “Internet Universality” that adopts a human-rights framework as a basis for articulating a set of principles and rights for the Internet. The paper discusses various drafts of this concept before examining the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet put forward by The Internet Rights & Principles Dynamic Coalition based at the UN Internet Governance Forum, and the working law Marco Civil da Internet introduced by Brazil

Next Generation Cloud Computing: New Trends and Research Directions

The landscape of cloud computing has significantly changed over the last decade. Not only have more providers and service offerings crowded the space, but also cloud infrastructure that was traditionally limited to single provider data centers is now evolving. In this paper, we firstly discuss the changing cloud infrastructure and consider the use of infrastructure from multiple providers and the benefit of decentralising computing away from data centers. These trends have resulted in the need for a variety of new computing architectures that will be offered by future cloud infrastructure. These architectures are anticipated to impact areas, such as connecting people and devices, data-intensive computing, the service space and self-learning systems. Finally, we lay out a roadmap of challenges that will need to be addressed for realising the potential of next generation cloud systems.Comment: Accepted to Future Generation Computer Systems, 07 September 201