End-user Empowerment in the Digital Age

End-user empowerment (or human empowerment) may be seen as an important aspect of a human-centric approach towards the digital economy. Despite the role of end-users has been recognized as a key element in information systems and end-user computing, empowering end-users may be seen as a next evolutionary step. This minitrack aims at advancing the understanding of what end-user empowerment really is, what the main challenges to develop end-user empowering systems are, and how end-user empowerment may be achieved in specific domains

Human-Centric Process-Aware Information Systems (HC-PAIS)

Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) support organizations in managing and automating their processes. A full automation of processes is in particular industries, such as service-oriented markets, not practicable. The integration of humans in PAIS is necessary to manage and perform processes that require human capabilities, judgments and decisions. A challenge of interdisciplinary PAIS research is to provide concepts and solutions that support human integration in PAIS and human orientation of PAIS in a way that provably increase the PAIS users' satisfaction and motivation with working with the Human-Centric Process Aware Information System (HC-PAIS) and consequently influence users' performance of tasks. This work is an initial step of research that aims at providing a definition of Human-Centric Process Aware Information Systems (HC-PAIS) and future research challenges of HC-PAIS. Results of focus group research are presented.Comment: 8 page

Data centric trust evaluation and prediction framework for IOT

© 2017 ITU. Application of trust principals in internet of things (IoT) has allowed to provide more trustworthy services among the corresponding stakeholders. The most common method of assessing trust in IoT applications is to estimate trust level of the end entities (entity-centric) relative to the trustor. In these systems, trust level of the data is assumed to be the same as the trust level of the data source. However, most of the IoT based systems are data centric and operate in dynamic environments, which need immediate actions without waiting for a trust report from end entities. We address this challenge by extending our previous proposals on trust establishment for entities based on their reputation, experience and knowledge, to trust estimation of data items [1-3]. First, we present a hybrid trust framework for evaluating both data trust and entity trust, which will be enhanced as a standardization for future data driven society. The modules including data trust metric extraction, data trust aggregation, evaluation and prediction are elaborated inside the proposed framework. Finally, a possible design model is described to implement the proposed ideas

Will 5G See its Blind Side? Evolving 5G for Universal Internet Access

Internet has shown itself to be a catalyst for economic growth and social equity but its potency is thwarted by the fact that the Internet is off limits for the vast majority of human beings. Mobile phones---the fastest growing technology in the world that now reaches around 80\% of humanity---can enable universal Internet access if it can resolve coverage problems that have historically plagued previous cellular architectures (2G, 3G, and 4G). These conventional architectures have not been able to sustain universal service provisioning since these architectures depend on having enough users per cell for their economic viability and thus are not well suited to rural areas (which are by definition sparsely populated). The new generation of mobile cellular technology (5G), currently in a formative phase and expected to be finalized around 2020, is aimed at orders of magnitude performance enhancement. 5G offers a clean slate to network designers and can be molded into an architecture also amenable to universal Internet provisioning. Keeping in mind the great social benefits of democratizing Internet and connectivity, we believe that the time is ripe for emphasizing universal Internet provisioning as an important goal on the 5G research agenda. In this paper, we investigate the opportunities and challenges in utilizing 5G for global access to the Internet for all (GAIA). We have also identified the major technical issues involved in a 5G-based GAIA solution and have set up a future research agenda by defining open research problems

The Road Ahead for Networking: A Survey on ICN-IP Coexistence Solutions

In recent years, the current Internet has experienced an unexpected paradigm shift in the usage model, which has pushed researchers towards the design of the Information-Centric Networking (ICN) paradigm as a possible replacement of the existing architecture. Even though both Academia and Industry have investigated the feasibility and effectiveness of ICN, achieving the complete replacement of the Internet Protocol (IP) is a challenging task. Some research groups have already addressed the coexistence by designing their own architectures, but none of those is the final solution to move towards the future Internet considering the unaltered state of the networking. To design such architecture, the research community needs now a comprehensive overview of the existing solutions that have so far addressed the coexistence. The purpose of this paper is to reach this goal by providing the first comprehensive survey and classification of the coexistence architectures according to their features (i.e., deployment approach, deployment scenarios, addressed coexistence requirements and architecture or technology used) and evaluation parameters (i.e., challenges emerging during the deployment and the runtime behaviour of an architecture). We believe that this paper will finally fill the gap required for moving towards the design of the final coexistence architecture.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, 3 table

Designing a novel virtual collaborative environment to support collaboration in design review meetings

Project review meetings are part of the project management process and are organised to assess progress and resolve any design conflicts to avoid delays in construction. One of the key challenges during a project review meeting is to bring the stakeholders together and use this time effectively to address design issues as quickly as possible. At present, current technology solutions based on BIM or CAD are information-centric and do not allow project teams to collectively explore the design from a range of perspectives and brainstorm ideas when design conflicts are encountered. This paper presents a system architecture that can be used to support multi-functional team collaboration more effectively during such design review meetings. The proposed architecture illustrates how information-centric BIM or CAD systems can be made human- and team-centric to enhance team communication and problem solving. An implementation of the proposed system architecture has been tested for its utility, likability and usefulness during design review meetings. The evaluation results suggest that the collaboration platform has the potential to enhance collaboration among multi-functional teams

Review of CCAFS Scaling Activities

This review was commissioned by CCAFS Learning Platform for Partnerships and Capacity Building for Scaling Climate Smart Agriculture, with the aim to reflect on CCAFS project portfolio to highlight good practices and gaps in implementation of CCAFS Scaling Activities. The review was undertaken with a systemic approach, using the concepts of design thinking and system thinking throughout its methodology and analysis. 21 practitioners throughout CCAFS regional, flagship and learning platform portfolios were interviewed between March and May 2019. The results are presented in a way that allows CCAFS to identify areas to deepen systematically upon; areas for CCAFS’s further strategic or conceptual support, and areas that require more research by CCAFS. The systemic analysis shows that CCAFS has the potential to consciously transform into a learning organization and an innovation environment, thereby fostering and increasing its performance, relevance and overall impact in changing and challenging circumstances. The results were discussed and validated with the CCAFS Core Team (CT) in the frame of a CCAFS CT Workshop on Scaling on 15th May in Madrid. In open learning formats, the CT prioritized its next step. The review report further contains a set of recommendations, derived from both the review and the CT Workshop on Scaling, which shall help CCAFS to transform into both a learning organization and an innovation environment