A Three-Fold Perspective of Continuous IT Value Assessment

Assessing Information Technology (IT) value is a priority in the digital age. The topic has been studied for decades, but the difficulty to (1) continuously measure and (2) steer value creation with IT investments still presents challenges. This paper presents an approach to evaluate the value of IT over time. The results include a multidimensional framework for the main phases of (1) dynamic contextualization and (2) data analysis. The results emerge from the first cycle of design science research conducted in a municipality-owned water supply company struggling to monitor and communicate IT value to different stakeholders, particularly the administration board. IT value assessment in digital transformation contexts must result from continuous monitoring in three essential perspectives: net value, goal achievement, and perceived value. The findings can be helpful to Chief Information Officers (CIOs) dealing with the pressure to report value in turbulent environments and justify their increasing IT investments

key issues. An Introduction by the Guest Editor of the Special Issue

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020This introduction presents an overview of the special issue of Con-Textos Kantianos devoted to Kant’s aesthetic theory. The articles in this issue have been organized into two sections: those written by keynote-authors, and those written in response to the general call for papers. Within each of these two sections, articles have been organized thematically, although the philosophical traditions that they engage with, as well as points of contact between articles, have also been considered. In the first section, keynote-authors address questions of aesthetic normativity; the role of aesthetics in the acquisition of empirical concepts; the emotional nature of aesthetics; subjectivity and disinterestedness; connections between aesthetics, anthropology, and politics; and aesthetic non-conceptualism. The second section begins with contributions dealing with matters of formalism and conceptualism in Kant’s aesthetics, as well as their relation and relevance to thinking about art, the arts, and contemporary art. It continues with papers that address key issues of Kant’s aesthetics, such as the free play and the role of imagination, as well as possible complementarities between the three Critiques. It closes with articles that focus on the reception of Kant’s aesthetic theory in the works of major philosophers of the 20th century, namely within critical theory and the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition.publishersversionpublishe

On the Applied Judgment of Taste

UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020 DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0090Kant’s account of taste is often taken to imply that aesthetic appreciation and moral issues are incompatible – as if one could not consider purposes of a moral sort while passing a judgment of taste. Taking into account how morally and politically engaged art has proven to be, it is easy to see why interest in Kant’s account of taste has waned. This cannot be the whole story, though. I claim that the applied judgment of taste can include the consideration of moral purposes while remaining an aesthetic judgment: Iargue, first, that the beauty of buildings and the beauty of horses may include the consideration of concepts of a moral sort and that human beauty does necessarily include it; in the second part of my paper, I will give an account of why the applied judgment of taste is a genuine kind of judgment of taste. If my views are correct, the applied judgment of taste instantiates aesthetic appreciation of morally and politically engaged art objects without dismissing – and on the contrary, considering – their moral and political engagement. As such, Kant’s notion of applied judgment of taste might enrich current discussions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of art, and art itself.publishersversionpublishe

The Role of Historical Sciences in Art Production and the Aesthetic Appreciation of Art

DL 57/2016/CP1453/CT0090 UIDB/00183/2020 UIDP/00183/2020This paper addresses the role played by historical sciences—their concepts, rules, and examples—in art production and the aesthetic appreciation of art. Based on Kant’s notion of ‘adherent beauty,’ and focusing on the case of ‘beautiful art,’ I will propose that historical sciences play a twofold role: not only do they work as restrictions when it comes to art production and appreciation, but they also function as enabling conditions and incitements for the disclosure of new rules and the ascription of aesthetic value to works of art.publishersversionpublishe

Distributed LQG control of a water delivery canal with feedforward from measured consumptions

This work addresses the design of distributed LQG controllers for water delivery canals that include feedforward from local farmer water consumptions. The proposed architecture consists of a network of local control agents, each connected to one of the canal pools and sharing information with their neighbors in order to act in a coordinated way. In order to improve performance, the measurement of the outflows from each pool is used as a feedforward signal. Although the feedforward action is local. It propagates due to the coordinates procedure. The paper presents the distributed LQG algorithm with feedforward and experimental results in a large scale pilot water delivery canal

Massive MIMO Full-Duplex Relaying with Optimal Power Allocation for Independent Multipairs

With the help of an in-band full-duplex relay station, it is possible to simultaneously transmit and receive signals from multiple users. The performance of such system can be greatly increased when the relay station is equipped with a large number of antennas on both transmitter and receiver sides. In this paper, we exploit the use of massive arrays to effectively suppress the loopback interference (LI) of a decode-and-forward relay (DF) and evaluate the performance of the end-to-end (e2e) transmission. This paper assumes imperfect channel state information is available at the relay and designs a minimum mean-square error (MMSE) filter to mitigate the interference. Subsequently, we adopt zero-forcing (ZF) filters for both detection and beamforming. The performance of such system is evaluated in terms of bit error rate (BER) at both relay and destinations, and an optimal choice for the transmission power at the relay is shown. We then propose a complexity efficient optimal power allocation (OPA) algorithm that, using the channel statistics, computes the minimum power that satisfies the rate constraints of each pair. The results obtained via simulation show that when both MMSE filtering and OPA method are used, better values for the energy efficiency are attained.Comment: Accepted to the 16th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications - SPAWC, Stockholm, Sweden 201

Alignment of velocity fields for video surveillance

Velocity fields play an important role in surveillance since they describe typical motion behaviors of video objects (e.g., pedestrians) in the scene. This paper presents an algorithm for the alignment of velocity fields acquired by different cameras, at different time intervals, from different viewpoints. Velocity fields are aligned using a warping function which maps corresponding points and vectors in both fields. The warping parameters are estimated by minimizing a non-linear least squares energy. Experimental tests show that the proposed model is able to compensate significant misalignments, including translation, rotation and scaling

Fault Tolerant Reconfigurable Control of a Water Delivery Canal - Actuators Faults

This work addresses the problem of designing fault tolerant controllers for a water delivery canal that tackle actuators faults. The type of faults considered consists of blocking of one of the gates. The detection of the fault is made by comparing the gate position command with the actual (measured) gate position. Both centralized and distributed controllers are made for local upstream water level control. Centralized controllers are multivariable LQG-LTR controllers that use a model of the system with all the available manipulated inputs (gate positions) and all the available outputs (pool levels). Initially, three gates and three pools are controlled. After the fault detection, the controller is reconfigured to use the only two still operating gates and the corresponding two pool water levels. Distributed control uses local (SISO) LQG-LTR controllers that negotiate with their neighbors in order to be coordinated. When a fault occurs, this negotiation takes place only among the controllers connected to the actuators that are not in a fault state. Experimental results obtained in a pilot canal are presented

Control of a water delivery canal with cooperative distributed MPC

This article addresses the problem of controlling pool levels in a water delivery canal using a novel cooperative distributed MPC control algorithm that incorporates stability constraints. According to a distributed control strategy, a local control agent is associated to all canal gates (actuators). In order to achieve cooperative action, each control agent computes the corresponding gate position (manipulated variable) by performing the minimization of a cost function that considers not only its local control objectives, but also the ones of their immediate neighbors. For this purpose, a MPC algorithm with stability constraints is used (SIORHC). At the beginning of each sampling interval, local control agents exchange information with their neighbors and adjust their decision in an iterative way. The resulting distributed MPC is denoted D-SIORHC and yields a stable closed-loop. Experimental results are provided to show the influence of the controller configuration parameters on the resulting performance