1,188 research outputs found
IT Value in Public Administrations: a Model Proposal for E-Procurement
Recent studies have affirmed the necessity of a discontinuity in the method of investigating the value produced in organisations by IT. Existing studies have in common a prevailing (when not exclusive) attention paid to the private sector, as testified by the frequent use of income or financial indicators to measure benefits. These approaches however cannot be directly applied to public utility organisations like public administrations. Taking into account this scenario, the present exploratory work looks at the analysis of IT investments in the public sector by identifying a viable approach to research in this domain. To move towards this objective, procurement management has been taken as the field to be observed, and an Italian publich Local Healthcare Agency which has managed several e-procurement projects has been analysed. This case represents a valuable context for examination and discussion because the outcomes of each project were evaluated in details. A riche IT Value Model devoted to the private secotr has been adopted and discussed, and later some resulting adaptations are suggested, together with some hints and limitations.Recent studies have affirmed the necessity of a discontinuity in the method of investigating the value produced in organisations by IT. Existing studies have in common a prevailing (when not exclusive) attention paid to the private sector, as testified by the frequent use of income or financial indicators to measure benefits. These approaches however cannot be directly applied to public utility organisations like public administrations. Taking into account this scenario, the present exploratory work looks at the analysis of IT investments in the public sector by identifying a viable approach to research in this domain. To move towards this objective, procurement management has been taken as the field to be observed, and an Italian publich Local Healthcare Agency which has managed several e-procurement projects has been analysed. This case represents a valuable context for examination and discussion because the outcomes of each project were evaluated in details. A riche IT Value Model devoted to the private secotr has been adopted and discussed, and later some resulting adaptations are suggested, together with some hints and limitations.Monograph's chapter
Holographic Superconductors with Lifshitz Scaling
Black holes in asymptotically Lifshitz spacetime provide a window onto finite
temperature effects in strongly coupled Lifshitz models. We add a Maxwell gauge
field and charged matter to a recently proposed gravity dual of 2+1 dimensional
Lifshitz theory. This gives rise to charged black holes with scalar hair, which
correspond to the superconducting phase of holographic superconductors with z >
1 Lifshitz scaling. Along the way we analyze the global geometry of static,
asymptotically Lifshitz black holes at arbitrary critical exponent z > 1. In
all known exact solutions there is a null curvature singularity in the black
hole region, and, by a general argument, the same applies to generic Lifshitz
black holes.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures; v2: added references; v3: matches published
versio
Ethical governance is essential to building trust in robotics and artificial intelligence systems
© 2018 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved. This paper explores the question of ethical governance for robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. We outline a roadmap-which links a number of elements, including ethics, standards, regulation, responsible research and innovation, and public engagement-as a framework to guide ethical governance in robotics and AI. We argue that ethical governance is essential to building public trust in robotics and AI, and conclude by proposing five pillars of good ethical governance. This article is part of the theme issue 'Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal, and technical opportunities and challenges'
Thermodynamics of Large AdS Black Holes
We consider leading order quantum corrections to the geometry of large AdS
black holes in a spherical reduction of four-dimensional Einstein gravity with
negative cosmological constant. The Hawking temperature grows without bound
with increasing black hole mass, yet the semiclassical back-reaction on the
geometry is relatively mild, indicating that observers in free fall outside a
large AdS black hole never see thermal radiation at the Hawking temperature.
The positive specific heat of large AdS black holes is a statement about the
dual gauge theory rather than an observable property on the gravity side.
Implications for string thermodynamics with an AdS infrared regulator are
briefly discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, v2. added reference
Holographic Superconductor for a Lifshitz fixed point
We consider the gravity dual of strongly coupled system at a Lifshitz-fixed
point and finite temperature, which was constructed in a recent work
arXiv:0909.0263. We construct an Abelian Higgs model in that background and
calculate condensation and conductivity using holographic techniques. We find
that condensation happens and DC conductivity blows up when temperature turns
below a critical value.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, v4: improved version, references adde
Complementarities between IT and Organizational Structure: The Role of Corporate Exploration and Exploitation
The decentralization of organizational decision authority has been shown to be complementary to Information Technology (IT) in prior research. We draw from the information processing view of organizations, the IT and de/centralization debate, and organizational learning theory to argue that IT payoffs can also be improved by greater centralization of decision authority, contingent on a firm’s corporate learning type. We argue that an exploratory learning type is best pursued with a decentralized organization design, while an exploitative learning type requires a centralized organization design. We hypothesize that under corporate exploration, IT payoffs are enhanced through greater decentralization, whereas under corporate exploitation, returns to IT are improved by greater centralization. Our study uses a novel multi‐source panel on the IT capital, the degree of de/centralization, and the performance of almost 260 German manufacturing firms. We estimate production functions to assess the contribution of combning IT with de/centralization to firmlevel productivity under different corporate learning types. Our results strongly support our hypotheses and hold up to a variety of robustness tests
Holographic superconductor models in the non-minimal derivative coupling theory
We study a general class of holographic superconductor models via the
St\"{u}ckelberg mechanism in the non-minimal derivative coupling theory in
which the charged scalar field is kinetically coupling to Einstein's tensor. We
explore the effects of the coupling parameter on the critical temperature, the
order of phase transitions and the critical exponents near the second-order
phase transition point. Moreover, we compute the electric conductive using the
probe approximation and check the ratios for the different
coupling parameters.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure
Entanglement Entropy and Wilson Loop in St\"{u}ckelberg Holographic Insulator/Superconductor Model
We study the behaviors of entanglement entropy and vacuum expectation value
of Wilson loop in the St\"{u}ckelberg holographic insulator/superconductor
model. This model has rich phase structures depending on model parameters. Both
the entanglement entropy for a strip geometry and the heavy quark potential
from the Wilson loop show that there exists a "confinement/deconfinement" phase
transition. In addition, we find that the non-monotonic behavior of the
entanglement entropy with respect to chemical potential is universal in this
model. The pseudo potential from the spatial Wilson loop also has a similar
non-monotonic behavior. It turns out that the entanglement entropy and Wilson
loop are good probes to study the properties of the holographic superconductor
phase transition.Comment: 23 pages,12 figures. v2: typos corrected, accepted in JHE
Holography of Charged Dilaton Black Holes
We study charged dilaton black branes in . Our system involves a
dilaton coupled to a Maxwell field with dilaton-dependent
gauge coupling, . First, we find the solutions for
extremal and near extremal branes through a combination of analytical and
numerical techniques. The near horizon geometries in the simplest cases, where
, are Lifshitz-like, with a dynamical exponent
determined by . The black hole thermodynamics varies in an interesting
way with , but in all cases the entropy is vanishing and the specific
heat is positive for the near extremal solutions. We then compute conductivity
in these backgrounds. We find that somewhat surprisingly, the AC conductivity
vanishes like at T=0 independent of . We also explore the
charged black brane physics of several other classes of gauge-coupling
functions . In addition to possible applications in AdS/CMT, the
extremal black branes are of interest from the point of view of the attractor
mechanism. The near horizon geometries for these branes are universal,
independent of the asymptotic values of the moduli, and describe generic
classes of endpoints for attractor flows which are different from .Comment: 33 pages, 3 figures, LaTex; v2, references added; v3, more refs
added; v4, refs added, minor correction
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