Considering collectives: Roles, members and goals

There is a growing need across many disciplines to be able to model and reason about groups of individuals (i.e., collectives) resulting in an increased interest within the field of ontology. In previous work a taxonomy of collectives was presented that allowed a user to distinguish the different types of collectives. The taxonomy classified each collective according to five criteria: membership, coherence, location, differentiation of role and depth. However the taxonomy is found to be lacking in terms of: addressing how changes in membership affect the identity of the collective, recognising the importance of role, and its sensitivity to temporal scope. Drawing from existing research this paper discusses how a collective can only be sufficiently characterised by considering the relationship between a collective, its members, the roles that they play and the coherence criteria (i.e., the reason that we consider a phenomenon to be a collective). Preliminary updates are suggested for the taxonomy that will allow collectives to be sufficiently characterised

A computational method to track the evolution of business models in the Digital Economy

Companies within the Digital Economy are evolving their business models as they take advantage of the opportunities afforded by emerging digital technologies. There is a need to develop methods that will allow researchers and policy makers to understand the existence of, and relationships between, the different business models within the Digital Economy and track their evolution. Such methods could also help quantify the size and growth of the Digital Economy. This paper presents a computational method, which utilizes machine learning and web scraping, to identify new business models, and a taxonomy of organisations, through the analysis of a firm’s webpage. The work seeks to provide an autonomous tool that provides regular output tracking trends in the number of firms in a market, their business model and changes in activity from product to service over time. This information would provide valuable and actionable insight for researchers, firms and markets

Detecting and Identifying Collective Phenomena within Movement Data

Collective phenomena are ubiquitous in our every day lives; each day we are likely to observe or take part in a collective. Examples include a traffic jam on the way to work, a flock of birds in the sky or a queue in the shop. These examples include only three types of collective that are considered in this thesis: those phenomena whose individual members can be assigned a physical location in geographic space. However, this criterion is satisfied by many different types of collective. The movement patterns that are exhibited by collectives are one of their most prominent properties; it is often the property that we wish to reason about most. For example, the movement patterns of crowds, traffic or demonstrations. This thesis hypothesises that, given a dataset that comprises the movement data for a group of individuals, the presence of certain collectives can be achieved through an examination of the exhibited movement patterns. To identify the different types of collective that exist, a general taxonomy of collectives is presented. A class of collectives are found to manifest themselves through spatial coherence. Therefore, a set of spatial coherence criteria have been developed that can be applied to a movement dataset to indicate if any individuals within that dataset may be participating in a spatial collective. To indicate the different types of spatial collective that may be extracted, a taxonomy of spatial collectives is also presented

Pedestrian route planning based on an enhanced representation of pedestrian network and probabilistic estimate of signal delays

The paper proposes an enhanced representation of the pedestrian network that provides benefits for pedestrian route planning over a network representation that is used by a majority of existing route planning services. Pedestrian network is represented in the proposed methodology by pavements and crossings between them. Route planning is based on the travel time derived from distance and average walking speed. Additional delays calculated using probabilistic method are applied for signal crossings. This allowed more accurate pedestrian route choice by accounting for signal delays and pavement closure, which is not possible under a usual network representation used for vehicles

Assessing the impact of digital innovations in the London transportation network

Findings suggest that the digital innovations introduced by Uber disrupted the market and changed the nature of how people interact with the wider transportation system. Uber has made it easier for individuals to move around the city, filling a gap in the existing transportation system. Uber have rapidly achieved a leading position in the private hire taxi service across the city. Regulation for Black Cabs needs to change if they are to compete and remain a service in the broader customer market

Improving User Experience and Communication of Digitally Enhanced Advanced Services (DEAS) Offers in Manufacturing Sector

Digitally enhanced advanced services (DEAS), offered currently by various industries, could be a challenging concept to comprehend for potential clients. This could result in limited interest in adopting (DEAS) or even understanding its true value with significant financial implications for the providers. Innovative ways to present and simplify complex information are provided by serious games and gamification, which simplify and engage users with intricate information in an enjoyable manner. Despite the use of serious games and gamification in other areas, only a few examples have been documented to convey servitization offers. This research explores the design and development of a serious game for the Howden Group, a real-world industry partner aiming to simplify and convey existing service agreement packages. The system was developed under the consultation of a focus group comprising five members of the industrial partner. The final system was evaluated by 30 participants from engineering and servitization disciplines who volunteered to test online the proposed system and discuss their user experience (UX) and future application requirements. The analysis of users’ feedback presented encouraging results, with 90% confirming that they understood the DEAS concept and offers. To conclude, the paper presents a tentative plan for future work which will address the issues highlighted by users’ feedback and enhance the positive aspects of similar applications

Improving User Experience and Communication of Digitally Enhanced Advanced Services (DEAS) Offers in Manufacturing Sector

Digitally enhanced advanced services (DEAS), offered currently by various industries, could be a challenging concept to comprehend for potential clients. This could result in limited interest in adopting (DEAS) or even understanding its true value with significant financial implications for the providers. Innovative ways to present and simplify complex information are provided by serious games and gamification, which simplify and engage users with intricate information in an enjoyable manner. Despite the use of serious games and gamification in other areas, only a few examples have been documented to convey servitization offers. This research explores the design and development of a serious game for the Howden Group, a real-world industry partner aiming to simplify and convey existing service agreement packages. The system was developed under the consultation of a focus group comprising five members of the industrial partner. The final system was evaluated by 30 participants from engineering and servitization disciplines who volunteered to test online the proposed system and discuss their user experience (UX) and future application requirements. The analysis of users’ feedback presented encouraging results, with 90% confirming that they understood the DEAS concept and offers. To conclude, the paper presents a tentative plan for future work which will address the issues highlighted by users’ feedback and enhance the positive aspects of similar applications

Improving User Experience and Communication of Digitally Enhanced Advanced Services (DEAS) Offers in Manufacturing Sector

Digitally enhanced advanced services (DEAS), offered currently by various industries, could be a challenging concept to comprehend for potential clients. This could result in limited interest in adopting (DEAS) or even understanding its true value with significant financial implications for the providers. Innovative ways to present and simplify complex information are provided by serious games and gamification, which simplify and engage users with intricate information in an enjoyable manner. Despite the use of serious games and gamification in other areas, only a few examples have been documented to convey servitization offers. This research explores the design and development of a serious game for the Howden Group, a real-world industry partner aiming to simplify and convey existing service agreement packages. The system was developed under the consultation of a focus group comprising five members of the industrial partner. The final system was evaluated by 30 participants from engineering and servitization disciplines who volunteered to test online the proposed system and discuss their user experience (UX) and future application requirements. The analysis of users’ feedback presented encouraging results, with 90% confirming that they understood the DEAS concept and offers. To conclude, the paper presents a tentative plan for future work which will address the issues highlighted by users’ feedback and enhance the positive aspects of similar applications