BlogForever D3.3: Development of the Digital Rights Management Policy

This report presents a set of recommended practices and approaches that a future BlogForever repository can use to develop a digital rights management policy. The report outlines core legal aspects of digital rights that might need consideration in developing policies, and what the challenges are, in particular, in relation to web archives and blog archives. These issues are discussed in the context of the digital information life cycle and steps that might be taken within the workflow of the BlogForever platform to facilitate the gathering and management of digital rights information. Further, the reports on interviews with experts in the field highlight current perspectives on rights management and provide empirical support for the recommendations that have been put forward

RAPP System Architecture

International audience— Robots are fast becoming a part of everyday life. This rise can be evidenced both through the public news and announcements, as well as in recent literature in the robotics scientific communities. This expanding development requires new paradigms in producing the necessary software to allow for the users' particular needs. In this paper we present a novel architectural design of the RAPP framework that attempts to address this issue, developed within the context of the EU funded project RAPP "Robotic Applications for Delivering Smart User Empowering Application". The proposed framework has been designed aiming towards a cloud-based approach to integrating robotic devices and their respective applications. This goal was defined going beyond the up-coming trends in infrastructures, and focusing on alternative approaches to conventional robotic controllers, while at the same time expanding the capabilities of the RAPP framework in a seamless and scaling manner

Variable structure robot control systems: The RAPP approach

International audienceThis paper presents a method of designing variable structure control systems for robots. As the on-board robot computational resources are limited, but in some cases the demands imposed on the robot by the user are virtually limitless, the solution is to produce a variable structure system. The task dependent part has to be exchanged, however the task governs the activities of the robot. Thus not only exchange of some task-dependent modules is required, but also supervisory responsibilities have to be switched. Such control systems are necessary in the case of robot companions, where the owner of the robot may demand from it to provide many services.

Big Data and Emerging Transportation Challenges: Findings from the NOESIS project

In the last years many Big Data technologies have been applied to the transportation sector all over the world. Despite existing and future promising applications, critical factors which lead to a successful application and value generation from Big Data technologies in transport are largely unknown. The European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 (H2020) NOESIS project aims at identifying critical features leading to the successful implementation of Big Data technologies and services in the field of transport. In order to accomplish that aim, key challenges of Big Data utilization in the transport domain, need to be initially identified. The scope of this paper is to present the research findings on the major Big Data in Transportation challenges. The NOESIS challenges describe the major transportation areas and sub-problems that could benefit by Big Data. Firstly, a literature review was conducted in order to obtain the main areas (challenges) within the transportation domain which have the potential of greater exploitation through Big Data methods. 10 initial focus areas were identified from reviewing the state-of-the-art in Big Data and transportation research. Secondly, findings from the literature review were discussed and validated during a workshop with experts on Big Data in Transportation, increasing those challenges to 13. For each of the focus areas, corresponding sub-problems have been also identified. The findings of this paper contribute to the exploitation of Big Data within transportation in two ways: i) it provides the necessary literature review and experts' discussion for identifying the transport domain areas in which big data technologies could be successfully applied and ii) it identifies sub-problems linked to each of the challenges that big data could help to improve transportation. As a result, it is believed that this work initiates a first step towards enhancing the socioeconomic impact of transportation investments using Big Data

Socio-Economic Assessment of Ecosystem-Based and Other Adaptation Strategies in Coastal Areas: A Systematic Review

Coastal areas are highly vulnerable to climate-change hazards (e.g., sea-level rise, flooding, coastal erosion), which can lead to significant impacts at the ecosystem and societal level. Interest in ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA) is gaining importance due to its potential multiple benefits, including social and environmental aspects, when compared to more traditional approaches such as hard engineering interventions. When assessing EbA strategies, further understanding of the nature–society functions, processes, values, and benefits is needed to increase its application. This study contributes to better knowledge of EbA and other adaptation strategies by developing a systematic literature review of studies performing socio-economic assessments of climate-change adaptation in coastal areas. The analysis of 54 publications revealed that cost–benefit analysis was applied in most studies, followed by multi-criteria analysis and other techniques. Hybrid adaptation strategies based on different combinations of hard, soft, and EbA interventions were considered as potential optimal solutions in a significant part of the assessments. This study shows some potential co-benefits of EbA, such as livelihood diversification or biodiversity conservation, but also stresses the need for further research on this topic, as well as on evaluating how EbA performs in the long term under changing climate-condition scenarios