INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES – ONE ENGINE OF GLOBALIZATION

Technological changes are “the main engine of capitalism and evolution” (A. Toffler), “the fundamental driving force in transformation of an economy” (C. Freeman). The paper proposes a theoretical investigation of information and communication technologies evolution and their impact on the globalization of economy. It defines terms like globalization - with special attention focused on its economical dimension, technological change, and information and communication technologies.globalization, information technology, communications, internet, digitization

Social Media – The New Paradigm of Collaboration and Communication for Business Environment

AbstractWe are currently witnessing a phenomenon of constant and quick growth in the use of the Internet for communication and collaboration between people. The 2.0 version of World Wide Web has become the medium for collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, virtual communities, socializing networks, group games – all united under the so called “Social Media” concept. The high level of use and interaction of Social Media influences greatly the business environment which is thus exposed to a paradigm shift, where hierarchies fall apart and the communication and colaboration create wider and wider networks for the employees and all the partners of the organisations. In this spirit, the purpose of this article is to briefly review the impact of the Social Media on business, based on the analysis of the relevant literature in the field. There is mentioned the creation of virtual proximities which rely on the transfer of knowledge, production of positive network externalities, increase of business information capital as well as the social and ethical implications related to Social Media

The Importance of Internet of Things Security for Smart Cities

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an extensive overview of security-related problems in the context of smart cities. The impressive heterogeneity, ubiquity, miniaturization, autonomous and unpredictable behaviour of objects interconnected in Internet of Things, the real data deluges generated by them and, on the other side, the new hacking methods based on sensors and short-range communication technologies transform smart cities in complex environments in which the already-existing security analyses are not useful anymore. Specific security vulnerabilities, threats and solutions are approached from different areas of the smart cities’ infrastructure. As urban management should pay close attention to security and privacy protection, network protocols, identity management, standardization, trusted architecture, etc., this chapter will serve them as a start point for better decisions in security design and management

Structural Logistic Regression for Link Analysis

We present Structural Logistic Regression, an extension of logistic regression to modeling relational data. It is an integrated approach to building regression models from data stored in relational databases in which potential predictors, both boolean and real-valued, are generated by structured search in the space of queries to the database, and then tested with statistical information criteria for inclusion in a logistic regression. Using statistics and relational representation allows modeling in noisy domains with complex structure. Link prediction is a task of high interest with exactly such characteristics. Be it in the domain of scientific citations, social networks or hypertext, the underlying data are extremely noisy and the features useful for prediction are not readily available in a flat file format. We propose the application of Structural Logistic Regression to building link prediction models, and present experimental results for the task of predicting citations made in scientific literature using relational data taken from the CiteSeer search engine. This data includes the citation graph, authorship and publication venues of papers, as well as their word content

The confidentiality – integrity – accessibility triad into the knowledge security: a reassessment from the point of view of the knowledge contribution to innovation

The necessity of (re)considering the three main faces of security mentioned in the title of the paper derives from the accumulation of the importance of the knowledge circulating in organizations, with the existence of numerous dangers and threats that target this knowledge, focusing on people as depositaries and users of knowledge. After a general presentation of the knowledge workers characteristics that can be analyzed as potential risks from the point of view of the confidentiality, integrity and accessibility of knowledge, the paper suggests some solutions that spin around the idea, that is, knowledge security is a human problem and not a technical one, and therefore it should be treated as such. The paper is mainly addressed to the managers interested in the use of knowledge in the activity of the organizations they lead, warning them about the sensitive points of the knowledge-related activities, with the dangers associated with them and suggesting them that the traditional informational security mechanisms are not sufficient, that they have to be reanalyzed and improved in knowledge security

Universities as knowledge providers in the technological innovation: Romania’s situation

In its first part, the present paper demonstrates the relation between innovation and knowledge using a literature review. Concepts such as technology, technological innovation, knowledge and knowledge flow are defined and described. The Newman model of knowledge flows is then used as a starting point for the analysis of the innovative potential in the Romanian academic sector. The paper also identifies the characteristics of the knowledge actors, transformation and knowledge artefacts at the level of the Romanian universities. In the conclusions part, starting from the characteristics we discovered, we drew a series of recommendations for changing the knowledge web in the academic environment into innovation

Knowledge flows percolation model – a new model for the relation between knowledge and innovation

The present paper proposes a new way of thinking regarding the relation between innovation and knowledge using a Physics-borrowed model, trying to prove whether knowledge resources can „flow” (be percolated) in a network or a grid, in order to be transformed in technological innovation. In the Knowledge Flow Percolation Model centre, human beings are seen as thinking electrons, both consuming and generating knowledge flow. Through the inter-dependent actions of individuals, knowledge circulates inside different types of organisations, allowing functioning and innovating in order to obtain competitive advantages. The model can be extended also at a national level, and some assumptions of self similarity appear in this process of extension. The model must be seen as a proposal for the research community and as a basis for future observations regarding the importance of knowledge flows in innovation

Mining Missing Hyperlinks from Human Navigation Traces: A Case Study of Wikipedia

Hyperlinks are an essential feature of the World Wide Web. They are especially important for online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia: an article can often only be understood in the context of related articles, and hyperlinks make it easy to explore this context. But important links are often missing, and several methods have been proposed to alleviate this problem by learning a linking model based on the structure of the existing links. Here we propose a novel approach to identifying missing links in Wikipedia. We build on the fact that the ultimate purpose of Wikipedia links is to aid navigation. Rather than merely suggesting new links that are in tune with the structure of existing links, our method finds missing links that would immediately enhance Wikipedia's navigability. We leverage data sets of navigation paths collected through a Wikipedia-based human-computation game in which users must find a short path from a start to a target article by only clicking links encountered along the way. We harness human navigational traces to identify a set of candidates for missing links and then rank these candidates. Experiments show that our procedure identifies missing links of high quality