The need to maximise the number of innovative trust and security (T&S) research project outputs impacting the marketplace is an important priority in the EU ICT Security Research Domain. This paper highlights supporting key activities and the CSP Forum initiative that strives to promote and encourage collaboration amongst the relevant security research actors and the wider community. Effective clustering activities such as CSP Forum clustering events helps such funded projects to come together as a community to identify market trends, gaps, issues and solutions. Market analysis is an important activity to work towards gaining successful market acceptance. Projects need to gain an in-depth understanding to enable them to work towards successfully exploiting their outputs and maximising their impact. This paper provides a sample of such success stories coming from the T&S research domain and an insight into the research to industry process, utilised also highlighting example barriers and recommendations for improvement.
Citizens can be considered as an important source of knowledge for innovating in open contexts, collaborating with initiatives for developing solutions to urban issues, in order to get improvements addressed to a collective well-being. This paper presents an approach to including transactive memory aspects into the development of collective initiatives, as a vehicle of supporting the relationships between the memory systems of contributors of ideas. Providing a visual representation of elements and mechanisms for building ideas from citizen initiatives would make the collective interactions of creating, refining and maturing solutions more understandable. Through a case study, the visual schematization was designed and validated by a community comprised of members of universities, experts and some local citizens. Finally, the analysis of results disclosed encouraging appreciations of the participants in respect of this proposal. For many of them, it is a good instrument for communicating and transferring initiatives for building innovative solutions.
MyNeighbourhood is a European project, part of the CIP ICT PSP Program in Smart Cities, aiming at recreating and strengthening the social ties within neighbourhoods, envisioning a new approach to the City. The project is based on an innovative vision, methodologies and tools which intend to create a Human Smart City starting from the neighbourhood and scaling up to the city. The project is a test bed of the Human Smart City concept that proposes to develop a citizen-driven, smart, all-inclusive and sustainable environment, with a new governance framework in which citizens and government engage in listening and talking to each other. This public governance model favours the emergence of a participatory innovation ecosystem that creates jobs, wealth and ultimately generates happiness for citizens.
Real-time traffic and transportation data are key factors for improving urban mobility services. With the emergence of smartphones, traditional data sources such as cameras and road sensors could be replaced with innovative approaches centred around smartphone users. The SUPERHUB project proposes a novel user centric approach for gathering, processing and consuming information in order to provide ecological-friendly multi-modal journey planning. Traffic sensing and Floating Car Data are addressed by two different methodologies to provide historical and real-time traffic analysis then merged to provide a unified traffic model called Speed Profile. In this paper, we present our innovative approach in aggregating different heterogeneous sources to identify mobility patterns, speed and traffic flow. Then we discuss its business benefits and its applications.
The impact creation process of European Union-funded R&D projects is an area needing attention, and is discussed in this paper. European tax-payers' money must be spent in the most beneficial way. The resources used must contribute to European wellbeing and have a wide and positive impact on industry, society and the citizens. One problem is that the impact creation process, on a large scale, takes a long time. The time frame for impact creation is much longer than the duration of the R&D project. The major part of the impact that can be achieved through R&D activities will take place well after completion of the actual R&D work. Care must be taken during execution of the project that all possible actions are performed for maximum post-project impact creation. The paper introduces an innovative methodology for impact monitoring during a project. The method used is based on impact waves and success tree approaches. Examples are given of practical implementation in the EU FI-PPP Project FITMAN.
Lack of a pan-European technical infrastructure that would enable EU citizens to easily use foreign services with their national electronic identities is one of the main obstacles of wider use of secure cross-border electronic transactions in EU. A promising approach in creating such an infrastructure is being provided by the EU STORK 2.0 project that brings together EU identity and service providers, as well as proven sources of business attributes, e.g. academic qualifications and mandates. In this paper we describe the STORK 2.0 infrastructure and three cross-border academic e-services that have been recently established in Slovenia and make use of electronic identities and sources of academic information: virtual learning environment, anonymous e-surveys, and job selection services. The services promise to be beneficial both for students and higher educational institutions, as well as for companies that make decisions on the basis of proven academic information, for example when validating job applicant's qualifications in an electronic way.
Pregnant women use mobile applications; however these resources often do not meet users' needs. As part of a FP7-funded project (“OptiBIRTH”), three motivationally-designed and clinically integrated, mobile applications were created to enable women to choose a vaginal birth after caesarean section or a repeat C Section. Method: Motivational theory, systematic literature review data and women's voices from European focus groups directed the design process. The resulting apps enabled women to reflect on their previous caesarean birth, consider, plan and communicate their optimal birth. App outputs shared with women's obstetricians and midwives would increase clinical decision-making communication. A pre-pilot evaluation with health care professionals in Ireland, Italy and Germany was conducted prior to the multi-centred trial pilot. Results: Two significant challenges emerged that had motivational implications for the overall apps usefulness. Discussion: Boundary-spanning strategies should be routinely be introduced from the study outset so that effective clinical, technological and motivational integration can be achieved.
We present a model-driven approach to create and maintain a collaboration platform for supporting the collaboration between acute hospitals and rehabilitation clinics to optimize transferal management. The model-driven approach makes the platform highly configurable to accommodate new clinical pathways and be easily extendable to include additional functions to meet future needs. All domain-specific aspects are described declaratively in an application model. The elements in the application model are mapped to corresponding elements in an application framework to obtain the executable collaboration platform. Attaching the mappings to the constructs of an underlying domain-specific language ensures that executable code can be derived from all application models. Furthermore, our framework includes reference models which serve as blueprints and will make it easier to create and adapt application models.
This paper describes the results of a maturity assessment of a set of generic building blocks for public administrations in the EU. In the European e-SENS project, various generic building blocks are developed, such as eID, eSignature, eDelivery and eDocument building blocks. They should be used by all EU administrations when they are sufficiently mature. In order to assess the maturity, an assessment framework is described based on a combination of existing methodologies, such as CAMSS and ADMS. The framework contains clusters of criteria on standardization, policy alignment and business/market needs. It has been applied by the e-SENS project to a set of 14 building blocks. The main lesson learned is that standardization criteria are fairly easy to check, policy alignment criteria need to be checked in sufficient detail and business/market need criteria can only be checked properly at national level via a public consultation. Some of the building blocks are brought further to the EU Multi-Stakeholder Platform on ICT standardization, while for others improvements have been defined.
A common approach in research projects is to plan the evaluation and in particular the validation phase In the last months of the project. When done late in the project, validation cannot provide valuable inputs to the development of the research idea, because there is no space to bring about changes, and very often ends up as confirmatory tests. Software validation can and should occur since creating the first lines of code until the completion of the system in test. Thus, we propose the approach where research project can adopt the agile paradigm used by startups “release early, release often”, not only to development, but also to validation: “validate early, validate often”, to improve the quality of projects results on one hand and to be in line with potential users on the other.
Todays increased interest in enterprise risk management is motivated by decision making in reaction to change and complex compliance requirements as well as the need to minimize business losses and improve business outcomes. It is therefore important to help business stakeholders become fully aware of applicable risks and their possible impact on other business constituents. This paper represents an extension of the OMG Business Motivation Model that addresses this topic by improving risk visibility through modelling explicit dependencies of risks on business motivation, business decisions, business processes and compliance requirements. This extension in the form of a meta-model as well as its potential to increase overall risk awareness in enterprises were evaluated.
Brain Computer Interfaces enable people with disability to access computer technology, when traditional modes are beyond their ability. This novel technology, uses brain waves to initiate the software, enabling people with acquired brain injury (ABI) to access applications for eHealth and eInclusion. This paper reports on the outcome of research with target end users and a control population to develop applications for communication, cognitive rehabilitation, social media and environmental control. Adopting a user centred approach we found that the control group achieved an average accuracy of 82.6% and end users achieved 74% over the four tasks. The findings illustrated that BCI systems are operational for users with ABI and numerous recommendations were made to support developer's move these systems towards use in a domestic environment.
As part of the energy turnaround a number of new challenges for the European energy supply system are emerging. This article is particularly concerned with the introduction of a price-based modular demand side management concept tailored to the requirements of SME. In this solution the grid connector unit, which represents the coupling point between smart grid and individual production companies, is described in detail. The results have been acquired within the research project Polar funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The Polar project aims to enable SME to identify, quantify and optimize the energy consumption of individual production facilities with an universal and economically usable energy management and demand side management.
In this paper we will provide an overview of the Business Process Abstract Language (BPAL) Platform, which implements a Business Process (BP) modelling and reasoning environment where the procedural knowledge of a BP can be enriched through ontology-based annotations. The BPAL Platform provides a graphical user interface to ease the definition of a Business Process Knowledge Base that collects the various facets of process knowledge. It also provides a reasoner implementing services for the enactment, verification, retrieval, and composition of processes in the knowledge base. After discussing the functionalities and the architecture of the tool, we report on an experimental evaluation of the whole system, whose results are encouraging and show the viability of the approach.
This paper presents the two first accomplished steps of our research. Its aim is threefold: (1) to facilitate the generation of business models for everybody having an internet connection, (2) to ease the search for partners with the aim of creating shared value, in a local or industrial perspective, and (3) to reduce the time of identification of partnerships and innovation opportunities. This research is based on the creation of an on-line application enabling the analysis of business models, and offering to a large amount of actors the possibility to take part in the search for shared value in a local or industrial perspective. In order to analyse the business models and to highlight the opportunities of shared value between groups of actors, we tested intra-sectorial and industrial, inter- or cross-sectorial analysis approaches which will be integrated into the on-line application with the use of semantic technology.
The approach presented in this paper aims for a technological contribution to online learning research and especially learning analytics discussing the model-driven data marshalling approach developed in the context of a large-scale European research project. The approach enables a transparent, end-user driven integration of learning applications and services in a distributed heterogeneous environment. The approach builds on service-oriented marshalling of data utilizing meta-modelling concepts and technologies as a realisation environment on design level, combined with interpretative workflow technologies on execution level. The application case presented in this paper relates to realizing enhanced assessment methods for online learning on a learning platform independent level.
This paper is a study on the formal representation of the temporal extent of periods, as defined in CIDOC CRM. Our proposal exploits positive and negative evidence, gained by observations, to approximate the definite and indefinite bounds of a period, stating whether it is considered as active or possibly active. We contribute to the modeling of imprecise temporal information by proposing a generalized definition of time intervals which allows the representation of fuzziness that characterizes archaeological findings and historical data. Moreover, we provide an alternative to Allen's operators, based on fuzzy time intervals. Finally, we extend our fuzzy interval model to represent four-dimensional volumes, which are associated with the spatiotemporal nature of periods; we also provide a spatiotemporal version of the basic temporal relations to approximate the temporal topology of periods. Our study has a crucial impact to fields associated with reality modeling, especially observation-based sciences.
Solving existing policy making problems such as the lack of transparency and the inability to crosscheck and assess the actual impact of implemented policies, as well as improving the empirical foundation for more factual, objective, evidence-based deliberation of governmental policies is amongst the top priorities in modern citizens' agendas. The proposed approach aims at making better use of Europe's open public data resources and empowering citizens - especially the younger generation - and policy makers to better assess government policies in the policy analysis and monitoring phases of the policy cycle. In this respect, it specifies the methodological framework and conceptual architecture of an easy to use platform, allowing citizens and public officials to create, apply, share, embed, annotate and discuss causal models, charts and graphs of historical data from open data sources.
Searching the archives using images or speech without relying on existing metadata. Finding shots on a particular person or object in an audiovisual collection in an instant, obtaining video segments with similar content, tracing video items based on spoken text and obtaining related transcripts. Most journalists can only dream of such processes and tools, making their (professional) lives so much easier and, above all, more efficient. AXES (Access to Audiovisual Archives) offers journalists - among other user groups - a platform that can do this. It includes a set of tools to interact with audiovisual libraries in new engaging ways, integrating advanced video and audio analysis technologies. Public broadcasting archives can thus become much richer repositories, and their use more productive.
This paper will focus on how ICT in the classroom could really work to provide the children the education they need in this 21st century. Learning for children with the use of ICT in the classroom can work if teachers have the ability and skills to integrate ICT in their classroom. This is where the headmasters play a crucial role, if the teachers are supported by the surrounding education system. Simply placing hardware in schools will NOT improve the quality of teaching and learning. The work of IICD has demonstrated that for ICT to become real instruments of learning, the teachers are the important key to achieve results. The IICD approach will be illustrated in relation to the “ICT enabled school program” in Ghana.
