Data science is changing our world in many different ways. Data and the associated data science innovations are changing everything: the way we work, the way we move, the way we interact, the way we care, the way we learn, and the way we socialize. As a result, many professions will cease to exist. For example, today’s call centers will disappear just like video rental shops disappeared. At the same time, new jobs, products, services, and opportunities emerge. Hence, it is important to understand the essence of data science. This extended abstract discusses the four essential elements of data science: “water” (availability, magnitude, and different forms of data), “fire” (irresponsible uses of data and threats related to fairness, accuracy, confidentiality, and transparency), “wind” (the way data science can be used to improve processes), and “earth” (the need for data science research and education). Next to providing an original view on data science, the abstract also highlights important next steps to ensure that data will not just change, but also improve our world.
In two sessions the International Professional Practice Partnership (IP3) of IFIP addressed a number of frameworks that provide definitions of ICT competences and typical profiles. These frameworks contribute to establishing an ICT profession that consists of competent and responsible professionals who can demonstrate the necessary skills and competences.
In today’s global, competitive economy, downtime has been identified as a key performance indicator for field service organisations. The emergence of an Internet of Things (IoT) has brought new enhancement possibilities to various industries such as the manufacturing and field service industry. This paper provides a vision and motivation for using IoT in Field Service Management (FSM) in order to address data quality and service delivery issues. The theory of information quality was used to undergird the research and a model for the optimisation of downtime management in the field service industry using the IoT is proposed. The model was used to drive the design of a “proof of concept” prototype, the KapCha prototype. The paper also includes a report on an empirical study of the application of the proposed IoT model in FSM. The experiment findings showed that the prototype reduced the round trip delay time for sending and receiving data and was scalable. As a result, access to quality information supporting advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence was provided. Therefore, service technicians can be alerted more quickly as soon as any potential technical problems occur. In turn improved diagnostics and more efficient decision making can be achieved. The model and the lessons learned provide valuable guidance to other researchers and fill the gap in research of empirical studies conducted on IoT implementations.
AbstractData science is changing our world in many different ways. Data and the associated data science innovations are changing everything: the way we work, the way we move, the way we interact, the way we care, the way we learn, and the way we socialize. As a result, many professions will cease to exist. For example, today’s call centers will disappear just like video rental shops disappeared. At the same time, new jobs, products, services, and opportunities emerge. Hence, it is important to understand the essence of data science. This extended abstract discusses the four essential elements of data science: “water” (availability, magnitude, and different forms of data), “fire” (irresponsible uses of data and threats related to fairness, accuracy, confidentiality, and transparency), “wind” (the way data science can be used to improve processes), and “earth” (the need for data science research and education). Next to providing an original view on data science, the abstract also highlights important next steps to ensure that data will not just change, but also improve our world.
Most definitions of the Internet of Things (IoT) take a technology perspective, referring to connected devices exchanging data with each other and with higher levels, establishing autonomously operating systems. From a business perspective, IoT can be regarded as a business transformation, driving commoditization or even threatening conventional businesses, providing opportunities for product and process improvements and opening perspectives for services business or entirely new businesses based on data acquired by IoT. While the development of the Internet of Things resembles in many aspects the characteristics of for example semiconductor and IT platforms, there are some essential differences, mainly in scale and scope, that make the kickstart of a successful IoT more complex. This paper addresses key elements of a successful deployment of IoT and also key roles for IT professionals in IoT.
The present study considered the current state of internet of things in Nigeria, future prospects and challenges to the usage of the technology in Nigerian Agriculture. In Nigeria, IoT has been used to dispense feed and water to chicks, virtual fences for monitoring farmlands and forest trees, cashless sales and purchases of farm produce and input, monitoring and management of staff performances on the farm and e-wallet for input, loan and information accessibility on agricultural issues. However, there is room for improvement in the area of security for the animals (animal tracking), weather forecasting and real-time soil monitoring, livestock and crop health surveillance. Challenges faced in the usage of IoT in Nigeria are inadequate/lack of capital, skilled manpower, facilities. In conclusion, IoT has great potentials to move Nigerian agriculture to an enviable position.
A growing number of sensors, embedded in wearables, smart electric meters and other connected devices, is surrounding us and reaching ever deeper into our private lives. While some sensors are commonly regarded as privacy-sensitive and always require user permission to be activated, others are less protected and less worried about. However, experimental research findings indicate that many seemingly innocuous sensors can be exploited to infer highly sensitive information about people in their vicinity. This paper reviews existing evidence from the literature and discusses potential implications for consumer privacy. Specifically, the analysis reveals that certain insufficiently protected sensors in smart devices allow inferences about users’ locations, activities and real identities, as well as about their keyboard and touchscreen inputs. The presented findings call into question the adequacy of current sensor access policies. It is argued that most data captured by smart consumer devices should be classified as highly sensitive by default. An introductory overview of sensors commonly found in these devices is also provided, along with a proposed classification scheme.
Through digitisation of physical artefacts and environments, the Internet of Things carries vast potential for process innovation. However, navigation of the quickly evolving technological landscape and identification of emerging opportunities for value creation remains challenging. To this end, we combine existing frameworks on information requirements, IT capability, and business value of IT. We evaluate the usability of these frameworks for IoT enabled innovation in our analysis of two sensor-based process innovation projects. We investigate the fit between process characteristics and technological functionality, and the implications of this alignment. Our analysis demonstrates that the framework provides a practically useful and theoretically coherent conceptual device for analyzing process characteristics and digital options to innovate processes. Furthermore, we find that IoT sensors are well suited to address connectivity and uncertainty requirements. However, in order to leverage them to address high equivocality requirements designers need deep contextual understanding to align IoT capability with information requirements.
The Internet of Things (IoT) demands new challenges in the design of computing and electronics components. One of the challenges is the power reduction of this expanding network of connected devices, where the majority is permanently connected. In a large set of applications, another significant issue is reliability, especially on critical areas as health and transport. This paper shows an overview of design strategies that we have developed to reduce power consumption and to increase reliability in circuits that are components of the IoT, as the reduction of the number of transistors in IoT devices, using optimisation techniques and the physical design of circuits tolerant to radiation effects.
Traditional reconfigurable devices known as FPGAs utilize a complicated programmable routing network to provide flexibility in connecting different logic elements across the FPGA chip. As such, the routing procedure may become very complicated, especially in the presence of tight timing constraints. Moreover, the routing network itself occupies a large portion of chip area as well as consumes a lot of power. Therefore, limiting their usage in mobile applications or IoT devices with higher performance and lower energy demands. In this paper, we introduce a new reconfigurable architecture which only allows communication between neighboring logic elements. This way, the routing structure and the routing resources become much simpler than traditional FPGAs. Moreover, we present two different method for scheduling and routing in our new proposed architecture. The first method deals with general circuits or irregular computations and is based on integer linear programming. The second method is for regular computations such as convolutional neural networks or matrix operations. We have shown the mapping results on ISCAS benchmark circuits as general irregular computations as well as heuristics to improve the efficiency of mapping for larger benchmarks. Moreover, we have shown results on regular computations including matrix multiplication and convolution operations of neural networks.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to grow in scope it is bound to pervade an increasing number of firms. To that end it becomes important to understand the challenges and opportunities associated with introducing IoT in the workplace. By studying IoT implementation and usage from the perspective of three different stakeholders cooperating around the same IoT system, we explore how the introduction of IoT in the workplace presents unique opportunities and challenges for both management and individual workers. We conclude that the identified opportunities expressed by the different stakeholders were increased productivity, the ability to monitor performance, and improved customer relations. Challenges encountered were increased stress among some workers and forming a shared understanding of the IoT system’s capabilities amongst different stakeholders.
The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought new improvement and development opportunities to the automotive industry, such as electric vehicles (EVs). EVs are well-known for their short ranges and many studies have reported on the challenges of trip planning and accurate remaining driving range (RDR) estimation. While the demand for connected vehicle applications and its enabling technology has progressed significantly in recent years, there are several constraints for connected and collaborative vehicle application deployments. Data integration issues are currently hindering the development of effective trip planning and RDR estimation solutions for drivers of EVs. Additional constraints have been identified in developing countries, including lack of charging station networks, EV data sources, and software applications. The purpose of this paper is to report on some of the main issues hindering EV data integration, as well as to report on an implementation in South Africa of a Data Integration Platform for EV data using the IoT. The findings show that data integration issues primarily relate to data availability, data quality, and interoperability between devices, IoT platforms, and EV service providers. The paper also identifies enabling technologies, drivers, and future directions for researchers in the IoT and EV domains.
In recent years, Internet of Things (IoT) has gained presence in all areas of life. Whilst private sector is the forerunner in the adoption of these devices, public sector usage has been lagging. With the rise of smart initiatives, public organizations are increasingly implementing IoT. The necessity to know in which areas of public sector IoT has been implemented and what public value has been derived, has gained importance as reporting of the cost efficiency and benefits of these initiatives has gained attention. This paper seeks to determine the importance of IoT in the public sector from the perspective of public value. IoT implementation in Estonian municipalities was studied to provide concrete data on the use of IoT. Next to efficiency, which is a known goal of IT implementation, the research findings suggest that while IoT has generated public value, there has been a shift in value creation with other outcomes such as effectiveness, transparency and collaboration gaining increased presence. While IoT shows great promise for public value creation, more research is needed to study how public sector can leverage these devices to harvest more benefits than the simple automatization of work processes.
AbstractArtificial Intelligence (AI) can and does bring immense benefits in all sorts of areas. But it also introduces (new) risks. Is more regulation needed? In order to answer this question arguments pro and con were presented by four panel members and discussed and challenged by the audience. Many issues were raised, ethical principles, the obstacles that make it hard to draft good legislation. We don’t want to stifle innovation or deny society the benefits of these technologies by excessive regulation. A distinction is made between science (research) and the application of AI technologies. Comparisons with other sectors and technologies are made to see whether parallels can be drawn.
The story of the Allied breaking of the German Enigma codes in World War 2 was first published in the 1970s. Even now many of the details, especially concerning the critical work in the 1930s undertaken by gifted and dedicated Polish codebreakers remains largely unknown. Their work is credited with saving the Allies several years work and so shortening the war and saving thousands of lives. The holding of the IFIP World Computer Congress in Poznan, home of the Polish codebreakers, gave an opportunity for their work to be highlighted to an international audience. Talks covering the work of the Polish, British and French codebreakers were given and webcast worldwide. In addition, a encoded Enigma message was sent at the start of the day from Poznan to Bletchley Park in the UK where the volunteers of the Bombe team at The National Museum of Computing successfully confirmed their breaking of the message at the start of the afternoon session.
This paper analyses the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) context in South Africa and presents views regarding the possible use of the Internet of Things (IoT) for WASH in South Africa. The views were informed by an analysis of literature related to the WASH domain nationally and internationally. Example case studies of the use of IoT in the WASH sector in developing countries, and where possible Africa, provided further background. As a triangulation exercise, a survey amongst various stakeholders in the WASH domain was conducted. To contextualise the WASH sector in South Africa, value chains were derived. To identity the opportunities for IoT, the findings of the study were combined with insights acquired on the IoT domain in general, both from literature and our experience and learnings.
The article describes the design of an Internet of Things based platform having as main objective the real-time management of energy consumption in water resource recovery facilities and their integration in a future demand side management environment. The monitoring of several electrical parameters, including energy consumption, is done via a dedicated energy meter, whose design is detailed in the article. The high level data communication from the energy meters to a central platform of the wastewater utility is done via the MQTT protocol. Within the water resource recovery facility, the access network is based either on Wi-Fi or LoRa, which are two enabling technologies for the Internet of Things. The meters are deployed in pilot demonstrators located in two water resource recovery facilities in Lisbon, Portugal.
We present IoTutor that is a cognitive computing solution for education of students in the IoT domain. We implement the IoTutor as a platform-independent web-based application that is able to interact with users via text or speech using natural language. We train the IoTutor with selected scientific publications relevant to the IoT education. To investigate users’ experience with the IoTutor, we ask a group of students taking an IoT master level course at the Linnaeus University to use the IoTutor for a period of two weeks. We ask students to express their opinions with respect to the attractiveness, perspicuity, efficiency, stimulation, and novelty of the IoTutor. The evaluation results show a trend that students express an overall positive attitude towards the IoTutor with majority of the aspects rated higher than the neutral value.
Enterprise information integration (EII) requires an accurate, precise and complete understanding of the disparate data sources, the needs of the information consumers, and how these map to the business concepts of the enterprise. In practice, such integration takes place in context of any enterprise information system. In the paper we explain various approaches to EII, its architectures as well as its association to enterprise application integration. We justify why XML technology contributes to finding sufficiently powerful support for EII. We present some features of the XML technology, mainly its database part, and show how it is usable in EII.
