Certificates play an important role in education and in professional development in companies. Individual learning records become essential for people’s professional careers. It is therefore important that these records are stored in long-term available and tamper-proof ledgers. A blockchain records transactions in a verifiable and permanent way, therefore it is very suitable to store fingerprints of certificates or other educational items. Blockchain reveals forgery of certificates and it supports learning histories. In this paper, we present the Blockchain for Education platform as a practical solution for issuing, validating and sharing of certificates. At first, we describe the conceptual system overview and then we present in detail the platform implementation including management of certification authorities and certificates, smart contracts as well as services for certifiers, learners and third parties such as employers. Finally, we describe use cases and first evaluation results that we gathered from end user tests with certifiers and conclude with a discussion.

1. Certificates play an important role in education and companies, where individual learning records become essential for people’s professional careers. It is therefore important that these records are stored in long-term available and tamper-proof ledgers. Until today, training facilities, educational institution or certification authorities issue paper-based certificates and certification processes are not digitized. Blockchain technology could support this transformation form paper certificates to digital certificates and it could help to generate learning histories. In this demonstration, we present the Blockchain for Education platform as a practical solution for issuing, monitoring, validating and sharing of certificates. The Blockchain for Education platform is based on the Ethereum blockchain and it uses smart contracts to support the certification process.

This paper presents an online serendipity experiment allowing academic and industrial research labs to quickly identify collaboration opportunities and form H2020 proposal consortia. This work was carried out in the context of a Living Labs Matchmaking session organized during the 4 th Living Labs Summer School. A set of 18 Living Labs data and H2020 Challenges data were entered in a software prototype named CONEX. The main objective consisted in identifying collaboration opportunities among participating Living-Labs for collectively answering to the EU Horizon2020 first call-for-proposals. The software prototype used for simulating a serendipity service was developed within previous EU research projects. This work addresses the paradox of systematizing unexpected or serendipitous connections that normally happen quite rarely. The actual findings reveal the feasibility of quickly exploring serendipitous connections in order to efficiently form Open Innovation ecosystems as recommended in the OI2 paradigm. However, findings unveil that terms used in all parsed and indexed content-objects have to be harmonized regardless the type of involved communities (e.g. folksonomy). It also reveals that profiling participating entities in using produced content-objects ensures a higher trust level compared to more traditional declarative approaches.

While this paper reports about an investigation on the degree to which autonomously generated connections among people are relevant, it rewinds the 7 years of undertaken exploration and experimentation on the People-Concepts Networking (PCN) approach for creating a new kind of connective technology that is not based on explicit links but rather on computing the correlation among a group of users' concepts from which emerge intangible links. The first stage of the PCN development was devoted to the design of an ontology model and to assemble the necessarily technology components for crawling, parsing, indexing, extracting and clustering concepts as well as interfacing with external applications for accessing users' content-objects. It has resulted into an embryonic form of a semantic based connective technology platform supporting the emergence of knowledge connection opportunities among users. The second stage happened at the crossroads of Living Labs (LL) and the creation of Internet of Things (IoT) based services that have extended PCN into People-Concepts-Things Networking. The goal was to study the capacity to connect with and re-use previous knowledge gained during IoT based service experiments within LLs in order to enhance the connective experience of users; hence increase the potential rate of adoption by user communities. Finally, the results of the surveys and experimentation are presented as well as a set of preliminary conclusions and perspectives on future work.

The Living Lab approach within the multi-year integrated project ECOSPACE focused on community building and active user involvement in the process of developing, introducing and evaluating new collaboration concepts and tools. This article reports about implementing and evaluating our adapted Living Labs framework to facilitate innovation in collaborative work environments to enhance professional communities. The pursued implementation approach is considered as a strategy for innovation, change and adoption. We use a perspective of socio-technical systems to explain the change-catalysing role of our framework and findings.

The ECOSPACE Integrated Project has developed an advanced collaborative workspace platform for eProfessionals. The technologies, services and collaboration tools have been developed, integrated and validated in various living labs addressing different contexts of eProfessional working. This paper reports about the Living Lab for Professional Communities of Innovation and covers three different user environments where innovative tools, services and practices have been experimented in different experimental settings. The first setting addresses the support of new work and collaboration practices in professional education. The second setting focuses on collaboration among business and research partners in promoting regional innovation. The third setting is about collaborative innovation in virtual communities. In the three settings, different user communities have adopted and experimented different sets of collaboration services. The paper presents the living lab methodology designed to launch, operate and monitor the different innovation and validation settings. Based on a cross-comparison of results and a longitudinal analysis, conclusions are drawn regarding the effectiveness of innovation services and collaborative platform, strategies to involve users and building user communities, and the effectiveness of the living labs methodology.

The living labs approach within ECOSPACE focuses on early user community building and active user involvement in the process of developing, testing and evaluating new collaboration concepts and tools. This paper reports about implementing and evaluating the living labs approach to facilitate innovation in collaborative work environments to enhance professional communities. The living lab approach is considered as a strategy for innovation, change and adoption. The perspective of socio-technical systems is used to understand and explain the change-catalyzing role of the living lab approach.

In this paper, we present the collaborative environment reference architecture (CERA) with the aim of supporting collaborative work environment (CWE) interoperability. The vision of CERA is to support users who are engaged in common collaborative spaces with similar work processes to work and collaborate seamlessly together, despite their use of proprietary CWE tools and systems. The underlying CERA concepts, design principles, and models are discussed, as well as the architectural decisions made as a result of the extended requirements analysis exercise. Furthermore, we present results from the Ecospace (http://www.ip-ecospace.org/) project as an example of a CERA instantiation which focuses on facilitating users collaborating across different CWE systems, namely BSCW, NetWeaver, and BC. We conclude with future research and implementation directions.

Although a number of new collaboration systems emerged of the last years, it is remarkable that email is still the most used collaboration application. However, this messaging based pattern of organizing collaboration causes a lot of problems like information and attachment overload and versioning problems. This paper discusses some of these problems as well as reasons why users are reluctant to switch to alternative cooperation means like document sharing in virtual project environments. Based on these observations we present tools developed with the EU funded Ecospace project that address these issue. These tools simplify the sharing process by combining and integrating sharing functionality with messaging, thus reducing the functional and cognitive distance between both environments.

This paper illustrates through a practical example an integration of a humanoid robotic architecture, with an open-platform collaborative working environment called BSCW (Be Smart-Cooperate Worldwide). BSCW is primarily designed to advocate a futuristic shared workspace system for humans. We exemplify how a complex robotic system (such as a humanoid robot) can be integrated as a proactive collaborative agent which provides services and interacts with other agents sharing the same collaborative environment workspace. Indeed, the robot is seen as a ‘user’ of the BSCW which is able to handle simple tasks and reports on their achievement status. We emphasis on the importance of using standard software such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) in order to easily build interfaces between several interacting complex software layers, namely from real-time constraints up to basic Internet data exchange.

This paper presents methodologies, tools and initial validation results on how the Frascati Living lab is supporting the regional business incubation process and stimulating innovation in the Frascati region. Action research is used as key methodological paradigm to create learning and evaluation environments. The technological platform enabling business incubation support relies on services and tools developed within the C@R and ECOSPACE Integrated Projects.

Nowadays, Concurrent Engineering generalised implementation within business and professional ecosystems requires new multidisciplinary and multi-site collaborative environments, methods and tools that could stimulate creativity and increase innovation opportunities. While the focus in the past was on how to improve processes within single organisations, the current business network dynamics render the old methods unusable. What is needed are the methods and tools to support interpersonal communication and interpersonal productivity in order to maintain a higher level of knowledge entropy that can eventually assist knowledge workers generating more ideas and therefore stimulates creativity. This paper presents a virtual space of networked individuals within on-line communities through the integration of several technologies, namely shared workspace, wikis, wikis and blogs, to better support interpersonal knowledge connection. While shared workspace technology has already been widely deployed to support project teams, very little has been done so far regarding the use of wiki and blog technologies in the context of supporting on-line communities (e.g. Wikipedia) of knowledge workers. Our main idea was to integrate those technologies together and to use the resulting collaborative environment as a knowledge networking instrument where fonnalised concepts and members' profile are key components to support people-concepts networking. Another aspect of this implementation is to be able to experiment new ways of connecting people and concepts together. There are already open source software components supporting hyper graph that could be used for navigating into people-concepts networks or maps where one can discover new relevant resources to collaborate with. This could lead to the design of a new open collaboration platfonn to stimulate creativity and innovation. The paper looks also into the open content licensing mode and its potential benefits into a collaborative working environment as a freedom element that spurs creativity and innovation. Overall, it is believed that this kind of technology integration could be providing much faster and broader access to existing knowledge and people knowhow, thus providing more opportunities or alternatives to professionals engaged into knowledge intensive work. Our approach is also to find a systematic way of collecting and analysing data in order to evaluate the impacts on interpersonal productivity, creativity and innovation within online collaboration sessions. After all, knowledge creation is a social activity that needs to be specifically addressed and supported within new collaborative working environments. The paper concludes by introducing a new scientific domain branded as "Knowledge Connection" which stands at the crossroads of existing scientific domains such as Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Representation and Visualisation, Collaborative Networks, and Computer Support for Collaborative Work.

This paper presents the middleware developed under the EUME project to integrate the EUME environment, an Intelligent Learning Management System aimed to support classroom activities, with the BSCW, a 'shared workspace' system that enables collaboration over the Web. This middleware allows the EUME multi-agent system to send information to, and get feedback from, the BSCW client-server system by means of a XML-RPC based communication. The motivation behind this integration stems from the need to improve the learning process initiated in the classroom with an infrastructure supporting follow-on activities based on cooperative work between remote students.

This paper describes the basic components of the L3 operating system and the experiences of the first two years using it. The system results from scientific research, but is addressed to commercial application. It is based on a small kernel handling tasks, threads and dataspaces. User level device drivers and file systems are described as examples of flexible OS services realized outside the kernel.