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Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain Technologies in the Public Sector: A Research Projects Perspective
No full text13391323335Electronic Governmen
Blockchain-Based Access Control in a Globalized Healthcare Provisioning Ecosystem
No full textThe COVID-19 pandemic further outlined the importance of global healthcare services provisioning for diagnosing and treating patients who tend to travel and live for large periods away from home and can be anywhere at any given time. Advances in technology enable healthcare practitioners to access critical data regarding a person’s health status to provide better services. Medical data are sensitive in nature, and therefore, a reliable mechanism should ensure that only authorized entities can access data when needed. This paper, through a layered consideration of a Globalized Healthcare Provisioning Ecosystem (GHPE), reveals the interdependencies among its major components and suggests a necessary abstraction to identify requirements for the design of an access control suitable for the ecosystem. These requirements are imposed by the nature of the medical data as well as by the newly introduced potentials of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices. As a result, an attribute-based access control framework is proposed aiming to provide prompt and secure access to medical data globally by utilizing state-of-the-art technologies and standards, including Next-Generation Access Control (NGAC), blockchain and smart contracts. Three types of smart contracts are proposed that enable access control to implement attribute and policy stores where policy classes and attributes are decentralized and immutable. In addition, the usage of blockchain-based distributed identities allows patients to be in control of access to their medical data and also enables healthcare service providers to access medical data promptly and reliably through the proposed access control framework. The qualitative characteristics of the proposed approach toward a decentralized and patient-centric access control in GHPE are demonstrated and discussed based on an application paradigm.1117265
Development and validation of students' digital competence scale (SDiCoS)
No full textTowards the transition to blended and remote education, evaluating the levels of students' digital competence and designing educational programs to advance them is of paramount importance. Existing validated digital competence scales usually ignore either important digital skills needed or new socio-technological innovations. This study proposes and validates a comprehensive digital competence scale for students in higher education. The suggested instrument includes skills of online learning and collaboration, social media, smart and mobile devices, safety, and data protection. The scale was evaluated on a sample of 156 undergraduate and postgraduate students just before and at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. The final scale is composed of 28 items and six digital competence components. The evaluation study revealed valid results in terms of model fit criteria, factor loadings, internal validity, and reliability. Individual factors like the students' field of study, computer experience and age revealed significant associations to the scale components, while gender revealed no significant differences. The suggested scale can be useful to the design of new actions and policies towards remote education and the digital skills' development of adult learners.1913
Digital Twins and Multi-Access Edge Computing for IIoT
No full textAll recent technological findings can be collectively used to strengthen the industrial Internet of things (IIoT) sector. The novel technology of multi-access edge computing or mobile edge computing (MEC) and digital twins have advanced rapidly in the industry. MEC is the middle layer between mobile devices and the cloud, and it provides scalability, reliability, security, efficient control, and storage of resources. Digital twins form a communication model that enhances the entire system by improving latency, overhead, and energy consumption. Methods The main focus in this study is the biggest challenges that researchers in the field of IIoT have to overcome to obtain a more efficient communication environment in terms of technology integration,efficient energy and data delivery, storage spaces, security, and real-time control and analysis. Thus, a distributed system is established in a local network, in which several functions operate. In addition, an MEC-based framework is proposed to reduce traffic and latency by merging the processing of data generated by IIoT devices at the edge of the network. The critical parts of the proposed IIoT system are evaluated by using emulation software. Results The results show that data delivery and offloading are performed more efficiently, energy consumption and processing are improved, and security, complexity, control, and reliability are enhanced. Conclusions The proposed framework and application provide authentication and integrity to end users and IoT devices.4652153
Emotional intelligence with the gender perspective in health organizations managers
No full textEmotional intelligence (EI) is considered as a necessary qualification for Health Service executives in order to emotionally understand the human resources they manage and how to best handle people, situations and infrastructures. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the EI levels of healthcare executives (senior, middle and junior executives), in the field of health, in relation to sex. An EI Scale Assessment Questionnaire was used, which explores aspects of EI, such as estimating, expressing, regulating and using EI in problem solving. The sample consisted of 161 participants and data analysis was implemented based on criterion x2. The data analysis showed that health care managers express a high level of emotional perception, and management– evaluation of their own and other emotions. In addition, results in relation to sex revealed that women express higher EI than men and also express higher management-evaluation of self-esteem than men.811e1148
Euro Area: Towards a European Common Bond? – Empirical Evidence from the Sovereign Debt Markets
No full textDespite the debt crisis of the period 2010–15, the Eurozone did not manage to adopt an efficient policy for reinforcing the creation of a common bond among the members-states of the union. Under these circumstances, the research aim of this manuscript is to further explore the integration level of bond markets in the EMU after the end of the 2010 debt crisis and the potential creation of a Euro Area common bond. The empirical evidence we gathered is suggestive of a significant integration degree of bond markets in the Euro Area, whereas plenty of asymmetries exist among the member-states notwithstanding. The dominant role of France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Ireland and Spain on the EA bond markets were unveiled. As a matter of fact, we propose that the EMU be conditionally prepared to issue a common Eurozone bond which will safeguard the financial stability in the monetary union.6041019104
Exploring the construct of the new way of thinking in the digital environment
No full textThe aim of this study is to provide insights concerning the effects of the ubiquitous digital environment on the way people think and the subsequent need to equip young individuals with the necessary skills. Several studies focus on defining the so-called digital skills, also providing indications that higher cognitive skills are required. However, they do not examine how young individuals could perform better to adapt to the continuously evolving digital environment. To address this gap, the study introduces and analyzes the construct of digital intelligence, representing the new way of thinking and behaviour in the digital environment. For the purposes of the study, a set of tests was given to students at Greek high schools, targeting 15-16 years old students and employing original tests to assess digital intelligence. According to the findings, digital intelligence is composed of: 1) logical reasoning, algorithms, and evaluation, 2) abstraction, decomposition, and patterns and generalization, 3) digital emotional intelligence and communication, 4) digital safety and security, and 5) digital identity, use, literacy, and rights. Assessing digital intelligence, as proposed in this study, could be used to assist vocational guidance, employee selection and evaluation, and development of revised school curricula.41132779279
Exploring the Relationship between Target Costing Functionality and Product Innovation: The Role of Information Systems
No full textThe role of management control practices in product innovation is a subject that has received great attention in management control literature. This research explores the relationship between target costing (TC) functionality, the quality of information systems (IS) and product innovation. We conducted an empirical study in 108 large industrial enterprises, which have research and development departments. The results show that there is a positive relationship between TC functionality and product innovation in terms of product newness and innovation rate. A direct effect of the quality of IS information on product innovation was not established but rather it was found that the positive association between the functionality of TC and product innovation is stronger in firms that provide IS information of higher quality as compared to firms that provide IS information of lower quality.32112414
Federated Learning Approach Decouples Clients From Training a Local Model and With the Communication With the Server
No full textTraffic sign recognition and autonomous vehicles computing are a few of the innovative applications which are emerging in the domain of mobile edge computing. Distributed machine learning in the form of Federated Learning (FL) has been applied to mobile edge computing through a range of methodologies and techniques for intelligent feature classification approaches. The challenges that research on such FL methods is facing is twofold: identify an optimal distributed architecture and algorithm components to each side to meet the demand of heavy data processing, and enhance the algorithm components with heuristics that fit to the problem domain and optimize the key parameters of the algorithms. In this prospect, we present a Federated Learning implementation based on a neural network architecture with emphasis to traffic sign image recognition. Our benchmark was tested with two FL strategies seeking an optimal performance model and in reference to a corresponding data set. We present the results of this work while we define the scope of future improvements to our model.1944213421
Gamification Design Patterns for User Engagement
No full textThe rapid development of technology in today’s times make business’ survival a rather complex task. It is therefore necessary for the specialized organization and administration of each company to differentiate and strengthen its competitive advantages. Gamification is an established practice in many business domains and can enforce employees to engage in business processes and change aspects of their behavior. Even though numerous gamification patterns that are described in literature have been used so far by businesses to various working environments, the outcomes were not the best possible that we would expect in terms of their right utilization to business non-game contexts. Thus, there is need for concise gamification patterns that can offer right guidance to game designers in business. Gamification design patterns can provide a distilled knowledge of techniques of how to design object-oriented software. This paper aims to address this gap in existing literature by describing new gamification design patterns, classifying them according to specific criteria and providing new information to this research domain. Our study is a descriptive literature review and is based on review of previous works. This descriptive literature review tries to give a better understanding by proposing new gamification design patterns in the continuously evolving research domain of gamification design patterns.21465567