IT Revolutions

Globalised-civilisation interaction intensity grows exponentially, involving all dimensions and regions of planetary environment. The resulting dynamics of critically high, exploding complexity urgently needs consistent understanding and efficient management. The new, provably universal concept of unreduced dynamic complexity of real interaction processes described here provides the former and can be used as a basis for the latter, in the form of “complexity revolution” in information systems controlling such “critically globalised” civilisation dynamics. We outline the relevant dynamic complexity properties and the ensuing principles of anticipated complexity transition in information and communication systems. We then emphasize key applications of unreduced complexity concept and complexity-driven IT to various aspects of post-industrial civilisation dynamics, including intelligent communication, context-aware information and control systems, reliable genetics, integral medicine, emergent engineering, efficient risk management at the new level of socio-economic development and resulting realistic sustainability.

Wireless communication supposed a great both -quantitative and qualitative, jump in the management of the information, allowing the access and interchange of it without the need of a physical cable connection. The wireless transmission of voice and information has remained in constant evolution, arising new standards like Bluetooth^TM, Wibree^TM or Zigbee^TM developed under the IEEE 802.15 norm. These newest wireless technologies are oriented to systems of communication of short-medium distance and optimized for a low cost and minor consume, becoming recognized as a flexible and reliable medium for data communications across a broad range of applications due to the potential that the wireless networks presents to operate in demanding environments providing clear advantages in cost, size, power, flexibility, and distributed intelligence. About the medical applications, the remote health or telecare (also called eHealth) is getting a bigger place into the manufacturers and medical companies, in order to incorporate products for assisted living and remote monitoring of health parameteres. At this point, the IEEE 1073, Personal Health Devices Working Group, stablish the framework for these kind of applications. Particularly, the 1073.3.X describes the physical and transport layers, where the new ultra low power short range wireless technologies can play a big role, providing solutions that allow the design of products which are particularly appropriate for monitor people’s health with interoperability requirements.

This paper presents a Virtualization Oriented Architecture (VOA) and an implementation of VOA for Hridaya - a Telemedicine initiative. Hadoop Compute cloud was established at our labs and jobs which require a massive computing capability such as ECG signal analysis were submitted and the study is presented in this current paper. VOA takes advantage of inexpensive community PCs and provides added advantages such as Fault Tolerance, Scalability, Performance, High Availability.

The advancement of location-based services now covers indoor location positioning. Under disaster in the building, the sufferer might faint, be wounded, or enclosed by structures in the dark. In the cases, the sufferer could not let the relief team know her position in the building. The LBS server provides location tracking or positioning of her device for quick relief. In the service UltraWideBand is used by its good penetrability. In dead-reckoning operation that the device is lost on the sensor network, the relief team traces logged profiles of location tracks. The strategy regards the privacy concerns.

This paper demonstrates that different software code inspection techniques have the potential to improve developer understanding of code being inspected to varying extents. This suggests that some code inspection techniques may be superior to others with respect to improving the efficacy of future inspections, harnessing collective wisdom, and extending team knowledge and networked intelligence. In particular, this paper reports results from a study of novice developers’ cognitive development during a software inspection training exercise. We found that developers who performed a code inspection prior to modification tended to operate at higher cognitive levels beginning very early in the modification exercise. Those who had not performed an inspection tended to operate at lower cognitive levels for longer periods of time. Results highlight the importance of code inspections in increasing developers’ understanding of a software system. We believe collaboration between academia and industry in studies such as these would benefit the three major stakeholders: academia, industry and graduates.

The ability to let a mobile device determine its location in an indoor environment supports the creation of a new range of mobile information system applications. Our goal is to complement the data networking capabilities of RF wireless LANs with accurate user location and tracking capabilities for user needed data prebuffering. We created a location based system enhancement for locating and tracking users of our control system inside the buildings. User location is used for data prebuffering and pushing information from server to user’s PDA. All server data is saved as artifacts (together) with its position information in building. The accessing of prebuffered data on mobile device can highly improve response time needed to view large multimedia data. This fact is very important for new possibilities of intelligent crisis management. Rescuers can handle with new types of artifacts which can increase rescue possibilities.

Semantic similarity models are a series of mathematical models for computing semantic similarity values among nodes in a semantic net. In this paper we reveal the paradox in the applications of these semantic similarity models in the field of information retrieval, which is that these models rely on a common prerequisite – the words of a user query must correspond to the nodes of a semantic net. In certain situations, this sort of correspondence can not be carried out, which invalidates the further working of these semantic similarity models. By means of two case studies, we analyze these issues. In addition, we discuss some possible solutions in order to address these issues. Conclusion and future works are drawn in the final section.

The virtual surgery planning and simulation tools have gained a great deal of importance in the last decade in a consequence of increasing capacities at the information technology level. The modern hardware architectures, large scale database systems, grid based computer networks, agile development processes, better 3D visualization and all the other strong aspects of the information technology brings necessary instruments into almost every desk. The last decade’s special software and sophisticated super computer environments are now serving to individual needs inside “tiny smart boxes” for reasonable prices. However, resistance to learning new computerized environments, insufficient training and all the other old habits prevents effective utilization of IT resources by the specialists of the health sector. In this paper, all the aspects of the former and current developments in surgery planning and simulation related tools are presented, future directions and expectations are investigated for better electronic health care systems.

The theory of Service Oriented Environment (SOE) emerges with advanced connectivity of the Internet technologies, openness of business environment and prosperousness of business activities. Service, as a critical object impenetrating every corner of SOE, is a hot research topic in many research domains. Software Engineering (SE), as a subject in engineering field, its researchers pay more attention to supporting advanced technologies for promoting service activities in SOE. In this paper, we draw the position in the research field of semantic service search, service evaluation and ranking in SOE. By means of the case study and literature review research approach, we discover the research motivations and research issues in this field.

To execute a complex business task, business entities may need to collaborate with each other as individually they may not have the capability or willingness to perform the task on its own. Such collaboration can be seen implemented in digital business ecosystems in the form of simple coalitions using multi-agent systems or by employing Electronic Institutions. A major challenge is choosing optimal partners who will deliver the agreed commitments, and act in the coalition’s interest. Business entities are scaled according to their quality level. Determining the quality of previously unknown business entities and predicting the quality of such an entity in a dynamic environment are crucial issues in Business Ecosystems. A comprehensive quality management system grounded in the concepts of Trust and Reputation can help address these issues.

Information technology in the health sector will continue to be an important topic in the oncoming years. This offers interfaces for new market potential for IT companies. However, which information technologies bring about change? This was the initial question for a Delphi study in the context of the research project FAZIT. In order to find answers to this question, information technological developments were identified, which could become relevant during the next 20 years.

The events of the last decades have impacted our lives and our health significantly. We expected that the technology boom will improve our lives. While this may be true in a specific context, generally speaking our societies are suffering from moral decays, terrorism fears, wars, financial crisis and unpredictable acts of nature that are increasing in frequency and in intensity. The complex nature of the world we live is impacting our health and wellbeing considerably. Our health is not only determined by our physical health but is the end product of the interplay of the physical, mental, emotional, financial, relational and spiritual events of a lifetime. In this paper we develop a framework that will help us define and measure total wellbeing of individuals in our volatile societies. This framework will help us better understand the complex nature of total wellbeing and develop effective prevention and intervention strategies.

With the advent of XML-based SOA, WS-BPEL shortly turned out to become a widely accepted standard for modeling business processes. Though SOA is said to embrace the principle of business agility, BPEL process definitions are still manually crafted into their final executable version. While SOA has proven to be a giant leap forward in building flexible IT systems, this static BPEL workflow model is somewhat paradoxical to the need for real business agility and should be enhanced to better sustain continual process evolution. In this paper, we point out the potential of adding business intelligence with respect to business process re-engineering patterns to the system to allow for automatic business process optimization. Furthermore, we point out that BPR macro-rules could be implemented leveraging micro-techniques from computer science. We present some practical examples that illustrate the benefit of such adaptive process models and our preliminary findings.

In environments like factories, buildings, and homes automation services tend to often change during their lifetime. Changes are concerned to business rules, process optimization, cost reduction, and so on. It is important to provide a smooth and straightforward way to deal with these changes so that could be handled in a faster and low cost manner. Some prominent solutions use the flexibility of Wireless Sensor Networks and the meaningful description of Semantic Web Services to provide service integration. In this work, we give an overview of current solutions for machinery integration that combine both technologies as well as a discussion about some perspectives and open issues when applying Wireless Sensor Networks and Semantic Web Services for automation services integration.

This paper addresses the field of Artificial Intelligence, road it went so far and possible road it should go. The paper was invited by the Conference of IT Revolutions 2008, and discusses some issues not emphasized in AI trajectory so far. The recommendations are that the main focus should be personalities rather than programs or agents, that genetic environment should be introduced in reasoning about personalities, and that limbic system should be studied and modeled. Engineered Psychology is proposed as a road to go. Need for basic principles in psychology are discussed and a mathematical equation is proposed as fundamental law of engineered and human psychology.

During the last decade communication technology has changed rapidly. Due to its decreasing costs and rising expansion, IP (Internet Protocol) technology has found its way to areas that have long been the domain of public-switched telephone networks (PSTN). Voice over IP (VoIP) applications are widely used not only for phone calls or common Internet conferences, but also tend to be used for safety critical communication applications. Hence security and safety topics arise, which pose new challenges in this area of research. The authors are convinced that new issues on the network layer as well as on the application layer require detailed analysis. Hence this paper gives an overview on latest developments in this area, and states the authors’ view on this topic. Thereby safety and security issues are faced from different abstraction layers. On the one hand the network layer and on the other hand the application layer focusing on middleware systems in the area of service oriented architectures (SOAs).

Artificial Intelligence, the big promise of the last millennium, has apparently made its way into our daily lives. Cell phones with speech control, evolutionary computing in data mining or power grids, optimized via neural network, show its applicability in industrial environments. The original expectation of true intelligence and thinking machines lies still ahead of us. Researchers are, however, optimistic as never before. This paper tries to compare the views, challenges and approaches of several disciplines: engineering, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy. It gives a short introduction to Psychoanalysis, discusses the term consciousness, social implications of intelligent machines, related theories, and expectations and shall serve as a starting point for first attempts of combining these diverse thoughts.

As computerization in healthcare services increase, the amount of available digital data is growing at an unprecedented rate and as a result healthcare organizations are much more able to store data than to extract knowledge from it. Today the major challenge is to transform these data into useful information and knowledge. It is important for healthcare organizations to use stored data to improve quality while reducing cost. This paper first investigates the data mining applications on centralized medical databases, and how they are used for diagnostic and population health, then introduces distributed databases. The integration needs and issues of distributed medical databases are described. Finally the paper focuses on data mining studies on distributed medical databases.

The considerable increases in greenhouse gases emissions and the subsequent climate changes are directly associated with the current rates of economic growth. As a result, the increasing environmental problems should result in an effort to accurately measure and control climate changes. In the present paper, we propose a theoretical inter-industry model for analyzing how economic activity, by industrial sector, affects the climate. We believe that the proposed methodology could be utilized for the feedback of the policy formulation procedure and could provide a vehicle for expanding conventional climate change analysis in economics.

For many years, physical asset indicators were the main evidence of an organization’s successful performance. However, the situation has changed after information technology revolution in the knowledge-based economy. Since 1980’s business performance has not been limited only to physical assets instead intellectual capital are increasingly playing a major role in business performance. In this paper, we utilize ontology as a tool for knowledge representation in the domain of intellectual capital measurement. The ontology classifies ways of intangible capital measurement.

This position paper examines a critical paradox in e-health: there is a striking gap between critical information services for health care that can be implemented today using existing in information and communication technologies and those services that are actually available. Facets of this paradox are examined in the context of Canadian analyses and policy, advanced research on health care reform, and current technological developments. Hypothetical scenarios are employed as a means of discussing the paradox and, ultimately, of describing potential solutions that are feasible now.

The advancement of omics technologies in concert with the enabling information technology development has accelerated biological research to a new realm in a blazing speed and sophistication. The limited single gene assay to the high throughput microarray assay and the laborious manual count of base-pairs to the robotic assisted machinery in genome sequencing are two examples to name. Yet even more sophisticated, the recent development in literature mining and artificial intelligence has allowed researchers to construct complex gene networks unraveling many formidable biological puzzles. To harness these emerging technologies to their full potential to medical applications, the Bio-intelligence program at the Institute for Information Technology, National Research Council Canada, aims to develop and exploit artificial intelligence and bioinformatics technologies to facilitate the development of intelligent decision support tools and systems to improve patient care - for early detection, accurate diagnosis/prognosis of disease, and better personalized therapeutic management.

The vast amount of data being generated by large scale omics projects and the computational approaches developed to deal with this data have the potential to accelerate the advancement of our understanding of the molecular basis of genetic diseases. This better understanding may have profound clinical implications and transform the medical practice; for instance, therapeutic management could be prescribed based on the patient’s genetic profile instead of being based on aggregate data. Current efforts have established the feasibility and utility of integrating and analysing heterogeneous genomic data to identify molecular associations to pathogenesis. However, since these initiatives are data-centric, they either restrict the research community to specific data sets or to a certain application domain, or force researchers to develop their own analysis tools. To fully exploit the potential of omics technologies, robust computational approaches need to be developed and made available to the community. This research addresses such challenge and proposes an integrative approach to facilitate knowledge discovery from diverse datasets and contribute to the advancement of genomic medicine.