Speaker: Csaba A. Szabo, Budapest Univ. of Technology and Economics, Hungary and Create-Net Research Centre, Italy

The objective of this talk is to address the most important aspects of planning, building and operating wireless infrastructures for digital communities based on the novel WiFi and WiMAX mesh network technologies.

Providing broadband access to citizens, communities, public institutions and developing businesses has become a strategic objective for governments worldwide, in particular to solve the “digital divide” problem. Building and operating broadband network infrastructures by public participation is essential for creating the right telecommunication environment for digital ecosystems, in particular to involve small-to-medium enterprises.

Although a large number of initiatives, called community networks or municipality networks, or digital cities have been launched worldwide, finding suitable technology solutions and business models are not at all straightforward tasks. As for the technology, in principle there is a variety of systems already widely used by telecom companies, but they are not optimal for deployment and operation by local government for various technical and regulatory reasons, and also the associated costs could be prohibitively high.

New wireless technologies have been emerged during the last couple of years that are particularly suitable for implementation by different communities and public administrations. These technologies, that include WiFi mesh networks, fixed and mobile WiMAX systems and their combinations, offer flexibility in installation as opposed to fiber or copper based infrastructures, require significantly less investment, and can operate in license-free frequency bands. Therefore, it is not surprising that many government subsidized pilot project have been recently implemented and are being tested. The talk will demonstrate some of the interesting examples.

Contact: szabo@hit.bme.hu, csaba.szabo@create-net.org

Home page: www.hit.bme.hu/~szabo

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Speaker: John Kennedy, IT Innovation and Research, Intel, Ireland

This DBE Tutorial session will introduce and demonstrate the software delivered to the open source community by the European Commission funded Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) project (http://digital-ecosystem.org).  A general introduction to the DBE project will be followed by an overview of the architecture of the open-source DBE platform. All three core components of the DBE will then be introduced:

1. The DBE Execution Environment, a peer-to-peer network of DBE Servents and core infrastructural services, optimised for SMEs
2. The DBE Studio, the development environment for the DBE
3. The DBE Evolutionary Environment, the software that uses concepts abstracted from the biological world to help optimise the ecosystem of SME services

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Speakers: Andrea Nicolai, T6, Project Manager D.B.E. EU Research Project, Italy and Javier Val , ITA, Istituto Technologico de Aragon, Aragon, Spain

The session will analyse how to understand DBE regional requirements and how to launch ‘markers of credibility’ of the DBE towards SMEs through several actions (from education programs to code camps to SMEs networking activities).  Regional Maturity Grade and Social Network Analysis will be presented as new methodologies to evaluate and model regional actions in support of DBE.  The workshop will touch on Governance issues and models for digital SMEs clusters.  The workshop will present Regional Policy strategies for SMEs innovation supported by DBE technologies and methodology, presenting a successful case study on the Aragon Region in Spain.

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Speakers: Vidyasagar Potdar and Chen Wu, Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute, Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia

Motivation and Outline of this tutorial:

Digital Ecosystems (DES) transcend the traditional rigorously defined collaborative environments from centralised or distributed or hybrid models into an open, flexible, domain cluster, demand-driven interactive environment. In order to foster such an open environment in our digital world, explorative simulations and prototypes can lead to a desirable vision for further research and implementation. This tutorial aims to provide a bottom-up approach to build a DES environment from an empirical perspective.

Objectives:

• To introduce the bottom up approach to build the Digital Ecosystem platform
• To discuss the technologies and tools to facilitate the infrastructure
• To clarify the issues within Digital Ecosystem platform development and deployment
• To Demonstrate Digital Ecosystems Simulation Prototype and DES Collaboration Platform

Contents:

• Part 1 – Digital Ecosystem Approach: A bottom-up approach of leveraging social software and semantic web will be introduced.
• Part 2 – Digital Ecosystem Simulation: The design, implementation, and live demonstration of a DES simulation will be presented to illustrate some fundamental characteristics of DES.
• Part 3 – Digital Ecosystem Collaboration Platform: A preliminary realisation of DES concepts and simulation will be provided as a DES collaboration platform built on top of MediaWiki and other social software

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Speakers: Farookh Hussain and Elizabeth Chang, Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute, Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia

Objectives and Outline of this tutorial:

In this tutorial, we present an overview of our vision of digital ecosystems, their analogy to ecological systems, their scientific innovation, technical exploration including architecture, swarm intelligence, design and implementation, their comparison to existing networked architecture, social, cultural and economic impact in the networked economy. We then give a detailed explanation on the key underlying technology of DES, known as Trust, Reputation and Recommendation System and its impact to the next generation of the Internet. We will also provide several practical examples as well as a demonstration of swarm intelligence-based self-organised digital ecosystems.

Contents:

• Analogy to Ecosystems
• Semantics for Digital Ecosystems
• Innovative Architecture of Digital Ecosystems
• Trust, Reputation and Recommendation Systems
• Collaboration between Digital Ecosystem
• Practical Demonstration of Digital Ecosystem

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