To be presented by: Csaba A. Szabo, Professor, Budapest Univ. of Technology and Economics, Hungary and Create-Net Research Center, Italy

Motivations

Providing broadband access to citizens, communities, public institutions and developing businesses has become a strategic objective for governments and international organizations worldwide. In particular, serious problems related to the “digital divide” have been widely recognized by public administrations. However, the solution to these problems is not straightforward. Although the appropriate technologies are there, telecommunication companies cannot deploy them as the large costs and very long return of investment makes it prohibitive according to their usual business models.

A large number of initiatives, under the collecting name community networks have been launched in North America as well as in Europe. By creating telecom infrastructure in underserved regions, governments can prevent remote communities from digital divide, and are able to create a climate for economic development, help startups to grow, bring new businesses into the region thus resulting in a healthy climate for economic development.

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.

Objective

The objective of this tutorial is to cover the most important aspects of planning, building and operating community network infrastructures – the technical, legal, regulatory and economic ones – in a single integrated treatment. This way the various specialists interested or involved in this area – engineers, economists, business managers, legal experts, public administration officers, researchers - can get acquainted with the complete “picture” before getting deeper involved in their respective fields of activity and interest.

Content

In the Introduction, we define what we mean by Community Networks, how they are connected to Digital Ecosystems and Digital Business Ecosystems, and to related initiatives such as Digital Communities and why this topic is of great importance.

In the Part 1, Services and Business Models, we present a methodology for the design of community networks. As a starting point, we first analyze potential user groups and the applications and services they need, and define their requirements towards the network infrastructure. Then we’ll look into possible business models, taking into account the legal environment that determines the playing field for traditional telcos, cable companies and new entrants, as well as opportunities and limitations for efforts initiated and controlled by the public sector. Topics include:

• Overview of applications and services for communities, public sector and businesses.
• Key legal and regulatory issues affecting community broadband projects in the United States and in Europe.
• Models for public sector involvement in regional and local broadband projects

Part 2, State-of-the-art wireless technologies for community networks focuses on analyzing existing and emerging wireless solutions and presents a methodology for technology selection. We first provide a general picture of the network architectures and an overview of access solutions which is the most challenging and important technology area, given the wide range of technologies available and the complexity of the related economical/business aspects. Wireless technologies particularly suitable for building community networks will be discussed in detail. Topics include:

• Specifics of defining network architectures and selecting technologies for community networks as compared to traditional telco network design
• Main characteristics and comparison of state of the art access technologies
• Overview of wireless and mobile solutions, state of the art and emerging trends
• WiFi, WiFi mesh, WiMAX fixed and mobile, beyond-3G mobile systems
• Guidelines for technology selection

In Part 3, a number of Case Studies are presented, carefully selected from several hundreds of networks built in both North America and Europe. Through the case studies, we demonstrate how the business models and technology design presented earlier can be used and implemented in different environments. Experience gained from recent planning of some European community networks are also included.

About the presenter

Csaba A. Szabo received his Ph. D. degree from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BUTE) and a Doctor of Technical Sciences title from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is a Professor at the Dept. of Telecommunications of BUTE. Dr. Szabo is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Member of the Int’l Society of Telemedicine and e-Health, and he is listed in the Marquis Who is Who in the World, Milleneum Edition.

His 30+ years of experience in academia, R&D and telecommunication business includes local and metropolitan area networks, integrated services wireless networks, video conferencing and media streaming, optical networks and wireless broadband access networks. Dr. Szabo has been a member of editorial boards of several journals including Computer Networks, and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Hungarian Journal “Telecommunications”.

He has been General Chair and Steering committee chair/member of several international conferences, including Multimedia Services Access Networks (MSAN), the 1st Int’l IEEE/Create-Net Workshop on Telemedicine over Broadband (BroadMed), the 2nd Int’l IEEE/Create-Net Workshop on Community Network and First/Last Mile Technologies, the 2nd and 3rd IEEE/Create-Net Conference on Testbeds and Research Infrastructures.

Dr. Szabo is a co-editor and co-author of a recent Wiley book titled “Broadband Services: Business Models and Technologies for Community Networks”.

He has been also with Create-Net, an international research center, based in Trento, Italy, as a Senior Advisor since 2004. In 2006, he served as Chief Technology Officer. At Create-Net, Dr. Szabo has been supervising the development of a novel real-life, service-oriented testbed, and is involved in the management of the EU Network of Excellence project OPAALS, workpackage “Community networks and digital ecosystems”.

Dr. Szabo has been involved in recent community network projects in Italy, Austria and Hungary

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

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

To be presented by:

        Claudia Niederée (L3S Research Center, Germany)

        Thomas Risse (L3S Research Center, Germany)

        Erich J. Neuhold (University of Vienna, Austria)

Abstract

A common trend that can be currently observed in information management is a movement towards less central control and more flexibility and self-organization. This is true on the level of the infrastructure technologies as well as in information management and services, where personalized and community-based solutions such as Flickr or collaborative spam filtering have lately been very successful. Part of this trend is due to the maturing of the information technology and of the user community. As a result the user community frequently wishes to play a more active but easy role in handling the functionalities offered.

Partly following and partly pushing this trend, a variety of technologies have been developed and established, which enable self-organizing information management on different levels (infrastructure, institutions, teams, individuals) by increased flexibility and the capability to react to dynamically changing requirements. For the infrastructure level, this includes the introduction of the peer-to-peer paradigm or the success of service-oriented architectures and their implementation in the form of Web services. On the level of personal and institutional information management, semantic enrichment and intelligent and dynamic forms of mediation and information integration are important ingredients for self-organizing collaborative processes. For the client side capabilities, powerful technologies that foster user participation and are bundled under the term "Web 2.0” play an increasingly important role.

In this tutorial, we give an overview over the technologies that are required for such a multi-level self-organizing setting that satisfies the information access and management needs of individuals, groups and organizations. The required technologies are illustrated by concrete example solutions as they have been developed in European and National research projects (e.g. BRICKS, NEPOMUK). Furthermore, the components are linked into an overall architecture for flexible support of self-organizing processes in information and knowledge management. We also show the parts where further R&D activities are required. The tutorial concludes with a discussion of open issues, where a special focus is put on the adequate and required long-term support of self-organizing processes.

Content

Scheduled as a full day tutorial, it will comprise a mixture of presentations, short system demos, and time for questions and open discussion of novel ideas. The individual topics will be covered by experts from the projects NEPOMUK and BRICKS. The tutorial is structured into four parts:

• Part I Introduction: Self-organizing Personal and Institutional Information Management
• Part II Underlying Technologies and their Promises
• Part III Challenges and Solutions for Knowledge Management Functionalities in Self-organizing Decentralized Infrastructures
• Part IV Conclusions and Open Issues

A short summary of these parts is given below:

Part 1 - Introduction: Self-organizing Personal and Institutional Information Management This part of the tutorial gives an introduction to the area of building Personal and Institutional information management systems on top of decentralized infrastructures. It starts with a discussion of the rationale for going towards next generation information management systems architectures by considering a mixed technology push – market pull perspective.

Part 2 - Underlying Technologies and their Promises In this part, the technologies underlying the new information management system architectures are presented. This includes

• Peer to Peer Infrastructures
• Service-oriented Architectures
• Semantic Technologies
• Emergent Semantics

For each of these technologies, the core concepts and promises behind the respective technology, its implementation status, related standards, and the main applications are discussed. In addition to the general technology promises, the tutorial will also examines the special promises of the technology in the Knowledge Management context. Of course, a full coverage of each of these technologies is beyond the scope of this tutorial. For this purpose pointers to further readings are also given as part of the presentation to interested participants.

Part 3 - Challenges and Solutions for Knowledge Management Functionality in Decentralized Infrastructures. This part forms the core of the tutorial. It looks into concrete solutions for dedicated personal and institutional information management topics when migrating from centralized systems to self-organizing and emerging federations of knowledge sources. The following five important topics will be considered in separate blocks:

• Dynamic Infrastructure Management
• Collaborative Information Management
• Semantic Technologies and Emergent Semantics
• Information Heterogeneities and Interoperation
• Personalization

For each of the above topics, the challenges raised by distributed infrastructures for the respective functionality are discussed and related to self-organizing principles. Based on the experiences gathered in the projects BRICKS and NEPOMUK as well as in other related projects exemplary solutions are presented for each of the topics. These solutions are illustrated by small system demonstration, wherever possible. Part IV Conclusions and Open Issues This part of the tutorial gives a short summary of the tutorial content and tries to draw useful conclusions from the lessons learned in the different projects as well as from the comparison of the solutions employed. Furthermore, it points out some open issues that arise from the setting and operating future Knowledge Management approaches on top of self-organizing infrastructures. This includes technical as well as organizational challenges that arise, for example, from the long-term operation of a flexible service infrastructure in a large, complex, dynamic and autonomous environment.

About the presenter

Claudia Niederée works as a senior researcher at the L3S Research Centre in Hannover, Germany. Before she joined the L3S she worked at the Fraunhofer Institute IPSI in Darmstadt, Germany. She holds a masters in Computer Science and was awarded a doctoral degree in Computer Science by the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg (Germany). Her main research interests are technologies related to digital libraries, personalization support, digital libraries, e-science and the Semantic Web. Currently, she is the R&D manager of the project VIKEF (IST 507173), an European Integrated Project in the area of semantic-enabled knowledge systems. She also worked in the European project DILIGENT that aims to build a Grid-based digital library infrastructure. Furthermore, she has experience in the organization of international workshops.

Contact details: Claudia Niederée, L3S Research Center, Appelstr. 9a, 30167 Hannover, Germany, Email: risse@l3s.de

Thomas Risse works as a senior researcher at the L3S Research Centre in Hannover, Germany. He received a PhD in Computer Science from the Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany in 2006. Before he joined the L3S Research Center in 2007 he lead a research group about intelligent information environments at Fraunhofer IPSI, Darmstadt. He worked in several European and industrial projects. Currently he is the technical director of the European funded research project BRICKS (IST 507457), which aim is the development of a decentralized infrastructure for the integrated access on distributed digital cultural resources. Thomas Risse's research interests are data management and access in distributed service oriented systems. Research topics include highly reliable data stores in decentralized and dynamic environments, federated search, self-organizing systems, and performance modeling of distribute systems.

Contact details: Thomas Risse, L3S Research Center, Appelstr. 9A, 30167 Hannover, Germany, Email: risse@l3s.de

Erich J. Neuhold is currently a Honorary Professor at the University of Vienna, Austria. Before his retirement as a Professor at the University of Darmstadt, Germany, he was Director of the Fraunhofer Institute IPSI, a research institute of about 120 persons. It’s research and application fields covered all aspects of information management systems, like self-organizing distributed systems, advanced knowledge management, semantics, and information mining as well a applications in e-learning, e-commerce and e-government in Web based contexts. He has been a member of many conference and administrative committees in all possible capacities. He has been a frequent invited speaker and tutorial presenter and has more than 200 scientific publications. He is a Fellow of IEEE and of the German Computer Society.

Contact details: Erich J. Neuhold, Fakultaet of Informatik, University of Vienna, Liebiggasse 4, A-1080 Vienna, Austria. E-mail: erich.neuhold@univie.ac.at

To be presented by: Paola Di Maio (BA Hons,MSc)

Motivation

Collaboration and Architectures of participations have started impacting the way organisations are shaped. Yet in the majority of 'real life' cases, there are still many barriers to knowledge sharing and communication. In this half day interactive tutorial, the facilitator will share in summarized format the essentials of collaboration from most recent research, and will work together with participants towards devising individual 'action plans' that they can bring back home with them to start leveraging the benefits of real time communication technologies. Workshop manual will be provided.

The tutorial/workshop is designed where possible to be interactive, whereby the participants are encouraged to make observations, comments ask questions and share their views. The last hour of the workshop is designed for participants who wish to present a 3-5 minute case study about their circumstances and organisations for discussion and analysis are welcome to do so (and can prepare a up to 3 slides for presentation if they like). Participants will have the opportunity to seek advice from the facilitator and others participants to develop their own plan for action. Additionally, the facilitator will accept suggestions for workshop topics and format from those who register.

Target audience

• Business intelligence professionals/researchers
• Knowledge workers/researchers
• Academics, university and public bodies administrators
• Anyone interested in collaboration and participatory initiatives applied to organisations

Objective

• Learn about Collaborative theories
• Explore New Models of participation
• See demos of ICT  for collaboration
• Identify obstacles to collaboration
• Manage collaboration

Content

Part 1

Introductions and overview
Introductions, presentation of the workshop format, review of the goals and contents, updates and agenda

Collaboration principles and theories
Understand theories and principles of collaboration

Models of participation
Examples of what is happening around the world, how, and why
(drivers, inhibiting factors etc)

ICT for collaborative intelligence
Demostration of the most popular tools for collaboration/participation (30 minutes) (NOTE FOR THE ORGANISERS: REQUIRES ONLINE/CONNECTED OVERHEAD PROJECTOR OR CAN DO OFFLINE DEMO WITH PRIOR NOTICE)

Part 2

Collaboration Management
How to promote collaboration in your organization without
Losing your job

Individual Case Studies
In addition to the facilitator case studies, participants will be able to present/discuss their personal circumstances and cases and ask advice to the facilitator and other participants.

Eview of What Discussed and Plans of Action
Participants will have the opportunity to share what they have learned, and if they wish to produce a bullet point list of what they plan to do

About the presenter

Paola Di Maio is an information systems designer and senior researcher, with over ten years professional experience in the creative, publishing and information industry. A former freelance science and technology writer, she holds a first degree in Modern Languages and an MSc in Information Systems from Christ Church College at the University of Kent at Canterbury,  she currently working in Asia as lecturer, where she holds regular workshops and operates globally as an independent researcher and consultant.

Contact her at paola.dimaio@gmail.com

Objectives
The aim of this tutorial is to:

Content

Part 1
Definition of Digital Ecosystems
Digital Ecosystem (DES) will be explained as dynamic and synergetic complex of Digital Communities consisting of interconnected, interrelated and interdependent Digital Species (DS) situated in Digital Environment (DE) that interact as a functional unit and are linked together through actions, information and transaction flows.

Part 2
Digital Ecosystem Design Methodology
DES Design Methodology will focus on the key factors associated with the DES design including the roles of different Digital Species (DS) within the DES, their organisation and collaboration, their individual design, and intelligence and security within the DES. This methodology framework allows better control over the design process and serves as a navigating tool during DES design.

Part 3
Role of the leading technologies within Digital Ecosystems
The new emerging technologies such as agent-based systems, swarm-intelligence, ontology, ambient intelligence, data mining, automated digital service discovery, etc. form a basis for effective implementation of the DES. We will discuss the role and advantages of each of these technologies, and show how they can be integrated into a highly efficient and effective system.

Part 4
An illustrative example of Digital Health Ecosystem
A DEScan be specifically developed for the health domain (Digital Health Ecosystem, DHES). The networked Digital Health Species (DHS) are situated in and used by the different hospitals, health services, general practitioners, pharmacies, health systems, health information resources, etc. The various DHS occupy the DHES and cooperate with each other producing outcomes highly beneficial for all parties involved.

About the presenters


Dr Maja Hadzic is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Research Lab for Digital Health Ecosystems of Curtin University of Technology. She obtained a Masters degree in Biochemistry from Belgium in 1999 and PhD in Health Information Systems from Curtin University of Technology in 2006.  Dr Hadzic has been a Medical Research Fellow for 3.5 years at the University of Newcastle.  Her research interests include the application of cutting-edge information technologies within the health domain, integration of ontology, multi-agent system and data mining technology, methodologies for Digital Ecosystems inspired by biological ecosystems, using ontologies for standardization of Electronic Health Records and application of data mining technologies in the analysis of multi-factorial phenomena. Her area of research is ground breaking in the area of health informatics and will revolutionize the way the services and research is performed within the health domain.  It is in line with the current trend of health services and research which is increasingly moving towards the use of intelligent information systems within the health domain.

Mr Amandeep Sidhu is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence Institute of Curtin University of Technology. He has submitted his PhD thesis in 2007 in Bioinformatics and is working on the Protein Ontology Project. He finished his Masters in Computer Science degree from La Trobe University in 2003. He did his Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science and Engineering with First Class Honors from Punjab Technical University, India in 2001. Some of his significant contributions include data integration of biomedical data, efficient modelling of biological data and information, design and implementation of biomedical ontologies, and data mining in bioinformatics. His research interests include biomedical ontologies, biological data modelling, structural bioinformatics, proteomics, XML-enabled Web services, and artificial intelligence.

Objectives
The aim of this tutorial is to:

Content

Part 1
Definition of Agile Methods
A brief history of agile development methods will be presented, and definitions of Agile Development Methods, and Lean Software Development Methods, will be discussed. The various reference disciplines in product development, lean manufacturing and management will be discussed. A specific Agile Methods, Scrum, will be discussed in detail.

Part 2
Agile Methods and the Digital Ecosystem
The Digital Ecosystem is characterized by adaptive behavior, evolving species, collaborative behavior encompassing diverse species, without which the Digital Ecosystem would atrophy and collapse. The characteristics of Agile methods are closely similar to those of the Digital Ecosystem, and are therefore applicable to development of systems within the D E. The agile software project is seen as an ecosystem also.
We will discuss the role and advantages of Agile Development Methods as a new and successful system development paradigm.

Part 3
Education and Research in Agile Methods in Thailand
Introducing Agile Development and Agile Project Management methods into University curriculum in Thailand is at the very beginning of the adoption curve. Given the strength of the ‘agile community’ it is considered important to extend education in agile methods. A presentation will be made about the teaching of agile methods in a software engineering course at Naresuan University, and the potential for research in agile methods, both within and without the concept and practices of the Digital Ecosystem.

Part 4
Adoption of Agile Methods in Thai Software Development organizations
A consultant who is leading the adoption of agile methods in Thai organizations will present on his experience, and on the success of building Agile Development teams. The potential in Thailand as an out-sourcing development provider will be discussed.

About the presenters


Mr Roy Morien is an honorary Research Fellow of the DEBI Institute Curtin University of Technology, an independent consultant and researcher, and a sometime Visiting IS Specialist at Naresuan University in Phitsanulok, Thailand. He has an Institute Of Technology degree in corporate law and administration and a Bachelor Degree in Accounting, from the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University of Technology), a PostGraduate Diploma in Information Systems, and a Master of Commerce(Information Systems) also from Curtin University of Technology. His industry experience, teaching and research interests since 1985 have been in software prototyping, Rapid Application Development Methods, and latterly Agile development Methods. He has presented seminars at numerous universities in Thailand, on Agile Development Methods, and has published at international conferences in Australia and the USA on Agile Methods and Agile Project Management.

Dr. Farookh Khadeer Hussain is currently the leader of research training at the Digital Ecosystems and Business Intelligence (DEBI) Institute. He has a PhD degree in Information Systems, a Masters degree in Information Technology and a Bachelors engineering degree in Computer Science. His research interests are trust and reputation modelling and management, semantic web, ontologies, digital ecosystems and frontier technologies.

Professor Suradet Jitprapaikulsarn
Professor Suradet is the professor of Computer Engineering in Naresuan University in Phitsanulok, Thailand. He is also well experienced in industry and consulting, as well as teaching software engineering and programming. Professor Suradet has a special interest in teaching testing methods in his software engineering classes.

Mr Benjamin Scherrey
Benjamin Scherrey is a software development architect for Proteus Technologies Co. Ltd ( http://proteus-tech.com ) and has been building and mentoring Agile development groups since 2002. Most recently he has introduced Agile development concepts to Reuters Software (Thailand) Ltd. He has been a consultant since 1989 building software development groups for clients around the world including IBM, GE Capital, CSX, Ericsson, and Harris D.T.S. With a wide variety of process background including ISO-9001, SEI's CMM, and Agile, he has been featured in many industry journals and conferences. Fond of Open Source and Open Standards programming with C++ and Python, he presently resides in Bangkok with his wife and son.

A/Prof. Yuen Poovarawan

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