In most of the current applications security is usually provided individually. This means that various applications use their own security mechanisms and services, applied only to their own resources and functions. Furthermore, procedures to configure security parameters are usually inconvenient and complicated for non-technical users. As an alternative to this approach, we have designed and implemented Secure Workstation, which represents an integrated security environment and protects local IT resources, messages and operations across multiple applications. It comprises five components, i.e. four most commonly used PC applications: Secure Station Manager (equivalent to Windows Explorer), Secure E-Mail Client, Secure Documents System, and Secure Browser. These four components for their security extensions use functions and credentials of the fifth component, Generic Security Provider [5]. With this approach, we provide standard security services (authentication, confidentiality, and integrity and access control) and also additional, extended security services, such as transparent handling of certificates, use of smart cards, strong authentication protocol, SAML based single-singe-on, secure sessions, and other security functions, to all PC applications with the same set of security modules and parameters.

Providing personalized support to students during courses is essential to facilitate them in their desired learning goals and reduce the dropout rate. Although teachers can play an effective role in providing personalized support, achieving individual-level assistance for massive courses becomes challenging. To overcome this challenge, this paper proposes a transformer-based approach that first models students’ knowledge of various course concepts based on their performance in various assessed tasks. Afterwards, the students’ concept-wise knowledge level derived from the models is combined with the available course material, leading to the generation of personalized concept-wise exercises by employing fine-tuned Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer (T5) architecture. These generated exercises help students to improve their knowledge about different course concepts. The proposed approach has been evaluated with various university courses to determine its quality, utility and effects on students’ academic performance. The evaluation results revealed that teachers and students were satisfied with the quality of the generated exercises, and these were found to be helpful for students to improve their concept-wise understanding. Furthermore, the generated exercises positively impacted students’ academic performance. 

Soft skills are becoming equally crucial as hard skills in today's labour market. In contrast to hard skills which are teachable typically through formal education, soft skills are non-technical and interpersonal, allowing individuals to be able to find and succeed in their studies, jobs, and professional life. Despite the increasing emphasis on soft skills, many university students are either unaware of or neglect enhancing them. Soft skills deficiency among university students has become a significant concern for employers, educators, and policymakers, as it negatively affects students' academic performance and future employment prospects. The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ perceptions of the demand for soft skills and the possibility and availability of learning opportunities. The expected outcomes intend to provide insights about awareness of soft skills among students and pathways to reduce the soft skills gap through training provisions in higher education settings. Furthermore, it aims to find out how the young generation (mainly Generation Z) would perceive digitalisation and specifically gamification as a solution to facilitate soft skills training. This is a mixed method study, in which, an open survey was the data collection media. The survey was conducted during the spring semester of 2023 and analysed using visualisation and summarisation methods. Based on the outcome of 66 master’s and bachelor's students attending the digitalisation courses in two classes in Sweden, over 50% of the students perceived a lack of soft skills in their curricula. They were also positive toward the use of gamification as an effective digital strategy, recognising it as a powerful tool to facilitate training and developing soft skills as a part of formal learning in higher education. As a suggested approach, gamifying soft skills training potentially creates simulations that mimic real-world situations to allow students to practice and develop their soft skills in a safe and low-stakes training environment. This facilitates training soft skills for better communication and collaboration during their academic journey and after their graduation and to prepare students for successful careers.

This thesis examines the cybersecurity incident response problem using a socio-technical approach. The motivation of this work is the need to bridge the knowledge and practise gap that exists because of the increasing complexity of cybersecurity threats and our limited capability of applying cybersecurity controls necessary to adequately respond to these threats. Throughout this thesis, knowledge from Systems Theory, Soft Systems Methodology and Socio-Technical Systems is applied to examine and document the socio-technical properties of cybersecurity incident response process. The holistic modelling of cybersecurity incident response process developed concepts and methods tested to improve the socio-technical security controls and minimise the existing gap in security controls.

The scientific enquiry of this thesis is based on pragmatism as the underpinning research philosophy.  The thesis uses a design science research approach and embeds multiple research methods to develop five artefacts (concept, model, method, framework and instantiation) outlined in nine peer-reviewed publications. The instantiated artefact embraces the knowledge developed during this research to provide a prototype for a socio-technical security information and event management system (ST-SIEM) integrated with an open source SIEM tool. The artefact relevance was validated through a panel of cybersecurity experts using a Delphi method. The Delphi method indicated the artefact can improve the efficacy of handling cybersecurity incidents.

In this short paper we present a socio-technical framework for integrating a security risk escalation maturity model into a security information and event management system. The objective of the framework is to develop the foundations for the next generation socio-technical security information and event management systems (ST-SIEMs) enabling socio-technical security operations centers (ST-SOCs). The primary benefit of the socio-technical framework is twofold: supporting organizations in overcoming the identified limitations in their security risk escalation maturity, and supporting SOCs in overcoming the limitations of their SIEMs. The risk escalation maturity level is quantified using metrics. These metrics are then used by SIEMs for cross correlating security events before they are disseminated to respective organizations. Typical SIEMs in use today calculate security events using generic risk factors not necessarily relevant for every organization. The proposed framework can enable security administrators to effectively and efficiently manage security warnings and to establish necessary countermeasures.

This article discusses the design and specifications of a Socio-Technical Security Information and Event Management System (ST-SIEM). This newly-developed artifact addresses an important limitation identified in today incident response practice—the lack of sufficient context in actionable security information disseminated to constituent organizations. ST-SIEM tackles this limitation by considering the socio-technical aspect of information systems security. This concept is achieved by correlating the technical metrics of security warnings (which are generic in nature, and the sources of which are sometimes unknown) with predefined social security metrics (used for modeling the security culture of constituent organizations). ST-SIEM, accordingly, adapts the risk factor of the triggered security warning based on each constituent organization security culture. Moreover, the artifact features several socio-technical taxonomies with an impact factor to support organizations in classifying, reporting, and escalating actionable security information. The overall project uses design science research as a framework to develop the artifact.

We describe cross language retrieval experiments using Amharic queries and English language document collection from our participation in the bilingual ad hoc track at the CLEF 2007. Two monolingual and eight bilingual runs were submitted. The bilingual experiments designed varied in terms of usage of long and short queries, presence of pseudo relevance feedback (PRF), and three approaches (maximal expansion, first-translation-given, manual) for word sense disambiguation. We used an Amharic-English machine readable dictionary (MRD) and an online Amharic-English dictionary in order to do the lookup translation of query terms. In utilizing both resources, matching query term bigrams were always given precedence over unigrams. Out of dictionary Amharic query terms were taken to be possible named entities in the language, and further filtering was attained through restricted fuzzy matching based on edit distance. The fuzzy matching was performed for each of these terms against automatically extracted English proper names. The Lemur toolkit for language modeling and information retrieval was used for indexing and retrieval. Although the experiments are too limited to draw conclusions from, the obtained results indicate that longer queries tend to perform similar to short ones, PRF improves performance considerably, and that queries tend to fare better when we use the first translation given in the MRD rather than using maximal expansion of terms by taking all the translations given in the MRD.

This paper positions urban ecology as increasingly conversant with multiple perspectives and methods for understanding the functions and qualities of diverse cities and urban situations. Despite progress in the field, we need clear pathways for positioning, connecting and synthesising specific knowledge and to make it speak to more systemic questions about cities and the life within them. These pathways need to be able to make use of diverse sources of information to better account for the diverse relations between people, other species and the ecological, social, cultural, economic, technical and increasingly digital structures that they are embedded in. Grounded in a description of the systemic knowledge needed, we propose five complementary and often connected approaches for building cumulative systemic understandings, and a framework for connecting and combining different methods and evidence. The approaches and the framework help position urban ecology and other fields of study as entry points to further advance interdisciplinary synthesis and open up new fields of research.

In the European Union significant asymmetries prevail among member states in the most diverse areas. The telecom sector is no exception to this, with some members being much more advanced than others. Within the member states asymmetries also occur. And if we extrapolate this to a broader audience, for example the OECD, the European Union has been far away from some other members in what concerns asymmetries within own countries, with Japan and South Korea being the most evident. In 2016 the European Commission proposed a new regulatory framework for the telecom sector which was adopted in late 2018 by the European Parliament and must be transposed to national laws by member-states by late 2020. As we move towards the digital revolution, the so-called industry 4.0, the new EU regulatory framework has the aim of removing most of these asymmetries, by guaranteeing that most citizens will have access to a very fast Internet connection regardless of where they live. This regulatory framework provides some guidance and goals and funding objectives, but for operators and governments this is just not sufficient per se. Against this background, the overall research issue of this thesis is a methodological approach to how to determine the best access technology from a multi-criteria and multi-stakeholder perspective. In particular, to provide coverage in a certain region who lacks service a priori (therefore unprofitable by nature), problematics to be addressed include: i) what are exactly the new regulatory framework guidelines; ii) which strategic operational model to use; iii) what is the most appropriate technology to achieve these objectives; iv) how to handle the pricing incognita and all the financial component; v) how risky it is to make these objectives a reality.

The European Union has recently launched an ambitious plan to mitigate drastically, by 2025, the number of households lacking access to a 100 Mbps broadband connection through the subsidisation of the deployment of network infrastructure in rural areas. Decision makers such as governments and regulatory authorities therefore have to choose, among a pool of alternatives, a technology capable of delivering the required throughput on a large scale, based on a trade-off between the infrastructure costs and the subscribers’ perceived utility for each alternative. Such a trade-off is not simple, since there is no straightforward manner to rank the subscribers’ perceived utility against the network infrastructure cost. In this article, we propose a methodology based on real options, which outputs the value of each technology using multi-attribute value theory as an input, alongside the project’s risk and its costs.

A new European Union regulatory framework for the telecom sector has been under a process of transposition to national laws by its member states that should have been completed by the end of 2020, notwithstanding some delays. A core purpose of the regulatory framework is to guarantee that most citizens will have access to very fast Internet connections, capable of 100 Mbps download link speed, regardless of where they live. According to this new framework, in areas where the market does not deliver, governments are to launch public tenders for the deployment, maintenance, and operations of network infrastructure as well as services, and public funds should be used to support the deployment of these broadband networks in less densely populated areas. Needless to say, public tenders of this nature are subject to different criteria when it comes to candidate evaluation. In this paper, we present a decision model for the selection of operators to deploy and maintain broadband networks in scarcely populated areas, taking into consideration infrastructure costs, the technical quality offered by the solutions, and the credibility of the candidates. We suggest an integrated multi-stakeholder multi-criteria approach and demonstrate how it can be used in this complex area and find that in the example provided, taking a relevant set of criteria into the analysis, optical fibre networks hold much higher chances to be used in these public tenders compared to networks based on the broadly favoured 5G technology.

We live in a time of educational transformations towards more 21st century pedagogies and learning. In the digital age children and young people need to learn critical thinking, creativity and innovation and the ability to solve complex problems and challenges. Traditional pedagogies are in crisis and many pupils experience school as both boring and irrelevant. As a response educators and researchers need to engage in transforming education through the invention of new designs in and for learning. This book explores how games can provide new ideas and new designs for future education. Computer games have become hugely popular and engaging, but as is apparent in this book, games are not magical solutions to making education more engaging, fun and relevant. 

Games and Education explores new designs in and for learning and offer inspiration to teachers, technologists and researchers interested in changing educational practices. Based on contributions from Scandinavian researchers, the book highlights participatory approaches to research and practice by providing more realistic experiences and models of how games can facilitate learning in school. 

Zines are small-circulation magazines that the creators make themselves with simple means. They are often part of underground and emerging communities, and have been an integral part of creative industries. In a study conducted by Austin in 2022, it was found that much of the success of Sweden’s creative industries comes from investment as well as progressive maternity and paternity leave (Austin 2022b). However, the study also revealed a seldom studied element of success in Sweden’s creative industries: the emphasis on creativity, comics, zines and games as part of Swedish culture. This study utilized a zine made during the research collection as a companion to the report (Austin 2022a). We argue that zine creation alongside research makes for more personal and related outputs and that this can be applied not only to academics, but also the games industry.

In this paper, we give a background to the importance of zines in Sweden’s creative industry, and how the practice is integral to game making both past and present. Further, we expand on how zines can be embraced as tools for interdisciplinary research, and as a companion output for both academics and industry professionals.

Studies on the use of electronic journals to promote reflective learning among student-teachers have mainly focused on the students’ reflection and their learning experience in the context of the teaching practicum. Using e-journal guiding questions and an analytical reflection rubric, this study examined the extent to which the student-teachers reflected on their learning and how their reflective skills evolved through e-journal keeping in the context of the teaching and learning process of a blended course. The results showed that most of the students’ responses to e-journal guiding questions were in non-reflection and reflection levels while few responses were in critical-reflection reflection level. The study also indicated that the longer the time for using e-journals, the more the student-teachers’ reflective skills improved. In the end, the study recommends continued efforts in designing, developing and implementing instructional events whereby student-teachers can have opportunities to exercise and sustain their reflective skills over an extended period of time.

The software crisis of the late 20th century led to questioning of the value of the Waterfall methodology. Waterfall is the most well-known example of a class of methodologies known as sequential methodologies. Following the publication of the Agile Manifesto in the early 2000s, many commercial organisations began using Agile methodologies. There are many Agile methodologies which form a class of methodologies which are called iterative methodologies. Iterative methodologies have had some, though not complete, success in commercial settings. There is significantly less evidence of public sector organisations adopting iterative methodologies. Since the introduction of iterative methodologies, a further class of methodology has emerged which incorporates elements of both iterative and sequential methodologies. This class is called hybrid methodologies. There continue to be examples of projects in the public sector that have failed, overrun in scope, budget, and cost. This work explores the reasons behind the reticence of the public sector organisations to adopt iterative or hybrid methodologies and analyses the factors that can affect IT project managers’ methodological choices. Eight project managers working in either a Swedish municipality or a United States (U.S.) federal agency were interviewed, and their responses analysed with a thematic analysis. The findings are that all the surveyed project managers were using hybrid methodologies and that the factors affecting methodological choice are external factors, such as law, compliance requirements; the political nature and organisational culture of public sector organisations; the ambiguous role of the project manager in public sector organisations; and the project’s nature. Other findings were the emergence of cyber security as a constraint and the lack of maturity of public sector organisations in relation to project management.

This thematic issue of the Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly journal is dedicated to using a socio-technical perspective in the Information Systems (IS) field. It contains a selection of extended papers presented at STPIS'18 – 4th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Perspective in IS Development held on June 12, 2018 in Tallinn, Estonia. The articles presented in this thematic issue contain at least 30% new material compared to the initial papers. After the extension, all articles went through two rounds of reviews to ensure the quality of the papers published in this issue. STPIS papers cover both theoretical and practical aspects of using a socio-technical perspective in IS, which is reflected in the current issue that contains both theoretically and practically oriented papers.

Machine learning of high-dimensional models have received attention for their ability to predict psychological variables, such as personality. However, it has been less examined to what degree such models are capable of generalizing across domains. Across two text domains (Reddit message and personal essays), compared to low-dimensional- and theoretical models, atheoretical high-dimensional models provided superior predictive accuracy within but poor/non-significant predictive accuracy across domains. Thus, complex models depended more on the specifics of the trained domain. Further, when examining predictors of models, few survived across domains. We argue that theory remains important when conducting prediction-focused studies and that research on both high- and low-dimensional models benefit from establishing conditions under which they generalize.

This article describes an open source Web-based visualization tool for exploring stakeholder conflicts in land use planning. It implements a multi-criteria decision analytic framework which solves a conflict constrained knapsack problem in order to find Pareto efficient combinations of actions which maximize public value given the conflict constraint. The user interface is centered around an interactive map in which geographical subareas are color shaded in proportion to the mean strength of preference for a particular chosen action within the population in the selected area. The overarching aim of this work is to investigate the use of Web technologies and formal problem-solving methods for improving public participation in land use planning and support local governments in the pursuit of improved decision making. The tool was developed using the free statistical programming language R and the web application framework Shiny. Its usefulness is demonstrated through a case study in Upplands Väsby municipality in Stockholm County, Sweden. The article ends with a summary together with some ideas for future research and development. 

Digital Learning and Collaborative Practices offers a comprehensive overview of design-based, technology-enhanced approaches to teaching and learning in virtual settings. Today’s digital communications foster new opportunities for sharing culture and knowledge while also prompting concerns over division, disinformation and surveillance. This book uniquely emphasises playful, collaborative experiences and democratic values in a variety of environments—adaptive, augmented, dialogic, game-based and beyond. Graduate students and researchers of educational technology, the learning sciences and interaction design will discover rich theories, interventions, models and approaches for concretising emerging practices and competencies in digital learning spaces.

We argue that integrated catastrophe models are useful for policy decisions, for which a large degree of uncertainty is a natural ingredient. Recently, much attention has been given to the financial management of natural disasters. This article describes the results of a case study performed in northeastern Hungary where different flood management strategies have been explored and compared using an integrated catastrophe model. The area used for the pilot study is the Palad-Csecsei basin (the Pilot basin) where 4 621 persons live. The Pilot basin is located in the Upper Tisza region. An executable and geographically explicit model has been developed, linking hydrological, geographical, financial, and social data. The outcomes of the policy simulations are represented at different granularity-levels; the individual, the aggregated (entire basin), and the governmental.

To achieve the recommendation stated in the chapter title, we propose the following:

Stakeholders can be better engaged in energy efficiency decisions through the use of multicriteria models.

Decision-makers should present trade-offs, such as cost and emissions, and combinations of acceptable solutions to various stakeholders such as the public, housing associations, regulatory agencies, and financial institutions.

Decision-makers should adopt a user-centred approach to energy efficiency measures by encouraging stakeholder dialogues around decision-support tools (e.g. multicriteria modelling) to improve understanding of costs and benefits of measures.

Decision-makers should identify opportunities for consensus building and mindset shifts about the wider benefits of energy efficiency measures by emphasising their social considerations.

Using Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) perspectives can strengthen Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) led multicriteria models that visualise trade-offs as well as identify plausible conflicts among stakeholders.

The integration of information technology (IT) into service delivery is currently seen as an innovative strategy to support the modernising of universities worldwide. However, in some institutions in developing countries, including Rwanda, IT has failed to add the intended value to university services, despite huge associated investments in IT. Consequently, IT-organisational alignment continues to be a primary concern for university managers. This alignment is viewed in terms of its strategic, socio-cultural, and technological dimensions. For effective IT-institutional alignment, several antecedents (alignment practices) for creating an appropriate fit between IT and organisations have been suggested in the literature. However, several studies exploring IT alignment focused mainly on general business companies, and similar research with an emphasis on higher education institutions is still scarce. Therefore, the aim of this research was twofold: firstly, it attempted to understand the process of IT integration into universities; and secondly, to propose a contextual model for IT-institutional alignment within a higher education context. A design science research methodology (DSRM) was applied in this research, using surveys and case studies as research strategies. Preliminary findings at the exploration phase of this research indicated a strong misalignment between IT and the university services caused by the lack of clearly defined alignment practices. Furthermore, as the research main outcome, an IT-Institutional Alignment Model (ITIAM) was proposed after reaching an understanding of the current state and challenges related to IT integration into teaching, learning, research and university administration. This model includes 44 alignment practices, related to both technical and non-technical dimensions. These alignment practices were clustered under six categories: (1) Communication, (2) Structure/Governance, (3) Technology Scope, (4) Competence/Value Measurement, (5) Skills, and (6) Partnership. Alignment practices related to institutional structure and governance, skills and communication were found to have a strong positive influence on the institutional performance, as compared to those related to competence and value measurement, partnership, and technology scope. Based on the research findings, the proposed ITIAM, which was iteratively tested and evaluated using case study institutions, was found to be a relevant tool for guiding the implementation of IT systems towards the improvement of institutional performance. Hence, this thesis makes a theoretical contribution by applying the concept of IT alignment within a higher education context and by documenting the empirically tested contextual alignment practices as conveyed in the ITIAM Model. Additionally, as a practical implication, the results can serve as a reference for an effective IT integration process in university services and for how to improve performance through effective use of IT in teaching, learning, research and educational management.

Effective alignment between IT and institutional activities has to be created to improve performance in the university service delivery. A specific IT-Institutional Alignment Model (ITIAM) with practices for improving institutional performance was earlier suggested. This study aims to evaluate the earlier developed model and provide an outline of the evaluation outcomes. Using a seven-evaluation criteria framework, 11 case study institutions from Rwanda were explored. Data from questionnaires and in-depth interviews were analyzed to understand the model relevance and acceptability level. Findings indicated a high degree of the model relevance to support in creating IT alignment with university services. Likewise, the evaluation showed a high degree of model acceptability per all the seven evaluation criteria. Version 2 of this model was proposed based on the stakeholders’ opinions. Practical evaluation of the ITIAM model along with a real-time IT system implementation in university services is left for further endeavors of this research. 

In this paper, I examine design documents from three different ICT design and development projects. I argue that they present intersecting visions of sustainability entailing the wide-spread use of ICT, describe the properties of users compatible with such ICT, and provide ways of judging the users. In the design documents, the inhabitants are made individually responsible for living sustainably, and surveillance is positioned as integral to this future with the help of ICT. Underlying the visions, I identify a translation process that captures the traces of the inhabitants' lives, classifies them according to different criteria of sustainable living, and returns them to the tapestry of everyday life to convince the users to behave differently. In the discourses of these documents, surveillance translates the traces, and the translations exert new pressures on existing power relations.

Information and communication technologies are not value-neutral. I examine two domains, public health surveillance and sustainability, in five papers covering: (i) the design and development of a software package for computer-assisted outbreak detection; (ii) a workflow for using simulation models to provide policy advice and a list of challenges for its practice; (iii) an analysis of design documents from three smart home projects presenting intersecting visions of sustainability; (iv) an analysis of EU-financed projects dealing with sustainability and ICT; (v) an analysis of the consequences of design choices when creating surveillance technologies. My contributions include three empirical studies of surveillance discourses where I identify the forms of action that are privileged and the values that are embedded into them. In these discourses, the presence of ICT entails increased surveillance, privileging technological expertise, and prioritising centralised forms of knowledge.

Cyber security awareness among smartphone users is becoming one of the main challenges of cyber security in both developed and developing countries. This paper focuses on Thailand, a developing country that is ranked among the riskiest countries in the world with regards to cybercrime. Through a survey exploring the knowledge and practices of Thai student smartphone owners, as the young population is the largest user group, we seek to estimate the level of their cyber security awareness about the most common risks. The findings reveal that they are most susceptible to identity theft or data compromise, while they were on the whole found to have a higher level of security awareness than students in other countries. We argue for Thailand’s digital economy to be sustainable, ICT4D projects need to extend their focus to this population of smartphone users to increase security awareness.

Along with the influence of the latest technology, the change in the character of stakeholders towards digital, as well as the Covid-19 outbreak has directed various organizations to carry out digital transformation (TD). However, there have been many failures in the implementation of the transformation, which are suspected to be due to a lack of governance. Previous studies have identified the influence of traditional and agile/adaptive TKTI on the success of TD in the private sector. Therefore, testing the model of TKTI's influence on TD and organizational performance (KO) in the public sector was carried out. This research takes a case study of ministry A's TD which received many TD awards. The survey was conducted by distributing e-questionnaires to 50 respondents, then analyzing the survey results using Structural Equation Modeling. The results show that the agile/adaptive and traditional TKTI mechanisms have a positive and significant effect on TD, as well as TD on KO. This research contributes to being a reference for the implementation of the hybrid TKTI mechanism for the public sector and research knowledge base

More and more social Q&A platforms are launching a new business model to monetize online knowledge. This monetizing process introduces a more complicated cost and benefit tradeoff to users, especially for askers' concerns. Much of the previous research was conducted in the context of free‐based Q&A platform, which hardly explains the triggers that motivate askers' pay intention. Based on the theories of social exchange and social capital, this study aims to identify and examine the antecedents of askers' pay intention from the perspective of benefit and cost. We empirically test our predictions based on survey data collected from 322 actual askers in a well‐known trilateral payment‐based social Q&A platform in China. The results by partial least squares (PLS) analysis indicate that besides noneconomic benefits including self‐enhancement, social support, and entertainment, financial factors such as cost and benefit have significant influences on the perceived value of using trilateral payment‐based Q&A platforms. More important, we further identify that the effect of financial benefit is moderated by perceived reciprocity belief, and the effect of perceived value is moderated by perceived trust in answerers. Our findings contribute to the previous literature by proposing a theoretical model that explains askers' behavioral intention, and the practical implications for payment‐based Q&A service providers and participants.

One of the main issues in undergraduate thesis supervision is a lack of understanding about the pedagogical assumptions underpinning the supervision process. In this paper, the concepts of the zone of proximal development and scaffolding are applied in developing a theoretical framework to understand the nature of the interactions that are expected between student, supervisor, research context and peers. Both designed-in and contingent scaffolding are applied in order to frame a personalized learning environment with a flexible structure that supports the interactions, based on individual zones of proximal development. A case study was conducted including students’ and supervisors’ views in several undergraduate degree programs within a Sri Lankan national university, and the findings were compared with the theoretical framework. The empirical data suggest that both students and supervisors tend to encounter problems if the thesis supervision process has not adequately designed to support the characteristics of constructivist learning.

Investment in renewable energy sources requires reliable data. However, meteorological datasets are often plagued by missing data, which can bias energy resource estimates if the missingness is systematic. We address this issue by considering the influence of missing data due to icing of equipment during the winter on the wind resource estimation for a potential wind turbine site in Norway. Using a mean-reverting jump-diffusion (MRJD) process to model electricity prices, we also account for the impact on the expected revenue from a wind turbine constructed at the site. While missing data due to icing significantly bias the wind resource estimate downwards, their impact on revenue estimates is dampened because of volatile electricity spot prices. By contrast, with low-volatility electricity prices, the effect of missing data on revenue estimates is highly significant. The seasonality-based method we develop removes most of the bias in wind resource and revenue estimation caused by missing data.

Digitaliseringen gör att förändringar sker allt snabbare. Förändringarna innebär stora möjligheter men lika stora risker. För att kunna utnyttja möjligheterna måste vi anpassa oss. Och vi måste göra det medvetet. Förändringarna ger organisationer bättre förutsättningar än någonsin för att lyckas, men för att lyckas behöver man förstå och utnyttja dem. Vissa klarar det, andra inte. Att digitalisera framgångsrikt är inte enkelt. Den här boken visar hur organisationer skapar värde i en digitaliserad verklighet. Boken går igenom digitalisering med utgångspunkt i vad en organisation egentligen är och vad den behöver. Den spänner över mål, affärsmodeller, strategier, organisering, beslut och projekt. Tyngdpunkten ligger på hur man strukturerar för att få effektivare beslutshantering och mer framgångsrika projektgenomföranden. Eftersom beslut och project är grundpelare för att kunna använda digitaliseringen. Boken lämpar sig särskilt väl för kurser i företagsekonomi, industriell ekonomi och data- och systemvetenskap. Men den vänder sig till alla som vill förstå hur organisationer ska hantera och dra nytta av digitaliseringen.

Extreme weather-related events like wildfires have been increasing in frequency and severity due to climate change. Public online conversations that reflect on these events as climate emergencies can create awareness and build support for climate action but are also used to spread misinformation and climate change denial. To what extent automated social media accounts—“social bots”—amplify different perspectives of such events and influence climate change discourses, remains unknown, however. We use Twitter and the 2019/2020 Australia bushfires as a case study to explore this issue. Utilizing more than 1 million Tweets, we identify how climate change is framed in the context of those fires, and to what extent social bots affect specific climate change frames, including the spread of misinformation. Our results show that climate change represents a substantial part of online conversations about fires. The bushfires are primarily framed as a climate change issue including its measurable impacts and political perspectives. Climate denial represents a small share of this conversation and receives limited amplification. Social bots seemingly contribute to the climate change conversation, both through frames that support and oppose climate action, and amplify to larger degree frames appealing to emotions, such as sympathy or humor. We also find that Twitter discussions about the role of social bots in spreading climate denial are amplified more than actual climate-critical frames propagated by bots. A complex interplay between social bots, Twitter conversations, and online news media is emerging, which shapes discussions about climate change and wildfires.

This looks at various ways that computer simulations can differ not in terms of their detailed mechanisms but in terms of its broader purpose, structure, ontology (what is represented), and approach to implementation. It starts with some different roles of people that may be concerned with a simulation and goes on to look at some of the different contexts within which a simulation is set (thus implying its use or purpose). It then looks at the kinds of system that might be simulated. Shifting to the modelling process, it looks at the role of the individuals within the simulations, the interactions between individuals, and the environment that they are embedded within. It then discusses the factors to consider in choosing a kind of model and some of the approaches to implementing it.

Workplaces today are more technologically pervasive than ever before, and communication devices such as smartphones have blurred traditional boundaries between work and non-work spheres of people. In fact, employers need to be mindful about this phenomenon when they have technology-based work expectations from their employees. Within this backdrop, this study attempts to reveal how the technological intensity at workplaces affects work–life conflict of employees who have different boundary preferences. The analysis based on 225 respondents shows that technological intensity is a significant mediator between work–life boundary preferences and work–life conflict of employees. Further, this study validates the findings of prior research based on Western samples on non-Western countries, followed by a discussion on the implications to practice and avenues for future research.

Purpose - This study aims to explore how and why employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions differently and the role of sociocultural factors in this process using sociomaterial analysis.

Design/methodology/approach - Data were gathered from 34 Sri Lankan knowledge workers using a series of workshop-based activities. The concept of sociomateriality is employed to understand how sociocultural elements are entangled with technology in work-life boundary experiences.

Findings - The findings of the thematic analyses suggest how culture is intertwined in the way employees perceive technology-mediated interruptions and how they manage information communication technologies (ICTs) to balance their work and nonwork demands. Participants have been unable to avoid technology-mediated boundary interruptions from work, as organisations have created norms to keep employees connected to organisations using information communication technologies. Traditional gender roles are specifically found to be entangled in employees' boundary management practices, disadvantaging women more.

Practical implications - The findings highlight how national culture and gender norms create challenging work-life experiences for female employees than males. This could create a disadvantageous position for female employees in their career progression. It is crucial to consider factors such as boundary preferences and family concerns when deciding on family-friendly work policies. Also, organisations have to consider the development of explicit guidelines on after-hours communication expectations.

Originality/value - Using the lens of sociomateriality, researchers can understand the contextual entanglement of ICTs with national culture and gender norms in creating different work-life boundary experiences. It seems ICTs are creating a disadvantage for female employees when managing work-nonwork boundaries, especially in power distant and collectivist cultures where traditional gender norms are highly valued and largely upheld. This study also contributes to the current discourse on work-life boundaries by providing insights from non-western perspectives.

The use and adaptation of digital tools such as social media to set up and develop a business is, a contemporary and a new dimension in women entrepreneurship. It is interesting to study how social media has improved the business of women entrepreneurs from how it was before the use of social media as digitalization has changed the game plan of many women entrepreneurs in different industries. The purpose of this study is to explore whether the use of social media has changed the business of women entrepreneurs in the beauty salon sector in any way especially concerning the marketing and communication activities of the business. The empirical context for the study is the beauty salon sector in Sri Lanka. This study analyzes the adaptation of Facebook use through electronic word of mouth theory using the data collected through 10 in-depth interviews conducted with 10 women entrepreneurs who own beauty salons and through the observations carried out using their Facebook business pages. As a medium to grow and advertise the business, as a medium of communication and customer care, as a medium of learning and skills sharing, and as a medium for collaborative work are the themes derived. The beauty salons of women have transformed after the use of Facebook in the aspects of communication, customer service, marketing and advertising, brand awareness and collaborative networking because of the positive electronic word of mouth the Facebook generated for their businesses.

Background

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in healthcare has facilitated the exchange and analysis of patient information, which enhances both patient care and medical research. However, the use of real patient data for training Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems introduces privacy risks. To tackle the privacy challenges and restricting data availability, synthetic data has emerged as a solution.

Aim

This thesis assesses the Synthetic Data Vault tools capabilities in generating syn- thetic data from a Swedish EHR dataset, focusing on its ability to balance privacy with data utility.

Method

This study focused on generating synthetic datasets to use in Adverse Drug Events detecting models, using Conditional Tabular Generative Adversarial Network (CT- GAN), Tabular Variational Autoencoder (TVAE), and GaussianCopula synthesiz- ers. Evaluation was conducted with the SynthEval Python package, and the most resilient datasets were further tested against adversarial attacks via Anonymeter Python package. Downstream performance was assessed by comparing the syn- thetic data to the original datasets using Random Forest models.

Results

The evaluation showed that TVAE struggled with imbalanced training data, while GaussianCopula excelled in privacy at the expense of utility aspects. CTGAN struck a balance between utility and privacy. The Anonymeter tests further con- firmed the synthetic datasets’ robustness against common privacy attacks.

Conclusion

The study concludes that synthetic data, specifically from CTGAN, can serve as a viable alternative to real data in contexts where privacy is a paramount concern, such as in training AI systems with EHRs. It also highlights the importance of tailored synthetic data solutions depending on the requirements of the use case and the characteristics of the original data.

Verification is an important instrument in the analysis of systems. Roughly, this means that requirements and designs are analyzed formally to determine their relationships. Various candidates for formalizing system development and integration have been proposed. However, a major obstacle is that these introduce non-standard objects and formalisms, leading to severe confusion. This is because these models often are unnecessarily complicated with several disadvantages regarding semantics as well as complexity. While avoiding the mathematical details as far as possible, we present some basic verification ideas using a simple language such as predicate logic and demonstrate how this can be used for defining and analyzing static and dynamic requirement fulfillment by designs as well as for detecting conflicts. The formalities can be found in the appendix.

In democratic societies there is widespread acknowledgment of the need to incorporate citizens' input in decision-making processes in more or less structured ways. But participatory decision making is balancing on the borders of inclusion, structure, precision and accuracy. To simply enable more participation will not yield enhanced democracy, and there is a clear need for more elaborated elicitation and decision analytical tools. This rigorous and thought-provoking volume draws on a stimulating variety of international case studies, from flood risk management in the Red River Delta of Vietnam.

This empirical study focuses on online collaboration and social interaction in temporary group formations. A case study of a massive multiplayer online game World of Warcraft explores these issues. Within this context little attention has been paid to temporary collaboration groups. The phenomenon is analyzed using interaction data complemented with interview data, forum data and consideration of game design.

We found two main types of interaction, sociable and instrumental, but investment in the social situation was exceedingly little. We conclude that the low levels of social interaction observed are the result of a game design that makes the cost of social play high and restricts the available space for players to act within the designed architecture of the game, thus limiting the possibilities for played sociality. The connection between designed and played sociality is crucial for understanding online collaboration as it shapes online social worlds and therefore users’ experiences within this social context.

This study explores how rationalization logic and rationalization processes influence digital gaming by looking at how players value and manage the time they spend on games. The study is framed in a discussion of leisure time, critical theories of computation and rationalization theory. Qualitative interview data is used in an inductive and phenomenology inspired approach. The results show two frames of understanding of gaming. First, games are perceived as media products and playing as a waste of time. Secondly, digital gaming is a hobby, a social activity highly valued within the framework of a rational time economy. We conclude that even though we are seeing a rationalization of leisure time in gaming, that rationalization process must be understood in the context of individualization within the new network society. This means that players are involved in a 'rational individualization' process where their management of leisure time and gaming activities are part of an ongoing identity project.

Narrative has been central to psychoanalysis from its inception. What has been explored less is the relationship between psychotherapy and interactive narrative. In particular, narrative therapy is a well-established practice in psychotherapy which shares central concerns with interactive narrative research and practice. In this paper, we explore the foundational role of narrative in psychotherapy and consider its interactive aspect. Then, we identify the overlap between interactive narratives and narrative therapy, and identify interactive narrative works which use this potential for therapeutic purposes. We also describe a concrete implementation, the board game Mind Stories, and introduce the concept of interactive narrative therapy.

Business-IT alignment (BITA) continues to be a top management concern. It generally refers to a preferred condition in which the relationship between business and IT is optimised to maximise the business value of IT. Early approaches in both research and practice have focused on the role of IT in supporting business strategies. Today, a more extended approach of BITA has been embraced that recognises soft factors that are related to people and culture issues at both tactical and operational levels of organisations. ‘Why alignment is important’ is not the crucial question today. In fact ‘how it can be achieved and matured’ is the real concern of business executives. There exists a number of theoretical models for conceptualising BITA, however, they have different focuses and contain different BITA components. Therefore, there is a need for a means of supporting practitioners for selecting an appropriate model.

Furthermore, there is a need for a more practice-oriented research that target higher maturity of BITA by understanding the organisational context, including barriers that hinders BITA and the mutual relationships between organisational culture and BITA. Thus, the overall problem addressed in the thesis is the following: In spite of extensive literature on business-IT alignment, there is still limited maturity of business-IT alignment in practice due to the limited knowledge on barriers that hinder BITA achievement from practitioners’ perspective, on the means for supporting the selection of an appropriate model for assessing BITA, and on mutual relationships between BITA and organisational culture.

Based on this research problem, five research objectives were developed. The first two objectives corresponded to barriers to achieving BITA and supporting the selection of BITA model respectively. The remaining three objectives corresponded to the two unidirectional influences between BITA and organisational culture (OC) and to the mutual relationships between them respectively. Different research methodologies and strategies were applied to achieve the research objectives, including qualitative and quantitative studies as well as design science.

The results presented in the thesis, each corresponding to an objective, are the following: 

• A list of barriers that practitioners can use as a basis for better achievement of BITA, a better focus on strategic vs. tactical barriers, and their relationships to BITA components.
• An evaluation framework that supports practitioners in selecting appropriate BITA models for assessing and modelling BITA.
• An extended version of the strategic alignment model (SAM) of Luftman (2000), which considers organisational culture.
• An analysis of the impact of BITA components on organisational culture profiles.
• A BITA-organisational culture integrated view that supports decision-makers in facilitating decisions regarding both BITA and organisational culture.

The results of the research provide both theoretical and empirical contributions to the business-IT alignment research and practice.