Advancements and Challenges towards a Collaborative Framework for 3D Tele-Immersive Social Networking

Social experiences realized through teleconferencing systems are still quite different from face to face meetings. The awareness that we are online and in a, to some extent, lesser real world are preventing us from really engaging and enjoying the event. Several reasons account for these differences and have been identified. We think it is now time to bridge these gaps and propose inspiring and innovative solutions in order to provide realistic, believable and engaging online experiences. We present a distributed and scalable framework named REVERIE that faces these challenges and provides a mix of these solutions. Applications built on top of the framework will be able to provide interactive, truly immersive, photo-realistic experiences to a multitude of users that for them will feel much more similar to having face to face meetings than the experience offered by conventional teleconferencing systems.

Regional Knowledge Maps - Potential and Challenges

Regional knowledge map is a tool recently demanded by some actors in an institutional level to help regional policy and innovation in a territory. Besides, knowledge maps facilitate the interaction between the actors of a territory and the collective learning. This paper reports the work in progress of a research project which objective is to define a methodology to efficiently design territorial knowledge maps, by extracting information of big volumes of data contained in diverse sources of information related to a region. Knowledge maps facilitate management of the intellectual capital in organisations. This paper investigates the value to apply this tool to a territorial region to manage the structures, infrastructures and the resources to enable regional innovation and regional development. Their design involves the identification of information sources that are required to find which knowledge is located in a territory, which actors are involved in innovation, and which is the context to develop this innovation (structures, infrastructures, resources and social capital). This paper summarizes the theoretical background and framework for the design of a methodology for the construction of knowledge maps, and gives an overview of the main challenges for the design of regional knowledge maps.

Challenges and Potentials for Keyword Extraction from Company Websites for the Development of Regional Knowledge Maps

Regional Innovation Systems describe the relations between actors, structures and infrastructures in a region in order to stimulate innovation and regional development. For these systems the collection and organization of information is crucial. In the present paper we investigate the possibilities to extract information from websites of companies. First we describe regional innovation systems and the information types that are necessary to create them. Then we discuss the possibilities of text mining and keyword extraction techniques to extract this information from company websites. Finally, we describe a small scale experiment in which keywords related to economic sectors and commodities are extracted from the websites of over 200 companies. This experiment shows what the main challenges are for information extraction from websites for regional innovation systems.

Challenges and Opportunities in Healthcare Volunteer Management: Insights from Volunteer Administrators

Volunteer administrators from 105 hospitals in five states in the northeast and southern United States provided open-ended survey responses about what they perceived to be the most pressing challenges and opportunities facing healthcare volunteer management. Taken together, these 105 hospitals used a total of 39,008 volunteers and 5.3 million volunteer hours during a 12-month period between 2010 and 2011. A qualitative content analysis of administrator responses suggests that primary challenges include volunteer recruitment and retention, administrative issues, and operational difficulties brought about by the current economic crisis. Key opportunities include more explicitly linking the volunteer function to hospital outcomes and community impact, expanding volunteer recruitment pools and roles and jobs, and developing organizational support for volunteers and making the volunteer management function more efficient and effective.

Reform, Standards and Teacher Identity: Challenges of Sustaining Commitment

Teacher commitment has been found to be a critical predictor of teachers’ work performance, absenteeism, retention, burnout and turnover, as well as having an important influence on students’ motivation, achievement, attitudes towards learning and being at school (Firestone (1996). Educational Administration Quarterly, 32(2), 209–235; Graham (1996). Journal of Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, 67(1), 45–47; Louis (1998). School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 9(1), 1–27; Tsui & Cheng (1999). Educational Research and Evaluation, 5(3), 249–268). It is also a necessary ingredient to the successful implementation, adaptation or resistance reform agendas. Surprisingly, however, the relationship between teachers’ motivation, efficacy, job satisfaction and commitment, and between commitment and the quality of their work has not been the subject of extensive research. Some literature presents commitment as a feature of being and behaving as a professional (Helsby, Knight, McCulloch, Saunders, & Warburton (1997). A report to participants on the professional cultures of Teachers Research Project, Lancaster University, January). Others suggest that it fluctuates according to personal, institutional and policy contexts (Louis (1998). School Effectiveness and School Improvement, 9(1), 1–27) and identify different dimensions of commitment which interact and fluctuate (Tyree (1996). Journal of Educational Research, 89(5), 295–304). Others claim that teachers’ commitment tends to decrease progressively over the course of the teaching career (Fraser, Draper, & Taylor (1998). Evaluation and Research in Education, 12 (2), 61–71; Huberman (1993). The lives of teachers. London: Cassell). In this research, experienced teachers in England and Australia were interviewed about their understandings of commitment. The data suggest that commitment may be better understood as a nested phenomena at the centre of which is a set of core, relatively permanent values based upon personal beliefs, images of self, role and identity which are subject to challenge by change which is socio-politically constructed.

Achieving human security through UN human rights law: prospects and challenges

This paper explores the prospects and challenges of achieving human security through United Nations (UN) human rights law. The paper does not aim to pronounce definitively on the achievement of human security by way of UN human rights law that is, to assess the achievement of human security per se 'as a future end state'. Rather the focus of the paper is firmly placed on the capacity of UN human rights law to achieve human security. The paper departs from the premise that if human rights define human security, international human rights law and UN human rights law in particular should have something to say about the achievement of human security.

The challenges of integrating the discussion of controversial issues in initial teacher training

In the framework of the Bologna process, and with regard to pre-service teacher education, it is necessary to model student-centred learning experiences in order to promote the required competences for future professional practice and critical participation in society. Despite the potential of discussion in promoting several competences, this methodology does not always integrate the teaching practices. This case study sought to: a) understand the experiences and views of future teachers from a School of Education on the use of discussion in their past education; and b) investigate the impact of an educational experience centred on discussion. Data were collected through narratives, questionnaires, interviews and participant observation. The learning situations experienced through this study contributed to the development of citizens more aware of their role in society and allowed the promotion of skills indispensable for an Elementary Education teacher.

Chancen und herausforderungen der rückversicherung in der gesetzlichen krankenversicherung (Chances and challenges of reinsurance in the social health scheme)

In 2009 a so-called morbidity orientated risk structure equalization scheme was installed for the German statutory health insurance in order to minimize structural differences between different providers with respect to revenue and expenditures. Even with this mechanism some risks to the individual health insurance providers remain. Reinsurance could be a way to mitigate these risks, but so far only very few contracts have been signed. Moreover the existing reinsurance contracts only focus on the periphery of the statutory health insurance system such as travel health insurance. In this article we therefore analyse existing risks for individual health insurance providers and evaluate their (re-)insurability. Hereafter the potential for reinsurance solutions in the German statutory health insurance itself as well as in newer forms of healthcare provision (e.g. integrated health care and managed care) is discussed. We find that reinsurance may be a reasonable solution for many of the risks in the statutory health insurance scheme. But as research in this area is very young further analysis of the nature of risks is necessary.

"One of our hosts in another country": Challenges of data geolocation in cloud storage

Physical location of data in cloud storage is an increasingly urgent problem. In a short time, it has evolved from the concern of a few regulated businesses to an important consideration for many cloud storage users. One of the characteristics of cloud storage is fluid transfer of data both within and among the data centres of a cloud provider. However, this has weakened the guarantees with respect to control over data replicas, protection of data in transit and physical location of data. This paper addresses the lack of reliable solutions for data placement control in cloud storage systems. We analyse the currently available solutions and identify their shortcomings. Furthermore, we describe a high-level architecture for a trusted, geolocation-based mechanism for data placement control in distributed cloud storage systems, which are the basis of an on-going work to define the detailed protocol and a prototype of such a solution. This mechanism aims to provide granular control over the capabilities of tenants to access data placed on geographically dispersed storage units comprising the cloud storage.

Immune responses in Bathymodiolus azoricus upon Vibrio challenges : approaches to characterize mussel survival strategies and physiological adaptations in deep sea extreme environments

Tese de Doutoramento, Ciências do Mar, especialidade de Biologia Marinha, 18 de Dezembro de 2015, Universidade dos Açores.