 TUTORIAL
Industrial Ecosystems as a Responsible Autonomy in a Networked World
Lecturer:
Mihaela Ulieru - Canada Research Chair, Canada
John Verdon - Department of National Defense, Canada Hardware to software to ‘Everyware’ – the future ‘Internet of things’ will enable spontaneous creation of global enterprises as ecosystems merged seamlessly into a forever growing open market economy, in which dynamic adaptation and seamless evolution are equivalent to survival. In such ‘opportunistic industrial ecosystems’ single devices / departments / enterprises become part of a larger and more complex infrastructure dynamically combining the individual properties or attributes of single entities to achieve an emergent desired behaviour of the ecosystem. Linked by eNetworks the Global Collaborative Ecosystem becomes more and more hybrid, inclusive and capable of almost everything imaginable… Where are the limits of the impossible? And are we ready to touch them with the same daring attitude which fuels our drive to push continuously the technological frontiers of the informatics side of the ‘INDIN equation’?
To truly leverage and benefit from the advances in network technologies significant effort must be invested in transforming the design principles of human organisation and to understanding the ‘people dimension’ a.k.a. the cultural and institutional implications of the mechanisms driving decentralisation in the networked economy. The task (and plague!) of ‘eternal transformation’ that accompanies accelerating change and technological innovation calls for an ongoing demand to not only 'run the organisation’ but to 'change the organisation' constantly, making every effort to accommodate periods of extreme change.
This tutorial explores the transition from the command and control (C2) structure and culture of the traditional hierarchy – as backbone of last Century’s Industrial Revolution - towards the eNetworked Industrial Ecosystem – as backbone for this Century’s on-going IT-Revolution. Socio-cultural and economic contextual variables that may help or hinder the implementation of a heterarchical organisation driven by responsible autonomy, are analysed underlining the paradox hidden in the ‘emergent’ nature of an eNetworked organisation. We illustrate how, within the classical ‘top-down’ managerial approach, the very power of initiative that can leverage ‘bottom-up’ clustering of resources to address dynamic organisational goals - is hindered - to conclude that a deep culture of trust and collaboration can unleash this power enabling the untapped ‘mystery’ of complexity to be used as a competitive advantage.
Biography
Professor Mihaela Ulieru has held the Canada Research Chair in Adaptive Information Infrastructures for the e-Society since 2005 when she also established (with Canada Foundation for Innovation funding) and leads the Adaptive Risk Management Laboratory (ARM Lab) researching complex networks as control paradigm for complex systems to develop evolvable architectures for resilient e-networked applications and holistic security ecosystems. She was recently appointed on Canada's Science, Technology and Innovation Council by the Minister of Industry, to advise the government and provide foresight on innovation issues related to ICT impact on Canada's economic development and social well-being against international standards of excellence. She has a PhD in Diagnostics and Controls of Dynamical Systems, from Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany and was on the Faculty at Brunel University in London, UK and at the University of Calgary in Canada where she held the Junior Nortel Chair in Intelligent Manufacturing and founded the Emergent Information Systems Lab. 
TUTORIAL
Data Ecosystems: Repositories in Digital Ecosystems
Lecturers:
Tobias Blanke - King's College London, UK
Mark Hedges - King's College London, UK The tutorial is motivated by the potential of a cluster of related technologies that address the management of digital assets in digital libraries or repositories within digital ecosystems, and by the benefits that will be obtained by increasing interaction and cooperation between researchers and practitioners in these fields. The digital material generated from and used by academic and other researchers is to an increasing extent being held in formal data management systems. These systems are variously categorised as digital repositories, libraries or archives, although the distinction between them relates more to the sort of data they contain and the use to which the data is put, rather than to major differences in functionality. In this tutorial, Tobias and Mark will present the general model of repository applications and will demonstrate several systems that use these principles to enable exploration of large data sets. The tutorial will cover the state of the art in this rapidly growing area of research. Several real world applications will be presented, which take the first steps towards a data ecosystem for research and business.
Biographies
Tobias Blanke is a Research Fellow at the Centre for e-Research of King's College London. He leads the technical work package for DARIAH, a large European project to create an integrated research infrastructure and digital repository for arts and humanities and cultural heritage data. Prior to joining CeRch, he was working for an international investment bank, where he was lead developer in a project to migrate a data warehouse reporting application. In his research, Tobias specialises in data and information management, digital libraries and information retrieval.
Mark Hedges is Deputy Director of the Centre for e-Research (CeRch) at King's College London, and formerly of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), which was also hosted at King's. He has managed a number of R&D projects in the fields of digital repositories, information modelling and data grids. Current activities include a project to identify and specify common interfaces for repository interoperability; an EPSRC Network Grant addressing digital repositories in e-Science; and the development of a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary research infrastructure for KCL. Prior to becoming involved in the fields of digital repositories and research infrastructures, he worked for 17 years in the software industry, taking the technical lead on a number of large-scale development projects for industrial and commercial clients. As well as his research interests, he has extensive experience of turning ideas and technologies into production systems that fulfil real world requirements in demanding environments. His academic background is in mathematics and philosophy and, more recently, in Byzantine studies. 
TUTORIAL
TextGrid
Lecturer - Marc Wilhelm Küster - University for Applied Sciences in Worms, Germany TextGrid, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), aims to create a community grid for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts. It forms a cornerstone in the emerging eHumanities. Building on existing expertise in the field of eScience and advancing towards the Semantic Grid, TextGrid partners are developing a comprehensive toolset for researchers in philology, linguistics and related fields. Reaching out to the academic community, the project establishes a digital ecosystem for eHumanities research that is both part of the larger German D-Grid initiative and linked through open interfaces to other eHumanities frameworks around the globe.
This TextGrid tutorial will provide an overview on the infrastructure of the TextGrid ecosystem, followed by a hands-on introduction to the development of new agents, the integration of new data sources and the use and population of service registries. Not only will this tutorial be relevant to eHumanities researchers but also to other disciplines that want to study the practicalities of the design of a domain-specific digital ecosystem that is still part of a larger ecosystem of ecosystems.
Biography
Marc Küster is Professor for XML-related Technologies and Web Services at the department for Computer Science at the University for Applied Sciences in Worms, Germany. He holds a diploma in physics and a master in literary studies and history and has long worked at the crossroads of IT and philology. His doctoral thesis Geordnetes Weltbild deals with the cultural history of alphabetic ordering from its beginning to present day treatment in computer systems. Küster heads the Worms’ team in the TextGrid consortium on grid-based tools for TEI-encoded editions, dictionaries and corpora and is of particular interested in interoperability issues and the application of the digital ecosystem paradigm in humanities. Küster is chairman of the CEN/TC304 ‘European Localisation Requirements’, CEN/ISSS Cultural Diversity Focus Group (CDFG) and serves on various national, European and international committees. |
Tutorials