We study the situation where the members of a community have the choice to participate in the completion of a common task. The process of completing the task involves only costs and no benefits to the individuals that participate in this process. However, completing the task results in changes that significantly benefit the community and that exceed the participation efforts. A task completion ...

Introduction The Twentieth Century has seen efforts to more directly involve individuals in governmental decision-making. A series of policies and methods to accomplish this generally goes under the name of citizen participation. Two threads of thought underlie the notion of citizen participation, individuals as consumers of government services and individuals as citizens with appropriate right...

Based on the promising developments in Cloud Computing technologies in recent years, commercial computing resource services (e.g. Amazon EC2) or software-as-a-service offerings (e.g. Salesforce.com) came into existence. However, the relatively weak business exploitation, participation, and adoption of other Cloud Computing services remain the main challenges. The vague value structures seem to ...

Sentient artefacts are our everyday life objects augmented with various sensors for value added services. We have been exploiting these artefacts for perceiving user context and proving proactive context aware services while keeping their natural appearances and roles intact. From our observations of these artefacts we have identified two passive advantages besides their explicit value added fu...

In future smart grid scenarios, a greater involvement and active participation of customers are desirable in order to integrate renewable energy. Based on today’s electricity tariff schemes an evolutionary process could lead to real-time pricing and a significantly higher frequency of supplier changes. If this becomes reality, the business-to-business processes and the corresponding data exchan...

Many ICT-based tools for supporting democratic participation that have been developed with public funds and applied in pilot projects have not yet achieved large-scale outreach. Optimists still believe this will happen; sceptics doubt. This paper starts from the assumption that technological development and diffusion are largely influenced by socioeconomic conditions. It develops a contingency ...

This paper presents an integrative demand response (DR) mechanism for energy management of appliances, an energy storage system and an electric vehicle (EV) within a home. The paper considers vehicle-to-home (V2H) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functions for energy management of EVs and the degradation cost of the EV battery caused by the V2H/V2G operation in developing the proposed DR mechanism. An...

Emergency response scenarios are characterized by the participation of multiple agencies, which cooperate to control the situation and restore normality. These agencies can come from diverse areas of expertise which entails that they represent knowledge differently, using their own vocabularies and terminologies. This fact complicates the automation of the information-sharing process, creating ...

To increase the interest of a child in motor training we have tried to use a humanoid social robot that acts like a coach to encourage the patient. The humanoid robot "KineTron" was assembled from commercially available Bioloid Premium robotic kit. Nine movement scenarios of robot behaviour combined with voice and music were developed. During the training session, a therapist activates one of t...