Multimedia conferencing has been an important topic in recent years, because of the urgent requirement of high quality multi-party communications. There are various conferencing frameworks using different methods: H.323-based conferencing has already applied in use; SIP-based conferencing is emerging in market gradually. While centralized conferencing is becoming mature, distributed conferencin...

Within both economics and computer science, many authors have claimed that decentralized or market-based approaches to decision-making are superior in general to centralized approaches. The contrary claim has also been made. Unfortunately, these claims are often supported only by informal or anecdotal evidence. In order to assess these competing claims, we present a review of the literatures in...

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Digital platforms are disruptive information technology (IT) artifacts that erode conventional business logic associated with traditional market structures. This paper presents a framework for examining the disruptive potential of digital platforms whereby we postulate that the strategic interplay of governance regimes and platform layers is deterministic of whether disruptive derivatives are p...

This paper addresses the tension between benefits of centralized data control against the benefits of decentralized control at the level of the business unit. Centralized data control provides the benefit of uniform standards whereas business unit data control grants flexibility to react to rapidly changing environments. Many data standardization efforts fail because they do not fully take into...

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) facilitate a new paradigm to structural identification and monitoring for civil infrastructure. Conventional structural monitoring systems based on wired sensors and centralized data acquisition systems are costly for installation as well as maintenance. WSNs have emerged as a technology that can overcome such difficulties, making deployment of a dense array of s...

The rooted delay-constrained minimum spanning tree problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem arising for example in the design of centralized broadcasting networks where quality of service constraints are of concern. We present a construction heuristic based on Kruskal’s algorithm for finding a minimum cost spanning tree which eliminates some drawbacks of existing heuristic metho...

The south central Andes is known as a region of enduring multiethnic diversity, yet it is also the cradle of one the South America's first successful expansive-state societies. Social structures that encouraged the maintenance of separate identities among coexistent ethnic groups may explain this apparent contradiction. Although the early expansion of the Tiwanaku state (A.D. 600-1000) is often...

P2P-networks become more and more interesting not only because of the emergence of file sharing systems like Gnutella. Such decentralized systems have a lot of advantages compared to centralized client-server systems. The organization of reliable topological structures of such networks is a central issue for normal operations and effective information search. However, the application of the cen...

In this paper we present a hybrid reputation model focused on organizational structures that attempts to solve problems associated with both centralized and decentralized reputation models. Agents in our approach are able not only to evaluate the behavior of others and store reputations values but also to send such information to a centralized mechanism and ask for reputations to this one and t...