infonet-economy

Credit Commons is an infrastructure, aiming to link existing and new communities in an open, grassroots, intercommunity value exchange environment. This paper aims to demonstrate that an infrastructure for intra and inter community exchange cannot be considered, merely as a technological project. It needs to be founded on a sociotechnical approach and deployed within an inclusive approach ensuring the early engagement of users and communities, as well as, other organisations such as academic institutions. Credit Commons comes to reinforce existing currency interchange hub solutions (Huber et Martignoni, 2013) having Switzerland as their initial center of activities. In this sense, the Credit Commons infrastructure would operate on three areas developed in this paper: Firstly, explaining the concept of mutual credit in a credit commons infrastructure. inclusive, crosscommunity participation, based on local communities accounting systems and mutual credit principles. Business entities engaging in bartering, online payments and transactions services, timebanks, LETS each with their respective time management systems are possible Credit Commons nodes. Secondly, mapping and discussing on the Credit Commons community. This part is looking closer to what kind of pilots and communities would be interested to use this infrastructure. The Credit Commons propose an inclusive design methodology, integrating a horizontal gender approach on Credit Common’s impact, social metrics and evaluation Thirdly, early deploying the open protocol layer as the backbone of the Credit Commons, where the aforementioned entities develop their activities. CoWaBoo is a protocol aiming to provide a sociotechnical section in between an early technical implementation of a intercommunity transactions protocol, confronted to group formation, knowledge curation and redocumentation of results in distributed, blockchain, architectures. This paper will end with a short discussion on the promise of a more transparent complexity that protocols based on blockchain and smart contracts bring with them. We are entering a new era of possibilities, and responsibilities, where sociotechnical tools will be conditioning both to our understanding and acting in it.

The marketing education community is well suited to be a leader in online education and the internet has proven a powerful tool in teaching a variety of marketing courses. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are one of the fastest growing approaches to teaching and learning in the new digital paradigm. They are categorized either as cMOOCs following a connectivist approach, or as xMOOCs based on behaviorist principles. In xMOOC environments, forums, if they function as a community, may however play a real connectivist role. This paper builds on the criteria of Herring (2004) in order to determine the existence and dynamics of a community in a Marketing MOOC. In a connectivist approach, forum participants request help, answer questions, discuss concepts and techniques and suggest application and additional learning material, thus co-creating knowledge. In today’s online teaching methods, users are included in multi-way processes which are not well accounted for in the literature often describing one-way processes. These dynamics may be key in ensuring a strong and well-functioning learning community. This research questions the existence of a clear distinction between cMOOCs and xMOOCs. It also observes that equal gender roles in marketing classes don’t seem to be replicated in MOOC environments, i.e. female participants appear to adopt lower profiles in MOOC forums.

BiTeM/SIB Text Mining (http://bitem.hesge.ch/) is a University re-search group carrying over activities in semantic and text analytics applied to health and life sciences. This paper reports on the participation of our team at the CLEF eHealth 2016 evaluation lab. The processing applied to each evaluation corpus (QUAREO and CépiDC) was originally very similar. Our method is based on an Au-tomatic Text Categorization (ATC) system. First, the system is set with a specific input ontology (French UMLS), and ATC assigns a rank list of related concepts to each document received in input. Then, a second module relocates all of the positive matches in the text, and normalizes the extracted entities. For the CépiDC corpus, the system was loaded with the Swiss ICD-10 GM thesaurus. However a late minute data transformation issue forced us to implement an ad hoc solution based on simple pat-tern matching to comply with the constraints of the CépiDC challenge. We obtained an average precision of 62% on the QUAREO entity extraction (over MEDLINE/EMEA texts, and exact/inexact), 48% on normalizing this entities, and 59% on the CépiDC subtask. Enhancing the recall by expanding the coverage of the terminologies could be an interesting approach to improve this system at moderate labour costs.

As institutions of public service, libraries play a major role in providing a democratic and egalitarian access to information and culture. Their missions are defined in several manifestos and codes of ethics (UNESCO, 1994; IFLA, 2012; IFLA, 2014). In such a context, integration of digital resources into libraries collections has created new difficulties, due to: - the complexity of organising and making these contents easily available; - visibility and promotion aspects. This, not only because the mission of libraries cover access to every kind of resources, digital or not, but also because it is one of the patrons’ expectations. Based on the results of a research project held in collaboration with some french and swiss libraries (Epron, Pouchot, Dillaerts and Prinz, 2014; Pouchot, Vieux, Peregrina, 2015), the aim of the poster is to set out some solutions to better integrate ebooks solutions into libraries’ offer and to optimise the communication actions about this kind of resources. Our suggestions are divided into two kinds of recommendations: on one hand, those dealing with content access, on the other hand, the ones regarding communication. First, patrons may have difficulties to identify, find, access and read ebooks. Their needs and wishes here may concern the devices as well as the content selection and providing. We encourage libraries to: - Supply the patrons with preloaded reading devices; - Offer personalised access to ebooks; - Propose downloadable lists of ebooks. For example, specific contents can be selected according to topics such as civic engagement or social development. Then, given that ebooks have appeared quite recently in libraries’ collections and that this kind of resources are intangible, this offer is often little-known by patrons. Furthermore, users do not always have sufficient technical and informational knowledge to access and read ebooks. Thus, it is necessary to inform them about: - the simple fact that this digital offer exists; - the scope of the offer; - technical aspects and constraints linked to these digital documents’ use (e.g. formats, devices, access protocols…); the support provided by their library (help, training, workshops…). Some actions can be undertaken to develop the ebooks’ potential and use: - To deliver appropriate and accurate information about ebooks by developing new services based on information literacy, use of ebooks and digital reading devices advice ; - To train patrons and to encourage them to self-study in this field ; - To efficiently communicate to highlight ebooks. In this way, libraries should offer a wide access to knowledge, regardless the medium, especially since digital contents break down physical barriers and can reach people with disabilities or far from (digital) reading (elders, prisoners…).

Space-time is a profound concept in physics. This concept was shown to be useful for dimensionality reduction. We present basic definitions with interesting counter-intuitions. We give theoretical propositions to show that space-time is a more powerful representation than Euclidean space. We apply this concept to manifold learning for preserving local information. Empirical results on nonmetric datasets show that more information can be preserved in space-time.

We develop a functional learning approach to modelling systems of time series which preserves the ability of standard linear time-series models (VARs) to uncover the Granger-causality links in between the series of the system while allowing for richer functional relationships. We propose a framework for learning multiple output-kernels associated with multiple input-kernels over a structured input space and outline an algorithm for simultaneous learning of the kernels with the model parameters with various forms of regularization including non-smooth sparsity inducing norms. We present results of synthetic experiments illustrating the benefits of the described approach.

This study aims to examine the impact of an Integrated Financial System (ERP system) implementation on accountant profiles in Swiss public administrations. ERP systems are widely researched by authors and are described as a form of change driver. Conversely, the types of changes and, more specifically, the consequences on accountants’ profiles are not studied and are therefore the core of our investigation. The methodology used in this study was based on the completion of a large survey allowing for statistical analysis and is focused on the necessary knowledge and skill sets of accountants working with an ERP system. In this survey, we brought to light new information about the current skill sets needed by accountants using an ERP system to improve the work of this profession and, therefore, to enhance the performance of finance and accounting staff and the quality of information supplied by public administrators. The results allowed us to design the profile of an accountant working with an ERP system in the public sector. In particular, the study examined knowledge and skill sets, as well as educational background and professional experience. Moreover, the criteria that impacted the ERP system users’ satisfaction were identified, and these findings especially provided practical implications for public sector CFOs. Finally, we highlighted the crucial need for continuous education in accounting and the necessity to reconsider and adapt the job descriptions of accounting and finance staff when they work with an ERP system.

We investigated two strategies for improving Information Retrieval thanks to incoming and outgoing citations. We first started from settings that worked last year and established a baseline. Then, we tried to rerank this run. The incoming citations’ strategy was to compute the number of incoming citations in PubMed Central, and to boost the score of the articles that were the most cited. The outgoing citations’ strategy was to promote the references of the retrieved documents. Unfortunately, no significant improvement from the baseline was observed.

The need for domain knowledge representation for program comprehension is now widely accepted in the program comprehension community. The so-called "concept assignment problem" represents the challenge to locate domain concepts in the source code of programs. The vast majority of attempts to solve it are based on static source code search for clues to domain concepts. In contrast, our approach is based on dynamic analysis using information retrieval (IR) metrics. First we explain how we modeled the domain concepts and their role in program comprehension. Next we present how some of the popular IR metrics could be adapted to the "concept assignment problem" and the way we implemented the search engine. Then we present our own metric and the performance of these metrics to retrieve domain concepts in source code. The contribution of the paper is to show how the IR metrics could be applied to the "concept assignment problem" when the "documents" to retrieve are domain concepts structured in an ontology.