Enabled

Discusses open systems, object orientation, software agents, domain-specific languages, component architectures, as well as the dramatic IT-enabled improvements in memory, communication, and processing resources that are now available for sophisticated control algorithms to exploit. Useful for practitioners and researchers in the fields of real-time systems, aerospace engineering, embedded systems, and artificial intelligence.

This book reports on cutting-edge research and advances in the field of intelligent vehicle systems. It presents a broad range of AI-enabled technologies, with a focus on automated, autonomous and connected vehicle systems. It covers advanced machine learning technologies, including deep and reinforcement learning algorithms, transfer learning and learning from big data, as well as control theory applied to mobility and vehicle systems. Furthermore, it reports on cutting-edge technologies for environmental perception and vehicle-to-everything (V2X), discussing socioeconomic and environmental implications, and aspects related to human factors and energy-efficiency alike, of automated mobility. Gathering chapters written by renowned researchers and professionals, this book offers a good balance of theoretical and practical knowledge. It provides researchers, practitioners and policy makers with a comprehensive and timely guide on the field of autonomous driving technologies.

In today’s dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agility as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time to market, and to ensure business IT alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged—so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems, case handling tools, and service orchestration engines. With this book, Reichert and Weber address these flexibility needs and provide an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle (i.e., modeling, configuration, execution and evolution). Their presentation is divided into six parts. Part I starts with an introduction of fundamental PAIS concepts and establishes the context of process flexibility in the light of practical scenarios. Part II focuses on flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the field of business process management (BPM). Part III details flexibility support for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time. Part IV deals with user- and data-driven processes, which aim at a tight integration of processes and data, and hence enable an increased flexibility compared to traditional PAIS. Part V introduces existing technologies and systems for the realization of a flexible PAIS. Finally, Part VI summarizes the main ideas of this book and gives an outlook on advanced flexibility issues. The book’s target groups include researchers, PhD students and Master students in the field of information systems. After reading the book, they will better understand PAIS flexibility aspects. To support the easy use as a textbook, a series of exercises is provided at the end of each chapter and slides and further teaching material are available on the book’s web site www.flexible-processes.com. Professionals specializing in business process management (BPM) who want to obtain a good understanding of flexibility challenges in BPM and state-of-the-art solutions will also benefit from the presentations of open source as well as commercial process management systems and related practical scenarios.

Private enterprises in advanced economies have been learning to use information and communication technology (ICT) to innovate and transform their processes, products, services and business models, significantly improving productivity and competitiveness. Moreover, the ICT industry itself has become a major source of job creation and a contributor to economic growth and business transformation. A key question today is whether and how developing countries can learn to benefit from the ICT revolution, and what roles the government and private sector can play. Already, a number of developing countries have been inspired by the example of India and China, and are now seeking to jump on the outsourcing bandwagon. Nevertheless, with few exceptions in the developing world, little attention has been paid by policymakers and practitioners to invest systematically and proactively in ICT-enabled growth, poverty reduction and grassroots innovation. Most communities and small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries, for example, face multiple constraints to adopting and leveraging this general purpose technology, and lack the capabilities for maximizing its potential. In "Enabling Enterprise Transformation", Nagy Hanna draws on his rich experience of over 35 years at the World Bank and other aid agencies as a development strategist and ICT policy expert, the most current research, and best practices from around the world to provide practical tools for promoting economic and social transformation through ICT. He assesses various initiatives to develop and diffuse ICT, such as innovation funds, incubators, parks, public-private partnerships, and comprehensive promotion programs. He argues for the strategic options now open for developing countries to participate in ICT production, to deploy ICT to transform industries and services, and to leverage ICT as a new national infrastructure for improving the business environment and enhancing the competitiveness of the whole economy. The challenge for leaders in developing countries is to create such social and institutional dynamics for learning about ICT use and adaptation at many levels. Lessons gained so far from programs to build these social learning and innovation capabilities at the institutional and grassroots levels should be shared among developing countries, and a dialogue among business leaders, policymakers, development agencies, educational institutions, and the general citizenry must be advanced.

In recent decades churches have accommodated people with disabilities in various ways. Through access ramps and elevators and sign language, disabled persons are invited in to worship. But are they actually enfolded into the church's mission? Have the able-bodied come to recognize and appreciate the potential contributions of people with disabilities in the ministry and witness of the church? Benjamin Conner wants to stimulate a new conversation between disability studies and Christian theology and missiology. How can we shape a new vision of the entire body of Christ sharing in the witness of the church? How would it look if we "disabled" Christian theology, discipleship, and theological education? Conner argues that it would in fact enable congregational witness. He has seen it happen and he shows us how. Imagine a church that fully incorporates persons with disabilities into its mission and witness. In this vision, people with disabilities contribute to the church’s pluriform witness, and the congregation embodies a robust hermeneutic of the gospel. Picture the entire body of Christ functioning beyond distinctions of dis/ability, promoting mutual flourishing and growing into fullness. Here is an enlargement of the church’s witness as a sign, agent, and foretaste of the kingdom of God. Here is a fresh and inspiring look at the mission of the church when it enfolds people with disabilities as full members. Missiological Engagements charts interdisciplinary and innovative trajectories in the history, theology, and practice of Christian mission, featuring contributions by leading thinkers from both the Euro-American West and the majority world whose missiological scholarship bridges church, academy, and society.

Regarding online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads, IBM® z SystemsTM platform, with IBM DB2®, data sharing, Workload Manager (WLM), geoplex, and other high-end features, is the widely acknowledged leader. Most customers now integrate business analytics with OLTP by running, for example, scoring functions from transactional context for real-time analytics or by applying machine-learning algorithms on enterprise data that is kept on the mainframe. As a result, IBM adds investment so clients can keep the complete lifecycle for data analysis, modeling, and scoring on z Systems control in a cost-efficient way, keeping the qualities of services in availability, security, reliability that z Systems solutions offer. Because of the changed architecture and tighter integration, IBM has shown, in a customer proof-of-concept, that a particular client was able to achieve an orders-of-magnitude improvement in performance, allowing that client's data scientist to investigate the data in a more interactive process. Open technologies, such as Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) can help customers update single components instead of being forced to replace everything at once. As a result, you have the possibility to combine your preferred tool for model generation (such as SAS Enterprise Miner or IBM SPSS® Modeler) with a different technology for model scoring (such as Zementis, a company focused on PMML scoring). IBM SPSS Modeler is a leading data mining workbench that can apply various algorithms in data preparation, cleansing, statistics, visualization, machine learning, and predictive analytics. It has over 20 years of experience and continued development, and is integrated with z Systems. With IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator 5.1 and SPSS Modeler 17.1, the possibility exists to do the complete predictive model creation including data transformation within DB2 Analytics Accelerator. So, instead of moving the data to a distributed environment, algorithms can be pushed to the data, using cost-efficient DB2 Accelerator for the required resource-intensive operations. This IBM Redbooks® publication explains the overall z Systems architecture, how the components can be installed and customized, how the new IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator loader can help efficient data loading for z Systems data and external data, how in-database transformation, in-database modeling, and in-transactional real-time scoring can be used, and what other related technologies are available. This book is intended for technical specialists and architects, and data scientists who want to use the technology on the z Systems platform. Most of the technologies described in this book require IBM DB2 for z/OS®. For acceleration of the data investigation, data transformation, and data modeling process, DB2 Analytics Accelerator is required. Most value can be achieved if most of the data already resides on z Systems platforms, although adding external data (like from social sources) poses no problem at all.

Service-oriented computing is an emerging factor in IT research and development. Organizations like W3C and the EU have begun research projects to develop industrial-strength applications. This book offers a thorough, practical introduction to one of the most promising approaches – the Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO). After a brief review of technologies and standards of the Worldwide Web, the Semantic Web, and Web Services, the book examines WSMO from the fundamentals to applications in e-commerce, e-government and e-banking; it also describes its relation to OWL-S and WSDL-S and other applications. The book offers an up-to-date introduction, plus pointers to future applications.