How Covid 19 Is Accelerating The Digital Revolution

This book explores how digital technologies have proved to be a useful and necessary tool to help ensure that local and regional governments on the frontline of the emergency can continue to provide essential public services during the COVID-19 crisis. Indeed, as the demand for digital technologies grows, local and regional governments are increasingly committed to improving the lives of their citizens under the principles of privacy, freedom of expression and democracy. The Digital Revolution began between the late 1950s and 1970s and represents the evolution of technology from the mechanical and analog to the digital. The advent of digital technology has also changed how humans communicate – today using computers, smartphones and the internet. Further, the digital revolution has made a tremendous wealth of information accessible to virtually everyone. In turn, the book focuses on key challenges for local and regional governments concerning digital technologies during this crisis, e.g. the balance between privacy and security, the digital divide, and accessibility. Privacy is a challenge in the mitigation of COVID-19, as governments rely on digital technologies like contact-tracking apps and big data to help trace peoples’ patterns and movements. While these methods are controversial and may infringe on rights to privacy, they also appear to be effective measures for rapidly controlling and limiting the spread of the virus. Next, the book discusses the 10 technology trends that can help build a resilient society, as well as their effects on how we do business, how we work, how we produce goods, how we learn, how we seek medical services and how we entertain ourselves. Lastly, the book addresses a range of diversified technologies, e.g. Online Shopping and Robot Deliveries, Digital and Contactless Payments, Remote Work, Distance Learning, Telehealth, Online Entertainment, Supply Chain 4.0, 3D Printing, Robotics and Drones, 5G, and Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

If Ray Kurzweil is correct, the world has experienced more technological change in the last decade than in the whole of the 20th century. This is enough, by itself, to be hugely challenging for most individuals and businesses. However, the systemic change referred to by Kurzweil has been compounded by the onset of first global pandemic in a century. The pandemic had an especially severe impact on the higher education sector where many institutions were providing education to thousands of students using traditional face-to-face, on-campus delivery. Prior to the pandemic, many decision-makers in the sector had recognised that digital technologies, which replaced industrial technologies as the main driver of economic growth around the end of the 20th century, provided the ability to modify this method of delivery to include a significant online component, delivered and accessible from anywhere. However, the power of inertia as well as the risks involved in being a technology leader encouraged all but a few institutions to put the serious introduction of online learning into the "for the future" basket. Hence, the initial reaction when mandated lockdowns necessitated an immediate and total shift to online delivery was generally one of apprehension and even despair.

'It is an absolutely invaluable guide embellished with insightful thoughts and a riveting narrative for digital reengineering that shows how successfully winning enterprises can emerge in the post-COVID world.' -Padma Vibhushan R. Mashelkar, President, Global Research Alliance 'This book by industry leaders, who are partnering with the Government in many ways to achieve the trillion dollar Digital India goal, is an asset for the industry and policymakers.'-Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology 'This book by seasoned practitioners will prove to be a prescription for success for organisations in the post-pandemic Digital Era.'-Dinesh Khara, Chairman, State Bank of India Worldwide business transformation is taking place across multiple industries as organisations are trying to gain a competitive advantage by launching new digital journeys quickly, rapidly and in an agile manner. The COVID-19 transformation and the inexorable push towards a 'new normal' for all processes and businesses will definitely see a complete reimagination of work. Digital reengineering will be the new imperative as technologies swarm into the extended workplace, processes get reengineered, design thinking enables a complete rearchitecting of the customer and other stakeholder journeys and touchpoints, and new skills and cultural change become the new imperative for human resource functions as well as the C-suite of all corporations. Through this book, CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and CDOs of organisations, who have embarked on the journey of digital transformation but have not been able to fully realise the benefits, will gain insights on aligning their existing investment with newer initiatives, as well as develop a proper roadmap for their digital future. Through the plans and deeds of real-life examples of those who have attempted and achieved digital acceleration on their own or in client organisations, readers will learn the proper methods of creating multiple digital accelerators, how to culturally align to new agile ways of delivering rapid solutions and become aware of new mantras of the API economy which can out digital success on steroids!

The healthcare industry is starting to adopt digital twins to improve personalized medicine, healthcare organization performance, and new medicine and devices. These digital twins can create useful models based on information from wearable devices, omics, and patient records to connect the dots across processes that span patients, doctors, and healthcare organizations as well as drug and device manufacturers. Digital twins are digital representations of human physiology built on computer models. The use of digital twins in healthcare is revolutionizing clinical processes and hospital management by enhancing medical care with digital tracking and advancing modelling of the human body. These tools are of great help to researchers in studying diseases, new drugs, and medical devices. Digital Twins and Healthcare: Trends, Techniques, and Challenges facilitates the advancement and knowledge dissemination in methodologies and applications of digital twins in the healthcare and medicine fields. This book raises interest and awareness of the uses of digital twins in healthcare in the research community. Covering topics such as deep neural network, edge computing, and transfer learning method, this premier reference source is an essential resource for hospital administrators, pharmacists, medical professionals, IT consultants, students and educators of higher education, librarians, and researchers.

Supply chains are experiencing a seismic shift towards customer-centricity and sustainability and the challenges that are bound to arise will require innovative solutions. The escalating complexities of logistics, exacerbated by the profound impacts of the pandemic, underscore the urgency for a paradigm shift. Every industry is grappling with unprecedented disruptions from shortages in essential components to workforce deficits. Navigating Cyber Threats and Cybersecurity in the Logistics Industry serves as a beacon of insight and solutions in this transformative landscape. This groundbreaking book, a result of an in-depth study evaluating 901 startups and scale-ups globally, delves into the Top Logistics Industry Trends & Startups. It unveils the pivotal role of the Insights Discovery Platform, powered by Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, covering over 2 million startups and scale-ups worldwide. This platform offers an immediate and comprehensive assessment of innovations, facilitating the early identification of startups and scale-ups that hold the key to revolutionizing logistics.

As smart cities become more prevalent, the need for explainable AI (XAI) applications has become increasingly important. Advances in Explainable AI Applications for Smart Cities is a co-edited book that showcases the latest research and development in XAI for smart city applications. This book covers a wide range of topics, including medical diagnosis, finance and banking, judicial systems, military training, manufacturing industries, autonomous vehicles, insurance claim management, and cybersecurity solutions. Through its diverse case studies and research, this book provides valuable insights into the importance of XAI in smart city applications. This book is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academicians, industry professionals, and scientists working in research laboratories. It provides a comprehensive overview of XAI concepts, advantages over AI, and its applications in smart city development. By showcasing the impact of XAI on various smart city applications, the book enables readers to understand the importance of XAI in creating more sustainable and efficient smart cities. Additionally, the book addresses the open challenges and research issues related to XAI in modern smart cities, providing a roadmap for future research in this field. Overall, this book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in understanding the importance of XAI in smart city applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in an unprecedented shock to firms with adverse consequences for existing productive capacities. At the same time, digitalization has increasingly been touted as a key pathway for mitigating economic losses from the pandemic, and we expect firms facing digital constraints to be less resilient to supply shocks. This paper uses firm-level data to investigate whether digitally-enabled firms have been able to mitigate economic losses arising from the pandemic better than digitally-constrained firms in the Middle East and Central Asia region using a difference-in-differences approach. Controlling for demand conditions, we find that digitally-enabled firms faced a lower decline in sales by about 4 percentage points during the pandemic compared to digitally-constrained firms, suggesting that digitalization acted as a hedge during the pandemic. Against this backdrop, our results suggest that policymakers need to close the digital gap and accelerate firms’ digital transformation. This will be essential for economies to bounce back from the pandemic, and build the foundations for future resilience.

This book presents ten essays that examine the potential of digital responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The essays explore new digital concepts for learning and teaching, provide an overview of organizational responses to the crisis through digital technologies, and examine digital solutions developed to manage the crisis. Scientists from many disciplines work together in the fight against the virus and its numerous consequences. This book explores how information systems researchers can contribute to these global efforts. The book will be of interest to researchers and scholars in the field of digital business and education.