Information Systems Resilience: The Role of Flexibility and Stability

This paper contributes to conceptualization of information system resilience. By building upon and extending the framework of Heeks and Ospina (2019), we argue that an information system's ability to be resilient lies in its balance between stability and flexibility. Based on empirical findings we suggest that a stable core and flexibility to change is crucial when a digital system is faced with unforeseen adversities. We hope to contribute to more theorizing of the information system resilience and inspire further research on this subject. The paper may also have practical value for stakeholders working with implementation of national information systems in the health sector. This is a qualitative case study conducted together with the Health Information Systems Programme (HISP) at the Institute of Informatics, University of Oslo. Our findings are based on empirical insights related to the DHIS2 software during the Covid-19 response. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Conducting a secret ballot elections for virtual meetings.

Communication plays a crucial role in business, education, and generally in everyday people's interactions. Face-to-face communication has been banned by the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions and had to be replaced with its electronic remote form. Popular digital applications allowed us to switch to online life quite easily. That conversion wasn't problematic for most (especially young) people. Working online and meeting people virtually became a standard, and people have mostly adapted to the new reality. Moving conventional communication to the Internet wasn't much challenging, because it was only a matter of existing ICT solutions popularization. They have already existed and were functional, but haven't been used much often. COVID-19 pandemic changed it permanently because there was no other way as rapid adoption to this unusual situation. Although most of the actions could have been realized online, some were more problematic to conduct electronically. One of them was secret balloting for virtual meetings. As open voting was not much complicated to arrange using remote communication, conduction the secret type of elections was not so obvious. In open voting electors' data can be revealed and the results may be easily verified when it's finished. Secret voting demands to remain voters' data and their choices confidential. That leads to the question of how to verify the users' identity and voting rights and keep them anonymous at the same time? This paper provides an overview of a person's remote identification and verification methods, also explores the possibilities of using them for secret voting authentication. Results show that conducting a secret ballot with remote voter authentication is possible. The method was widely described and also applied in a authors' digital system. A fully functional ICT solution has been tested in real elections across several organizations in Poland, in which present authorities were elected electronically during the COVID-19 lockdown period.

Build Your World – Meaningful Choices in a Hybrid Stage Play

This paper examines the design of meaningful choices for theater audiences embedded in a hybrid play using digital tools and systems. A case study is presented that is established on a hybrid stage performance called ALIENATION based on the so-far unpublished eponymous novel by Corinna Antelmann, which premiered in early 2022 at the Landestheater Linz. The audience could take part in the performance via a real-time rendering engine. Apart from describing the case study in detail, we outline further applications and opportunities to facilitate audience participation and engagement. In general, ALIENATION's design and production positively impacted the audience's attention, especially regarding younger demographics. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Building Digital Resilience to Combat Pandemics: Comparison of South Korea, Sri Lanka and Rwanda

Use of digital technologies for management of COVID-19 pandemic was widely observed across the globe. However, building resilient digital systems to better manage the pandemic based on country contexts was a challenge. The objective of this study is to identify socio-technical determinants of building resilient digital technologies based on a comparative study or three countries. Case study method was utilized with qualitative data collection methods to identify thematic areas for comparison. The study revealed that resilient digital pandemic responses will rely on a plurality of technologies, and on agility, flexibility and capacity in producing these solutions. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Online Teaching of Digital Systems during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The previous years have brought a major disruption with the COVID-19 outbreak, and universities around the world had to quickly adapt to the new format of teaching and learning. Different fields faced various obstacles in trying to provide the best possible classroom-like experience to students during the lockdown. For engineering study programs, especially in the courses where the laboratory is very important, it was a difficult task to replicate the syllabus in the online domain. This paper presents experiences from online teaching of the Digital System Design course at the University of Novi Sad. Traditional and online variants of the course are presented and compared, with the focus on laboratory exercises which were the most difficult to adapt. In addition, student experiences are summarized and compared to experiences in the previous years when the course was held traditionally. © 2022 Croatian Society MIPRO.

Attention-based clinical note summarization

In recent years, the trend of deploying digital systems in numerous industries has hiked. The health sector has observed an extensive adoption of digital systems and services that generate significant medical records. Electronic health records contain valuable information for prospective and retrospective analysis that is often not entirely exploited because of the complicated dense information storage. The crude purpose of condensing health records is to select the information that holds most characteristics of the original documents based on a reported disease. These summaries may boost diagnosis and save a doctor's time during a saturated workload situation like the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we are applying a multi-head attention-based mechanism to perform extractive summarization of meaningful phrases on clinical notes. Our method finds major sentences for a summary by correlating tokens, segments, and positional embeddings of sentences in a clinical note. The model outputs attention scores that are statistically transformed to extract critical phrases for visualization on the heat-mapping tool and for human use. © 2022 ACM.

Coping with Changing Contexts: A Healthcare Security Perspective

With the fourth industrial revolution, there is a digitization wave going on for the transformation of existing systems into modern digital systems. This has opened the window for many opportunities, but at the same time, there is a multitude of cyber-security threats that need to be addressed. This paper considers one such threat posed by phishing and ransomware attacks to the healthcare infrastructures. Phishing has also been the most prevalent attack mechanism on the healthcare infrastructures during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The paper proposes two intervention strategies as a step towards catering to the challenges posed by phishing and ransomware attacks in the context of healthcare infrastructures. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

Adaptive Digital Encounters: An approach for reducing digital impact on outpatient flow

Healthcare service delivery has been greatly impacted by the current Covid-19 pandemic. One of the key drawbacks of the current Healthcare Management Information Systems (HMIS) is the lack of research towards improving the user's experience before, during, or after interacting with the digital system, product, or service. This has further increased the amount of cognitive load experienced by healthcare providers. Adaptive Digital Encounters (ADE) provide a mechanism for dynamically generating and upgrading the user interfaces of healthcare and wellness applications, by incorporating past histories of the patient data. It also integrates various medical devices to automate the process of collecting vital signs and reduces the burden of inserting data. This paper provides the basic building blocks which were employed to incorporate the ADE into a live application. Our results indicate an above-average score of 1.13 (-3 to +3) using the UEQ-S questionnaire, indicating a positive UX evaluation from 11 participants. © 2021 IEEE.

Solar-powered, Digital Classroom-in-Box: A Digital System to Mitigate the Digital Divide of Post-pandemic Education

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools (primary, secondary, and tertiary) have been forced to go online, using fully virtual and hybrid models of schooling. Leveraging digital technology to carry out learning has been the de facto alternative to simply halting schooling. While the pandemic has wreaked havoc on schools, it has also accelerated digital delivery of education into a mainstream practice. Along with numerous benefits, digital learning also poses some challenges, such as inequity in access to educational resources. Digital learning is still out of reach for large populations in many developing regions, either due to lack of infrastructure or because it is not affordable. Since digital learning, as well as digital divides, will still be with us in the post-pandemic world, there is a need to develop pathways for delivering access to education, while also being cognizant of digital divides and a lack of resources in many areas of the world. As one of the ways to answer that need, we investigated the impact of a solar powered education system that is designed to deliver educational contents to less privileged people of the developing world, particularly in rural locations, and mitigate the digital divide in education. The engineered system is composed of a solar panel, battery, a pico-projector, and digital content stored in the projector. The system unlocks the opportunity to deliver education at remote locations where internet and electricity are not commonplace and reliable. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Innovative remote laboratory to enhance remote learning for he digital electronics subjects

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced engineering disciplines to rethink practical activities which are imperative for development of engineering skills in higher education. The main challenge is developing new practical activities that suit remote learning whilst maintaining the experiences of an in-person lab session. This paper outlines the development and implementation of a remotely accessible undergraduate laboratory exercise using off the shelf equipment and remote learning software. In the described lab, students learn the fundamentals of digital systems and the process of using software to design logic circuits, through to implementing and analysing these circuits on an electronic board. The remote lab was successfully implemented using a camera, NI ELVIS II device with a Digital System Development Board (DSDB) and programmed using NI Multisim. The paper describes the development and transition of a traditionally in-person lab to a remote application whilst keeping the same intended learning outcomes and making sure a blended approach can be used in the future. Students remotely trigger inputs (as they would do in-person) to see the cause and effect of their design on the real hardware by pairing visual switches on screen to the physical switches on the board. The students use the camera pointed to the device to see how their designs behave when implemented on the real hardware. The designed lab has already been undertaken by more than 100 undergraduate students from a variety of engineering programmes over a series of multiple sessions. The paper discusses the feedback received from the use of surveys, semi-structured interviews and focus groups of students and academics involved in the development of these remote labs. The discussion focus includes the ease of use, relevance to core subject material and if the practical activities help with their understanding of theory. The paper then concludes by exploring future developments as well as the lessons learnt. © the authors, 2021. All Rights Reserved.