Hybrid scientific conferences: An ongoing experiment

Feder discusses hybrid scientific conferences which is an ongoing experiment. Before the pandemic, remote participation in conferences was often frowned on. But now "the genie is out of the bottle" for remote participation in meetings, which can have the advantage of accessibility and sustainability. Hybrid formats are here to stay, he says, even as "there is a lot of pressure to get back to how we held meetings prepandemic." The purposes of scientific conferences include sharing knowledge, providing visibility for early-career scientists, and maintaining and extending networks. Hybrid options could improve some traditional conferences, which may not always deliver what scientists want from them.

ANALYSIS OF THE FEASIBILITY OF IMMERSIVE VIRTUALIZATION IN TECHNICAL TRAINING

Goal: propose a method of training in regulatory standards using immersive virtualization, aiming at improving student knowledge retention compared to traditional online models. Theoretical Reference: use of literature through research on similar methods already applied in immersive training, dissertations, articles and national standards. Method: practical application of training in an immersive environment in two large industries located in the metropolitan region of Curitiba, PR, where the evaluated ones completed an evaluation questionnaire according to their degree of satisfaction, which is the main parameter used in this work to prove the efficiency of the method. Results and conclusion: the practical application of immersive training, compilation of data and analysis of results confirm the viability proposed in the method. As the country develops technologically, the method will have its applicability increasingly accessible and proven. Research implications: a method of technological training developed as an alternative to the current molds, will certainly bring great contributions to the academy, and, at the same time, with the reduction of machine downtime, displacements, logistical costs and agglomerations, this work will bring contributions to the industry. Originality/Value: with the advent of the covid-19 pandemic experienced in recent times, traditional methods of professional training needed to be quickly adapted, aiming to minimize the impact caused by the restriction of physical contact between people. The proposed method provides the possibility of maintaining professional training processes, offering society the possibility of being trained effectively. © 2023 AOS-Estratagia and Inovacao. All Rights Reserved.

Impact of Telehealth and Process Virtualization on Healthcare Utilization

Technological advancements and the COVID-19 pandemic have catapulted process virtualization across many industries, including healthcare, where telehealth has enabled significant digital transformation of care delivery. Although telehealth has been proposed as a potential solution to improve access to care and restrain runaway healthcare costs, it can increase spending if telehealth use leads to new types of resource utilization. Drawing on the lens of process virtualization theory, we study the impact of telehealth on healthcare utilization by examining visit-level patient data of telehealth use in facilitating e-visits with healthcare providers. On average, a telehealth visit reduces the number of future outpatient visits by 13.6% (or 0.15 visits), equal to a reduction of $239 in total cost within 30 days after the visit. Our results suggest that the benefits of telehealth use are observed primarily among diseases with high virtualization potential. Specifically, patients with mental health, skin, metabolic, and musculoskeletal diseases exhibit a significant reduction of 0.21 outpatient visits per quarter (an equivalent cost reduction of $179) when they are treated via telehealth, suggesting a substitution effect with respect to traditional clinic visits. Our research identifies the boundary conditions that determine the nuanced impact of telehealth on care utilization and shows that its effectiveness depends on the process virtualization potential of different diseases. Our findings have several practical and theoretical implications for fostering telehealth use in a value-based healthcare environment, especially for diseases with high virtualization potential where telehealth use should be promoted to bend the cost curve.

Personal Marketing in the Digital World

The development of information and communication technologies causes a number of consequences observed both on the macro and micro scale. This is reflected in the development of the information society, the network society as well as the digital economy. The multifunctionality and application potential of new information and communication technologies make them applicable in many areas of enterprise management. This also concerns personal marketing, which in the era of the development of digital media gains new opportunities and tools for implementing the assumptions of this concept. The purpose of the chapter is to present the premises, determinants, and possibilities of using innovative technologies in the area of personal marketing. The findings resulting from the conducted research indicate that the use of the internet and artificial intelligence in personal marketing requires considering several conditions, including psychological as well as sociocultural ones related to the observed generational changes. At the same time, it should be noted that the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the processes of the virtualization of work and resulted in new challenges for personal marketing in terms of creating hybrid work solutions that will be adequate for the post-pandemic reality.

Towards an SDN/NFV based Network Infrastructure for Hospital Information Systems and Healthcare Services

Today's hospitals have become extremely dependent on technology to providing valuable patient services. From collecting as well as administering data of patients to delivering advanced therapies. The network infrastructure of the hospital is charged to provide various solution that are mission critical to address the increasing demands of healthcare services. Software Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization will improve infrastructure agility, making it easier to design, deliver and use networking services in a dynamic and scalable environment. Combining SDN and NFV provides significant benefits throughout the infrastructure network. Additionally, external parties are able to use infrastructure services in order to establish new service offerings. The infrastructure services are opened for many parties like developers of applications and service vendors. In this article, we first highlight some of the issues in the hospital information system (HIS) and healthcare services which network infrastructure will eventually confront. Then, concepts of SDN as well as NFV are presented. In addition, description of the benefits that SDN and NFV have for HIS and healthcare services. Finally, a new multi-layer architecture based on SDN and NFV is proposed and how this architecture can deal with the existing challenges of HIS and healthcare services. © 2022 IEEE.

Digitally Transforming Organisational Cultures: Ensuring Enhanced Innovation in a Remote Working World

The Covid-19 pandemic has brought with it dramatic environmental changes, forcing organisations to adopt digital technologies on a wider scale, under significant time pressure. While the pandemic tested the agility and resilience of organisations, team dynamics and the implications of virtualisation on collaboration and creativity have become increasingly important for research (George et al., 2020) as the daily working routines in which employees have been embedded in for decades have become disrupted. The abrupt move to "working from home” that the pandemic created is arguably the most significant organisational design change in our lifetimes. Organisations are now asking how the virtualisation of work has impacted on the collaboration and communication necessary for driving innovation behaviour, and what strategies are available to develop remote innovation solutions. In this study, we explore organisational culture theory against the backdrop of digitally transforming innovation development as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. This multi-layered model offers a useful framework for thinking about processes that foster innovation. By doing so, we investigate how organisations have adapted their approach to remote, collaborative innovation from the perspective of nineteen industry experts. The purpose of this study is to present the determinants of organisational culture to develop digital innovation in a hybrid working environment. Our findings reveal twelve distinct variables across the artifacts, values, and assumptions required to ensure digital innovation. These findings have implications for theory and practice, as it provides organisational leaders with a strategic understanding as to how a remote innovative culture can be developed, and subsequently exploited. © 2022, Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All right reserved.

Enhancing museums' attractiveness through digitization: An investigation of Italian medium and large-sized museums and cultural institutions

The Covid-19 pandemic put the museums' viability under stress, with national and supranational policies imposing closures and restricting the number of admitted visitors. Digitization enables cultural institutions to overcome such constraints, prompting innovative service delivery models. However, evidence on digitization's implications on organizational attractiveness (OA) is scant. Taking a retrospective approach, the article proposes a parallel mediation analysis to shed some light on the effects of digitization on museums' attractiveness. Findings suggest that digitization enhances OA directly and indirectly, via the delivery of digital services to physical visitors. Furthermore, digitization allows museums to meet the virtual visitors' expectations, enriching the cultural service offering. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

A guide for the implementation of network resources

Introduction: Changes in higher medical education, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus pandemic, prompted the integration of information and communication technologies to teaching in Cuba and the world. The virtual university of health became an important means to support the teaching-educational processes;therefore, professors had to face the challenge of virtualizing their training activities. Objective: To validate a guide for designing and assembling virtual teaching-learning environments in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. Methods: A technological innovation research was carried out in three stages: design of the guide, implementation and validation. A survey was conducted to the participants of the virtual training in virtual teaching-learning environments. Results: Six steps were proposed for the design and implementation of training processes through the virtual modality: analysis of resources and feasibility;course design or adaptation of an existing program;content production;resource uploading and activity configuration;training action;and course assessment, improvement and redesign. Conclusions: The integration of technology to higher education teaching is a reality driven by the epidemiological situation, which will continue to develop until it becomes part of the professor's regular work. This guide systematizes and simplifies actions to facilitate the initial virtualization process. A flexible and scalable model is proposed to improve continuously the quality of the educational teaching process in virtual teaching-learning environments. © 2023, Editorial Ciencias Medicas. All rights reserved.

Changes in corporate social responsibility activity during a pandemic: The case of COVID-19

This study examines the practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) during COVID-19. Little is known about how organizations practice CSR during acute exogenous crises. Overlooking how CSR practices change during a crisis matters because organizations are compelled into trade-offs that carry implications for their CSR initiatives. Analysis of interview data with CSR managers, from 21 Dubai-based business organizations during COVID-19, uncovers changes in the content and process of CSR during the pandemic. The results show that the practice of CSR underwent a fundamental change in focus as organizations shifted to an employee-centric model of CSR and away from an environmental one. Measures placed on organizations and society to combat the pandemic also led to a recalibration of stakeholder and issue salience, with notable effects on CSR that challenge the capability of the power–legitimacy–urgency framework to anticipate these shifts. We consider the impacts associated with the shift in the content of CSR initiatives and process of their implementation and discuss the implications of the findings for CSR theory, research, policy, and practice. © 2023 The Authors. Business Ethics, the Environment & Responsibility published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Hospitality management instructor attitudes towards COVID-driven compulsory course-virtualization: A qualitative descriptive study

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how hospitality management instructors at a college of management in the Northeastern United States describe their attitudes towards the effects on instruction of the COVID-driven compulsory virtualization of their courses that occurred in Spring 2020. The Theory of Technology Acceptance, the Extended Theory of Technology Acceptance, and the Unified Theory of the Use and Acceptance of Technology jointly constituted this study's theoretical foundations. Data collection was guided by three research questions, namely: (i) How do hospitality management instructors describe their attitudes towards the effects on teaching of the COVID-driven virtualization of instruction that occurred in Spring 2020? (ii) How do such instructors describe the setbacks created by said virtualization? (iii) How do such instructors describe the benefits of said virtualization? Data was acquired through 14 semi-structured interviews and two semi-structured focus groups. Thematic analysis of the data yielded eight themes: (i) Virtual instruction was relatively convenient in some respects;(ii) Student-on-student interaction was limited;(iii) Instructor-student interaction was limited;(iv) Complex material was hard to teach;(v) Students disengaged;(vi) Virtual courses came to resemble correspondence courses;(vii) Courses involving labs and lab-like components could not be taught properly: (viii) Virtual instruction had more downsides than upsides. Conclusion: In order for the virtualization of hospitality management courses to succeed, the technology being used must allow the emotional dynamics that govern in-person instruction to govern virtual instruction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

BRAZILIAN CULTURE DURING THE PANDEMIC

The article examines the situation in which Brazilian culture found itself during the Covid-19 pandemic. Its negative impact on all spheres of cultural life has led to the need for the virtualization. This forced measure had both positive and negative aspects, revealing the insufficient effectiveness of the federal government in a crisis and exposing the most pressing problems of Brazilian society at the present historical stage. Particular attention is paid to the problem of survival of popular culture during the pandemic, the carriers of which are the most vulnerable layers of the Brazilian society. The author notes positive changes in the state cultural policy on the eve of the post-Covid period. © 2022, Iberoamerica (Russian Federation). All Rights Reserved.

Visual Description of Digital IT Consulting Services Using DITCOS-DN: Proposal and Evaluation of a Graphical Editor

The digital transformation of the IT consulting domain recently gained momentum due to the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the range of IT consulting services that are fully digital is still very limited. Plus, there are no standardized and established methods for describing digital IT consulting services, nor there is any suitable tooling for digital IT consulting service provisioning. The present work aims to reduce this gap by contributing to establishing a well-defined approach to formally describing digital IT consulting services that could possibly be a candidate for standardization. Building upon (i) the ontology DITCOS-O, which provides the semantic basis for our approach, and (ii) the YAML-based description notation DITCOS-DN, which we leverage to describe digital IT consulting service models, we propose a graphical, web-based editor (called DITCOS-ModEd) to simplify service model maintenance. Following a design science based research process, we developed a prototype and empirically evaluated its applicability with the help of IT consultants. This first evaluation allowed us to identify some limitations and to plan specific improvements, both to the underlying artifacts DITCOS-O and DITCOS-DN, as well as to DITCOS-ModEd itself. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

What is holding back business process virtualization in the post-COVID-19 era? Based on process virtualization theory (PVT).

The post-pandemic COVID-19 has been influential in accelerating the digital transformation of enterprises and business process virtualization. However, in a virtual working environment with no physical interaction, the psychological requirements of the communication between teleworkers and the negative impact of information systems are hindering the business process virtualization. Studying the relationship between the interaction between organizational members and job performance is an important part of organizational psychology. For an enterprise to maintain high-efficiency output, it is necessary to study psychological factors related to business process virtualization. This paper verified the factors hindering business process virtualization based on process virtualization theory (PVT). The research was implemented on a sample of 343 teleworkers in China enterprises. The structure of the model of this study includes two aspects that hinder the business process virtualization: the psychological requirements of teleworkers (Sensory requirements, Synchronism requirements, and Relationship requirements) and the negative effects of information systems (Information overload and Communication overload). The results show that teleworkers' sensory requirements, synchronism requirements, and communication overload negatively impact business process virtualization. However, unlike the results in the existing literature, the relationship requirements and information overload do not affect the business process virtualization. The results will help business managers, teleworkers, and information system developers develop strategies to address the negative factors hindering business process virtualization. In the so-called new "normal era," our research will help companies to create a successful virtual work environment.

Networking Data and Intelligent Management in the Post-COVID19 Era: A Report on APNOMS 2021

This article presents a report on APNOMS 2021, which was held on September 8–10, 2021 in Tainan, Taiwan. The theme of APNOMS 2021 was "Networking Data and Intelligent Management in the Post-COVID19 Era.”. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Crisis-driven digital transformation as a trigger for process virtualization: Fulfilling knowledge work process requirements for remote work

Process Virtualization Theory (PVT) proposes a set of requirements and relationships to explain and predict whether or not a knowledge work process can be successfully virtualized. However, at least in remote work, the crisis-driven digital transformation (e.g., during the COVID-19 pandemic) shows that almost all knowledge work processes can be virtualized unexpectedly and immediately. Since the requirements for these processes remain the same and need to be met to continue the processes remotely, an interesting question arises of how information technology (IT) can help to meet these requirements in a crisis-driven digital transformation of knowledge work. To address this question, we conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with a multiple-case approach using a critical realist perspective. Our findings contribute to information systems (IS) research in a twofold way. First, we demonstrate that the crisis-driven digital transformation of knowledge work triggers a revisited perspective on PVT by turning virtualized knowledge work processes into a prerequisite. Second, we show how the IT characteristics of PVT (representation, reach, monitoring capability) help to fulfill knowledge work process requirements in remote work settings and outline two additional IT characteristics (social presence and situation awareness) that positively support the fulfillment.

A Lightweight Smart Camera Solution for Covid-19

With the growth of IoT devices and edge computing technologies, a challenge is to deal with the network capacity and response latency in real-time applications. Such an approach to the solutions is to deploy the Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Thing (IoT) applications, namely AIoT and Internet of Things (IoT) applications at the edge. In this paper, we introduce a smart AIoT solution to support the control of covid-19 epidemic with two main features: social distance application to control social distance violators in different areas and facemask detection to identify violators who didn't wear a mask. The proposed design architecture comprises three layers: the first one is the Centralized Cloud, which implements the backend, a web server connects to a secure database. The web dashboard helps the administrators manage the streams of surveillance cameras, visualize the number of social distance violators in different areas, and show recorded facemask violators in table for convenient;the second layer is the Edge, social distance and facemask services are packaged into Docker container and deployed in a lightweight Kubernetes (K3s) cluster which have GPU. The Cluster should be deployed on both Jetson Nano and Raspberry Pi 3 devices. This design intends to increase high availability, scalability, self-healing, resource utilization, stability, and automation deployment for the edge services;and the final layer - the End Devices, which includes multiple cameras connected directly to the AI services at Edge. These cameras help us collect and send data to the edge servers for analyzing purpose. The results show that the proposed system works correctly, edge services run at an acceptable framerate. © 2022 IEEE.

National Theatre in My Kitchen: Access to Culture for Blind People in Poland During Covid‐19

This article reflects on the phenomenon of the virtualization of culture and its significance in providing accessibility to people with visual impairment. From this point of view, virtual culture becomes a space of negotiation between social inclusion and exclusion. By examining the experiences of participants in cultural events and the planners of such events, I try to identify possible advantages as well as dangers related to the process of transferring cultural life to the Internet. The scope of my research embraces accessible cultural events offered by selected institutions and non‐governmental orga-nizations in Poland. Research data was collected by interviewing both employees and participants of events with visual impairment. I have also drawn upon my own experiences as a blind admirer of culture and a worker in the sector of cultural accessibility. My main research question is: Does the virtualization of culture make events more accessible for people with visual impairment, or does it increase already‐existing barriers? A further issue is explored—namely new solutions that are appearing in the accessible remote events on offer. The theoretical framework for this study includes accessibility studies and disability studies. © 2023 by the author(s);licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal).

DevOps and IaC to Automate the Delivery of Hands-On Software Lab Exams

During the recent COVID-19 outbreak, many educational institutions had to operate fully remotely and conduct examinations online. Conducting hands-on software lab exams online raises serious issues and concerns such as: 1) the heterogeneity of examinees' personal computers, 2) the computers may not be powerful enough to run the required software for the hands-on exam, especially hardware intensive programs, 3) cheating and plagiarism are hardly controllable since examinees are using their personal computers and they can look up whatever information they need. The paper proposes a highly available and scalable software cloud architecture that utilizes modern cloud technologies, DevOps principles, and infrastructure as code tools of various categories to facilitate the construction of a highly available and scalable architectural solution that automates the delivery of software lab exams. Evaluation and results of the proposed architecture illustrate that a cloud instance that is preconfigured with all the required exam material can be instantiated and completely ready to use in an average of 149 seconds. Moreover, deploying the backend server on a Kubernetes Cluster allowed the system to automatically scale and handle sudden loads due to Kubernetes' auto-scaling and self-healing features. © 2022 IEEE.

University Students and ICT after the COVID-19 Crisis. Towards instrumental use and disconnection

The article analyzes the use that UCM students make of ICT, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is found that women, more than men, stop doing things to navigate. The youngest university students are the ones who connect the most, sleep less because they are connected and connect to their social networks during classes. The daily management and maintenance of their social networks is not a burden. For personal relationships, men and women prefer face-to-face and binary people indistinctly. The upward trend in digital disconnection continues. © GKA Ediciones, authors.

The course virtualization experience at the University of Costa Rica

The University of Costa Rica has faced the challenge in the last two years of using virtual mechanisms for the development of its courses. The objective of this article is to analyze the experience that the student population lived from the virtualization of courses and the use of technological means given the suspension of face-to-face classes that occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic during cycles I and II of the year 2020. Likewise, it aims to assess the qualification offered by the student body to the teaching performance in the synchronous and asynchronous remote classes. The results reveal that the experience of virtualization of courses and the teaching performance in this modality was perceived positively by the student population.