Introduction

This chapter is contextual in nature. It provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19, highlighting both the significant number of deaths caused by the pandemic as well as the economic disruption that occurred. Particular attention is paid to the role of digital technologies during the pandemic, which enabled a wide range of activities (e.g. work, education and shopping) to go online. The disruptive impact of COVID-19 is widespread and far-reaching, with the pandemic acting as a 'change agent' expanding and encouraging the greater use of digital technologies. The second half of the chapter presents summaries of the other chapters in the book. In doing so, it illustrates the scope and scale of the impact of COVID-19, the multitude of different challenges it has caused, and how these varied across different regions and contexts, as well as the diversity of reactions to the pandemic. Some of these reactions are technical in nature, while others are commercial and political. The summaries also draw attention to ongoing policy debates, the significance of which has been heightened by the pandemic. © 2023 the authors.

Technical-economic assessments on the feasibility of new infrastructures serving seaport and dry port of Venice

Despite the millenary tradition of the city, the current port of Venice was built only about a hundred of years ago and located in a suburb named Marghera. The lack of an updated regulatory plan and of suitable inland transport connections have made it difficult to increase commercial traffic after the crisis of the chemical industry, although a strong growth in the luxury cruise industry. Only the construction of new infrastructures (both land and sea side) and the recovery of many abandoned areas have given a new impetus to the port. However, the reduction in maritime traffic caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a drastic decline in commercial movements and cruises, with the risk of a total economic collapse. The recent approval of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, that identifies ports as strategic infrastructures, and the approval of the "Strategic Development Plan" aimed at establishing the "Simplified Logistics Zone of the Port of Venice and Rodigino" by the Veneto Region, have directed new investments towards the port of Venice. Furthermore, the growing awareness of the weakness of the lagoon ecosystem, the need to preserve Venice and the impossibility of enlarging the port areas have led to the need for new infrastructures that still allow the use of the current port. This article will mainly evaluate the technical-economic feasibility of new docking points outside the Venice lagoon that can be used by passenger ships of gross tonnage over 40,000 tons and by transoceanic container ships. Measures to improve the accessibility of the current seaport and dry port through new road and rail infrastructures will also be examined and evaluated. Indications are given regarding the necessary regeneration of the current sea- and dry-port and interventions aimed at ensuring greater environmental sustainability, such as cold ironing and electric mobility. © 2023 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V.

The High-Performance Computing Resources for the EXSCALATE4CoV Project

In order to repurpose currently available therapeutics for novel diseases, druggable targets have to be identified and matched with small molecules. In the case of a public health emergency, such as the ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, this identification needs to be accomplished quickly to support the rapid initiation of effective treatments to minimize casualties. The utilization of supercomputers, or more generally High-Performance Computing (HPC) facilities, to accelerate drug design is well established, but when the pandemic emerged in early 2020, it was necessary to activate a process of urgent computing, i.e., prioritized and immediate access to the most powerful computing resources available. Thanks to the close collaboration of the partners in the HPC activity, it was possible to rapidly deploy an urgent computing infrastructure of world-class supercomputers, massive cloud storage, efficient simulation software, and analysis tools. With this infrastructure, the project team performed very long molecular dynamics simulations and extreme-scale virtual drug screening experiments, eventually identifying molecules with potential antiviral activity. In conclusion, the EXaSCale smArt pLatform Against paThogEns for CoronaVirus (EXSCALATE4CoV) project successfully brought together Italian computing resources to help identify effective drugs to stop the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Technical-economic assessments on the feasibility of new infrastructures serving seaport and dry port of Venice

Despite the millenary tradition of the city, the current port of Venice was built only about a hundred of years ago and located in a suburb named Marghera. The lack of an updated regulatory plan and of suitable inland transport connections have made it difficult to increase commercial traffic after the crisis of the chemical industry, although a strong growth in the luxury cruise industry. Only the construction of new infrastructures (both land and sea side) and the recovery of many abandoned areas have given a new impetus to the port. However, the reduction in maritime traffic caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a drastic decline in commercial movements and cruises, with the risk of a total economic collapse. The recent approval of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, that identifies ports as strategic infrastructures, and the approval of the "Strategic Development Plan" aimed at establishing the "Simplified Logistics Zone of the Port of Venice and Rodigino" by the Veneto Region, have directed new investments towards the port of Venice. Furthermore, the growing awareness of the weakness of the lagoon ecosystem, the need to preserve Venice and the impossibility of enlarging the port areas have led to the need for new infrastructures that still allow the use of the current port. This article will mainly evaluate the technical-economic feasibility of new docking points outside the Venice lagoon that can be used by passenger ships of gross tonnage over 40,000 tons and by transoceanic container ships. Measures to improve the accessibility of the current seaport and dry port through new road and rail infrastructures will also be examined and evaluated. Indications are given regarding the necessary regeneration of the current sea- and dry-port and interventions aimed at ensuring greater environmental sustainability, such as cold ironing and electric mobility. © 2023 The Authors. Published by ELSEVIER B.V.

A Cybersecurity Evaluation Model (CSEM) for Indian SMEs Working in a Virtual Team Environment

During COVID-19 pandemic, there has been unprecedented increase in the number of employees working outside an organisations IT infrastructure due to the use of personal devices. The scale and sophistication of cyberattacks also continue to increase post-COVID-19 and it has become critical for SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) to safeguard their information and IT assets. COVID19 proved to be a major catalyst for the adoption of digital approaches to remote working that many organisations did not previously believe to be feasible. The systems are becoming increasingly exposed to cyber-attacks as a result of remote access technology and cloud networks. The literature points to a gap in the existing knowledge to address the cybersecurity requirements for SMEs in India working in a virtual setup. The purpose of this paper is to develop a cybersecurity evaluation model (CSEM) that can be leveraged by SMEs which will eventually help them assess their cyber-risk portfolio. Based on the research project and the methodology used in the past for similar research, a quantitative approach will be chosen for this research. This research requires the researcher to roll out an online survey, which will enable the participants to evaluate cybersecurity risks by responding to the survey questionnaire. Analysing and implementing a CSEM will not only assist SMEs in identifying their strengths and weaknesses but will also include simple best practice guidelines for effectively plugging their cybersecurity flaws while working remotely. © 2022 IEEE.

Data-Driven Analysis and Optimization for Urban Energy Systems Equitable Resilience

Electric vehicles (EVs) can be leveraged as power resources to support the grid operation in challenging scenarios, e.g., natural disasters or health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper aims to enhance equity of power resilience in urban energy systems by means of strategic allocation of EV charging infrastructure. We first use data-driven approaches to infer the relationships between communities' power resilience equity and available EV charging infrastructure as well as other prominent social-demographic factors. This inference leads to the development of a machine learning model for power resilience inequity prediction. We further develop an optimization frame-work that jointly considers equitable resiliency and resource utilization to guide the optimized EV charging infrastructure allocation across the city. Case studies demonstrate the capability of the devised approach in enhancing power resilience equity in marginalized communities. © 2023 IEEE.

Podcasting and Education: Reflections on the Case of FreshEd

Highlights New media formats such as podcasts are revolutionizing the production and dissemination of knowledge in and outside of higher education. One danger is the rise of EdTech companies that have used the pandemic as an opportunity to increase profits as more individuals and systems of higher education rely on digital platforms and products. This report explores the revolutionary potential of podcasts as an education technology that does not necessarily further the privatization of education. The case of the FreshEd podcast is highlighted. The concept of "infrastructuralism” is used to show how an ethos of Open Science can challenge many exploitative academic conventions and social relations. The main problem of a digital infrastructure that does not use the profit motive, however, is sustainable financing.

Uncoupling Inequality: Reflections on the Ethics of Benchmarks for Digital Media

Our collaboration seeks to demonstrate shared interrogation by exploring the ethics of machine learning benchmarks from a socio-technical management perspective with insight from public health and ethnic studies. Benchmarks, such as ImageNet, are annotated open data sets for training algorithms. The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced the practical need for ethical information infrastructures to analyze digital and social media, especially related to medicine and race. Social media analysis that obscures Black teen mental health and ignores anti-Asian hate fails as information infrastructure. Despite inadequately handling non-dominant voices, machine learning benchmarks are the basis for analysis in operational systems. Turning to the management literature, we interrogate cross-cutting problems of benchmarks through the lens of coupling, or mutual interdependence between people, technologies, and environments. Uncoupling inequality from machine learning benchmarks may require conceptualizing the social dependencies that build structural barriers to inclusion. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Solidarity and Care Economy in Times of ‘Crisis': A View from Greece and Hungary Between 2015 and 2020

This chapter describes the emergence of solidarity actions in two European countries-Greece and Hungary-in response to two recent crises: the arrival of large numbers of refugees in 2015 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Focusing on the experiences in two European countries with different socio-political, historical trajectories and civic traditions, we look at how solidarity economy emerged in crisis and how it was framed not only on monetised value but also on care and nurture. Our accounts of Greece and Hungary draw from ethnographic fieldwork and other qualitative social research (interviews and focus groups) with grassroots solidarity collectives. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022.

The perspective of energy poverty and 1st energy crisis of green transition

The role of energy transition amidst the energy crisis and how policymakers can drive down emissions while focusing on energy security are critical. Given the geo-political situation, energy crisis volatility, energy shortage and climate change all affect the green transition and the short-term priorities for energy companies and policymakers. Energy security is not an isolated issue but has widespread implications as various sectors depend on energy supply to function properly. Governments around the world are faced with this trilemma, how to balance energy security with energy sustainability while also considering energy affordability. Sustainability has been in focus for about a decade. However, energy security is suddenly becoming one of the most important priorities that policymakers need to consider. Unfortunately, the renewable energy infrastructure is not yet ready to replace the growing volume of energy demand from hydrocarbon, which the world has been dependent on. This means, for now, a surge in energy generation through hydrocarbon to meet the existing energy demand deficit. However, it is important not to lose focus on the challenge of energy sustainability and climate change adaption and mitigation. Where trends like carbon capture and storage;solar, wind, hydro, green hydrogen, etc.;renewable energy infrastructure and integrations, with supply chain and engineering services consideration [in aspect for the growing market in this space] need better attention with regards to investment and full-scale implementation. This paper aims to analyze this 1st energy crisis of green transition with a priori on energy poverty with consideration of major influences and associated impacts. Furthermore, it proposes a specific framework for inclusive investigations, which considers the entire energy ecosystem with consideration of major influences, to enable the policymakers to better drive the green transition. This involves formulating energy policies that are not entirely conservative towards renewable energy sources but instead promote investments in both green and relatively more environmentally benign energy sources compared to high emission hydrocarbons. In this regard, this paper renders exhaustive prospects and recommendations. © 2023 Elsevier Ltd

Road Development Risks and Challenges in the Philippines

The Philippines, as a fast-growing country, has had the highest road infrastructure investment to date for the past five years compared to the previous years. The infrastructure programs of the government as a solution to decongest Metro Manila and develop the countryside for economic growth are promising yet result in various risks and challenges. This research presents the road development issues from multiple sources;primary data from interviews of stakeholders of road development, secondary data from online news articles, social network services, government issuance, policies, and related literature. The Philippines is in a dire economic situation due to the Covid-19 outbreak that resulted in the country's worst economic performance since the Asian financial crisis in 1998. The country's economic managers pinned high hopes on the government infrastructure programs as a vital strategy to help pump-prime the economy towards recovery due to its job generation and multiplier effects. Hence, it implicates enormous risks and challenges such as low tax revenues, the trade-off with more urgent Covid-19 response measures, foreign and private companies support, unsolicited project proposals, inequitable distribution of infrastructures, and delays in construction activities. Various road development stakeholders also mentioned the need for strict road regulations, urban and regional planning, aesthetic improvement, urban renewal in aid of car-centric infrastructures, and routine maintenance on-road sections. The data are structured in various categories such as public involvement, environmental preservation, public policy, project planning, road design, road safety, economic recovery, and construction time. Lastly, the implications for future research directions are discussed. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Operationalizing Resiliency among Childcare Providers during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Childcare, a critical infrastructure, played an important role to create community resiliency during the COVID-19 pandemic. By finding pathways to remain open, or rapidly return to operations, the adaptive capacity of childcare providers to offer care in the face of unprecedented challenges functioned to promote societal level mitigation of the COVID-19 pandemic impacts, to assist families in their personal financial recoveries, and to provide consistent, caring, and meaningful educational experiences for society's youngest members. This paper assesses the operational adaptations of childcare centers as a key resource and critical infrastructure during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Greater Rochester, NY metropolitan region. Our findings evaluate the policy, provider mitigation, and response actions documenting the challenges they faced and the solutions they innovated. Implications for this research extend to climate-induced disruptions, including fires, water shortages, electric grid cyberattacks, and other disruptions where extended stay-at-home orders or service critical interventions are implemented. © 2022 IEEE.

Optimizing computational costs of Spark for SARS-CoV-2 sequences comparisons on a commercial cloud

Cloud computing is currently one of the prime choices in the computing infrastructure landscape. In addition to advantages such as the pay-per-use bill model and resource elasticity, there are technical benefits regarding heterogeneity and large-scale configuration. Alongside the classical need for performance, for example, time, space, and energy, there is an interest in the financial cost that might come from budget constraints. Based on scalability considerations and the pricing model of traditional public clouds, a reasonable optimization strategy output could be the most suitable configuration of virtual machines to run a specific workload. From the perspective of runtime and monetary cost optimizations, we provide the adaptation of a Hadoop applications execution cost model extracted from the literature aiming at Spark applications modeled with the MapReduce paradigm. We evaluate our optimizer model executing an improved version of the Diff Sequences Spark application to perform SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus pairwise sequence comparisons using the AWS EC2's virtual machine instances. The experimental results with our model outperformed 80% of the random resource selection scenarios. By only employing spot worker nodes exposed to revocation scenarios rather than on-demand workers, we obtained an average monetary cost reduction of 35.66% with a slight runtime increase of 3.36%. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Peri-urban schools of Kinshasa before and during COVID-19: an evaluation of water, handwashing facilities, and girl students' hand hygiene practices

The COVID-19 pandemic has led communities, including Kinshasa peri-urban schools, to reinforce WASH-related practices as a key com-ponent in preventing the spread of COVID-19. This study aimed to determine the institutional and behavioural changes in adolescent girl students' handwashing practices before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A cross-sectional study was performed, observing the hand hygiene of adolescent girl students, and assessing WASH facilities at schools, chosen from a sample previously selected in the study area. The results indicate significant increases in the prevalence of water points in schools from 10.9 to 22.5%, of handwashing facilities from 43 to 60.1% of schools with an average number of handwashing facilities from one to two, and the prevalence of school WASH brigades from 4.8 to 11.8% of schools. There was also a significant increase in schools receiving funds, and other support for WASH, respectively, from 24.9 to 70.3%, and from 17 to 45.9%, while the proportion of adolescent girl students washing their hands after using the toilet and before eating significantly increased from 6 to 28.4%. However, to improve the current WASH picture, and succeed in curtailing the spread of COVID-19 and related impacts, additional efforts to enhance handwashing practice and WASH items' coverage are expected. © 2023 The Authors.

Green Infrastructure and Slow Tourism: A Methodological Approach for Mining Heritage Accessibility in the Sulcis-Iglesiente Bioregion (Sardinia, Italy)

In European countries many measures are carried out to improve the disadvantaged conditions and socio-economic marginality of rural areas in comparison with central places. These conditions also affect the quality of travel for visitors and tourists. Therefore, in response to a ‘new' tourist demand, motivated also by the restrictions following the spread of the COVID-19 virus in recent years, the institutions and the different local actors are working more incisively to improve rural areas. The rural tourism services offer, combined with the Green Infrastructure (GI) project, at different scales—from local to regional—interesting territorial development strategies to achieve the Agenda 2030 objectives. This contribution considers the Sulcis-Iglesiente-Guspinese area, in the Sardinia Region (IT), as a case study. In this area, the landscape context is marked by past mining activity, and the project of a path of historical, cultural, and religious values has proven to be an activator of regenerative processes, in environmental, social, and economic terms. The present study proposes a methodological approach to develop an index (FI—feasibility index) to assess the feasibility of the Stop Places (SPs) project along a horse trail to integrate the current slow mobility of bicycles and pedestrians in the bioregion. © 2023 by the authors.

Road Development Risks and Challenges in the Philippines

The Philippines, as a fast-growing country, has had the highest road infrastructure investment to date for the past five years compared to the previous years. The infrastructure programs of the government as a solution to decongest Metro Manila and develop the countryside for economic growth are promising yet result in various risks and challenges. This research presents the road development issues from multiple sources;primary data from interviews of stakeholders of road development, secondary data from online news articles, social network services, government issuance, policies, and related literature. The Philippines is in a dire economic situation due to the Covid-19 outbreak that resulted in the country's worst economic performance since the Asian financial crisis in 1998. The country's economic managers pinned high hopes on the government infrastructure programs as a vital strategy to help pump-prime the economy towards recovery due to its job generation and multiplier effects. Hence, it implicates enormous risks and challenges such as low tax revenues, the trade-off with more urgent Covid-19 response measures, foreign and private companies support, unsolicited project proposals, inequitable distribution of infrastructures, and delays in construction activities. Various road development stakeholders also mentioned the need for strict road regulations, urban and regional planning, aesthetic improvement, urban renewal in aid of car-centric infrastructures, and routine maintenance on-road sections. The data are structured in various categories such as public involvement, environmental preservation, public policy, project planning, road design, road safety, economic recovery, and construction time. Lastly, the implications for future research directions are discussed. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

Shifting towards Antifragile Critical Infrastructure Systems

Antifragility, which is an evolutionary understanding of resilience, has become a predominant concept in academic and industrial fields as the criticality of vital infrastructures (like healthcare and transportation) has become more flexible and varying due the impact of digitization and adverse circumstances, such as changing the prioritization of industrial services while accelerating IoT (Internet of Things) deployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The crucial role of antifragility is to enable critical infrastructures to gain from disorder to foster their adaptability to real unexpected environmental changes. Thus, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive survey on the antifragility concept while clarifying the difference with the resilience concept. Moreover, it highlights how the COVID-19 crisis has revealed the fragility of critical infrastructures and unintentionally promoted the antifragility concept. To showcase the main concepts, we adopt the blockchain as an example of an antifragile system. Copyright © 2022 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved.

Charging after Lockdown: The Aftermath of COVID-19 Policies on Electric Vehicle Charging Behaviour in The Netherlands

During the COVID-19—related lockdowns (2020–2022), mobility patterns and charging needs were substantially affected. Policies such as work from home, lockdowns, and curfews reduced traffic and commuting significantly. This global pandemic may have also substantially changed mobility patterns on the long term and therefore the need for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. This paper analyzes changes in electric charging in the Netherlands for different user groups during different phases of the COVID-19 lockdown to assess the effects on EV charging needs. Charging needs dropped significantly during this period, which also changed the distribution of the load on the electricity grid throughout the day. Curfews affected the start times of charging sessions during peak hours of grid consumption. Infrastructure dedicated to commuters was used less intensively, and the charging needs of professional taxi drivers were drastically reduced during lockdown periods. These trends were partially observed during a post–lockdown measuring period of roughly 8 months, indicating a longer shift in mobility and charging patterns. © 2023 by the authors.

Buycotting to save the neighbourhood? exploring the altered meaning of social infrastructures of consumption during the Covid-19 crisis in Linden, Hannover, Germany

The Sars-CoV-2 virus and the related public health measures have triggered a break in everyday life. Despite growing global protest movements against these health measures, ‘solidarity' was called for by civil society groups, affected businesses, and politicians as an intuitive mode of action in this crisis. Writing from Germany, we explore how in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis a specific discourse of solidarity and locality blossomed;namely a call to solidarity-based consumption. Using documentary photography, we discuss the shifts in the attribution of meaning and discourses through which consumption has been framed by small-shop owners in Linden, Hannover, Germany. In the paper, we explore the local geographies of boycotting and specifically the ways calls for boycotting are articulated by shop owners in the neighbourhood. We find that these calls became entangled with a specific neighbourhood identity. Through our photographic documentation we also find that purchases at local stores are now framed as a necessary act of local support. Finally, we reflect on the limitations of consumption as a strategy to overcome crisis and express solidarity.

Accountability and neglect in UK social care innovation

Innovation alters who is accountable for social care and how they are held to account. This article shows how organisational, institutional and technological innovation in infrastructures of social care can reconfigure accountability instruments and propel change between distinct modes of accountability. However, innovation also sustains neglect, both in terms of issues, objects and subjects missing from research, and in terms of low levels of institutional reflexivity mobilised to evaluate and direct innovation's impacts. Evidenced using two-level situational analysis – across a UK research portfolio and within a public robotics lab – we argue that confronting this neglect is critical for post-pandemic reform.