Fundamental science and applied research and technology development (RTD) are facing significant ... more Fundamental science and applied research and technology development (RTD) are facing significant challenges that particularly compound to the notorious credibility, reproducibility, funding and sustainability crises. The underlying, serious shortcomings are substantially amplified by a metrics-obsessed publication culture, and a growing cohort of academics fishing for fairly stagnant (public) funding budgets. This work presents, for the first time, a groundbreaking strategy to successfully address these severe issues; the novel strategy proposed here leverages the distributed ledger technology (DLT) “blockchain” to capitalize on cryptoeconomic mechanisms, such as tokenization, consensus, crowdsourcing, smart contracts, reputation systems as well as staking, reward and slashing mechanisms. This powerful toolbox, which is so far widely unfamiliar to traditional scientific and RTD communities (“TradSci”), is synergistically combined with the exponentially growing computing capabilities...
This report blazes a trail for global standardization. For the first time, representatives from m... more This report blazes a trail for global standardization. For the first time, representatives from many different SDOs and academic institutions have created an open access database of specifications, reviews and guidelines for a particular theme (Artificial Intelligence)
This chapter covers the critical topic of standards within the area of big data. Starting with an... more This chapter covers the critical topic of standards within the area of big data. Starting with an overview of standardisation as a means for achieving interoperability, the chapter moves on to identify the European Standards Development Organizations that contribute to the European Commission’s plan for the Digital Single Market. The author goes on to describe, through use cases, exemplar big data challenges, demonstrates the need for standardisation and finally identifies the critical big data use cases where standards can add value. The chapter provides an overview of the key standardisation activities within the EU and the current status of international standardisation efforts. Finally, the chapter closes with future trends for big data standardisation.
Since its launch just over a decade ago by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed ledger tec... more Since its launch just over a decade ago by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) blockchain has followed a breathtaking trajectory into manifold application spaces. This study aper analyses how key factors underpinning the success of this ground-breaking “Internet of value” technology, such as staking of collateral (“skin in the game”), competitive crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and prediction markets, can be applied to substantially innovate the legacy organization of science, research, and technology development (RTD). Here, we elaborate a highly integrative, community-based strategy where a token-based crypto-economy supports finding best possible consensus, trust, and truth by adding unconventional elements known from reputation systems, betting, secondary markets, and social networking. These tokens support the holder’s formalized reputation and are used in liquid-democracy style governance and arbitration within projects or community-driven initiati...
To drive innovation and competitiveness, organisations need to foster the development and broad a... more To drive innovation and competitiveness, organisations need to foster the development and broad adoption of data technologies, value-adding use cases and sustainable business models. Enabling an effective data ecosystem requires overcoming several technical challenges associated with the cost and complexity of management, processing, analysis and utilisation of data. This chapter details a community-driven initiative to identify and characterise the key technical research priorities for research and development in data technologies. The chapter examines the systemic and structured methodology used to gather inputs from over 200 stakeholder organisations. The result of the process identified five key technical research priorities in the areas of data management, data processing, data analytics, data visualisation and user interactions, and data protection, together with 28 sub-level challenges. The process also highlighted the important role of data standardisation, data engineering ...
ICT has the capability to improve the quality of life experienced by our citizens through educati... more ICT has the capability to improve the quality of life experienced by our citizens through education, training, new services, innovation and automated control systems. ICT especially the emerging technologies investigated here are of immense importance to supporting education, health, innovation and infrastructure. AI and Big Data systems show great potential for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which currently requires immediate global action in areas like climate change, poverty and pollution to ensure that additional damage to societies and the planet is prevented. Standardization is key to sustainability in the fourth industrial revolution. As standards are living documents, they evolve with the technologies and provide an additional pathway to technological innovation. Application solutions employing AI/Big Data technologies or utilising platforms based on these technologies provide interoperability and quality assurance through standardization. These d...
Social media has become an important platform for the public to express their opinions and commen... more Social media has become an important platform for the public to express their opinions and comment on all manner of things. Analysis of social media data can yield interesting facts and views about another person, product, business or an issue. This paper focuses on content profiling based on sentiment analysis of Twitter data for a particular User, Business or a Hashtag by focusing on the emotions, reactions and opinions written on Twitter by different users in the form of tweets and using statistical, learning and natural language processing techniques.. To accomplish the task, this paper will also use various Machine Learning techniques along with a combination of Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) VADER Library. The different machine learning classifiers are evaluated and results show that Artificial Neural Networks perform the best with 76.46% accuracy, Random Forest second most accurate classifier with 75.95% accuracy and Multinomial Naïve Bayes achieved 75.65% accuracy. T...
We outline the concept of an open technology platform that builds upon a publicly accessible libr... more We outline the concept of an open technology platform that builds upon a publicly accessible library of fluidic designs, manufacturing processes, and experimental characterization, as well as virtualization by a "digital twin" based on modeling, simulation, and cloud computing. Backed by the rapidly emerging Web3 technology "Blockchain," we significantly extend traditional approaches to effectively incentivize broader participation by an interdisciplinary "value network" of diverse players. Ranging from skilled individuals (the "citizen scientist" and the "garage entrepreneur") and more established research institutions to companies with their infrastructures, equipment, and services, the novel platform approach enables all stakeholders to jointly contribute to value creation along more decentralized supply chain designs including research and technology development (RTD). A blockchain-enabled token economy efficiently leverages the "Wisdom of the Crowds" and secures "trust" and transparency by reputation systems requiring "skin in the game" from contributors. Prediction markets are created for guiding decision making, planning, and allocation of funding; competitive parallelization of work and its validation from independent participants substantially enhances quality, credibility, and speed of project outcomes in the real world along the entire path from RTD, fabrication, and testing to eventual commercialization. This novel, Blockchain-backed, open platform concept can be led by a corporation, academic entity, a loosely organized group, or even "chieflessly" within a smart-contract encoded Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The proposed strategy is particularly attractive for highly interdisciplinary fields like microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip systems in the context of manifold applications in the Life Sciences. As an exemplar, we outline the centrifugal "Lab-on-a-Disc" technology. Rather than engaging in all sub-disciplines themselves, many smaller, highly innovative actors can focus on strengthening the product component distinguishing their unique selling point (USP), e.g., a particular bioassay, detection scheme, or application scenario. In this effort, system integrators access underlying commons like fluidic design, manufacture, instrumentation, and software from a more resilient and diversified supply chain, e.g., based on a verified pool of community-endorsed or certified providers.
2021 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC), 2021
When the UN published the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, emerging technologies ... more When the UN published the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) were not yet mature. However, through its deployment across industry sectors and verticals, issues related to sustainability, fairness, inclusiveness, efficiency, and usability of these technologies are now priorities for global consumers and producers. This paper discusses what needs to be considered by both policy makers and ‘managers’ in order to exploit the use of AI for SDG achievement. AI can act as a real and meaningful enabler to achieve sustainability goals; however, it may also have negative impacts. Therefore, a carefully balanced approach is required to ensure that Artificial Intelligence systems are employed to help solve sustainability issues without inadvertently affecting other goals.
An overwhelming majority of experts has been flagging for decades that "Saving the Planet" requir... more An overwhelming majority of experts has been flagging for decades that "Saving the Planet" requires immediate, persistent and drastic action to curb a variety of catastrophic risks over the 21st century. However, despite compelling evidence and a range of suggested solutions, transnational coordination of effective measures to protect our biosphere continues to fall short. To remedy, we propose a novel platform for addressing the central issue of affording trust, transparency and truth while minimising administrative overheads. This will empower an even loosely organised, global grassroots community to coordinate a large-scale project on a shared goal ("Commons") spanning the digital and real world. The Web3 concept is based on the swiftly emerging "Blockchain" and related cryptographic, distributed and permissionless technologies. "Wisdom of the crowds" mechanisms involving competitive parallelisation and prediction markets are enabled by formalised reputation and staking to incentivise high-quality work, fair validation and best management practice. While these mechanisms have been (mostly separately) applied to science, business, governance, web, sensor, information and communication technologies (ICT), our integrative approach around Blockchain-enabled 'operating principles and protocols' sets the basis for designing novel forms of potentially crowdfunded Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs).
Emerging Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Bloc... more Emerging Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain and 5G communications are innovation accelerators creating new products, processes and industries by disrupting the Information Communication Technologies status quo. International Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) and Standard Setting Organisations (SSOs) develop and evolve consensus documents of the state of the art and publish these international agreements as Standards. In this document the authors present uses cases where some of these emerging technologies can contribute significantly to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
PurposeIdeally, quality should be, and is, an integral element of education, yet capturing and ar... more PurposeIdeally, quality should be, and is, an integral element of education, yet capturing and articulating quality is not simple. Programme quality reviews in third-level education can demonstrate quality and identify areas for improvement, offering many potential benefits. However, details on the process of quality programme review are limited in the literature. This study aims to report on the introduction of a standardised programme review process in one university.Design/methodology/approachUsing a standardised template, the annual programme review (APR) process captured student voice, external examiner reports, statistical data and action/s since the previous review. Following completion of programme reviews across the university, the APR process was itself evaluated using questionnaires and focus groups.FindingsFindings showed that the programme chairs understood the rationale for the review, welcomed the standardised format and felt the information could inform future progra...
Fundamental science and applied research and technology development (RTD) are facing significant ... more Fundamental science and applied research and technology development (RTD) are facing significant challenges that particularly compound to the notorious credibility, reproducibility, funding and sustainability crises. The underlying, serious shortcomings are substantially amplified by a metrics-obsessed publication culture, and a growing cohort of academics fishing for fairly stagnant (public) funding budgets. This work presents, for the first time, a groundbreaking strategy to successfully address these severe issues; the novel strategy proposed here leverages the distributed ledger technology (DLT) “blockchain” to capitalize on cryptoeconomic mechanisms, such as tokenization, consensus, crowdsourcing, smart contracts, reputation systems as well as staking, reward and slashing mechanisms. This powerful toolbox, which is so far widely unfamiliar to traditional scientific and RTD communities (“TradSci”), is synergistically combined with the exponentially growing computing capabilities...
This report blazes a trail for global standardization. For the first time, representatives from m... more This report blazes a trail for global standardization. For the first time, representatives from many different SDOs and academic institutions have created an open access database of specifications, reviews and guidelines for a particular theme (Artificial Intelligence)
This chapter covers the critical topic of standards within the area of big data. Starting with an... more This chapter covers the critical topic of standards within the area of big data. Starting with an overview of standardisation as a means for achieving interoperability, the chapter moves on to identify the European Standards Development Organizations that contribute to the European Commission’s plan for the Digital Single Market. The author goes on to describe, through use cases, exemplar big data challenges, demonstrates the need for standardisation and finally identifies the critical big data use cases where standards can add value. The chapter provides an overview of the key standardisation activities within the EU and the current status of international standardisation efforts. Finally, the chapter closes with future trends for big data standardisation.
Since its launch just over a decade ago by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed ledger tec... more Since its launch just over a decade ago by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) blockchain has followed a breathtaking trajectory into manifold application spaces. This study aper analyses how key factors underpinning the success of this ground-breaking “Internet of value” technology, such as staking of collateral (“skin in the game”), competitive crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and prediction markets, can be applied to substantially innovate the legacy organization of science, research, and technology development (RTD). Here, we elaborate a highly integrative, community-based strategy where a token-based crypto-economy supports finding best possible consensus, trust, and truth by adding unconventional elements known from reputation systems, betting, secondary markets, and social networking. These tokens support the holder’s formalized reputation and are used in liquid-democracy style governance and arbitration within projects or community-driven initiati...
To drive innovation and competitiveness, organisations need to foster the development and broad a... more To drive innovation and competitiveness, organisations need to foster the development and broad adoption of data technologies, value-adding use cases and sustainable business models. Enabling an effective data ecosystem requires overcoming several technical challenges associated with the cost and complexity of management, processing, analysis and utilisation of data. This chapter details a community-driven initiative to identify and characterise the key technical research priorities for research and development in data technologies. The chapter examines the systemic and structured methodology used to gather inputs from over 200 stakeholder organisations. The result of the process identified five key technical research priorities in the areas of data management, data processing, data analytics, data visualisation and user interactions, and data protection, together with 28 sub-level challenges. The process also highlighted the important role of data standardisation, data engineering ...
ICT has the capability to improve the quality of life experienced by our citizens through educati... more ICT has the capability to improve the quality of life experienced by our citizens through education, training, new services, innovation and automated control systems. ICT especially the emerging technologies investigated here are of immense importance to supporting education, health, innovation and infrastructure. AI and Big Data systems show great potential for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals which currently requires immediate global action in areas like climate change, poverty and pollution to ensure that additional damage to societies and the planet is prevented. Standardization is key to sustainability in the fourth industrial revolution. As standards are living documents, they evolve with the technologies and provide an additional pathway to technological innovation. Application solutions employing AI/Big Data technologies or utilising platforms based on these technologies provide interoperability and quality assurance through standardization. These d...
Social media has become an important platform for the public to express their opinions and commen... more Social media has become an important platform for the public to express their opinions and comment on all manner of things. Analysis of social media data can yield interesting facts and views about another person, product, business or an issue. This paper focuses on content profiling based on sentiment analysis of Twitter data for a particular User, Business or a Hashtag by focusing on the emotions, reactions and opinions written on Twitter by different users in the form of tweets and using statistical, learning and natural language processing techniques.. To accomplish the task, this paper will also use various Machine Learning techniques along with a combination of Python Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) VADER Library. The different machine learning classifiers are evaluated and results show that Artificial Neural Networks perform the best with 76.46% accuracy, Random Forest second most accurate classifier with 75.95% accuracy and Multinomial Naïve Bayes achieved 75.65% accuracy. T...
We outline the concept of an open technology platform that builds upon a publicly accessible libr... more We outline the concept of an open technology platform that builds upon a publicly accessible library of fluidic designs, manufacturing processes, and experimental characterization, as well as virtualization by a "digital twin" based on modeling, simulation, and cloud computing. Backed by the rapidly emerging Web3 technology "Blockchain," we significantly extend traditional approaches to effectively incentivize broader participation by an interdisciplinary "value network" of diverse players. Ranging from skilled individuals (the "citizen scientist" and the "garage entrepreneur") and more established research institutions to companies with their infrastructures, equipment, and services, the novel platform approach enables all stakeholders to jointly contribute to value creation along more decentralized supply chain designs including research and technology development (RTD). A blockchain-enabled token economy efficiently leverages the "Wisdom of the Crowds" and secures "trust" and transparency by reputation systems requiring "skin in the game" from contributors. Prediction markets are created for guiding decision making, planning, and allocation of funding; competitive parallelization of work and its validation from independent participants substantially enhances quality, credibility, and speed of project outcomes in the real world along the entire path from RTD, fabrication, and testing to eventual commercialization. This novel, Blockchain-backed, open platform concept can be led by a corporation, academic entity, a loosely organized group, or even "chieflessly" within a smart-contract encoded Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The proposed strategy is particularly attractive for highly interdisciplinary fields like microfluidic Lab-on-a-Chip systems in the context of manifold applications in the Life Sciences. As an exemplar, we outline the centrifugal "Lab-on-a-Disc" technology. Rather than engaging in all sub-disciplines themselves, many smaller, highly innovative actors can focus on strengthening the product component distinguishing their unique selling point (USP), e.g., a particular bioassay, detection scheme, or application scenario. In this effort, system integrators access underlying commons like fluidic design, manufacture, instrumentation, and software from a more resilient and diversified supply chain, e.g., based on a verified pool of community-endorsed or certified providers.
2021 IEEE International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC), 2021
When the UN published the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, emerging technologies ... more When the UN published the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) were not yet mature. However, through its deployment across industry sectors and verticals, issues related to sustainability, fairness, inclusiveness, efficiency, and usability of these technologies are now priorities for global consumers and producers. This paper discusses what needs to be considered by both policy makers and ‘managers’ in order to exploit the use of AI for SDG achievement. AI can act as a real and meaningful enabler to achieve sustainability goals; however, it may also have negative impacts. Therefore, a carefully balanced approach is required to ensure that Artificial Intelligence systems are employed to help solve sustainability issues without inadvertently affecting other goals.
An overwhelming majority of experts has been flagging for decades that "Saving the Planet" requir... more An overwhelming majority of experts has been flagging for decades that "Saving the Planet" requires immediate, persistent and drastic action to curb a variety of catastrophic risks over the 21st century. However, despite compelling evidence and a range of suggested solutions, transnational coordination of effective measures to protect our biosphere continues to fall short. To remedy, we propose a novel platform for addressing the central issue of affording trust, transparency and truth while minimising administrative overheads. This will empower an even loosely organised, global grassroots community to coordinate a large-scale project on a shared goal ("Commons") spanning the digital and real world. The Web3 concept is based on the swiftly emerging "Blockchain" and related cryptographic, distributed and permissionless technologies. "Wisdom of the crowds" mechanisms involving competitive parallelisation and prediction markets are enabled by formalised reputation and staking to incentivise high-quality work, fair validation and best management practice. While these mechanisms have been (mostly separately) applied to science, business, governance, web, sensor, information and communication technologies (ICT), our integrative approach around Blockchain-enabled 'operating principles and protocols' sets the basis for designing novel forms of potentially crowdfunded Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs).
Emerging Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Bloc... more Emerging Technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain and 5G communications are innovation accelerators creating new products, processes and industries by disrupting the Information Communication Technologies status quo. International Standards Development Organisations (SDOs) and Standard Setting Organisations (SSOs) develop and evolve consensus documents of the state of the art and publish these international agreements as Standards. In this document the authors present uses cases where some of these emerging technologies can contribute significantly to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
PurposeIdeally, quality should be, and is, an integral element of education, yet capturing and ar... more PurposeIdeally, quality should be, and is, an integral element of education, yet capturing and articulating quality is not simple. Programme quality reviews in third-level education can demonstrate quality and identify areas for improvement, offering many potential benefits. However, details on the process of quality programme review are limited in the literature. This study aims to report on the introduction of a standardised programme review process in one university.Design/methodology/approachUsing a standardised template, the annual programme review (APR) process captured student voice, external examiner reports, statistical data and action/s since the previous review. Following completion of programme reviews across the university, the APR process was itself evaluated using questionnaires and focus groups.FindingsFindings showed that the programme chairs understood the rationale for the review, welcomed the standardised format and felt the information could inform future progra...
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Papers by Ray Walshe