Hilde G. Corneliussen, Gilda Seddighi

Although digitalization across sectors drives an increasing demand for IT specialists, women still make up a small part of computing communities, IT education and work – in the US and across Europe. Our project aims to build knowledge about how this situation can be improved in the context of Nordic gender equality regimes. The "gender equality paradox" is a label for women's underrepresentation in STEM disciplines, particularly in IT, that seems to be more extreme in highly gender egalitarian cultures. It has been suggested that the paradox is a result o f women's choices in wealthy countries with a high degree of individual freedom. Our project highlights another side to this paradox, as we explore attitudes towards women's underrepresentation among IT employers and organizations . The analysis reveals mixed signals from the organizations: while they recognize the low proportion of women in IT, they simultaneously negotiate the meaning of women's underrepresentation in IT in ways that do not make gender equality in IT a goal, thus it leaves little space for gender equality actions. While this can have major consequences for women's careers in computing and IT work, it also illustrates a central mechanism of the "gender equality paradox" characterized by a widely accepted norm of gender equality existing alon gside employers' skepticism to the goal of gender balance in computing. Here we analyze the organizations' approaches towards gender equality ideals through the notion of "discursive resources", which points to how individuals translate these ideals in light of their own organizational context. Furthermore, this highlights the importance of taking the organizations' "discursive resources" into account when suggesting solutions to increased awareness of and engagement for gender equality in the IT sector.

Imen Ben Mansour, Ines Alaya, Moncef Tagina

Parallelism arises as an attractive option when solving Multi -Objective optimization problems (MOPs). Moreover, it seems interesting when metaheuristics demand an intensive use of CPU or memory . In this paper, we propose a parallel implementation of a hybrid ant colony optimization metaheuristic for the multiobjective knapsack problem using the OpenMP framework called MHAC_OMP. The proposed approach combined a MultiObjective Ant Colony Optimization (MOACO) algorithm with Tchebycheff based Local Search (TLS) procedure. The idea behind MHAC_OMP is to evolve several independent MOACO in parallel . Each MOACO hold a local archive to maintain diversity. The parallelization is defined as assuming a shared-memory based on threads in which the initialization phase begins with a single thread called the master thread and executed sequentially. Afterward, a parallel region is defined where many threads are created, each one of them executing its own copy of th e proposed ant colony algorithm independently. Experimental results show a significant efficiency of the solutions returned over the sequential implementation.

Anne Falkenberg, Benjamin Buchwitz

The large number of available prices gave rise to price comparison sites that yet lack recommendation services to support their customers in scheduling buying decisions. Using a large data set with 1.46 million daily minimum price observations for four product categories of e lectronic consumer goods, we outline reasons for the slow adoption of recommendation services, evaluate 6.56 billion price forecasts and show that forecasted product prices can be used to build recommendation services to advise customers on their purchase time decision. We compare 16 different methods that can act as the core of price prediction services and give detailed insights on performance as well as advice on model selection for short-, medium and long-term forecasting horizons, outline differences b y category and advocate the transition towards prescriptive price analytics services.

Elizabeth A. Matthews, Juan E. Gilbert

Procedural Content Generation for Games is the application of computers to generate game content such as landscapes, vegetation, or maps. This paper proposes a system (Atlas Chronicle) for the generation of world maps for games that feature story -driven locations. The system uses a combination of story abstraction, graphs, physics simulation, Perlin noise, interpolation, and climate mapping to generate 2D tile-based maps given a basic story structure. To measure the fitness of the levels generated, a user study was performed using established game enjoyment metrics. The study utilized three different content generation approaches for comparison. Eighteen participants (11 Male, 7 Female), aged between 18 and 24 years old were screened based on their prior gaming experience. Results show that levels generated by Atlas Chronicle resulted in statistically similar responses as for the manually designed and static levels.

Amela Karahasanović, Alma Leora Culén, Jan Håvard Skjetne, Geir Hasle1 1SINTEF Digital, Norway Researcher

Rural areas are less attractive and sustainable for people and businesses alike, partially due to inadequate transport services. In this paper, we address transport-related challenges in rural Norway. The focal aspect of our approach is to define a set of values for the d esign and mechanisms of transitioning towards more sustainable rural transport making a real -life difference for people living in rural areas. We connect UN sustainability goals and transition design to discuss how these can be operationalized and used throughout the design process seeking to innovate rural transport. Reflecting on how to find the initial ‘leverage points’ to scaffold the transition to more sustainable transport systems, we explore the possibility of introducing relevant Key Performance Ind icators early on in the design process. We report on our experiences and findings regarding the use Key Performance Indicators in different phases of a design-led innovation process.

Matteo Fanchin, Patrik Pluchino, Luciano Gamberini

Lately, the music domain has been characterized by the appearance of innovative tools that are revolutionizing both the musicians’ way of playing and the musical instruments themselves. For instance, the Internet of Musical Things comprises smart musical instruments and devices that can communicate and control each other wirelessly, changing the musicians-instruments interaction completely. The present experiment analyzes the subjective experience , i.e., usability, user experience, and acceptance, of beginners and expert guitar players, considering three multi-effect pedalboards. These last comprised two prototypes, designed and developed for the study, that were characterized by a high level of personalization. Findings showed that more positive evaluations were assigned to the prototypes than to the traditional multi-effect pedalboard in terms of perceived ease of use, enjoyment, and intention of use. Furthermore, the study underlined the relevance of high customization in affecting the self -reported metrics. Indeed, in some circumstances, the most innovative prototype, i.e., completely wireless, received more favorable evaluations than both other musical devices.

Maja Kocoń

This paper describes the synthesis of virtual human head movements while waiting for a response in human-machine interaction systems. The described approach uses a three-dimensional human head model and kinematic chain of rigid elements. We proposed a method to perform a motion sequence of a virtual head in the idle mode. Th is mode is a state when a virtual person or robot performs subtle movements during the waiting phases between different interaction intervals. This form of action removes the problem of character freeze in motion and has a higher degree of user acceptance. This research covers issues related to creating trajectories of motion to rotate the head model's rigid objects. The proposed method has been used to trajectory generation for loop animation and executes smooth movements in the idle mode. Since the used algorithm has low computational requirements and introduces low interaction delays, we can use it in real-time operation in the HMI framework.

Jean Samarone de Almeida Ferreira, Ana Paula Lüdtke Ferreira, Naylor Bastiani Perez

Prediction of harvest yield is an important and challenging problem . Attempts to solve this problem rely usually rely on regression techniques highly dependent on local factors. This paper presents a hidden Markov model a pproach for forecasting weight production . The model can deal with any culture or provided data. Results show that the model can capture both spatial and temporal harvest variability. Model analysis can help determine causes of variability, differently from regression or more straightforward Markov chain approaches. The resulting structure can benefit from statistical techniques for model tuning and model fitting.

Ángel Rubén Barberis, Lorena E. Del Moral Sachetti

The optimization of Call Centers is not an easy problem to solve, due to the complexity of the mathematical models that derive from the Erlang formulas. Thi s complexity is transferred to optimization models, which in most cases are made up of non -linear and non -differentiable objective functions. As in all areas of Operations Research, solving these problems demands efficient, fast and precise algorithms. Sim ulation as an experimental tool con stitutes an essential environment for the validation of optimization algorithms, especially when there are no well -defined problem repositories with known results metrics that can be compared. This paper describes a strat egy that uses stochastic simulation to study the statistical convergence of integer nonlinear optimization algorithms in the study of Call Center problems.

Hirofumi Nagano, Taku Shimosawa, Atsushi Shimamura, Norihisa Komoda 1Research, Development Division, Hitachi America, Ltd. Researcher, 2535 Augustine Dr, Santa Clara, California Researcher, United States

Currently most of the workflows in enterprise business processes are implemented and managed as information system. However, workflows between organizations are still processed manually based on paper document because it is difficult for the organizations to trust the process and the result of workflow in the system which is provided by one of the organizations or a third -party organization. In this paper, a system architecture for cross organizational workflow management utilizing blockchain technology is proposed. It eliminates every Single Point of Trust (SPoT) which causes falsification risk of the process and data. Our proposed system architecture is considered to connect with internal workflow management system and accommodates two types of smart contracts for interorganizational workflow definition and interorganizational workflow processing, which validates related data in every transaction. By this architecture, each organization can be aware of the data falsificat ion when the data on one of the organization nodes is falsified by a malicious workflow administrator or a system administrator. Through the implementation of the proposed system and evaluation of the falsification risks based on the attack scenarios along workflow life cycle, it is confirmed that all the risks are avoided by the proposed system architecture.

Mathew Nicho

The objective of this paper is to present a serious games model that assist organizations to substantially enhance computer user’s cyber security awareness. Extensive research into academic literature revealed that a comprehensive model for designing serious games for training users to red uce user vulnerabilities in lacking. This paper thus focusses on strategically deploying serious games to educate, train and aware organizational users to detect, prevent, eliminate/mitigate and report instances of social engineering threats deployed by advanced persistent threat (APT) vectors, that predominantly target organisational user vulnerabilities. Training computer users on APT threat vectors which deploys simple so cial engineering yet complex technical methods to exploit internetworked computer user and subsequent vulnerabilities is a challenging task faced by organizations worldwide as is evident from publicly reported attacks. Serious games find immense applicati ons in the domain of education, information systems and information security due to convenience of time, instant feedback, attractiveness and the ease of simulating novel and multiple attack scenarios. While serious games and models have been proposed by researchers in cyber security domain, attributes for building a serious gaming model for APT is wanting in both academic and practitioner domains. In this respect, we propose a serious game model GAM-APT by integrating the serious gaming model components namely the ‘player’, ‘game’ and ‘knowledge’ dimensions with Gagne’s nine events.

Pedro Isaías

Editorial preface for Volume 15, Issue 2 of the IADIS International Journal on Computer Science and Information Systems (IJCSIS). This issue brings together peer-reviewed original research contributions covering the wide spectrum of Information Systems, Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering, and Digital Transformation.