Christian Uhl, Bernd Freisleben

BigBlueButton (BBB) is a web conferencing system designed for online learning. It consists of a set of pre-configured open -source software tools to realize video conferencing functionality primarily for teaching purposes. Due to the COVID -19 pande mic, our university decided to roll out BBB for the university’s educational activities in the first nationwide lock -down in early 2020. Based on our experiences in deploying, operating, and using BBB at our university for about 12 months, we present suggestions on how the services provided by BBB can be improved to meet the technical demands identified during online lecturing at our university. Our suggestions include the

Cynthia Pickering, Erik Fisher, Paul Ross

This paper describes the temporal progression of human and social dimensions that undergraduate information and communications technology (ICT) students realized during an experiential learning externship where they explored digital divide technology solutions for low-income neighborhoods in the surrounding urban community . The described research represents significant adaptation and use of socio-technical integration research (STIR) with undergraduate ICT students engaged in work based experiential learning t o promote equity in STEM education, instill a sense of civic responsibility, and practice approaches to tackling complex societal problems. Methods used for the research study included: STIR, semi -structured interviews, and on -site group observations. Usi ng STIR, an embedded social scientist conduct ed regular one-on-one dialogs with three of four student externs , to collaboratively describe each student’s consideration of human and social dimensions as part of their technical work, explore alternative choices and their potential outcomes, and engage in reflexive learning that in some cases, influenced deliberate changes to material and behavioral practices. The on-site observation of group activities within the ICT innovation center situated in the local ur ban community provide d additional ecosystem context during technical solution design and development of the digital divide solution for local high schools and feeder schools. Outcomes for participating undergraduate ICT students showed: 1) Technology learning improvements for all students ; 2) Capacity building to reflect, anticipate and respond to sociotechnical interactions for some students; and 3) Each student was able to progress to a new level of socio-technical learning and decision making . Refle xive discourse with participants surface d cultural assets and consideration of alternative knowledges in collaborative technology design, development, and implementation that can potentially lead to solutions that are more community centered now and in the future as the ICT students transition to the workforce.

Fábio Longo De Moura, Filipe De Sá-Soares

There is currently a great demand, which looks set to continue to grow in the near future, for professionals in the Information Systems and Technology area. The search for these professionals faces the difficulty of hiring individuals suited to the company’s culture and who have a set of competencies that can add value to the company in the short term, with the possibility of a lasting relationship and with gains for both parties, employee and employer. However, several references that assist in the structuring of professional profiles do not follow a standard when using the concepts needed to describe professional competencies, falling short to provide a more accurate support to the process of hiring and developing professionals. This work analyzes eight competency frameworks, reviews the definitions of competency-related concepts and proposes a competency grammar to standardize and clarify the specification of competencies, by resorting to Backus-Naur Form. To validate the proposal, Information S ystems and Technolog y professionals, as well as practitioners from four other professional areas, reported attributes of their occupations, in light of the adopted definitions and observing the proposed grammatical rules.

Dalia Gallico

The paper presents the nuanced role of culture in the sustainable development agenda of the United Nations, highlighting the contr ibution of House Museums in all the World. Museums are increasingly aware of the need to become more sustainable. To this end, many museums are already doing some green work and green thinking, thus contributing to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) and to creating a sustainable future. Government and funding bodies are increasingly demanding environmental assessment. As agents of social responsibility we are expected more and more to deal with the results of env ironmental change such as flooding and drought, and to fulfil our role as a forum for public debate. We believe that despite the Covid -19 Pandemic and its devastating effect on personal, public, political, economic and cultural life over this past year it is important to also keep looking beyond it. Sustainability remains even more relevant for the future of society and museums alike. The research presents the results about an open call for museums and museum professionals, to have an important role to play in building a more peaceful, equal, and sustainable future. Best practices on sustainability address these issues, examine the challenges, inspire examples and show that a lot is possible.

Eduard Daoud, Nabil Khalil, Martin Gaedke

Counterfeit products are a major problem that the market has faced for a long time. According to the Global Brand Counterfeiting Report 2018, "Amount of Total Counterfeiting, globally has reached to 1.2 Trillion USD in 2017 and is Bound to Reach 1.82 Trillion USD by the Year 2020" a solution to t his concern has already been researched and published by the authors in previous research papers published in e -society 2020 and IADIS journal. However, the issue with the previously mentioned solution was that the object detection performance and accuracy in detecting small objects need to be improved. In this paper, a comparison between the current state of the art algorithm YOLO (You Only Look Once) used in the new implementation and the SSD (Single Shot Detector) algorithm, the faster R -CNN (Region -Based Convolutional Neural Networks) used in the old implementation is made under the same condition and using the same training, testing, and validation sets. The comparison is made in the context of the present task to discuss and prove why YOLO is a more suitable option for the counterfeit product detection task.

Yusuf Bozkurt, Reiner Braun, Alexander Rossmann

Literature reviews are essential for any scientific work, both as part of a dissertation or as a stand-alone work. Scientists benefit from the fact that more and more literature is available in electronic form, and finding and accessing relevant literature has become more accessible through scientific databases. However, a traditional literature review method is characterized by a highly manual process, while technologies and methods in big data, machine learning, and text mining have advanced. Especially in areas where research streams are rapidly evolving, and topics are becoming more comprehensive, complex, and heterogeneous, it is challenging to provide a holistic overview and identify research gaps manually. Therefore, we have developed a framework that supports the traditional approach of conducting a literature review using machine learning and text mining methods. The framework is particularly suitable in cases where a large amount of literature is available, and a holistic understanding of the research area is needed. The framework consists of several steps in which the critical mind of the scientist is supported by machine learning. The unstructured text data is transformed into a structured form through data preparation realized with text mining, making it applicable for various machine learning techniques. A concrete example in the field of smart cities makes the framework tangible.

Pedro Isaías

Editorial preface for Volume 17, Issue 1 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.