The rapid expansion of AI-based remote services has intensified debates about the long-term implications of growing structural concentration in infrastructure and expertise. As AI capabilities become increasingly intertwined with geopolitical interests, the availability and reliability of foundational AI services can no longer be taken for granted. This issue is particularly pressing for AI-enabled public services for citizens, as governments and public agencies are progressively adopting 24/7 AI-driven support systems typically operated through commercial offerings from a small oligopoly of global technology providers. This paper challenges the prevailing assumption that general-purpose architectures, offered by these providers, are the optimal choice for all application contexts. Through practical experimentation, we demonstrate that viable and cost-effective alternatives exist. Alternatives that align with principles of digital and cultural sovereignty. Our findings provide an empirical illustration that sovereign AI-based public services are both technically feasible and economically sustainable, capable of operating effectively on premises with modest computational and financial resources while maintaining cultural and digital autonomy. The technical insights and deployment lessons reported here are intended to inform the adoption of similar sovereign AI public services by national agencies and governments worldwide.
Current products, especially in the automotive sector, pose complex technical systems having a multi-disciplinary mechatronic nature. Industrial standards supporting system engineering and production typically (i) address the production phase only, but do not cover the complete product life cycle, and (ii) focus on production processes and resources rather than the products themselves. The presented approach is motivated by incorporating the impacts of the end-of-life phase of the product life cycle into the engineering phase. This paper proposes a modeling approach coming up from the Product-Process-Resource (PPR) modeling paradigm. It combines requirements on (i) respecting the product structure as a basis for the model, and (ii) incorporates repairing, remanufacturing, or upcycling within cyber-physical production systems. The proposed model called PoPAN should accompany the product during the entire life cycle as a digital shadow encapsulated within the Asset Administration Shell of a product. To facilitate the adoption of the proposed paradigm, the paper also proposes serialization of the model in the AutomationML data format. The model is demonstrated on a use-case for disassembling electric vehicle batteries to support their remanufacturing for stationary battery applications.
This paper aims to discuss the impact of Earnings Management (EM) practices in the hospitality industry and identify research gaps to be investigated in future research. The methodology is based on a systematic literature review (SLR), including 15 academic papers in the final sample, published from 2004 to 2021. There is clear evidence of EM practices in the hospitality industry, which are implemented through different techniques. Yet, several research gaps still persist. For instance, little is known about the EM behaviour of multinational hotel chains or private Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), and we still do not know how such opportunistic behaviour is impacted by different variables. The recent COVID-19 pandemic also offers interesting future research opportunities. Despite the earnings management topic being widely explored in the literature, this SLR shows that the investigation of EM within the hospitality industry is very scarce. Nevertheless, since EM reduces the quality of financial reporting, these practices are a problem for investors, auditors, regulators and other stakeholders, who must rely on earnings disclosure to make decisions, which justifies the importance of its study.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
Alireza Shabani shojaei , Belem Barbosa , Zaila Oliveira
Notwithstanding the increasing commitment of managers toward environmental sustainability, consumer skepticism remains widespread, often resulting in perceptions of greenwashing. Although greenwashing has been studied by researchers, there is a lack of understanding of how consumers' Perceived greenwashing affects their consumption behavior. The current study aims to investigate how perceived greenwashing impacts consumers’ purchasing behavior of environmentally friendly products. The study used the “theory of planned behavior” and the “theory of perceived risk”. For data analysis, SmartPLS3 was employed. Results confirm that the perceived greenwashing leads to a decrease in the attitude, purchase intention, and purchase behavior of eco-friendly products. Both perceived risk and perceived differentiation also were found to influence purchase intention. These findings confirm the negative impact of greenwashing perception on consumer behavior and highlight the need for transparency and clear environmental claims in product communication.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
Staff scheduling is a well-known problem in operations research and finds its application at hospitals, airports, supermarkets, and many others. Its goal is to assign shifts to staff members such that a certain objective function, e.g. revenue, is maximized. Meanwhile, various constraints of the staff members and the organization need to be satisfied. Typically in staff scheduling problems, there are hard constraints on the minimum number of employees that should be available at specific points of time. Often multiple hard constraints guaranteeing the availability of specific number of employees with different roles need to be considered. Staff scheduling for demand-responsive services, such as, e.g., ride-pooling and ride-hailing services, differs in a key way from this: There are often no hard constraints on the minimum number of employees needed at fixed points in time. Rather, the number of employees working at different points in time should vary according to the demand at those points in time. Having too few employees at a point in time results in lost revenue, while having too many employees at a point in time results in not having enough employees at other points in time, since the total personnel-hours are limited. The objective is to maximize the total reward generated over a planning horizon, given a monotonic relationship between the number of shifts active at a point in time and the instantaneous reward generated at that point in time. This key difference makes it difficult to use existing staff scheduling algorithms for planning shifts in demand-responsive services. In this article, we present a novel approach for modelling and solving staff scheduling problems for demand-responsive services that optimizes for the relevant reward function.
This paper investigates the spatial pricing and fleet management strategies for an integrated platform that provides both ride-sourcing services and intracity parcel delivery services over a transportation network utilizing the idle time of ride-sourcing drivers. Specifically, the integrated platform simultaneously offers on-demand ride-sourcing services for passengers and multiple modes of parcel delivery services for customers, including: (1) on-demand delivery, where drivers immediately pick up and deliver parcels upon receiving a delivery request; and (2) flexible delivery, where drivers can pick up (or drop off) parcels only when they are idle and waiting for the next ride-sourcing request. A continuous-time Markov Chain (CTMC) model is proposed to characterize the status change of drivers under joint movement of passengers and parcels over the transportation network with limited vehicle capacity, where the service quality of ride-sourcing services, on-demand delivery services, and flexible delivery services are rigorously quantified. Building on the CTMC model, incentives for ride-sourcing passengers, delivery customers, drivers, and the platform are captured through an economic equilibrium model, and the optimal spatial pricing decisions of the platform are derived by solving a non-convex profit-maximizing problem. We prove the well-posedness of the model and develop a tailored algorithm to compute the optimal decisions of the platform. Furthermore, we validate the proposed model in a comprehensive case study for San Francisco, demonstrating that joint management of ride-sourcing services and intracity package delivery services can lead to a Pareto improvement that benefits all stakeholders in the integrated ride-sourcing and parcel delivery market under realistic parcel and passenger demand patterns.
The recent success and proliferation of machine learning and deep learning have provided powerful tools, which are also utilized for encrypted traffic analysis, classification, and threat detection in computer networks. These methods, neural networks in particular, are often complex and require a huge corpus of training data. Therefore, this paper focuses on collecting a large up-to-date dataset with almost 200 fine-grained service labels and 140 million network flows extended with packet-level metadata. The number of flows is three orders of magnitude higher than in other existing public labeled datasets of encrypted traffic. The number of service labels, which is important to make the problem hard and realistic, is four times higher than in the public dataset with the most class labels. The published dataset is intended as a benchmark for identifying services in encrypted traffic. Service identification can be further extended with the task of "rejecting" unknown services, i.e., the traffic not seen during the training phase. Neural networks offer superior performance for tackling this more challenging problem. To showcase the dataset's usefulness, we implemented a neural network with a multi-modal architecture, which is the state-of-the-art approach, and achieved 97.04% classification accuracy and detected 91.94% of unknown services with 5% false positive rate.
Michael Gundall, Julius Stegmann, Mike Reichardt
et al.
Live migration of services is a prerequisite for various use cases that must be fulfilled for the realization of Industry 4.0. In addition, many different types of services need to provide mobility and consequently need to be migrated live. These can be offloaded algorithms from mobile devices, such as unmanned vehicles or robots, security services, communication services or classic control tasks. In particular, the latter place very high demands on determinism and latency. Here, it is of utmost importance that the downtime of the service is as low as possible. Since existing live migration approaches try to optimize multiple metrics such as downtime, migration time as well as energy consumption, which are equally relevant in the IT domain, it is not possible to use any of these approaches without adoptions. Therefore, a novel concept is proposed that builds on top of both existing migration approaches as well as virtualization technologies and aims primarily at minimizing service downtime. Furthermore, the concept is evaluated using a test environment. The results show that a sub-millisecond downtime can be achieved with the proposed concept. Moreover, the total migration time is in the range of several hundred milliseconds for the highest performance setting and two seconds for a non-invasive approach.
Pablo Flôres Limberger , Lucimari Acosta Pereira, Tércio Pereira
Loyalty programs (LPs) have been considered a key determining factor for the performance of many companies. Although the benefits, satisfaction, perceived functional value (PFV), and loyalty (BSPfvL) have been widely explored, few studies have attempted to compare the results of this model in different groups of consumers. This study aims to analyze the relationships for varying levels of user involvement in airline loyalty programs. The population of this study was individual members of airway loyalty programs in Brazil. We obtained 429 answered questionnaires. We used multi-group analysis (MGA) using Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results of this study indicate the mediation effect of satisfaction and perceived value and moderation of consumer involvement. A difference was identified between the two groups regarding hedonic benefits, satisfaction, and loyalty. This research has successfully contributed to the airline industry regarding the importance of loyalty benefits. Additionally, it highlights the importance of establishing consumers’ involvement in company loyalty programs. Finally, this study provides practical and theoretical contributions and guides future research efforts.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
In the present study we analyse aspects related to the culinary side of the region of Dobrogea (Romania). The
main research methods for the present article were the comparative study of specialized literature, with coverage
of the main publications dedicated to the chosen topic, and the survey done through a questionnaire, launched
with the purpose of checking the level of knowledge of the gastronomy of Dobrogea among the consumers and to
identify its characteristic elements in order to consider it as vector for the local gastronomic tourism. The results
of our research have highlighted the fact that customers give a high importance to the culinary aspect when
choosing a holiday destination, and that the local Dobrogean dishes, wines, desserts and the quality products
which have received recognition at a European level are not sufficiently known by the general public. This fact is
due, on one side, to the insufficient information given about the geographical origin of the products during the
marketing and sale phase and, on the other side, to a general lack in promotion for Dobrogean products, especially
in other regions of Romania and abroad.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, Business
The value of college sport can be measured in many ways. Most people measure it in dollars, others point to less-tangible benefits such as alumni engagement and campus morale, only a few focus on its educational value. Yet this, as Myles Brand repeatedly recognized, is the value that really counts. Brand’s was something of a voice in the wilderness on this issue—a voice sorely missed in this age of debate about limits on compensation for student-athletes. As a philosophy professor, Brand’s insistence on the educational value of sport follows a tradition begun in ancient Greece by Pythagoras, Socrates, and especially Plato. In this essay, I honor Brand and that ancient tradition by exploring the value of college sport from a philosophical perspective. I interrogate the oppositions of amateurism vs. professionalism, academics vs. athletics, and employment vs. exploitation to arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that ideals of excellence and professionalism are at the heart of “amateurism” in the context of college sport. Education, meanwhile, is the value in college sport that needs to guide all the others—including those that involve dollar signs.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, Sports
The study examines the relationship between mobile financial services and individual financial behavior in India wherein a sizeable population is yet to be financially included. Addressing the endogeneity associated with the use of mobile financial services using an instrumental variable method, the study finds that the use of mobile financial services increases the likelihood of investment, having insurance and borrowing from formal financial institutions. Further, the analysis highlights that access to mobile financial services have the potential to bridge the gender divide in financial inclusion. Fastening the pace of access to mobile financial services may partially alter pandemic induced poverty.
We propose a heuristics-based social-sensor cloud service selection and composition model to reconstruct mosaic scenes. The proposed approach leverages crowdsourced social media images to create an image mosaic to reconstruct a scene at a designated location and an interval of time. The novel approach relies on the set of features defined on the bases of the image metadata to determine the relevance and composability of services. Novel heuristics are developed to filter out non-relevant services. Multiple machine learning strategies are employed to produce smooth service composition resulting in a mosaic of relevant images indexed by geolocation and time. The preliminary analytical results prove the feasibility of the proposed composition model.
With the development of cloud computing, service computing, IoT(Internet of Things) and mobile Internet, the diversity and sociality of services are increasingly apparent. To meet the customized user demands, Service Ecosystem is emerging as a complex social-technology system, which is formed with various IT services through cross-border integration. However, how to analyze and promote the evolution mechanism of service ecosystem is still a serious challenge in the field, which is of great significance to achieve the expected system evolution trends. Based on this, this paper proposes a value-driven analysis framework of service ecosystem, including value creation, value operation, value realization and value distribution. In addition, a computational experiment system is established to verify the effectiveness of the analysis framework, which stimulates the effect of different operation strategies on the value network in the service ecosystem. The result shows that our analysis framework can provide new means and ideas for the analysis of service ecosystem evolution, and can also support the design of operation strategies. Index
Em si tratando de dados estatísticos no turismo para fins de tomada de decisão e elaboração de políticas públicas, estes são decisivos para que os destinos turísticos tenham condições de ofertar novos produtos e serviços, preparando-se para atender às reais necessidades de seus visitantes. Desta forma, objetiva-se neste presente estudo relatar as experiências de trabalho do Observatório do Turismo do Maranhão como instrumento de inteligência e tomada de decisão para a elaboração de políticas públicas de turismo no estado do Maranhão. Utilizou-se de pesquisa bibliográfica e documental, e caracteriza-se como descritiva e exploratória, além do relato de experiência dos membros sobre o funcionamento e dinâmica do Observatório. Conclui-se que a criação do Observatório do Turismo do Maranhão no ano de 2017 tem criado dados até então inexistentes e atualizado outros, de forma a contribuir com o fortalecimento dos polos turísticos do Maranhão.
Recreation. Leisure, Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
Hafedh Mili, Ghizlane El-Boussaidi, Anas Shatnawi
et al.
Service-orientation views applications as orchestrations of independent software services that (1) implement functions that are reusable across many applications, (2) can be invoked remotely, and (3) are packaged to decouple potential callers from their implementation technology. As such, it enables organizations to develop quality applications faster than without services. Legacy applications are not service-oriented. Yet, they implement many reusable functions that could be exposed as \emph{services}. Organizations face three main issues when re-engineering legacy application to (re)use services: (1) to mine their existing applications for reusable functions that can become services, (2) to package those functions into services, and (3) to refactor legacy applications to invoke those services to ease future maintenance. In this paper, we explore these three issues and propose research directions to address them. We choose to focus on the service-oriented re-engineering of recent legacy object-oriented applications, and more specifically, on JEE applications, for several reasons. First, we wanted to focus on architectural challenges, and thus we choose to \textit{not} have to deal with programming language difference between source and target system. We chose JEE applications, in particular, because they embody the range of complexities that one can encounter in recent legacy applications, namely, multi-language systems, multi-tier applications, the reliance on external configuration files, and the reliance on frameworks and container services during runtime. These characteristics pose unique challenges for the three issues mentioned above.
The primary purpose of this research was to garner an understanding of how African American male athletic directors manage diversity and inclusion in their college athletic departments. The authors conducted a collective qualitative case study of two major university athletic departments that each had an African American male athletic director. The authors conducted interviews, took field notes, and analyzed relevant documents/artifacts, all of which served as data sources. Results indicate these leaders viewed diversity and inclusion as (a) increasing racial and gender minority representation in leadership positions and (b) utilizing this diversity as a mechanism for role modeling and mentoring. Differences between the leaders also emerged, as one explicitly focused on conducting an organizational analysis and on making diversity training mandatory for all employees, while the other did not engage in these activities. The authors discuss contributions to the literature and future directions for research.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, Sports
Andreia Costa, Pedro Pintassilgo, António Matias
et al.
In the Algarve the potential for birdwatching tourism is widely
recognized, especially in the Ria Formosa Natural Park (RFNP). This study
aims to describe birdwatchers’ profile in the RFNP. For this purpose, a
survey was applied. The results show that the most frequent nationalities
of birdwatchers are: British (39%), Dutch (17%) and Portuguese (17%). The
majority of birdwatchers are male (55%) and married (57%). The average
age is 50 years old. They are highly educated (74% have an academic
degree). Concerning profession, the most frequent answer was retired
(41%). Respondents are committed to the activity as the majority possess
special equipment and practice birdwatching in vacations. This study also
tests if nationality is related to other characteristics of the birdwatchers,
by using the Kruskal-Wallis and the Chi-square tests. Overall, the results
of this study highlight that regional management organizations should
invest in developing birdwatching in the RFNP.
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services
Francesc González Reverté, Pablo Díaz Luque, Joan Miquel Gomis López
et al.
The aim of this paper is to debate the IT concept from the perception different agents of the tourism sector have about it and to see to what extent there is agreement or disagreement in the definition of the concept itself, its influence on the competitive improvement of destinations and future trends. In short, it intends to analyze the potential, but also to understand the risks and main challenges that the incorporation of IT can cause over current destinations. The work procedure involves asking experts in the tourism sector and in the academic world about the different thematic areas on IT and ITD: the definition of the concept and the welfare of its evolution in the immediate future, the characteristics and components of an ITD system, the role of the technological components in an ITD, the linking of IT with sustainability, the limits and risks of IT display, and the determinants and conditionings that destinations have for the development of IT strategies. The collected information has been obtained from the opinion of around thirty experts, with the purpose of gathering different points of view through the Delphi method: the academic specialists (belonging to national and international universities), those affected (from the case of study of the tourist municipalities of the province of Barcelona) and the facilitators (companies and organizations involved in the use of technologies to promote IT).
Recreation leadership. Administration of recreation services, The city as an economic factor. City promotion