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Between 2020 and 2022, an extensive number of papers about the COVID-19 pandemic have been developed to help authorities in the decision-making process to tackle the pandemic. One of the key functions to achieving a timely response to all the activities is scheduling. Therefore, this paper presents a literature review of all the research regarding scheduling and the COVID-19 outbreak. The search was conducted in SCOPUS and snowballing, gathering a total of 323 papers. A systematic review was conducted, and 43 articles were included. This literature review is classified into five sections: vaccines, testing, developed tools, healthcare scheduling, and others. It was found that the scheduling function is mainly concentrated on designing vaccination strategies. The discussion section provides insights from the literature, including descriptive analysis, used methods, and implemented models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Active Labour Market Policy (ALMP) aims to reduce unemployment by increasing the employability of specific categories of the unemployed. Occupational training without commencing employment, officially called Work, Internship and Transportation, is a form of the Youth Guarantee reform. This measure, which has been implemented since mid-2010 by co-financing the work of young people with no work experience, has both advantages and disadvantages that we wanted to explore more closely. Therefore, in May 2018, a survey was conducted on a sample of 207 young people up to the age of thirty, who were beneficiaries of the aforementioned measure in the City of Split. The study aimed to investigate the (dis-)advantages of occupational training without commencing employment, as well as the effects of the implemented measure on further employment. During the study, the majority of respondents were unemployed and limited-term employees. Prior to the implementation of occupational training, they expected interesting work assignments (71.5%), effective work relationships (86.5%), and adequate workspace and equipment (more than 80%). The respondents with a university degree did not rate occupational training more positively than those with lower education, nor did they mention its greater benefits in further employment. As for the main reasons in favour of the implementation of occupational training without commencing employment, the respondents emphasize the need for work experience of any kind, especially such in the professions which they were educated for, and the acquisition of formal work experience. In addition to their positive experiences, such as gaining new knowledge and acquaintances, they also highlight the negative experiences and shortcomings of the measure. These are, primarily, insufficient remuneration and equally poor job prospects after training, lack of acquired expertise, a feeling of working for free, as well as the "circularity" of the measure, which significantly impedes permanent employment in the workplace where the training was conducted. In conclusion, the measure mainly provides a temporary solution of youth unemployment and mitigates its proportions, contributing to an apparent reduction in the number of unemployed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an innovative course conceived at the Medizinische Fakultät of the Universität Duisburg-Essen on robotics and computer science. Highly motivated students have participated in this course and, as a first consequence, a research has been initiated in the field of Turing machines applied to optimization of triage systems used for disasters. Additionally, a prototype of a universal Turing machine has been built using the Lego Mindstorms EV3 robotics system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper, we describe an architecture that brings the Dual Reality paradigm into intelligent environments also referred to as smart spaces. This architecture aims at enhancing the development of already existing and of new (or future) assistance systems for these smart spaces including the possibility for pre-testing without installing them in the real environment. All information, either really sensed or simulated, can be transmitted in real time from the intelligent environment to a corresponding virtual representation reflecting the real world and vice versa based on an event-based communication infrastructure. Users can interact with the virtual model using a dashboard-like visualization, which also offers the possibility to run simulators and other services that are probably not yet installed in the smart space. The advantages of both worlds can be used to enrich assistance systems and to improve the adaptation of these systems taking the current context into account. We describe a smart space running this new infrastructure. In this instrumented shopping environment, all sensors and actuators can communicate with each other using the event-based infrastructure. Besides that, all data is also transmitted to a Management Dashboard and visualized adequately. In this dashboard-like visualization, a store manager can access all data sensed in the environment and control some installed actuators. We describe briefly how this infrastructure can be used for testing a price tag framework, which offers the ability to generate images that can be transferred to and displayed at electronic shelf labels. Before installing this service in the real environment, the testing is performed in the virtual model using data from the real world. After a successful test phase, the service can be established in the smart shopping environment with very little effort. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]