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Geographical location, infrastructures, and services are the main consolidated pillars of a port in terms of its capacity to compete and cooperate with other ports. In the last years, a new pillar was identified: emerging technologies. Ports’ issues were initially solved with individual ICT solutions adopted by each decision-maker, which generated efficiencies in the three main port flows: cargo, information, and financial. However, new benefits and challenges are connected with the introduction of shared emerging ICT among decision-makers inside ports. The crucial issue concerns the fact that several decision-makers could share a decision about a single-port operation. Therefore, the effectiveness and efficiency of ports depend on how the interactions between the decision-makers are solved. Port operations are associated with movements (cargo) and transactions (information and financial) in a synchronic graph, which allows highlighting the role of emerging technologies in the modification of port operation generalized cost, considering the different decision-makers. The focal point concerns the building of a theoretical model using the formal equations of Transport System Models (TSMs) for the estimation of the cost for a Unit of Load (UL), e.g., a container traveling along a path, composed of a sequence of port operations, inside a port with and without emerging technologies. The proposed theoretical model provides the possibility of estimating ex ante the reduction of cost (port time of UL) given by introducing new technologies and a Port Community System (PCS). Different scenarios, considering some cases, ranging from the absence of ICT to the presence of a PCS, are compared, considering the different situations from a non-congested port to a congested one. The main results of the study and its novelty concern, on the one hand, the extension of TSMs to port systems, highlighting the problem of a non-single decision-maker (two or more) in some port operations and, on the other hand, the possibility of reducing the generalized cost (e.g., time) in the same operations in which there are concurrent decision-makers, through the use of an advanced PCS. The reported numerical example confirms the theoretical results. The work can be useful for researchers for port planners (e.g., port authorities) because it permits evaluating the utility for introducing shared emerging technologies using advanced PCS in a unified view.

The plan of a novel Energy Service Utility (ESU) traced the evolution lines towards a modern positioning of a multiutility environment that is oriented towards the required topics of green and smart city, a leader in the environmental context, in smart networks and new energy models. This strategy has triggered numerous interventions with the main aim to mobilize citizens and especially young population in this field. After the analysis, our goal is to try to translate the plan into suggestions for improvement and business ideas, based on the emerging ICT. The main point of changing the classical 'platform' to 'platfirm' was to contribute to the ideas, to the tips regarding the levels of the plan and, for the classified groups to its implementation.

The report explores theories and practices surrounding citizens’ veillance activities, namely a broad range of citizen-driven initiatives for civic purposes. These can aim at creating new forms of knowledge and awareness; building new social communities and commitments; contributing to protection of common goods; empowering citizens in protecting or restoring some fundamental individual and collective rights. The concept of “veillance” is used here to refer to activities performed by citizens broadly and primarily to produce socially useful, empowering knowledge —rather than to control somebody. Therefore, the working definition proposed for veillance is a condition of citizens’ cognitive alertness and knowledge production proactively oriented towards the protection of common goods. Describing the workshop on Citizens’ veillance held on 20-21 March 2014 at the JRC in Ispra, the report further elaborates these discussions and reflections by providing some provisional recommendations while identifying several epistemic and normative issues emerged that require further investigation. Several ongoing changes are reframing the processes of knowledge production. Science and knowledge are no longer produced only in official sites, but everywhere in society, and especially through ICT and the web. Scientists’ (and artists-scientists’) and citizens’ science often merge and converge in producing relevant, reliable and transparent knowledge to complement and in some instances change or redirect official, institutional knowledge. In order to be democratically legitimate and to re-draw the boundaries between the traditional public function of knowledge production and these new forms of lay production of knowledge, the values promoted by these initiatives are to be reflected in more democratic and transparent ICT architectures., JRC.G.6-Digital Citizen Security

Open Access article Research and innovation in emerging technologies can have great benefits but also raise ethical and social concerns. The current discourse on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a novel attempt to come to conceptual and practical ways of dealing with such concerns. In order to effectively understand and address possible ethical and social issues, stakeholders need to have an understanding of what such issues might be. This paper explores ethical issues related to the field of emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs). Based on a foresight study of ICT that led to the identification of eleven emerging technologies, we outline the field of ethical and social issues of these technologies. This overview of possible problems can serve as an important sensitising device to these issues. We describe how such awareness can contribute to the successful deployment of responsible practice in research and innovation.

Part 3: Section 2: Critical View of the Future; International audience; This paper provides an overview of emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) that can be expected to become socially relevant in the next 10 to 15 years. It describes the results of a dual discourse analysis of publiccations on emerging ICTs. Sources were, on the one hand, government/policy publications and, on the other, publications by research institutions. This discourse analysis led to the identification of 11 emerging ICTs. For each of these ICTs, defining features were collected. In order to gain a larger scale understanding, the defining features were then regrouped to assess which likely effect they might have on the relationship between humans and their environment. These features are then interpreted and investigated with regard to what they betray about the implied assumptions about individuals, society and technology. The paper ends by critically reflecting the chosen approach and asking how this research can help us develop technology in desirable ways.

Part 4: Section 3: Technological Futures; International audience; Doing research on future and emerging technologies raises a number of significant ontological and epistemological challenges. The fundamental uncertainty of the future, combined with problems of appropriate descriptions of tech nology in general, render it difficult to come to an appropriate account of the likely shape and use of future technologies. This paper discusses several streams of research that address this issue, including the question of relevant description and context, interpretive flexibility, affordances of technology, and multi-stability of technological trajectories. The paper proposes that some of these problems may be addressed by using a democratic and participative approach to technology research and development. Participative technology assessment is then discussed as an example of an established way of democratically engaging with technology stakeholders during research and development. The paper concludes by discussing the promises and limitations of such a participative approach with regard to the question of understanding and researching future technologies.

Ethical issues of information and communication technologies (ICTs) are important because they can have significant effects on human liberty, happiness, and people’s ability to lead a good life. They are also of functional interest because they can determine whether technologies are used and whether their positive potential can unfold. For these reasons, policy makers are interested in finding out what these issues are and how they can be addressed. The best way of creating ICT policy that is sensitive to ethical issues pertain to being proactive in addressing such issues at an early stage of the technology life cycle. The present paper uses this position as a starting point and discusses how knowledge of ethical aspects of emerging ICTs can be gained. It develops a methodology that goes beyond established futures methodologies to cater for the difficult nature of ethical issues. The authors outline how the description of emerging ICTs can be used for an ethical analysis.

Most research on ICT ethics concentrates either on existing usages of technologies and current issues or on questions that raise significant theoretical or practical interest, such as ICT implants or healthcare ICT. What is currently missing is a systematic attempt to identify ethical issues in development and implementation of technologies that are not yet widely used but which can plausibly be predicted to be commonly used in a time frame of about 10 years. The Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications (ETICA) project will move beyond the state of the art in ICT ethics by offering a comprehensive overview of ethical and social issues in ICT that are likely to develop in the medium term future. ETICA will do this by providing a list of emerging technologies and their applications as well as develop a matrix of technological applications within which ICT ethical issues can be easily identified. The potential ethical issues will be subsequently ranked and graded by evaluating them according to top priority issues. By distinguishing between technologies and applications and using the resulting issues matrix, the ETICA approach will allow for the identification of issues that are currently not yet on the agenda. The matrix and resulting evaluation will be useful for continuous monitoring of the ICT field. One of the first tasks of the ETICA project is to develop a research approach that will allow a maximally comprehensive identification of emerging ICTs and their applications. By comprehensive identification we mean the review and assessment of materials that are collected for identification purposes of emerging technologies from various sources of information. Thus the data is collected from policies, research programmes, research and market forecasts and research projects as well as from selected citizen driven sources. In this deliverable we describe the basic process and materials that we believe will be suitable for the ETICA project's' objectives and goals.

Most research on ICT ethics concentrates either on existing usages of technologies and current issues or on questions that raise significant theoretical or practical interest, such as ICT implants or healthcare ICT. What is currently missing is a systematic attempt to identify ethical issues in development and implementation of technologies that are not yet widely used but which can plausibly be predicted to be commonly used in a time frame of about 10 years. The Ethical Issues of Emerging ICT Applications (ETICA) project will move beyond the state of the art in ICT ethics by offering a comprehensive overview of ethical and social issues in ICT that are likely to develop in the medium term future. ETICA will do this by providing a list of emerging technologies and their applications as well as develop a matrix of technological applications within which ICT ethical issues can be easily identified. The potential ethical issues will be subsequently ranked and graded by evaluating them according to top priority issues. By distinguishing between technologies and applications and using the resulting issues matrix, the ETICA approach will allow for the identification of issues that are currently not yet on the agenda. The matrix and resulting evaluation will be useful for continuous monitoring of the ICT field. One of the first tasks of the ETICA project is to develop a research approach that will allow a maximally comprehensive identification of emerging ICTs and their applications. By comprehensive identification we mean the review and assessment of materials that are collected for identification purposes of emerging technologies from various sources of information. Thus the data is collected from policies, research programmes, research and market forecasts and research projects as well as from selected citizen driven sources. In this deliverable we describe the basic process and materials that we believe will be suitable for the ETICA project's' objectives and goals.