Dimitrios Askounis

Artificial intelligence in short term electric load forecasting: a state-of-the-art survey for the researcher

Abstract Intelligent solutions, based on artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, to solve complicated practical problems in various sectors are becoming more and more widespread nowadays. AI-based systems are being developed and deployed worldwide in myriad applications, mainly because of their symbolic reasoning, flexibility and explanation capabilities. This paper provides an overview for the researcher of AI technologies, as well as their current use in the field of short term electric load forecasting (STELF). The history of AI in STELF is outlined, leading to a discussion of the various approaches as well as the current research directions. The paper concludes by sharing thoughts and estimations on AI future prospects in this area. This review reveals that although still regarded as a novel methodology, AI technologies are shown to have matured to the point of offering real practical benefits in many of their applications.

Citizens Collaboration and Co-Creation in Public Service Delivery: The COCKPIT Project

Governments are striving to deliver more efficient and effective public services in order to achieve better public service quality, with reduced waiting times, improved cost effectiveness, higher productivity and more transparency. Its an issue of doing things in new ways that requires fundamental change in the provision of public services in the future and a complete new approach for Governments to work and interact with their citizens. Currently, Societies witness more than ever that Web 2.0 and social media in particular, constitute the emerging, if not already established, mass collaboration and cooperation platform between citizens and administrations, as the latter have started to realise the benefits of such applications. The COCKPIT project builds on these developments and based on a highly synergetic approach aims to define a new Governance model for the next generation public service delivery, by combining various research areas.

A review of the European Union eParticipation action pilot projects

Purpose – As the society has long ago left the “industrial age” and entered the “information age”, people, enterprises and above all decision makers are constantly trying to get the best out of the opportunities and the technologies offered, for facilitating their life and their work. One of the most active and promising domains nowadays, is eParticipation, which is actively promoted by all stakeholders, as there is a great need of reconnecting citizens with the decision makers and re‐engaging them into the democratic procedures, especially as during the last years this gap is expanding, with the most convincing proof being the huge figure of voter turnout during the latest European elections. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.Design/methodology/approach – A review of the most active and well‐known eParticipation action pilot projects funded in the European Union is presented, alongside with a methodological framework that has been followed for mapping, assessing and evaluating those pr...

A review of electronic government interoperability frameworks: patterns and challenges

e-Government Interoperability Frameworks (e-GIFs) outline the essential prerequisites for joined-up and web-enabled e-government, providing the basic standards that every public authority must adopt. Today, their scope has been extended to facilitate the seamless exchange of information and the deployment of interoperable systems in Central and Municipal Government. In the scope of this paper, the interoperability frameworks released by eight countries are presented, and a comparative analysis among their findings is conducted to indicate the similarities and differences in their philosophy and implementation, resulting in a set of recommendations for any interested party willing to create or update an Interoperability Framework.

NeXCLass: A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR NON-ORDERED MULTICRITERIA CLASSIFICATION

This paper presents NexClass, a Decision Support System (DSS) which supports classification of alternatives into predefined non-ordered categories according to their performance on evaluation criteria and implements a novel classification algorithm based on multicriteria analysis and outranking relations. More detailed, assignment to classes is based on the concept of non-exclusivity, which defines at what degree an alternative can be included in a specific category. For each category, a threshold is defined by the decision maker, which indicates its limit with respect to the evaluation criteria. Alternatives are next evaluated according to the criteria and non-excluding degrees are calculated for each category. Finally, an alternative is assigned to the category for which non-excluding degree gets the lowest value. NexClass DSS implements the above classification algorithm, providing a user-friendly interface, which supports decision makers to formulate and solve classification problems. In addition to the methodology and the DSS, we present a real world application at a classification problem in banking environment. Our findings derived from evaluation experiments in the banking environment provide valid evidence that the proposed methodology and the DSS effectively support decision makers in classification decisions.

Accelerating Policy Making 2.0: Innovation directions and research perspectives as distilled from four standout cases

Abstract People are lately re-considering the advantages of becoming once again an active part of the society, as they everyday discover new ways of connecting with each other towards common goals. This increasing change of attitude calls for new tools and methods as traditional tools for policy making have proved unable to predict and cope with most of todays pressing and persistent challenges. In this context, it is considered as of pivotal importance to study a set of representative set of modern Policy Making 2.0 best cases, in order to scout towards evidence-based future directions, policy propositions, documented results and conclusions. The purpose of the paper at hand is to provide policy makers, practitioners, as well as other interested stakeholders, with a bouquet of (mostly ICT-related) policy implications and practical recommendations that steam through an evidence based, domain-wide study, aiming at directing them towards more efficient and effective launch, steering and sustaining of Policy Making 2.0 initiatives. Early engagement of stakeholders, openness, user friendliness and agility in the whole procedure constitutes only a high level presentation of the propositions and implications derived as a result of the analysis that follows.

Infusing social data analytics into Future Internet applications for manufacturing

Today, a new age of engagement and collaboration has emerged with the proliferation of usergenerated content in social networks and generally the Web 2.0, rendering it particularly difficult for enterprises to monitor and act upon all content following conventional data mining methodologies. In this paper, we present our approach for a Future Internet enabler (FITMAN Anlzer) that provides automated, social data analytics and aims at assisting enterprises in becoming more tuned to their customer needs and gaining insights into current and future trends to early embed them into product design. The FITMAN Anlzer implementation is domainindependent and allows any manufacturer to effectively train it based on his needs and create personalized reports to timely capture the right information. Our methodology includes trend analytics, polarity detection through machine learning, data querying through flexible reports and finally informative charts to visualize the results in order to help companies in their decision making procedures.

Evaluation of the Impact and Adoption of E-government Services in the Balkans

Governments around the world are embracing the digital revolution to enhance services for their citizens. However, the development of quality e-services and delivery systems that are efficient and effective is only one aspect of e-government.

Adding Rules on Existing Hypermedia APIs

During the past years, the data deluge that prevails in the World Wide Web has been accompanied by a number of APIs that expose business logic. In this paper, we discuss a novel approach to enrich existing API standards definitions with business rules. Taking advantage of the REST principles, we aim at enabling the creation of generic clients that can dynamically navigate through semantically enriched web affordances with the help of Hydra-based Hypermedia API descriptions, which encapsulate the finite state machine of possible actions into SWRL rules.

Transforming traditional production system transactions to interoperable eBusiness-aware systems with the use of generic process models

Through the years, successful enterprises have been identified as the ones that were able to adapt their processes and ways of conducting business to the needs of their environment and the technological achievements of their times. This statement has not changed during recent years, but today, due to the major breakthrough of the internet and the possibilities it offers for a unified electronic marketplace, enterprises have to take advantage of the new technological tools offered, in order not only to adapt to this new emerging environment, but also to benefit from it and expand their operations in parallel with minimising costs. Achieving interoperability of the various production systems, and not only enabling hard-wired connectivity, seems to be the key that will unlock the gates leading to this newly established global market, and therefore enterprises need to focus more on their already established processes in order to be able to formulate a global standard for executing business transactions and cooperating smoothly with each other.