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The purpose of this work is to bridge FL and blockchain technology through designing a blockchain-based smart agent system architecture and applying in FL. and blockchain technology through designing a blockchain-based smart agent system architecture and applying in FL. FL is an emerging collaborative machine learning technique that trains a model across multiple devices or servers holding private data samples without exchanging their data. The locally trained results are aggregated by a centralized server in a privacy-preserving way. However, there is an assumption where the centralized server is trustworthy, which is impractical. Fortunately, blockchain technology has opened a new era of data exchange among trustless strangers because of its decentralized architecture and cryptography-supported techniques.

In this study, the author proposes a novel design of a smart agent inspired by the smart contract concept. Specifically, based on the proposed smart agent, a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving and fair deep learning blockchain-FL framework is designed, where the agent network is consistent with the blockchain network and each smart agent is a participant in the FL task. During the whole training process, both the data and the model are not at the risk of leakage.

A demonstration of the proposed architecture is designed to train a neural network. Finally, the implementation of the proposed architecture is conducted in the Ethereum development, showing the effectiveness and applicability of the design.

The author aims to investigate the feasibility and practicality of linking the three areas together, namely, multi-agent system, FL and blockchain. A blockchain-FL framework, which is based on a smart agent system, has been proposed. The author has made several contributions to the state-of-the-art. First of all, a concrete design of a smart agent model is proposed, inspired by the smart contract concept in blockchain. The smart agent is autonomous and is able to disseminate, verify the information and execute the supported protocols. Based on the proposed smart agent model, a new architecture composed by these agents is formed, which is a blockchain network. Then, a fully decentralized, privacy-preserving and smart agent blockchain-FL framework has been proposed, where a smart agent acts as both a peer in a blockchain network and a participant in a FL task at the same time. Finally, a demonstration to train an artificial neural network is implemented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a critical framework to analyse how “smart” plays out in tourism places. Moving from a recognition of the strategies, expected impacts and imageries of Smart City, the authors engage with the mobilities literature to identify pitfalls in the quest of “smartening up” cities for hypermobile populations.

The study adopted a set of geoanalytical techniques to establish the potential relationship between the territorial upgrade of mobility and the socio-economic change processes the city of Barcelona is experiencing.

The paper suggests the effect of “smart” in cities could indeed be one of economic recovery; however, one triggering fundamental transformation of the social fabric of the city, whose most evident facet is the creation of globalised functional enclaves that may be forcefields of exclusion for the most vulnerable populations.

This paper contributes to a new stream of critical research on “smart” with a strong focus on the power of mobilities and mobility systems, whose digital enhancement plays out as a leveraging agent of new place connections and negotiations for short-term populations, but at the same time, may exclude disadvantaged subjects in their capacity to access and afford the system network.

The purpose of this article is to clarify current and widespread misconceptions about the properties of blockchain technologies and to describe challenges and avenues for correct and trustworthy design and implementation of distributed ledger system (DLS) or Technology (DLT).

The authors contrast the properties of a blockchain with desired, however emergent, properties of a DLS, which is a complex and distributed system. They point out and justify, with facts and analysis, current misconceptions about the blockchain and DLSs. They describe challenges that these systems will need to address and possible solution avenues for achieving trustworthiness.

Many of the statements that have appeared on the internet, news and academic articles, such as immutable ledger and exact copies, may be misleading. These are desired emergent properties of a complex system, not assured properties. It is well-known within the distributed systems and critical software community that it is extremely hard to prove that a complex system correctly and completely implements emergent properties. Further research and development for trustworthy DLS design and implementation is needed, both practical and theoretical.

This is the first known published attempt at describing current misconceptions about blockchain technologies. Further collaborative work, discussions, potential solutions, evaluations, resulting publications and verified reference implementations are needed to ensure DLTs are safe, secure, and trustworthy.

Interdisciplinary teams with members from academia, business and industry, and from disciplines such as business, entrepreneurship, theoretical and practical computer science, cybersecurity, finance, mathematics and statistics, must be formed. Such teams must collaborate with the objective of developing strategies and techniques for ensuring the correctness and security of future DLSs in which our society may become dependent.

The value and originality of this article is twofold: the disproving, through fact collection and systematic analysis, of current misconceptions about the properties of the blockchain and DLSs, and the discussion of challenges to achieving adequate trustworthiness along with the proposal of general avenues for possible solutions.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the supply chain's resilience in crowd networks from both static and dynamic perspectives.

This paper first defines the supply chain’s resilience, then proposes a graphical and game-theoretic framework to evaluate the resilience.

In this framework, an equilibrium with high resilience will be achieved after the iterated prisoner's dilemma in the supply chain. The two-stage update mechanism contributes to higher profits, higher stability and stronger risk resistance capability. The reputation-based tit-for-tat strategy in the second stage helps to realize society cooperation.

This work pays more attention to the dynamic evolution of interactions between organizations in the supply chain. It provides an important theoretical basis for future work such as how to effectively control and guide the evolution of events in the intelligence network and how to stand sudden changes and avoid collapse.

The Reflective Middleware for Acoustic Management (ReM-AM), based on the Middleware for Cloud Learning Environments (AmICL), aims to improve the interaction between users and agents in a Smart Environment (SE) using acoustic services, in order to consider the unpredictable situations due to the sounds and vibrations. The middleware allows observing, analyzing, modifying and interacting in every state of a SE from the acoustics. This work details an extension of the ReM-AM using the ontology-driven architecture (ODA) paradigm for acoustic management.

This work details an extension of the ReM-AM using the ontology-driven architecture (ODA) paradigm for acoustic management. In this paper are defined the different domains of knowledge required for the management of the sounds in SEs, which are modeled using ontologies.

This work proposes an acoustics and sound ontology, a service-oriented architecture (SOA) ontology, and a data analytics and autonomic computing ontology, which work together. Finally, the paper presents three case studies in the context of smart workplace (SWP), ambient-assisted living (AAL) and Smart Cities (SC).

Future works will be based on the development of algorithms for classification and analysis of sound events, to help with emotion recognition not only from speech but also from random and separate sound events. Also, other works will be about the definition of the implementation requirements, and the definition of the real context modeling requirements to develop a real prototype.

In the case studies is possible to observe the flexibility that the ReM-AM middleware based on the ODA paradigm has by being aware of different contexts and acquire information of each, using this information to adapt itself to the environment and improve it using the autonomic cycles. To achieve this, the middleware integrates the classes and relations in its ontologies naturally in the autonomic cycles.

The main contribution of this work is the description of the ontologies required for future works about acoustic management in SE, considering that what has been studied by other works is the utilization of ontologies for sound event recognition but not have been expanded like knowledge source in an SE middleware. Specifically, this paper presents the theoretical framework of this work composed of the AmICL middleware, ReM-AM middleware and the ODA paradigm.

The purpose of this study is to review the extant literature on chatbots and stakeholder interactions to identify major trends and shed light on knowledge gaps.

A systematic literature review was conducted combining qualitative and quantitative approaches. A code book based on early systematic literature reviews was developed and used to extract information from 62 discrete peer-reviewed English articles. An inductive approach was used to analyse definitions of chatbots, topics, metrics, perspectives and implications.

Chatbots have been studied by many different disciplines, but not much from organizational, stakeholder and corporate communication perspectives. Existing studies focus on the technical developments of chatbots and chatbot language and conversations skills. Research has remained anchored at the micro-level understanding of the phenomenon, that is, the nature of chatbots, but has not yet taken into consideration the meso (organizational) or macro (societal) levels.

This study focused only on academic peer-reviewed papers in English and excluded conference proceeding, books, book chapters and editorials that may have offered other important and relevant reflections. The limited number of studies in communication-related disciplines shows that corporate communication scholars could contribute more to the discussion of chatbot–stakeholder interactions.

This is the first research in the field of corporate communication that examines organizational chatbot–stakeholder interactions. Results of this review offer important information on chatbots' organizational capabilities and affordances, which, arguably, must be taken into consideration when stakeholder engagement strategies are set.