This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Ecosystemic Evolution Feeded by Smart Systems" that was published in Future Internet

In the field of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and sustainability, a profound challenge emerges — the intersection of traditional practices with the relentless march of technology. Companies face a pressing dilemma as they navigate mandatory and voluntary CSR requirements, grapple with stakeholder demands, and strive for transparency in a digitally-driven era. The relationship between technology and CSR has become a pivotal concern, affecting compliance, monitoring, reporting, and ultimately, the very fabric of corporate reputation. This challenge calls for a nuanced understanding, and it is precisely this void that the book, Technology-Driven Evolution of the Corporate Social Responsibility Ecosystem, aims to fill. The central predicament lies in the dynamic evolution of CSR practices against the backdrop of technological advancements. As companies seek to balance mandatory and voluntary CSR initiatives, the landscape is fraught with complexities. Stakeholders, armed with technology, demand accountability, and transparency, pressuring companies to adapt swiftly. The challenge extends to the need for effective reporting, maintaining social legitimacy, and navigating the intricacies of CSR governance in a rapidly digitizing world. The traditional norms of CSR are being reshaped, requiring businesses to not only comprehend but also harness technology to align with societal expectations and environmental imperatives.

Smart systems are rapidly evolving and finding ways to influence different aspects of human life, industry, and the environment. Smart systems based on available data should have the ability to predict and be adaptive, which leads to performing reliable, smart actions. Smartness and learning capabilities are essential characteristics describing smart systems besides connectivity and digital virtual cloudification technologies. Perspectives and Considerations on the Evolution of Smart Systems discusses the latest edge development that informs and facilitates the next level of development. It highlights how the evolving technologies and techniques are going to impact the developments in the field considering climate, environment, circular economy, and ecosystems. Covering topics such as dynamic difficulty adjustment, intelligent control, and serious games, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for engineers, computer scientists, IT professionals, developers, data analysts, students and educators of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

The intelligence of a city is the capacity to learn: to learn the past, its history and the culture of its territory. Unlike the smart city, we do not build a city from scratch and there is nothing, there is no smart city standard car intelligence is measured this ability to fit into a territorial dynamic, a story and a culture. Continuous learning through instantaneous feedback provides the digital to understand and map the urban system and driver.

Advances in technology continue to alter the ways in which we conduct our lives, from the private sphere to how we interact with others in public. As these innovations become more integrated into modern society, their applications become increasingly relevant in various facets of life. Wearable Technologies: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly material on the development and implementation of wearables within various environments, emphasizing the valuable resources offered by these advances. Highlighting a range of pertinent topics, such as assistive technologies, data storage, and health and fitness applications, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for researchers, academics, professionals, students, and practitioners interested in the emerging applications of wearable technologies.

This book discusses the evolution of future-generation technologies through the Internet of things, bringing together all the related technologies on a single platform to offer valuable insights for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, academics and industry practitioners. The book uses data, network engineering and intelligent decision- support system-by-design principles to design a reliable IoT-enabled ecosystem and to implement cyber-physical pervasive infrastructure solutions. It takes readers on a journey that begins with understanding the insight paradigm of IoT-enabled technologies and how it can be applied. It walks readers through engaging with real-time challenges and building a safe infrastructure for IoT-based, future-generation technologies. The book helps researchers and practitioners to understand the design architecture through IoT and the state of the art in IoT countermeasures. It also highlights the differences between heterogeneous platforms in IoT-enabled infrastructure and traditional ad hoc or infrastructural networks, and provides a comprehensive discussion on functional frameworks for IoT, object identification, IoT domain model, RFID technology, wearable sensors, WBAN, IoT semantics, knowledge extraction, and security and privacy issues in IoT-based ecosystems. Written by leading international experts, it explores IoT-enabled insight paradigms, which are utilized for the future benefit of humans. It also includes references to numerous works. Divided into stand-alone chapters, this highly readable book is intended for specialists, researchers, graduate students, designers, experts, and engineers involved in research on healthcare-related issues.

This Research Topic is hosted in partnership with the "Grazing in Future Multi-Scapes" international workshop. The workshop will be held online, 30th May - 5th June 2021. Throughout different landscapes of the world, “grazing” herbivores fulfill essential roles in ecology, agriculture, economies and cultures including: families, farms, and communities. Not only do livestock provide food and wealth, they also deliver ecosystem services through the roles they play in environmental composition, structure and dynamics. Grazing, as a descriptive adjective, locates herbivores within a spatial and temporal pastoral context where they naturally graze or are grazed by farmers, ranchers, shepherds etc. In many cases, however, pastoralism with the single objective of maximizing animal production and/or profit has transformed landscapes, diminishing biodiversity, reducing water and air quality, accelerating loss of soil and plant biomass, and displacing indigenous animals and people. These degenerative landscape transformations have jeopardized present and future ecosystem and societal services, breaking the natural integration of land, water, air, health, society and culture. Land-users, policy makers and societies are calling for alternative approaches to pastoral systems; a call for diversified-adaptive and integrative agro-ecological and food-pastoral-systems designs that operate across multiple scales and ‘scapes’ (e.g. thought-, social-, land-, food-, health-, wild-scapes), simultaneously. There needs to be a paradigm shift in pastoral production systems and how grazing herbivores are managed –grazed- within them, derived initially from a change in perception of how they provide wealth. The thoughtscapes will include paradigm shifts where grazers move away from the actual archetype of pastoralism, future landscapes are re-imagined, and regenerative and sustainable management paradigms are put in place to achieve these visions. From this will come a change in collective thinking of how communities and cultures (socialscapes) perceive their relationships with pastoral lands. The landscapes are the biotic and abiotic four-dimensional domains or environments in need of nurture. Landscapes are the tables where humans and herbivores gain their nourishment, i.e. foodscapes. Foodscapes and dietary perceptions, dictate actions and reactions that are changing as developed countries grapple with diseases related to obesity, and people starve in developing countries. Societies are demanding healthscapes and nutraceutical foodscapes, and paradoxically, some are moving away from animal products. While indigenous species of animals, including humans (wildscapes), have been displaced from many of their lands by monotonic pastoralism, multifunctional pastoral systems can be designed in view of dynamic multi-scapes of the future. The purpose of this Research Topic is to influence future mental and practical models of pastoralism in continually evolving multi-scapes. We seek a collection of papers that will cultivate such a shift in thinking towards future models of sustainable multipurpose pastoralism. The contributions will be synthesized to establish how multifunctional pastoral systems can be re-imagined and then designed in view of the integrative dynamics of sustainable future multi-scapes.

Een selectie van teksten van architect Kas Oosterhuis waarin hij zijn beweegredenen uiteenzet rond de digitale revolutie, die hij vanaf het begin van de 90-er jaren, in zijn ontwerppraktijk inzet.

This open access book is an encyclopaedic analysis of the current and future energy system of the world’s most populous country and second biggest economy. What happens in China impacts the planet. In the past 40 years China has achieved one of the most remarkable economic growth rates in history. Its GDP has risen by a factor of 65, enabling 850,000 people to rise out of poverty. Growth on this scale comes with consequences. China is the world’s biggest consumer of primary energy and the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 emissions. Creating a prosperous and harmonious society that delivers economic growth and a high quality of life for all will require radical change in the energy sector, and a rewiring of the economy more widely. In China’s Energy Revolution in the Context of the Global Energy Transition, a team of researchers from the Development Research Center of the State Council of China and Shell International examine how China can revolutionise its supply and use of energy. They examine the entire energy system: coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables and new energies in production, conversion, distribution and consumption. They compare China with case studies and lessons learned in other countries. They ask which technology, policy and market mechanisms are required to support the change and they explore how international cooperation can smooth the way to an energy revolution in China and across the world. And, they create and compare scenarios on possible pathways to a future energy system that is low-carbon, affordable, secure and reliable.