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As was stated in one of the current review articles on social informatics: Research activities related to social informatics are expanding, even as community fragmentation, topical dispersion, and methodological diversity continue to increase. Specifically, the different understandings of social informatics in regional communities have strong impacts, and each has a different history, methodological grounding, and often a different thematic focus. Therefore, this special issue would like to present different perspectives on social informatics that arose in the world. The special issue will be divided into two parts that cover the full scope of social informatics. The first part will focus on theoretically oriented articles and the second part on empirically oriented articles. The special issue is also open to articles that have a thematically close research focus (e.g. socio-informatics) and/or use regional terms that can be translated into English as social informatics, e.g. samfunnsinformatikk, sosialinformatikk, sosioinformatikk, sozioinformatik, sozialinformatik, социальная информатика, družboslovna informatika, 社会情報学 and others.

At the end of 2019, COVID-19 (Coronavirus 2019) emerged in Wuhan, China, and spread rapidly worldwide. The use of virtual social networks, especially Twitter, has increased due to the present condition. The purpose of the present systematic literature review is to review the investigations on Twitter's role in the COVID-19 crisis. For this purpose, an appropriate search strategy was used to extract the studies conducted in the Web of Science and PubMed databases. In the end, 24 articles were reviewed. The results indicate that in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, the content and tweets posted on Twitter were affected by this crisis, and various people such as the general public, health professionals, and politicians were sharing opinions, emotions, personal experience, and educational content about exposure to COVID-19 on this social media. Therefore, the speed of providing information to people has been one of the main advantages of Twitter during the crisis of COVID-19; however, the risk of using invalid information without scientific citation is also one of the most important concerns of using Twitter among people as well as health and governmental organizations. Thus, users should evaluate information accuracy more carefully and pay attention to the quality and validity of information before employing or sharing it. Governments and professionals can also prevent this disease's contagion even in similar future crises by employing Twitter correctly in the period of crisis and using the useful experience gained from applying social networks in the outbreak of COVID-19.

Today, data security is an increasingly hot topic, and thus also the security and reliability of end-user identity verification, i.e. authentication. In recent years, banks began to substitute password authentication by more secure ways of authentication because passwords were not considered to be secure enough. Current legislation even forces banks to implement multi-factor authentication of their clients. Banks, therefore, consider using biometric authentication as one of the possible ways. To verify a user's identity, biometric authentication uses unique biometric characteristics of the user. Examples of such methods are facial recognition, iris scanning, fingerprints, and so on. This paper deals with another biometric feature that could be used for authentication in mobile banking applications; as almost all mobile phones have an integrated camera, hand authentication can make a banking information system more secure and its user interface more convenient. Although the idea of hand biometric authentication is not entirely new and there exist many ways of implementing it, our approach based on using convolutional neural networks is not only innovative, but its results are promising as well. This paper presents a modern approach to identifying users by convolutional neural networks when this type of neural network is used both for hand features extraction and bank user identity validation.

The rapid evolution of Internet use has led to the collection of big data about users, which has raised users’ privacy concerns about their personal information. This study adopts the hypothesis to evaluate the perception of the information sensitivity of Internet users in Saudi Arabia as research subjects. This study analyzes the sensitivity of 35 types of information through a questionnaire with answers from 508 participants from Saudi Arabia and estimates the cultural influence by comparing Saudi results with users from the USA, Brazil and Germany. Demographic information, such as age, gender, marital status and education, and attitude characteristics, such as disposition to privacy, propensity to take risks, privacy violation experience and trust in institutions, influence Saudi individuals’ perception of sensitivity towards various types of information. The survey results show slight differences in the sensitivity levels between Internet users in Saudi Arabia and their counterparts in other nations. Ultimately, this study contributes to improving the international model of information sensitivity perception between different nations.

Scientific and technological developments in informatics enable intensive transformation of data into valuable information. Enriched with context, information may be turned into knowledge, allowing organizations to optimize their processes and profile themselves as learning knowledge organizations. Several classifications of knowledge and knowledge management are available in scientific literature and research publications. In this paper the implementation and application of information and communication technology in knowledge management is being assessed from the perspective of synchrony and mutual interaction among collaborating parties.  Following the PRISMA scheme, a systematic review procedure using Scopus and Web of Science databases was conducted. Obtained manuscripts underwent manual content analysis. The outcome of this analysis represents the classification of widespread ICTs into diverse categories based on extensive literature research. It specifies an original type of classification by connecting intertwined synchronicity and interaction as the main classification criteria, and it provides examples of commonly used ICTs in business practice. The introduced classification aims to deepen the comprehension of ICTs, which may lead to improved efficiency and/or eligibility of technological implementations and applications of knowledge management based on the undeniably enormous benefits of the use of ICTs in processing of business operations.

A single Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a transitional state between normal cognition and dementia. The typical diagnostic procedure relies on neuropsychological testing, which is insufficiently accurate and does not provide information on patients’ clinical profiles. The objective of this paper is to improve the recognition of elderly primary care patients with MCI by using an approach typically applied in the market basket analysis – association rules mining. In our case, the association rules represent various combinations of the clinical features or patterns associated with MCI. The analytical process was performed in line with the CRISP-DM, the methodology for data mining projects widely used in various research or industry domains. In the data preparation phase, we applied several approaches to improve the data quality like the k-Nearest Neighbour, correlation analysis, Chi Merge and K-Means algorithms. The analytical solution´s success was confirmed not only by the novelty and correctness of new knowledge, but also by the form of visualization that is easily understandable for domain experts. This iterative approach provides a set of rules (patterns) that meet minimum support and reliability. The extracted rules may help medical professionals recognize clinical patterns; however, the final decision depends on the expert. A medical expert has a crucial role in this process by enabling the link between the information contained in the rules and the evidence-based knowledge. It markedly contributes to the interpretability of the results.

The visual impairment of a completely blind person encourages them to develop their abilities in other areas. This concerns mainly a significant improvement in the use of touch, hearing and memory. Blind people can use these skills with the help of assistance technologies when looking for employment. The aim of the article is to show how the presented solution – an ambient system – assists a blind person in their work in the area of electrical engineering and informatics. The article thus contributes to the knowledge base of solution design in the area of active support of visually impaired persons’ employment. This article describes an assistance technology capable of using the increased skills of blind people for work in informatics and electrical engineering. The assistance technology is part of an ambient system prototype in an intelligent building. The automatic assistance extends to practical electrical engineering, helping a blind person to connect complex circuits and construct hardware with the use of standard electrotechnical components, with no need for specially manufactured components that would compensate for the visual impairment. The assistance for specialized work in informatics includes a special environment HANIBAL focused on creating source code. It uses context free languages to work with graphics related information and also for modifying the user interface. The ambient system prototype for assisted living and occupational assistance enables the use of standard electrotechnical equipment, e.g. multimeter or oscilloscope, made available to a blind person in the environment of an intelligent building by means of touch or synthesized speech. The article thus outlines a new possibility for visually impaired people to find employment in academic environment and participate in informatics and electrical engineering development.

The article deals with the topical issue of the current digital age, the questions related to the legal protection of biometric data, including the potentiality of their misuse. These issues have not yet been systematically addressed in the Czech Republic and there is no statistical data on public attitudes towards biometric data and its use. This article presents an analysis of the current legal regulation, which places a significantly higher standard than the previous legislation on the processing of biometric data as a special category of personal data. The authors considered both particular consequences of the impact of this regulation on human privacy and principles of this regulation as well as the subjective perception of the most important attributes of the behaviour of the main actors. The aim of the article is to contribute to raising the awareness of the risks of using biometric data and to contribute to explaining the key principles of GDPR in its application to biometrics. The article also discusses the related outputs of the sociological survey of CVVM showing that Czech population prefers the protection of their privacy over user comfort (three to one ratio). About 71% of all respondents have heard about biometric data and almost half of them have at least a rough idea what biometric data is. However, only 70% of respondents realize that modern technologies make it possible to collect, process and (mis)use personal data, even without their knowledge or consent.

The study focuses on testing the protection of computing technology and peripheral devices based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology in a selected corporate organization. The potential of RFID technology is also employed to obtain statistical data about real-time use of the devices. Based on the comparison of high and ultra high frequency of RFID technology, the appropriate variant was selected for operation, selected devices were tagged with RFID tags, and the success of their detection was monitored both in the test period and in real operation. After three months’ operation, the cost connected with protection implementation and its benefits was assessed. The main benefit is reducing the number of stolen devices. Users’ tendency to bypass the protection was minimal. A further result of this study is determining the overall value of computing technology and peripheral devices to be protected against loss caused by theft that would make the investment in RFID technology pay off for the corporation. It was confirmed that deploying this type of protection pays off for the organization in four years thanks to the prevention of direct losses. After the assessment of the results, a possible future use of RFID potential beyond the protection itself is considered, that would optimize a corporation's inventory and track the movement of individual devices among users. These considerations include, in particular, the efficiency of use of IT staff working time, the prevention of unavailability of devices and the increase of the level of IT service provided to users.

Security tips are now used as a method of priming online users from falling prey for fraudulent scams. These security tips usually come as email, SMS or online posts where they can be easily accessed by the users. In this work, phishing attacks are simulated with varying cues that are available in such fraudulent email messages, SMS and web pages were used to investigate the effectiveness of the security tips used by Nigerian banks to prime their customers of online threats. A total of 427 respondents, purposively selected from three tertiary institutions in Ogun State, participated in the study. Each respondent was asked to identify five messages with varying phishing cues to evaluate their understanding of the security tips messages. The results which were computed at 95% Confidence Interval, indicated that 58.91% failed on the first attribute, 58.59% failed on the second attribute while 58.73% failed on the third attribute. 74.24% of the participant could not correctly identify a fake email message (fourth attribute) while 76.71% could not correctly identify a phished bank verification number update message (fifth attribute). Using the Mann Whitney Test, the result further showed that overall, those who failed the test are significantly more than those who passed. Moreover, a regression model is proposed to evaluate the influence of the socio demographic factors used in the study. This result indicated that gender, academic qualification and user's computer knowledge significantly influences their ability to recognize phished messages.

The aim of the article is to describe the current status of IPv6 implementation in the Czech Republic and in the world, including the comparison of the different IPv4 and IPv6 transition mechanisms and the outlook for the future. The article is based on extensive research of current sources related to this issue, available on the Internet. It also describes the major security risks associated with the new IP protocol version. Attention is also paid to the economic evaluation of the implementation of IPv6. The article should help those interested in moving to IPv6 to better focus on this complex issue.

Data mining methods are still more popular, even in domains where there is traditionally limited support by analytical tools and where the analyst´s manual work still prevails. Using these methods in the fiscal domain enables deeper analysis and can bring new findings. The deployment of data mining methods is one part of the OpenBudgets.eu project, which focuses on transparency and accountability in the public funds management. This overview article summarizes selected experiences of the authors of the project from the development, implementation and application of selected data mining methods on mining fiscal data. These methods are integrated into the central platform of the project available for the advanced and common users interested in fiscal data analysis. The pilot analysis showed that the problem of data mining in this domain is the large amount of found rules together with its heterogenous origin.

Artificial General Intelligence seeks to create an artificial system capable of solving many different and possibly unforeseen tasks thus being comparable in its intelligence to that of a human. Such an endeavour, however, requires suitable methods that can evaluate whether an artificial system is intelligent, and to what extent. This review paper searches for such evaluation methods. Therefore, an extensive literature overview is conducted that covers both philosophical and cognitive presumptions of intelligence as well as formal definitions and practical tests of intelligence grounded in Algorithmic Information Theory. Based on a comparison of the introduced approaches, the paper identifies two distinct groups based on fundamentally different presumptions. The one group of approaches, such as Turing test, is based on the presumption that success in a complex task is a sufficient condition for intelligence evaluation, while the other group of approaches, such as Algorithmic Intelligence Quotient test, also require explicit verification of success in simple tasks. This paper, therefore, concludes that the Algorithmic Intelligence Quotient test, derived from Universal Intelligence definition, is currently the most suitable candidate for a practical intelligence evaluation method of artificial systems. Although the test has several known limitations.

The paper examines effects of a predefined and immutable money supply using a simulation performed in Minsky. It uses the cryptocurrency Bitcoin as an example and compares its settings and outcomes with Euro as a credit based fiat currency. Minsky is a specialized software for creating SFC economic models. It operates in continuous time. Unlike Euro, Bitcoin is a non-liability currency. It is not being issued against debt and it does not allow a fiduciary issue. The study examines the economy of the EU complexly, focusing on its monetary system, using Eurostat data. Then it changes the rules of the system so that they comply with the rules of Bitcoin’s protocol. The performed simulations show different effects of these monetary settings on wealth distribution among particular groups of economic subjects as well as on the stability of the economy as a whole after some time has passed.

Social media networks are tools that recruiters can utilize during a recruitment process. Most importantly, social media networks can be used in conjunction with applications capable of downloading information about their potential candidates. The aim of this article is to present a creation process of a model that could be helpful in recruiting area. A crucial part of this model is application software that downloads user’s data, particularly from Facebook profiles. This model should propose appropriate analytical methods for data processing. The output of this article is employee recruitment model that can be used as a guide to utilize the potential of social media networks by HR professionals. Test run of this model on our population sample showed prediction accuracy of 68 % to 84 %.

This article presents an overview that compares the historical tendencies in defining informatics as a new discipline, subject area or field of study focused on the design and application of computer technology. Apart from computer construction, the focus is on two major areas: computational processes and information processes. The article first considers the development in the United States of America (USA), which differed substantially from Europe. In the USA the development concerned disciplines referred to as computer science, computer engineering and (library and) information science. The article then discusses the situation in France and Germany. Consequently, the development in the USA and Western Europe is contrasted with the development in the Soviet Union, particularly with the crucial role of cybernetics in this region. The time range considered in the article is limited to the 1960s and 1970s. The article introduces the individual regional concepts of informatics and discusses the social, economic and political background of the emergence and development of these concepts. This view makes it possible to present an original approach to the ambiguous interpretation of “What is informatics as a scientific discipline in an international context”, while respecting the distinctions given by the outset and historical development in different countries.

Mobile phones have become an essential device for accessing the web. This is due to the advantages of portability, lower cost and ease. However, the adoption of mobile phones for online activities is now being challenged by myriads of cybercrimes. One of such crimes is phishing attack. In this work, a lightweight anti-phishing technique is proposed to combat phishing attacks on mobile devices. This is necessary because these mobile platforms have increased the attack surface for phishers while diminishing the effectiveness of existing countermeasures. The proposed approach uses a number of URL behavior to determine the status of a website based on frequency analysis of extracted phishing features from PhishTank. To increase the detection power of unknown pattern, a machine learning algorithm called Support Vector Machine is adopted. The results indicated that the approach is very efficient against phishing sites with negligible false negatives.

Systems like e-voting, e-banking or e-health must offer flexibility to continuously meet technical and legal changing requirements and must at the same time guarantee robustness to respect their security and sensitivity. Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) and Service Oriented Software Engineering (SOSE) with their modular design represent the most suitable paradigms for those systems. They have strong complementary advantages, despite their similarities, their heterogeneity still hinders systems to benefit from both of them. In this paper, we propose a hybrid framework HACS (Hybrid Approach between Component and Service). HACS proposes to define sensitive systems as a hybrid architecture where the critical parts are controlled according to CBSE coupled to the flexibility and dynamism of SOSE. To address heterogeneity and make possible the substitution between hybrid components, HACS uses a common syntax with semantic annotations based on SAWSDL related to two ontologies; HACS ontology and domain ontology. We illustrate HACS all along the paper through an e-voting case study.

The article defines standard criteria used to characterize the cryptographic quality of the S box: regularity, non linearity, autocorrelation, avalanche and immunity against differential cryptanalysis. The values of autocorrelation, avalanche and immunity against differential cryptanalysis for regular 8x8 S-boxes with non-linearity 98 and regular 8x8 S-boxes with non linearity 104 are compared. It is statistically verified that higher non-linearity improves the values of these criteria in a cryptographically advantageous sense.

This paper discusses the definition of business rules using business vocabulary and semantics. At the beginning business rules, business vocabulary and semantics of business rules are specified. There is also outlined the current state of research on this topic. Then the definition and formalization of business rules using semantics and business vocabulary is described. Based on these proposed procedures was created a tool that implements and simulate these processes. The main advantage of this tool is “Business Rules Layer”, which implements business rules into the system but is separated from this system. Source code of the rules and the system are not mixed together. Finally, the results are evaluated and future development is suggested.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate Enterprise Architecture modelling capabilities of Archimate - a visual language. We analyse problem of an integration of a consumer oriented tablet ecosystem into existing enterprise technology architectures. We discuss forces leading towards an increase of heterogeneous environment during deployment of tablet applications into enterprise systems. The article is primarily targeted at IT architects and managers in the enterprise sector, who are involved in strategic decision processes.

The Data Message Information System is a remarkable information system of the state infrastructure. Design of an information system of such importance should be done with much care also due to fact that if a design flaw appeared later, it could have severe impacts at the users. A flaw that will be discussed in this paper applies to a data message sending process of messages containing PDF attachments. Users with the default Safari web browser on OS X do not need to be always able to open such attachments. The paper analyses the situation and gives an answer to a question when will a PDF attachment be opened correctly and when not.

This article aims to provide a brief and comprehensive introduction to the issue of cyber warfare and to display the recent development in this area. Geographically, it focuses on the Middle East region, since the vast majority of the most important recent cyber attacks appeared just in there or were connected to it. The first part of the article tries to define the key notion of cyber warfare, compares it to the standard warfare and presents different types of cyber weapons that are known today. The second part points out examples of the most striking recent cyber attacks and uses them as evidences to demonstrate today's importance and dissemination of cyber warfare. Finally, the article sums up pros and cons of the cyber weapons and, in view of these, predicts a significant increase in their use in any future war conflicts.

While we are living in rapidly changing environment driven by the online services, marketing has been rather reluctant in serious apprehending of these consequences. We do not aim to analyse this complex delay that we call conceptual jetlag here. (Conceptual consciousness of marketing is far behind the velocity of the plane online services.) Rather we try to establish certain switchback that is driven by concept of philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the artistic notion of postinternet. By these means we aim at unveiling the general drive of marketing: The product (take Photoshop as an instance) is meant not only to satisfy our needs and desires. It is creates them. This basic assumption of marketing and the dominance of online environment can elucidate each other since the "fluid ontology" of virtual environment consists precisely in the possibility of being formed by the will of its users.

Nowadays there exist several frameworks to utilize a computation power of graphics cards and other computational devices such as FPGA, ARM and multi-core processors. The best known are either low-level and need a lot of controlling code or are bounded only to special graphic cards. Furthermore there exist more specialized frameworks, mainly aimed to the mathematic field. Described framework is adjusted to use in a multi-agent simulations. Here it provides an option to accelerate computations when preparing simulation and mainly to accelerate a computation of simulation itself.