Introduction to the Issue on Artificial Intelligence in the Public Sector: Risks and Benefits of AI for Governments

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted by public sector organizations to provide better public services and to transform their internal processes. AI is now considered a key enabler for digital innovation and transformation in the public sector. However, AI is still relatively a new research area in the field of digital...

Decision-making Support for Opening Government Data

Government institutions collect and produce an extraordinary number of datasets to conduct and execute their programs and agendas. Various types of datasets collected by the governments can increase transparency and accountability, improve citizen engagement, and create value-added services for the public. Through the Open Government Data (OGD)...

Conversion Meter: A new tool to assess the conversion potential of vacant office buildings into housing

Building owners and other stakeholders can adopt different strategies to cope with vacancy, such as consolidation, rent reduction, selling the building, renovation, transfor-mation and conversion to adapted reuse, or demolish and build a new building. This paper dis-cusses a new developed tool to cope with vacancy by adaptive reuse. It presents...

Societal Burden and Engineering Challenges of Ageing Infrastructure

Ageing is an inherent feature of nature and, hence, of materials, structures and systems. Yet, it seems a rather new topic in both science and engineering. The main reason for increasing attention for ageing as a topic is the growing awareness that, particularly in industrialized countries, ageing of our assets is a financial burden for the...

Housing Equity Withdrawal: Perceptions of Obstacles among Older Australian Home Owners and associated Service Providers

Housing wealth dominates the asset portfolios of the older population in Australia and many other countries. Given the anticipated spike in fiscal costs associated with population ageing, there is growing policy interest in housing equity withdrawal (HEW) to finance living needs in retirement. This paper sheds light on homeowners’ perceptions...

Uncertainties in Redesigning an Existing Quay Wall

A feasibility study was carried out on the redesigning of an existing quay wall of a core harbor in the Netherlands, which was more than 45 years old. The geotechnical behavior of the existing quay wall, especially because of its age, as a response to the maximum load change is undoubtedly the uncertain parameter here. The design and redesign...

Servicing the Arctic. Report 1: Design requirements and operational profile of an Arctic Offshore Support Vessel: Literature Survey

Background The Dutch maritime industry has only limited knowledge about Arctic engineering, in spite of a growing market and interest by the oil and gas industry. This literature survey is the first in a series of three reports to develop a concept design of an Arctic Offshore Support Vessel (AOSV). The purpose is to give a perspective on Arctic...

Key issues in successfull tranformations of industral heritage

Much of our industrial heritage lost its function in the transition from an industrial to a more service-based economy. Meantime, changing consumer preferences have shortened the functional and economic life cycle of buildings to such an extent that many have become vacant and obsolete. Developers tend to prefer to demolish such buildings and...

Respect for autonomy and technological risks

Technological developments can undermine the autonomy of the individual. Autonomy is one's ability to make and act upon decisions according to one's own moral framework. Respect for autonomy dictates that risks should not be imposed on the individual without her consent. Technological developments can bring about risks, which often confront the...

Conversion of office buildings

Building conversion is a way of activating and reusing vacant office buildings. Former research (Barlow and Gann, 1993, Brand, 1994, Douglas, 2006, Geraedts and Van der Voordt, 2003, 2007) has shown possibilities for conversion through theory and practise, and has delivered instruments for determining the conversion possibility of vacant...

A Network Approach for Distinguishing Ethical Issues in Research and Development

In this paper we report on our experiences with using network analysis to discern and analyse ethical issues in research into, and the development of, a new wastewater treatment technology. Using network analysis, we preliminarily interpreted some of our observations in a Group Decision Room (GDR) session where we invited important stakeholders...