This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2018, held in Cardiff, UK, in September 2018. The 57 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 143 submissions. They provide a comprehensive overview of identified challenges and recent advances in various collaborative network (CN) domains and their applications, with a strong focus on the following areas: blockchain in collaborative networks, industry transformation and innovation, semantics in networks of cognitive systems, cognitive systems for resilience management, collaborative energy services in smart cities, cognitive systems in agribusiness, building information modeling, industry 4.0 support frameworks, health and social welfare services, risk, privacy and security, collaboration platform issues, sensing, smart and sustainable enterprises, information systems integration, dynamic logistics networks, collaborative business processes, value creation in networks, users and organizations profiling, and collaborative business strategies.

This volume contains reflections and research on interdisciplinarity by practitioners and various scientists from the various disciplines of cognitive science. This book includes overviews of theory on interdisciplinary research and education, as well as

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 21st IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2020, held in Valencia, Spain, in November 2020. The conference was held virtually. The 53 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 135 submissions. They provide a comprehensive overview of major challenges and recent advances in various domains related to the digital transformation and collaborative networks and their applications with a strong focus on the following areas related to the main theme of the conference: collaborative business ecosystems; collaborative business models; collaboration platform; data and knowledge services; blockchain and knowledge graphs; maintenance, compliance and liability; digital transformation; skills for organizations of the future; collaboration in open innovation; collaboration in supply chain; simulation and analysis in collaborative systems; product and service systems; collaboration impacts; boosting sustainability through collaboration in Agri-food 4.0; digital innovation hubs for digitalizing European industry; and collaborative networks for health and wellness data management.

We create technology enabling us to do things never before possible and it ultimately changes the way we live, work, play, and interact with each other. Throughout human history, the democratization of technology making a technology available to the masses, has brought about sweeping cultural, social, political, and societal changes. In the last half-century, the democratization of computers, information, the Internet, and social media have revolutionized and transformed our lives. We now stand at the beginning of a new era sure to bring about waves of new revolutions, the cognitive systems era. Until now, humans have done all of the thinking. However, our lives are about to be infused with artificial entities capable of performing high-level cognitive processing previously possible only in the human mind. Systems capable of this kind of "synthetic cognition" will achieve and surpass the level of human experts in almost every field of endeavor. Far from replacing humans, these cognitive systems will be our collaborators, teachers, confidants, colleagues, and companions. The future will belong to those who can better partner with these cognitive systems. Made available to the average person via the Internet, handheld devices, and through ordinary objects all around us, expertise will become democratized. Everything will change when anyone has access to expertise in any field and new things will be possible. The democratization of expertise is the foundation on which our society’s revolutions will be built over the next half-century. This book discusses societal and cultural revolutions throughout history brought about by the adoption of new technology and gives brief histories of human cognitive augmentation and artificial intelligence. In the coming cognitive systems era, humans, by collaboratively partnering with cognitive systems, will together achieve expert-level performance—synthetic expertise—with humans performing some of the cognitive processing and cognitive systems performing some. As the capabilities of cognitive systems improve over time, the balance of thinking will shift from being mostly human to mostly artificial. This book introduces the Levels of Cognitive Augmentation to describe this shift. Drawing from previous research in cognitive systems and intelligent agent theory, the knowledge stores required for expertise are identified in a Knowledge Level description of expertise. This book introduces a new abstract level, called the Expertise Level to describe the skills needed for expertise. Combining the knowledge-level and expertise-level descriptions, this book introduces the Model of Expertise. This book demonstrates use of the Model of Expertise by presenting several synthetic expert architectures: a synthetic teacher (Synthia), a synthetic friend/therapist (Sy), a synthetic elderly companion (Lois), a synthetic research companion (Synclair), and an automated scientific hypothesis explorer (Ashe). This book is intended for anyone interested in the fields of cognitive systems, cognitive computing, cognitive augmentation, or artificial intelligence or the impact of technologies from these fields on society. Anyone doing research and development in the area of cognitive systems or artificial intelligence will find this book particularly useful.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 20th IFIP WG 5.5 Working Conference on Virtual Enterprises, PRO-VE 2019, held in Turin, Italy, in September 2019. The 56 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 141 submissions. They provide a comprehensive overview of major challenges and recent advances in various domains related to the digital transformation and collaborative networks and their applications with a strong focus on the following areas related to the main theme of the conference: collaborative models, platforms and systems for digital revolution; manufacturing ecosystem and collaboration in Industry 4.0; big data analytics and intelligence; risk, performance, and uncertainty in collaborative networked systems; semantic data/service discovery, retrieval, and composition in a collaborative networked world; trust and sustainability analysis in collaborative networks; value creation and social impact of collaborative networks on the digital revolution; technology development platforms supporting collaborative systems; collective intelligence and collaboration in advanced/emerging applications; and collaborative manufacturing and factories of the future, e-health and care, food and agribusiness, and crisis/disaster management.

This book presents neuromorphic cognitive systems from a learning and memory-centered perspective. It illustrates how to build a system network of neurons to perform spike-based information processing, computing, and high-level cognitive tasks. It is beneficial to a wide spectrum of readers, including undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers who are interested in neuromorphic computing and neuromorphic engineering, as well as engineers and professionals in industry who are involved in the design and applications of neuromorphic cognitive systems, neuromorphic sensors and processors, and cognitive robotics. The book formulates a systematic framework, from the basic mathematical and computational methods in spike-based neural encoding, learning in both single and multi-layered networks, to a near cognitive level composed of memory and cognition. Since the mechanisms for integrating spiking neurons integrate to formulate cognitive functions as in the brain are little understood, studies of neuromorphic cognitive systems are urgently needed. The topics covered in this book range from the neuronal level to the system level. In the neuronal level, synaptic adaptation plays an important role in learning patterns. In order to perform higher-level cognitive functions such as recognition and memory, spiking neurons with learning abilities are consistently integrated, building a system with encoding, learning and memory functionalities. The book describes these aspects in detail.