Open University of Catalonia

About: Open University of Catalonia is a education organization based out in Barcelona, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Collaborative learning & Educational technology. The organization has 1943 authors who have published 4646 publications receiving 64200 citations. The organization is also known as: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya & UOC.

The consequences of job insecurity for employees: The moderator role of job dependence

Abstract: With globalization and increased international competition have come more flexible forms of employment and increased job insecurity. The authors address the impact of perceived job insecurity on employees' work attitudes and intentions. After reviewing relevant research on stress theory and the relationship between job insecurity and its consequences, they test two hypotheses on 942 employees in Spain, namely: first, that job insecurity relates negatively to job satisfaction and organiza- tional commitment and positively to intention to leave; and, second, that job insecur- ity, economic need and employability interact in the prediction of these outcomes. s a result of globalization and international competition, the labour mar- A ket has undergone rapid change over recent decades. Organizations have therefore had recourse to various measures to reduce costs and increase efficiency, for example downsizing, restructuring, merging, privatization and outsourcing (Hellgren and Sverke, 2003; Allen et al., 2001; Reisel and Banai, 2002; Tivendell and Bourbonnais, 2000; Probst, 2003). Out of these transform- ations there have emerged new forms of employment relationship based on flexi- bility - and these can increase workers' feelings of insecurity about actual jobs (Sverke and Goslinga, 2003; Chirumbolo and Hellgren, 2003). Job insecurity has been defined as "perceived powerlessness to maintain desired continuity in a threatened job situation" (Greenhalgh and Rosenblatt, 1984, p. 438). In re- sponse to job insecurity, workers' attitudes evolve in ways that can have import- ant consequences for their health and behaviour (Davy, Kinicki and Scheck,

SimILS: a simulation-based extension of the iterated local search metaheuristic for stochastic combinatorial optimization

Abstract: Iterated Local Search (ILS) is one of the most popular single-solution-based metaheuristics. ILS is recognized by many authors as a relatively simple yet efficient framework able to deal with complex combinatorial optimization problems (COPs). ILS-based algorithms have been successfully applied to provide near-optimal solutions to different COPs in logistics, transportation, production, etc. However, ILS is designed to solve COPs under deterministic scenarios. In some real-life applications where uncertainty is present, the deterministic assumption makes the model less accurate since it does not reflect the real stochastic nature of the system. This paper presents the SimILS framework that extends ILS by integrating simulation to be able to cope with Stochastic COPs in a natural way. The paper also describes several tested applications that illustrate the main concepts behind SimILS and give rise to a new brand of ILS-based algorithms.

Energy-Aware Application-Centric VM Allocation for HPC Workloads

Abstract: Virtualized data centers and clouds are being increasingly considered for traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads that have typically targeted Grids and conventional HPC platforms. However, maximizing energy efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and utilization of data center resources while ensuring performance and other Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees for HPC applications requires careful consideration of important and extremely challenging tradeoffs. An innovative application-centric energy-aware strategy for Virtual Machine (VM) allocation is presented. The proposed strategy ensures high resource utilization and energy efficiency through VM consolidation while satisfying application QoS. While existing VM allocation solutions are aimed at satisfying only the resource utilization requirements of applications along only one dimension (CPU utilization), the proposed approach is more generic as it employs knowledge obtained through application profiling along multiple dimensions. The results of our evaluation show that the proposed VM allocation strategy enables significant reduction either in energy consumption or in execution time, depending on the optimization goals.

Off-Line Evaluation of Mobile-Centric Indoor Positioning Systems: The Experiences from the 2017 IPIN Competition.

Abstract: The development of indoor positioning solutions using smartphones is a growing activity with an enormous potential for everyday life and professional applications. The research activities on this topic concentrate on the development of new positioning solutions that are tested in specific environments under their own evaluation metrics. To explore the real positioning quality of smartphone-based solutions and their capabilities for seamlessly adapting to different scenarios, it is needed to find fair evaluation frameworks. The design of competitions using extensive pre-recorded datasets is a valid way to generate open data for comparing the different solutions created by research teams. In this paper, we discuss the details of the 2017 IPIN indoor localization competition, the different datasets created, the teams participating in the event, and the results they obtained. We compare these results with other competition-based approaches (Microsoft and Perf-loc) and on-line evaluation web sites. The lessons learned by organising these competitions and the benefits for the community are addressed along the paper. Our analysis paves the way for future developments on the standardization of evaluations and for creating a widely-adopted benchmark strategy for researchers and companies in the field.