University of the Aegean

About: University of the Aegean is a education organization based out in Mytilene, Greece. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2818 authors who have published 8100 publications receiving 179275 citations. The organization is also known as: UAEG.

Determinants of software-as-a-service benefits and impact on firm performance

Abstract: Software as a Service (SaaS) is increasingly used by firms for sourcing business application software. SaaS can enable a cost reduction and quality improvement of existing operations and provide rapid and low-cost innovation. However, decision makers are unclear about how they can benefit from SaaS. This study contributes to filling this knowledge gap by investigating factors that determine the magnitudes of operational and innovational benefits and firm performance. These research hypotheses were tested using data collected through a survey of 102 Dutch firms that use sophisticated financial SaaS services. The results show that a firm's adaptation to the SaaS model as well as its ACAP positively affects operational and innovation benefits, whereas contractual governance positively affects only the innovational benefits, and relational governance does not affect any of these two types of benefits. Although both operational and innovational benefits positively impact a firm's performance, the former have a stronger impact than the latter. The insights gained from our survey can support firms' decision-making concerning the maximization of the business benefits and firm performance.

Technical guidelines for enhancing privacy and data protection in modern electronic medical environments

Abstract: Raising awareness and providing guidance to on-line data protection is undoubtedly a crucial issue worldwide. Equally important is the issue of applying privacy-related legislation in a coherent and coordinated way. Both these topics gain extra attention when referring to medical environments and, thus, to the protection of patients' privacy and medical data. Electronic medical transactions require the transmission of personal and medical information over insecure communication channels like the Internet. It is, therefore, a rather straightforward task to capture the electronic medical behavior of a patient, thus constructing "patient profiles," or reveal sensitive information related to a patient's medical history. The consequence is clearly a potential violation of the patient's privacy. We performed a risk analysis study for a Greek shared care environment for the treatment of patients suffering from beta-thalassemia, an empirically embedded scenario that is representative of many other electronic medical environments; we capitalized on its results to provide an assessment of the associated risks, focusing on the description of countermeasures, in the form of technical guidelines that can be employed in such medical environments for protecting the privacy of personal and medical information.

Delay- and diversity-aware buffer-aided relay selection policies in cooperative networks

Abstract: Buffer-Aided (BA) relaying has shown tremendous performance improvements in terms of throughput and outage probability, although it has been criticized of suffering from long delays that are restrictive for applications, such as video streaming, Web browsing, and file sharing. In this paper, we propose novel relay selection policies aiming at reducing the average delay by incorporating the buffer size of the relays into the decision making of the relay selection process. More specifically, we first propose two new delay-aware policies. One is based on the hybrid relay selection algorithm, where the relay selection takes into account the queue sizes so that the delay is reduced and the diversity is maintained. The other approach is based on the max – link relay selection algorithm. For the max – link algorithm, a delay-aware only approach starves the buffers and increases the outage probability of the system. Thus, for max – link, we propose a delay- and diversity-aware BA relay selection policy targeting the reduction of the average delay, while maintaining the diversity of the transmission. The proposed policies are analyzed by means of Markov Chains and expressions for the outage, throughput, and delay are derived. The asymptotic performance of the policies is also discussed. The improved performance in terms of delays and the use of the proposed algorithms are demonstrated via extensive simulations and comparisons, signifying, at the same time, the need for adaptive mechanisms to handle the interplay between delay and diversity.