Information and Communication technology

Purpose - An increasing number of tourist destinations and hotels are using new technology and solutions to promote their products and services. IoT represents a great opportunity for tourism and hospitality to increase customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing operational costs. The purpose of this paper is to define what IoT actually is and to find out how it can be of benefit to people in tourism and hospitality. The aims of this paper are to provide an insight into IoT and explore how IoT solutions provide opportunities for tourism and hospitality to better serve customers, increase the efficiency of operations and provide differentiated services.
Methodology - Based on an extensive literature review, this study explores the development of IoT and its application in tourism and hospitality. This paper attempts to show the core components of IoT through a case-study analysis of well-established IoT technology. It offers a viewpoint on the current state of development and the future developments that are expected.
Findings - The research finds that technology (such as IoT, for example) will continue to impact guest service and customer relationship management in tourism and hospitality. The findings of this study suggest that the adoption of IoT technologies widely redesigns and improves the performance of all the main business processes in hospitality and can also be very useful in the tourism sector. Furthermore, the findings give new insight into the role of IoT, especially with regard to guest satisfaction enhancement and cost reduction.
Contribution - The paper provides an overview of IoT functionalities as well as insight into IoT application examples in a tourism and hospitality context. Moreover, the paper examines the practical implications about the role and use of IoT in tourism and hospitality and puts forward future guidelines for hotel (destination) managers, which should enable them to keep up with global tourism trends and put them on an equal footing with other participants in the online tourism and travel market. This paper contributes to the understanding of IoT and highlights the importance of new technology and solutions in tourism and hospitality that bring numerous benefits, starting with cost reduction, improved functionality, greater productivity and increased guest satisfaction. Also, this study provides meaningful new dimensions of important IoT-based features and services and can serve as a basis for further research in this area.
Keywords: Internet of Things, Smart Tourism, Hospitality, Information and Communication technology (ICT)

Nowadays, information and communication technologies are incorporating extremely rapidly to the individual's education and training. This trend lead the European academic research to focus on key terms like open distance learning or lifelong learning. In this context, there are a large number of past and actual projects and researches concerning the content, methodologies, technologies and new pedagogical challenges - all parts of so-called e- learning environments. There are a lot of achievements from this work but there is still a significant work left for the process of building a reliable and efficient learning process capable of satisfying the end user needs and meet the necessary requirements imposed by the educational organizations (content, standardization, measurement tools, ratings, etc.). This article reveals the components of an e-learning environment, the present trends in this research field and some conclusions.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has practically penetrated into all spheres of life. Therefore a closer look at the impact of ICT in public financial management and performance is highly justified. Public finance is defined as a field of economics concerned with paying for collective or governmental activities, and with the administration and design of those activities. Activities will be viewed as services or more precisely as public services. We believe that there is need to consider performance from the perspective of effective performance and the perceived performance. In fact the real or effective performance might not correspond to the perceived performance. A service can be considered from the perspective of the decision-maker, who in our case could be a government or a collectivity. ICT can be employed in the three phases that concern the decision-maker: design, implementation and evaluation. The beneficiaries of a service can employ ICT in any of the three ...

The internet has become one of the most important means of communication in all areas of our life. In the paper we focused on central and local government bodies and their attitude towards information and communication technology. By analysing web pages, inquiring public servants and testing the responses on citizens' questions we tried to discover influences of Internet on better informing of citizens, their participation in making decisions of public interest and communication between citizens and central and local government bodies.

This study aimed at empirically examining the impact of information and communication technology interaction intensity among supply chain members on the dynamic capabilities of organizations. The study took Taiwan's top 1000 manufacturers as the study population, whereas the relationship between the manufacturers and their suppliers was taken as the research unit, and the respondents consisted of the executives or senior procurement specialists dealing with suppliers in the organizations. LISREL was used to verify models and test their goodness-of-fit. In the data analysis, the parameters were estimated with the default maximum likelihood estimation method. Empirical results of this research can help businesses take a closer look into how the intensity of supply chain ICT interaction impacts the dynamic capabilities of the supply chain members, so that businesses can hold on to different intensities of their supply chain ICT interactions to increase the relationship commitment and trust among the supply chain members, and further promote their dynamic capabilities.

A preoccupation with content and connectivity in bridging the digital divide obscures the role of information and communication technology in making different ways of knowing and other logics and experiences visible or invisible. How to deal with this diversity in information systems and what is the role of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS)? In a discussion of the Development Gateway,

Illumination invariance remains the most researched, yet the most challenging aspect of automatic face recognition. In this paper we investigate the discriminative power of colour-based invariants in the presence of large illumination changes between training and test data, when appearance changes due to cast shadows and non-Lambertian effects are significant. Specifically, there are three main contributions: (i) we employ a more sophisticated photometric model of the camera and show how its parameters can be estimated, (ii) we derive several novel colour-based face invariants, and (iii) on a large database of video sequences we examine and evaluate the largest number of colour-based representations in the literature. Our results suggest that colour invariants do have a substantial discriminative power which may increase the robustness and accuracy of recognition from low resolution images.

Advances in information and communication technology are changing organisations, includ-ing those in educational settings. Old practices are being altered, and new practices, spaces and possibilities created. The changes are such that it is timely to consider whether our ...

Purpose – This paper aims to determine how trust and perceptions shape uses of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in public access venues (libraries, telecentres, and cybercafés) in 25 developing countries around the world. Design/methodology/approach – As part of a global study conducted by the Technology & Social Change Group at the University of Washington, local research teams conducted surveys,

This article focuses on the critical role ICT policy design and implementation can play in developing a knowledge-based economy in distressed US communities. Using a multiple case study research design, the study tests three hypotheses: (1) linkages among government, education and industry are a critical success factor for ICT interventions; (2) due to the long-term nature of ICT, vision and leadership are also critical; and (3) investments in technology infrastructure must be part of a larger local planning process to succeed. These hypotheses are supported, but the strength of the article is in the details about how communities crafted unique responses to critical issues.

The starting point of the present paper is the idea that to define a regional development policy which should effectively respond to the new challenges of the future, in particular to the globalisation of the economy and the acceleration of technological changes, it is necessary to think about new methods that grant a privilege to the local solution, using to

With the spread of the Internet and the Web, higher education institutions are becoming increasingly interested in exploiting modern standard information and communication technologies to provide learners and trainees with advanced services for tele-education. Within the European Union 4th Framework Programme, the GESTALT project has defined and implemented a flexible, component-based architecture aimed at supporting on-line discovery and delivery of