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New developments in information and communication technologies (ICT) have enabled public organizations to innovate in their internal processes and in the services they offer. In this context, these developments have led to the emergence of e-government and smart city concepts that will modify, and ultimately improve, the way public organizations operate.

Information technologies are deeply involved in shaping the contemporary human condition and its social organization. To a certain extent, these technologies are "micro-politics" that endorse, in their concepts and conceptions, moral and political choices affecting our relations with ourselves, with others and with the world. They are both a social construction and a social constraint.

Faced with technological developments such as Big Data, artificial intelligence, algorithms, the Internet of Things, robots, platforms, cybersecurity, etc., digital education has become a major issue for our society. Educational initiatives are now emerging in a variety of directions, affecting all age groups, in formal and informal educational settings.

Welcome to NaDI-CeRCLe, the Research Center For Marketing and Service Management. Established in 2005 as part of the Faculty of Economics, Social Sciences and Management (EMCP), the Nadi-CeRCLe brings together a dynamic team of faculty members, researchers, doctoral students, and practitioners. Since 2018, CeRCLe has proudly been a founding partner of the Namur Digital Institute (NaDI), driving forward cutting-edge research and collaboration in the digital age.

Our society is undergoing a digital revolution, impacting its organization, but also its practices, and even its values. Most sectors of our society have to integrate this revolution, including eHealth, eGov, eServices, collaborative economy. Solving these challenges requires a transdisciplinary approach including technology, scientific foundations, but also societal, ethical, juridical and economic viewpoints.NADI aims at federating all the UNamur researchers working on the following challenges in 7 research fields:

Building on a tradition of computer science research at the University of Namur, NaDI federates six research centers focusing on different aspects of the digital society.

Contact Co-President Bruno Dumas bruno.dumas@unamur.be Co-President Alexandre de Streel alexandre.destreel@unamur.be Organization Discover the members

NADI offers extensive expertise in artificial intelligence: bio-inspired robotics, robust, interactive, interpretable and safe machine learning, automatic program verification, declarative programming, business intelligence, knowledge representation and automatic software testing. This has already led to numerous collaborations with medical experts, industry and civil society. Along with other areas of expertise at NADI, AI experts are also exploring the educational, ethical, societal and legal implications of AI.

The University of Namur is involved in the European CERTAINTY project, an initiative led by the German Fraunhofer Institute to explore new avenues in cancer treatment. Launched in December 2023, this European consortium is funded by the European Union - Horizon Europe program - to the tune of almost 10 million euros over the next 4.5 years.

Discover NaDI-CeRCLe's internal and associate members.

Synopsis The spreading of internet-based technologies since the mid-90s has led to a paradigm shift from monolithic centralized information systems to distributed information systems based upon the composition of software components, interacting with each other and of heterogeneous natures. The popularity of these systems is nowadays such that our everyday life is touched by them.Classically concurrent and distributed systems are coded by using the message passing paradigm-according to which components exchange information by sending and receiving messages. In the aim of clearly separating computational and interactional aspects of computations, Gelernter and Carriero have proposed an alternative framework in which components interact through the availability of information placed on a shared space. Their framework has been concretized in a language called Linda. A series of languages, referred to nowadays as coordination languages, have been developed afterwards. In addition to providing a more declarative framework, such languages nicely fit applications like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, in which users share information by adding it or consulting it in a common place. Such systems are in fact particular cases of so-called socio-technical systems in which humans interact with machines and their environments through complex dependencies. As coordination languages nicely meet social networks, the question naturally arises whether they can also nicely code socio-technical systems. However, answering this question first requires to see how well programs written in coordination languages can reflect what they are assumed to model.This thesis aims at addressing these two questions. To that end, we shall use the Bach coordination language developed at the University of Namur as a representative of Linda-like languages. We shall extend it in a language named Multi-Bach to be able to code and reason on socio-technical systems. We will also introduce a workbench Anemone to support the modelling of such systems. Finally, we will evidence the interest of our approach through the coding of several social-technical systems. The Jury Prof. Wim Vanhoof - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Jean-Marie Jacquet - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Katrien Beuls - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Pierre-Yves Schobbens - University of Namur, BelgiumProf. Laura Bocchi - University of Kent, United KingdomProf. Stefano Mariani - UNIMORE University, Italy Participation upon registration. Register here