Mariana Nagy (p), Laura Bocancios

Javier López

As a participant in the Digital Cities Challenge initiative, the City of Arad has shaped its digital strategy that reflects the community`s development needs, vision and ambition.
Arad’s Digital Transformation Strategy is oriented towards education in digital technologies, accessibility to digital services and skills for the population. The three dimensions of the strategy – open data, education and innovation – are the local priorities. Due to the social-economic impact of COVID-19 outbreak, large budget amounts and human efforts have been redistributed towards health and online school education, some of the planned activities have been delayed. Nevertheless, the process of digitalisation met an unprecedented acceleration, the community as a whole acknowledging the vital importance of digital transformation.
The local administration is committed to modernise its services and improve urban environment through the use of technology, in collaboration with the community. Open data, digital education and innovation would represent a step-change in Arad’s identity and performance.
Under the Intelligent Cities Challenge initiative, Arad has selected six city goals as top priorities for short and medium term, according to the strategic orientation defined in the Digital transformation Strategy and other strategic documents developed by the City. The paper presents the steps of implementation for the prioritized actions in order to achieve the re-invention of the City through innovative use of data and technologies.

Daniel VanDer Velden (p)

Mariana Nagy

Digital agriculture is developing rapidly, with the literature discussing these technologies developing in step. There is a promise that digital technologies will replace farmers in the near future, which is cause for concern in a range of critical agriculture studies. In this article we first aim to show that this argument originates in a disembodied view on digitalisation, which emphasises abstract and universal accounts of digital technologies. We follow this with an argument against this disembodied view, which we base on accounts of embodied digitalisation by farmers.

It is a disembodied view of digital technologies that make it possible to envision a future where the farmer can be replaced by digital agriculture technologies. Digital technologies are often seen as placeless, abstract yet universal. Exactly this universal nature of digital agriculture makes it possible to discuss how digital technologies will replace the farmer, as the farmer as a concept is no longer an actor bound to a specific place and context. To dispute this disembodied account of digitalisation we will use this article to provide an alternative account of using digital technologies that is based on a relational and embodied account of digital agriculture use by farmers.

To provide this relatively novel view on digital agriculture we draw on 26 in-depth interviews with Dutch crop farmers, contractors and ag-tech developers. In these interviews, participants describe how farmers work with digital agriculture technologies, where they highlight the embodied use of these technologies. We develop this argument further by connecting to the field of science and technology studies, mainly drawing on studies that study human-technology interactions. We use the concept of digi-grasping, which has been previously used in order to describe embodied understandings of digital technologies. This account of embodied digitalisation, or digi-grasping, has implications for our understanding of digital agriculture and provides a new view on how digital technologies can be integrated in the socio-material world of farmers.

This provides a concrete example of how farmers integrate digital technologies within existing social-material relations and answers to questions of how farmer work with the socio-cyber-physical systems that are made possible through the digital transformation of agriculture. This is particularly relevant when discussing the potential for farmers in utilising the opportunities offered by digital technologies.

Rosa Jorda-Borrell, Javier López (p)

Daniel Van Der Velden

The recent literature on emerging ICT technologies estimates that by 2030 there will be between 26 and 30 billion devices located in homes and businesses, equipped with sensors, processors, software which will be connected to what is known as the Internet of Things. This technology along with other new ICT technologies such as cloud computing or artificial intelligence, can reach the complete automation of production processes. Furthermore, the implementation of these technologies will favor cost reduction as a result of predictive maintenance, as well as greater speed and intelligence in operations, thanks to the machine to machine (M2M) communication, and a more efficient interaction between humans and smart devices.
The aim of this research is to identify the most relevant factors that favor cutting-edge ICT technologies adoption in firms, belonging to sample of countries. Accordingly, a literature review was conducted to find previous research work on ICT adoption in firms, identifying two main models: the TOE and the DOI models. Next, a sample was built with aggregate information at the country level on the resources of the companies, the accessibility to cutting-edge ICT technologies, the effectiveness of the institutions in their assistance to the business activity, the sophistication of the demand, and the degree of global integration of the companies. Thus, the sample consisted of 136 observations from developed and underdeveloped countries and was obtained from four sources: The World Competitiveness Report, The Global Information Technology Report, The World Bank, and the database of the European Patent Office (EPO). The estimation method consisted in a PLS-SEM analysis, which allowed to study the analyzed phenomenon in an integral way, and also to evaluate the possible mediation between the explanatory factors.

" * This presentation is part of the results of the R+D+i PID2019-107993GB-I00 funded by MCIN/ AEI/10.13039/501100011033"