Search

International audience; ICG (impedance cardiography) and ECG (electrocardiography) provide important indications about functioning of the heart and of overall cardiovascular system. Measuring ICG along with ECG using wearable devices will improve the quality of health monitoring, as ICG points to important hemodynamic parameters (such as time intervals, stroke volume, cardiac output, and their variability). In this work, various electrode locations (12 different setups) have been tested for possible joint ECG & ICG data acquisition (using the same electrodes) and signal quality has been evaluated for every setup. It is shown that, while typically ICG is acquired over the whole thorax, a wrist-based joint acquisition of ECG & ICG signals can achieve acceptable signal quality and therefore can be considered in wearable sensing.

The open-source event-driven ECG dataset is available at https://github.com/jedaiproject/Open-Source-Event-Driven-ECG-Dataset; International audience; In this article, non-uniformly sampled electrocardiogram (ECG) signals obtained from level-crossing analog-to-digital converters (LC-ADCs) are analyzed for event-driven classification and compression performance. The signal compression results show that it is important to assess the distortion in event-driven signals when simulating LC-ADC models, especially at lower resolutions and larger quantization steps. The effects of varying the LC-ADC parameters for the application of cardiac arrhythmia classifiers are also assessed using an artificial neural network (ANN) and the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database. In comparison with uniformly-sampled data, it is possible to achieve comparable classification accuracy at a much lower complexity with event-driven ECG signals. The results show the best event-driven model achieves over 97% accuracy with 79% reduction in ANN complexity with signal-to-distortion ratio (S/D)≥21dB. For S/D

International audience; In this paper, a new methodology for choosing design parameters of level-crossing analog-to-digital converters (LC-ADCs) is presented that improves sampling accuracy and reduces the data stream rate. Using the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset, several LC-ADC models are designed, simulated and then evaluated in terms of compression and signal-to-distortion ratio. A new one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) based classifier is presented. The 1D-CNN is used to evaluate the event-driven data from several LC-ADC models. With uniformly sampled data, the 1D-CNN has 99.49%, 92.4% and 94.78% overall accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, respectively. In comparison, a 7-bit LC-ADC with 2385Hz clock frequency and 6-bit clock resolution offers 99.2%, 89.98% and 91.64% overall accuracy, sensitivity and specificity, respectively. It also offers 3x data compression while maintaining a signal-to-distortion ratio of 21.19dB. Furthermore, it only requires 49% floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) for cardiac arrhythmia classification in comparison with the uniformly sampled ADC. Finally, an open-source event-driven arrhythmia database is presented.

part : TC 1: Foundations of Computer Science; International audience; Signal flow graphs are combinatorial models for linear dynamical systems, playing a foundational role in control theory and engineering. In this survey, we overview a series of works [3, 10, 11, 13, 15–18, 31, 51, 63] that develop a compositional theory of these structures, and explore several striking insights emerging from this approach. In particular, the use of string diagrams, a categorical syntax for graphical models, allows to switch from the traditional combinatorial treatment of signal flow graphs to an algebraic characterisation. Within this framework, signal flow graphs may then be treated as a fully-fledged (visual) programming language, and equipped with important meta-theoretical properties, such as a complete axiomatisation and a full abstraction theorem. Moreover, the abstract viewpoint offered by string diagrams reveals that the same algebraic structures modelling linear dynamical systems may also be used to interpret diverse kinds of models, such as electrical circuits and Petri nets.In this respect, our work is a contribution to compositional network theory (see e.g., [1, 2, 4–6, 9, 12, 20, 21, 23, 24, 26, 28–30, 32, 37, 49, 59], ?), an emerging multidisciplinary research programme aiming at a uniform compositional study of different sorts of computational models.

International audience; The design of a robust perception method is a substantial component towards achieving underwater human–robot collaboration. However, in complex environments such as the oceans, perception is still a challenging issue. Data‐fusion of different sensing modalities can improve perception in dynamic and unstructured ocean environments. This study addresses the control of a highly maneuverable autonomous underwater vehicle for diver tracking based on visual and acoustic signals data fusion measured by low‐cost sensors. The underwater vehicle U‐CAT tracks a diver using a 3‐degree‐of‐freedom fuzzy logic Mamdani controller. The proposed tracking approach was validated through open water real‐time experiments. Combining acoustic and visual signals for underwater target tracking provides several advantages compared to previously done related research. The obtained results suggest that the proposed solution ensures effective detection and tracking in poor visibility operating conditions.

International audience; For many decades, Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) has been associated with relational databases. In the era of big data and NoSQL stores, it is important to provide approaches and systems capable of analyzing this type of data for decision-making. In this paper, we present a new BI&A approach that both: (i) extracts, transforms and loads the required data for OLAP analysis (on-demand ETL) from document stores, and (ii) provides the models and the systems required for suitable OLAP analysis. We focus here, on the on-demand ETL stage where, unlike existing works, we consider the dispersion of data over two or more collections.

Part 2: Digital Transformation; International audience; Countries are struggling to develop data exchange infrastructures needed to reap the benefits of e-government. Understanding the development of infrastructures can only be achieved by combining insights from institutional, technical and process perspectives. This paper contributes by analysing data exchange infrastructures in the Netherlands and Estonia from an integral perspective. The institutional design framework of Koppenjan and Groenewegen is used to analyse the developments in both countries. The analysis shows that the starting points, cultures, path dependencies and institutional structure result in different governance models for data exchange infrastructures. Estonia has a single – centrally governed – data-exchange infrastructure that is used by public and private parties for all kinds of data exchanges (including citizen-to-business and business-to-business). In contrast, the institutional structure in the Netherlands demands a strict demarcation between public and private infrastructures, resulting in several data exchange infrastructures. While there are examples of sharing infrastructure components across various levels of the Dutch government, public infrastructures cannot be used for business-to-business or citizen-to-business data exchange due to the potential for market distortion by government. Both the centrally governed Estonian model and the decentrally governed Dutch model have pros and cons on multiple levels.

Online ahead of print; International audience; Each year breast-cancer (BC) is the most common invasive cancer in women, causing a considerable death rate. Given that, BC is classified as a hormone-dependent cancer, when it collides with pregnancy, different questions may arise for which there are still no convincing answers. To deal with this issue, two new frameworks are proposed within this paper: CORAM and DIST-CORAM. The former is the first unified framework dedicated to the extraction of a generic basis of Correlated-Rare association rules from gene expression data. The proposed approach has been successfully applied on a breast-cancer Gene Expression Matrix (GSE1379) with very promising results. The latter, the DIST-CORAM approach, is a big-data processing system based on Apache spark, which deals with correlation mining from streams of micro-array pregnancy associated breast-cancer (PABC). It is successfully applied on the (GSE31192) gene expression matrix (GEM). The correlated patterns of gene-sets affirm that PABC exhibits heightened aggressiveness compared to cancers for Non-PABC women. In fact, the high levels of estrogen and progesterone hormones unfortunately contribute to the tumor aggressiveness and the proliferation of the cancer.

Logical Methods in Computer Science ; Volume 16, Issue 3 ; 1860-5974, We demonstrate that the most well-known approach to rewriting graphical structures, the Double-Pushout (DPO) approach, possesses a notion of sequential compositions of rules along an overlap that is associative in a natural sense. Notably, our results hold in the general setting of $\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories. This observation complements the classical Concurrency Theorem of DPO rewriting. We then proceed to define rule algebras in both settings, where the most general categories permissible are the finitary (or finitary restrictions of) $\mathcal{M}$-adhesive categories with $\mathcal{M}$-effective unions. If in addition a given such category possess an $\mathcal{M}$-initial object, the resulting rule algebra is unital (in addition to being associative). We demonstrate that in this setting a canonical representation of the rule algebras is obtainable, which opens the possibility of applying the concept to define and compute the evolution of statistical moments of observables in stochastic DPO rewriting systems.

The Eilenberg-Kelly theorem states that a category C with an object I and two functors ⊗ : C × C → C and ⊸ : C op × C → C related by an adjunction − ⊗ B ⊣ B ⊸ − natural in B is monoidal iff it is closed and moreover the adjunction holds internally. We dissect the proof of this theorem and observe that the necessity for a side condition on closedness arises because the standard definition of closed category is left-skew in regards to associativity. We analyze Street's observation that left-skew monoidality is equivalent to left-skew closedness and establish that monoidality is equivalent to closedness unconditionally under an adjusted definition of closedness that requires normal associativity. We also work out a definition of right-skew closedness equivalent to right-skew monoidality. We give examples of each type of structure; in particular, we look at the Kleisli category of a left-strong monad on a left-skew closed category and the Kleisli category of a lax closed monad on a right-skew closed category. We also view skew and normal monoidal and closed categories as special cases of skew and normal promonoidal categories and take a brief look at left-skew prounital-closed categories.

International audience; In the last two decades we have witnessed a massive development of technologies (both hardware and software) which have enabled the creation of billions of connected devices. These devices are nowadays used in a very wide range of applications, and they all contain different types of valuable assets, which have been the target of an increasing number of cyber attacks. Both scientific and industrial communities have focused their attention to implement new design processes to reduce the risk of cybersecurity breaches. This paper includes two different contributions in the field of hardware security and privacy

International audience; Fin-actuated underwater robots usually control motion by changing the locomotion primitives of the fins, such as frequency, amplitude, phase shift, or in more complicated cases also the angle of attack. Modelling the generated thrust by an oscillating fin results in a highly non-linear model, thus making it difficult to derive a respective inverse model. In this work, we derived a dynamic model relating the generated thrust to the fins oscillating amplitude and frequency, and proposed the associated inverse-model. The proposed model's accuracy is evaluated by comparing both the theoretical and measured generated thrust for various frequencies. Furthermore, using the proposed fin model, we demonstrate hovering experimental results with the robot U-CAT. The results demonstrate the possibility to control fin-actuated vehicles using the proposed model to generate the fins oscillation amplitudes as control input.

International audience; We propose a novel strategy of formalized synthesis of Software Based Self-Test (SBST) for testing microprocessors with RISC architecture to cover a large class of high-level functional faults. This is comparable to that used in memory testing which also covers a large class of structural faults such as stuck-at-faults (SAF), conditional SAF, multiple SAF and bridging faults. The approach is fully high-level, the model of the microprocessor is derived from the instruction set and architecture description, and no knowledge about gate-level implementation is needed. To keep the approach scalable, the microprocessor is partitioned into modules under test (MUT), and each MUT is in turn partitioned into data and control parts. For the data parts, pseudo-exhaustive tests are applied, while for the control parts, a novel generic functional control fault model was developed. A novel method for measuring high-level fault coverage for the control parts of MUTs is proposed. The measure can be interpreted as the quality of covering the high-level functional faults, which are difficult to enumerate. We apply High-Level Decision Diagrams for formalization and optimization of high-level test generation for control parts of modules and for trading off different test characteristics, such as test length, test generation time and fault coverage. The test is well-structured and can be easily unrolled online during test execution. Experimental results demonstrate high SAF coverage, achieved for a part of a RISC processor with known implementation, whereas the test was generated without knowledge of implementation details.

International audience; As an abundant and non-toxic wide band gap semiconductor with a high electron mobility, ZnO in the form of nanowires (NWs) has emerged as an important electron transporting material in a vast number of nanostructured solar cells. ZnO NWs are grown by low-cost chemical deposition techniques and their integration into solar cells presents, in principle, significant advantages including efficient optical absorption through light trapping phenomena and enhanced charge carrier separation and collection. However, they also raise some significant issues related to the control of the interface properties and to the technological integration. The present review is intended to report a detailed analysis of the state-of-the-art of all types of nanostructured solar cells integrating ZnO NWs, including extremely thin absorber solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, dye-sensitized solar cells, organic and hybrid solar cells, as well as halide perovskite-based solar cells.

Part 7: Digital Governance; International audience; Infrastructural development is a significant determinant of economic growth. It remains an elusive pursuit for many developing economies suffering from public infrastructural project failures. Although the causes of these failures are identifiable, they remain persistent. Government corruption has been identified as the primary cause of project failures amidst a host of other causal factors, spurred by the ambiguity in public service administration. These factors heighten capital expenditures and hence, the need for more transparent systems in public infrastructural project planning and -delivery. This research uses a case-study methodology to examine the importance of public involvement in addressing the causes of failures in public infrastructural project planning and -delivery. Using Nigeria as a case, the findings from conducted interviews and a document review support the proposition of a technologically collaborative approach in addressing the causes of public infrastructural project failures. The institutionalization of transparency-enhancing blockchain systems are vital in government and public involvement in the processes of public infrastructural project planning and -delivery.

Graphical abstract, Despite the intense research activity in the last two decades, ontology integration still presents a number of challenging issues. As ontologies are continuously growing in number, complexity and size and are adopted within open distributed systems such as the Semantic Web, integration becomes a central problem and has to be addressed in a context of increasing scale and heterogeneity. In this paper, we describe a holistic alignment-based method for customized ontology integration. The holistic approach proposes additional challenges as multiple ontologies are jointly integrated at once, in contrast to most common approaches that perform an incremental pairwise ontology integration. By applying consolidated techniques for ontology matching, we investigate the impact on the resulting ontology. The proposed method takes multiple ontologies as well as pairwise alignments and returns a refactored/non-refactored integrated ontology that faithfully preserves the original knowledge of the input ontologies and alignments. We have tested the method on large biomedical ontologies from the LargeBio OAEI track. Results show effectiveness, and overall, a decreased integration cost over multiple ontologies.•OIAR and AROM are two implementations of the proposed method.•OIAR creates a bridge ontology, and AROM creates a fully merged ontology.•The implementation includes the option of ontology refactoring.

International audience; Cloud computing is a state-of-the-art technological innovation providing an extensive list of benefits for almost every business and governmental, small or medium-sized organizations. It has truly revolutionized the computational era by cutting down cost and reducing complexities of infrastructural configurations for computational platforms. This state-of-the-art technology is rapidly being adapted by various large organizations from healthcare to critical infrastructure to carry out their business processes that, otherwise, would require large storage capacity, huge computational power, and expensive hardware. The purpose of this special issue was to arrange a venue for cloud researchers around the world to share their state-of-the-art research and development that could benefit the cloud community. This helped collect high-quality articles that reported recent research advances regarding security and privacy issues in cloud computing, covering various topics of interest.

Part 1: General E-Government and Open Government; International audience; Digital image alterations (morphing) of identity document photos is a major concern and may potentially allow citizens with malicious intent to enrol for identity document(s) later to be used also by another individual. Taking the photo in the application office – live enrolment – can address this issue. However, this is a break with tradition and entails a sizeable overhaul in the public sector, which can be reluctant to change and often lacks the necessary formal methods that ensure a smooth transition. The objective of this paper is to map the main barriers and drivers related to live enrolment based on theoretical research and interviews conducted with high-ranking officers at passport authorities in Estonia, Kosovo, Norway and Sweden. These countries have successfully switched to live enrolment. The main driver for live enrolment has been increased security; for Estonia, user convenience was important and was behind the decision of keeping alternative application processes for the citizens around. The absence of legacy systems makes it easier to implement public sector innovations, such as live enrolment. Behind the successful implementation is proper risk management, covering technological, political and organisational risks. Finally, the research results indicate varying experiences, obstacles, cultural differences and trade-offs, emphasizing the need to understand barriers and drivers in a contextualised way.

International audience; Motivated by the role of copper ions in biological processes the aim of this study was to elucidate the impact of copper ions bound to hydroxyapatite on l-serine (l-Ser) and O-phospho-l-serine (O-Ph-l-Ser) adsorption at different acidity of aqueous solutions. The adsorption phenomenon was studied by FTIR, UV, and AA spectroscopy, XRD and thermal analysis methods together with the evolved gases analysis taking into consideration the ionic state of the amino acids as well as the apatite surface state, which are tightly correlated with the solution pH. In acidic solution, the main process involves apatite dissolution releasing calcium and copper ions. At pH > 5 the complexation of amino acids with Ca2+ or Cu2+ ions is more important leading also to the release of cations. The ability of copper ions to form water soluble complexes with l-Ser and O-Ph-l-Ser leads to an important loss of these ions, while calcium release is very low at this pH. Therefore, the use of copper ions substituting calcium in the apatite structure to enhance the ability of amino acids adsorption on the apatite surface seems problematic even at pH > 5.

Part 5: Big and Open Linked Data; International audience; Governments are creating and maintaining increasing amounts of data, and, recently, releasing data as open government data. As the amount of data available increases, so too should the exploitation of this data. However, this potential currently seems to be unexploited. Since exploiting open government data has the potential to create new public value, the absence of this exploitation is something that should be explored. It is therefore timely to investigate how the potential of existing datasets could be unleashed to provide services that create public value. For this purpose, we conducted a literature study and an empirical survey of the relevant drivers, barriers and gaps. Based on the results, we propose a framework that addresses some of the key challenges and puts forward an agile co-production process to support effective data-driven service creation. The proposed framework incorporates elements from agile development, lean startups, co-creation, and open government data literature and aims to increase our understanding on how open government data may be able to drive public service co-creation.

Part 2: Regular Papers; International audience; Security risk management is an important part of system development. Given that a majority of modern organisations rely heavily on information systems, security plays a big part in ensuring smooth operations of business processes. For example, many people rely on e-services offered by banks and medical establishments. Inadequate security measures in information systems have unwanted effects on an organisation’s reputation and on people’s lives. In this case study research paper, we target the secure system development problem by suggesting the application of security risk oriented patterns. These patterns help find security risk occurrences in business processes and present mitigations for these risks. They provide business analysts with means to elicit and introduce security requirements to business processes. At the same time, they reduce the efforts needed for risk analysis. These security risk oriented patterns are applied on business processes from an aviation-turnaround system. In this paper, we report our experience to derive security requirements to mitigate security risks in distributed systems.

International audience; The objective of this paper is to assess the improvement potential as well as heat integration opportunities of the oxy- pulverized coal power plant by means of the mapping exergy destruction sources on a conventional architecture as a first step towards an integrated, highly efficient system with optimized operating conditions and advanced architecture. On the basis of a first generation oxy-fired power plant, composed by conventional cryogenic ASU and CPU, a standard pulverized-coal boiler with supercritical steam cycle, the whole system is modeled at elementary equipment level. Operating conditions and current state-of-the-art design are considered in order to set a base-case for the identification of the exergy destruction.The exergy analysis reveals the location and the magnitude of the losses. Main losses occur in the boiler, steam generation, turbines, distillation unit, compression steps of the ASU and CPU, gas quality control system, and in the regenerative heater. According to this assessment, a novel architecture is investigated. Compression heat integration, bypass regenerative heater with improved heat exchange, preheating of the oxygen flow with the bypass flow surplus heat and reheat of the cold depolluted flue gas in a regenerative heater are implemented. Important reduction in exergy destruction is reported and the exergy efficiency of the integrated power plant increases from 36.4% to 39.6% (considering CO2 as a product), which corresponds to an overall exergy destruction diminution of 16%. The resulting net plant energy efficiency is 36.1%LHV, which is a 3.5%-pts increase compared to the base-case oxy-fired power plant, reducing the energy penalty down to 7.9%-pts when compared to the reference air-fired unit without CCS.

International audience; This paper demonstrates a novel motion control approach for biomimetic underwater vehicles with pitching fins. Even though these vehicles are highly maneuverable, the actua-tion of their different degrees of freedom (DOFs) is strongly coupled. To address this problem, we propose to use smooth DOF prioritization depending on which maneuver the vehicle is about to do. DOF prioritization has allowed us to develop a modular, easily applicable and extendable motion control architecture for U-CAT vehicle, which is meant for archaeological shipwreck penetration. We demonstrate the benefits of this architecture by developing an remotely operated vehicle autopilot for depth and yaw using a nonlinear state feedback controller. We also show the extensibility of the approach by controlling 3 DOFs of a fully autonomous U-CAT. The real-time experimental results show high position tracking precision (depth RMS error: 1.9 cm; yaw RMS error: 2.5 •) Comparative experiments justify the use of DOF prioritization.

Three independent stiffness measurement techniques are applied to characterize virgin glass fiber laminates. Natural frequency based measurements of laminate stiffness are compared to results from simple quasi-static testing and Lamb wave dispersion curves. Genetic algorithm (GA) and a modified two-stage Simplex optimization are employed to solve parameter identification inverse problems. The two-stage Simplex method is shown to converge to similar solutions as global genetic algorithms for Lamb wave optimization. The identified elastic and shear moduli show very good agreement, confirming the feasibility of these methods for material characterization. Poisson's ratios on the other hand were not reliably obtained from these two indirect methods due to low sensitivity.

Part 3: Decision Support Tools and Systems; International audience; In the context of the CRISMA FP7 project we have developed a seamless decision support concept to connect simulated crisis scenarios and aggregated performance indicators of impact scenarios with state of the art Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. To prove the practicality of the approach we have developed a decision support tool realising the important aspects of the method. The tool is a highly interactive and user-friendly decision support system (DSS) that effectively helps the decision maker and strategic planner to perform multi-criteria ranking of scenarios. The tool is based on state-of-the-art web technologies.

International audience; Dataflow modelling languages such as SCADE or Simulink are the de-facto standard for the Model Driven Development of safety critical embedded control and command systems. Software is mainly being produced by Automated Code Generators whose correctness can only be assessed meaningfully if the input language semantics is well known. These semantics share a common part but are mainly defined through block libraries. The writing of a complete formal specification for the block libraries of the usual languages is highly challenging due to the high variability of the structure and semantics of each block. This contribution relates the use of software product line principles in the design of a domain specific language targeting the formal specification of block libraries. It summarises the advantages of this DSL regarding the writing, validation and formal verification of such specifications. These experiments have been carried out in the context of the GeneAuto embedded code generator project targeting Simulink and Scicos; and are being extended and applied in its follow up projects ProjetP and Hi-MoCo.

International audience; The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) give a large-scale description in realized word-final schwas of French lexical words for different regions (North vs. South) and different speaking styles (read vs. spontaneous speech); (ii) highlight differences in prosodic features and test these differences via automatic classification techniques. The proposed study relies on a subset of 12.5 hours of the French PFC corpus. Manually transcribed speech was segmented and labeled using automatic speech alignment and a pronunciation dictionary including optional word-final schwas for all words ending in a consonant. F0 and intensity values were extracted and averaged over segments. Our study revealed that, for both speaking styles, word-final schwas of southern French tended to keep relatively high F0 values and longer durations in comparison with northern French where F0 tends to drop on a word-final schwa. On average, spontaneous speech featured smaller F0 drops between final full vowel and subsequent word-final schwa vowel as well as longer durations. The automatic North/South classification of word-final schwas achieved better results for spontaneous speech. As for distinguishing between speaking styles, southern French obtained slightly better scores than the northern varieties.

In this paper, the interaction of the longitudinal mode L(0,4) with a resin deposit coupled to the wall of a stainless steel pipe is studied. The considered deposit has the shape of an axisymmetric ring. The purpose of this work is to analyze the attenuation of mode L(0,4) as a function of deposit width. A finite element model is used for the computation of displacements at the pipe surface and a bistatic measurement method is employed to obtain time signals related to displacements at the same surface. A good agreement between the numerical predictions and the experimental results allows us to discuss the attenuation of mode L(0,4). An exponential law of the attenuation versus the deposit width is deduced from various results. To show that this loss of energy is mainly due to the scattering of mode L(0,4) in the deposit during its propagation along the pipe, an additional study on the scattering of mode L(0,4) is carried out for a stainless steel pipe embedded in a resin matrix.

International audience; This paper presents a linear electrochemomechanical model for microscale ionic actuators. A frequency-domain approach is used to facilitate model interpretation, simplify model application, and accelerate the generation of actuator-specific models. A system comprising a micro PEDOT:PSS/PEO actuator with external loading at its tip was modeled to incorporate the mass loading effect using the proposed approach. Analysis showed that the simulation results of the reported model were in agreement with the experimental measurements conducted with variability in the mass and input voltage. The success of the proposed modeling approach promises to enable its application in the control of microscale ionic actuators for potential biomedical applications.

Part 3: Reference Architectures and Patterns; International audience; The Once-Only Principle states that citizens and businesses provide data only once in contact with public administrations. So far, many European countries have started to implement the Once-Only Principle at national level, but its cross-border implementation is still fragmented and limited. This paper presents the development of a Reference Architecture for the Once-Only Principle in Europe. The case study, stemming from the EU-funded Once-Only Principle project (TOOP) highlights the challenges faced by the architecture team when developing the Reference Architecture that tackles the Once-Only Principle across different countries and policy domains. The architecture is not built from scratch, but re-uses and enhances already available building blocks in order to seamlessly preserve interoperability and to comply with regulations and existing technical standards, leaving at the same time enough space for vendors and open source developers to propose their compliant solutions, whatever is their business model.

Part 2: Critical Reflections; International audience; Estonia has acquired the reputation of a successful e-voting country, and perhaps justifiably so. It was the first country in the world to enable remote online voting in nationwide elections in 2005 and the share of e-voters has been on a rise ever since, now reaching one-third of all voters. Against this backdrop of a seemingly flourishing e-democracy, we set out to ask if the country’s success in e-voting also implies its success in e-democracy in a broader sense. In a qualitative case study, we compare Estonia’s experience in e-voting with the implementation and outcomes of three e-participation projects to demonstrate that considerable discrepancies exist between the take-up and perceived success of e-voting vis-à-vis other e-democracy instruments. In light of these findings the paper further discusses the factors that are likely to account for these differences and highlights the need to look beyond the success of online voting for a holistic evaluation of the state of e-democracy in a given country.