Background: This systematic review will address the influence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) on democratic processes and citizens’ participation, which is enabled by such tools as social media, e-voting systems, e-government initiatives, and e-participation platforms. Methods: Based on an in-depth analysis of 46 peer-reviewed articles published between 1999 and 2024, this review emphasizes how ICTs have improved democratic engagement quality, efficiency, and transparency, but highlights key challenges and research gaps. Results: From this angle, ICT tools have great potential to nurture civic engagement and good governance through transparency. Challenges persist with the ethical and social implications of surveillance technologies, security concerns about digital voting systems, and the widening digital divide disproportionately affecting marginalized populations. The current regulatory framework dealing with privacy and misinformation issues is relatively weak, and there is also a lack of understanding about ICTs’ long-term effects on democratic governance. Conclusions: This review underlines the duality of the roles played by ICT as both an enabler and a challenge to democratic processes. It calls for regulatory measures to protect privacy, fight disinformation, and reduce the digital divide. Future research in this area should focus on the long-term effects of ICTs and how they can be equitably and efficiently integrated into democratic systems, with strategies aimed at maximizing benefits while minimizing risks.

In the continuously changing labor market, understanding the dynamics of online job postings is crucial for economic and workforce development. With the increasing reliance on Online Job Portals, analyzing online job postings has become an essential tool for capturing real-time labor-market trends. This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for processing online job postings to generate labor-market intelligence. The proposed methodology encompasses data source selection, data extraction, cleansing, normalization, and deduplication procedures. The final step involves information extraction based on employer industry, occupation, workplace, skills, and required experience. We address the key challenges that emerge at each step and discuss how they can be resolved. Our methodology is applied to two use cases: the first focuses on the analysis of the Greek labor market in the tourism industry during the COVID-19 pandemic, revealing shifts in job demands, skill requirements, and employment types. In the second use case, a data-driven ontology is employed to extract skills from job postings using machine learning. The findings highlight that the proposed methodology, utilizing NLP and machine-learning techniques instead of LLMs, can be applied to different labor market-analysis use cases and offer valuable insights for businesses, job seekers, and policymakers.

Federated learning (FL) has emerged as a promising technique for preserving user privacy and ensuring data security in distributed machine learning contexts, particularly in edge intelligence and edge caching applications. Recognizing the prevalent challenges of imbalanced and noisy data impacting scalability and resilience, our study introduces two innovative algorithms crafted for FL within a peer-to-peer framework. These algorithms aim to enhance performance, especially in decentralized and resource-limited settings. Furthermore, we propose a client-balancing Dirichlet sampling algorithm with probabilistic guarantees to mitigate oversampling issues, optimizing data distribution among clients to achieve more accurate and reliable model training. Within the specifics of our study, we employed 10, 20, and 40 Raspberry Pi devices as clients in a practical FL scenario, simulating real-world conditions. The well-known FedAvg algorithm was implemented, enabling multi-epoch client training before weight integration. Additionally, we examined the influence of real-world dataset noise, culminating in a performance analysis that underscores how our novel methods and research significantly advance robust and efficient FL techniques, thereby enhancing the overall effectiveness of decentralized machine learning applications, including edge intelligence and edge caching.

In this paper, an investigation is conducted to estimate the effect of economic uncertainty on volume volatility, focusing on four systemic Greek banking institutions, including (i) Alpha Bank, (ii) Eurobank, (iii) National Bank of Greece, and (iv) Piraeus Bank. The purpose of this study is to explain in detail if the EPU is linked with volume volatility in the largest banking institutions in Greece. For the analysis of this paper, data used are monthly data of volume to explain the economic uncertainty on volume volatility. The analysis period covers the period from January 2001 to August 2018, incorporating various market phases, such as the global financial crisis of 2008, the European debt crisis, and capital controls in the Greek economy. The methodology used for the research is the well-known GARCH model. Based on the estimated regressions, the present research findings showed that economic uncertainty has various effects on the volume volatility of the four systemic Greek banking institutions. More specifically, when economic uncertainty receives a high value, then the volatility of the volume in Greek banking institutions increases, receiving a higher value. In conclusion, it is observed that economic uncertainty positively affects the volume volatility of the Greek banking system.

Workload management is a cornerstone of contemporary human resource management with widespread applications in private and public sectors. The challenges in human resource management are particularly pronounced within the public sector: particularly in task allocation. The absence of a standardized workload distribution method presents a significant challenge and results in unnecessary costs in terms of man-hours and financial resources expended on surplus human resource utilization. In the current research, we analyze how to deal with the “race condition” above and propose a dynamic workload management model based on the response time required to implement each task. Our model is trained and tested using comprehensive employee data comprising 450 records for training, 100 records for testing, and 88 records for validation. Approximately 11% of the initial data are deemed either inaccurate or invalid. The deployment of the ANFIS algorithm provides a quantified capability for each employee to handle tasks in the public sector. The proposed idea is deployed in a virtualized platform where each employee is implemented as an independent node with specific capabilities. An upper limit of work acceptance is proposed based on a documented study and laws that suggest work time frames in each public body, ensuring that no employee reaches the saturation level of exhaustion. In addition, a variant of the “slow start” model is incorporated as a hybrid congestion control mechanism with exceptional outcomes, offering a gradual execution window for each node under test and providing a smooth and controlled start-up phase for new connections. The ultimate goal is to identify and outline the entire structure of the Greek public sector along with the capabilities of its employees, thereby determining the organization’s executive capacity.

Human resource management has a significant influence on the performance of any public body. Employee classification and ranking are definitely time-consuming processes, which in many cases lead to controversial results. In addition, assessing employee efficiency through a variety of skills could lead to never-ending calculations and error-prone statistics. On the other hand, hard skill selection is proven to formulate a base for further investigation since subjectivity is not included in the performance equation. This research proposes a ranking model of employee selection based on certain criteria and attributes. The proposed prototype shows a series of results with a low error rate using ANFIS as the base methodology approach. This research was explanatory, and the population of this study consisted of employees with the majority of the sample in the wider region of Western Greece. The results showed a harmonic co-existence of the factors that proportionally affect the productivity of the employees in public service. Therefore, it provides the HR department with valuable information regarding the overall productivity of the public body, as well as significant material based on each profile separately. Therefore, efficiency was achieved through an automated time-saving procedure. The final output will enhance any personnel selection system with data extracted directly from the system, ensuring that the current method outperformed traditional approaches and secured a non-subjective procedure on employee management applied to the public sector.