We analyze the path from cryptocurrencies to official Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), to shed some light on the ultimate dematerialization of money. To that end, we made an extensive search that resulted in a review of more than 100 academic and grey literature references, including official positions from central banks. We present and discuss the characteristics of the different CBDC variants being considered—namely, wholesale, retail, and, for the latter, the account-based, and token-based—as well as ongoing pilots, scenarios of interoperability, and open issues. Our contribution enables decision-makers and society at large to understand the potential advantages and risks of introducing CBDCs, and how these vary according to many technical and economic design choices. The practical implication is that a debate becomes possible about the trade-offs that the stakeholders are willing to accept.

The COST CARES project aims to support healthcare cost containment and improve healthcare quality across Europe by developing the research and development necessary for person-centred care (PCC) and health promotion. This paper presents an overview evaluation strategy for testing ‘Exploratory Health Laboratories’ to deliver these aims. Our strategy is theory driven and evidence based, and developed through a multi-disciplinary and European-wide team. Specifically, we define the key approach and essential criteria necessary to evaluate initial testing, and on-going large-scale implementation with a core set of accompanying methods (metrics, models, and measurements). This paper also outlines the enabling mechanisms that support the development of the “Health Labs” towards innovative models of ethically grounded and evidenced-based PCC.

Path protection is a fast and capacity-efficient approach for increasing the availability of end-to-end connections. However, sometimes it is not possible to obtain a fully disjoint path pair. In this case, it may be admissible to consider a path pair which is as disjoint as possible, and thus provide the best (in a certain sense) level of the single-fault protection that can be ensured using this type of approach. A shared risk link group (SRLG) is a group of links which have a common risk of failure. Two new heuristics for solving the min-sum maximally node and SRLG-disjoint path pair are presented. The relative performance of the new heuristics and also of two other previously proposed heuristics is evaluated using four different networks. Results, regarding accuracy and execution time of the studied heuristics, show that one of the new proposed algorithms can be a good compromise for use in the Generalized Multi-protocol Label Switching control plane.