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In the 1870s, microscopy societies began to proliferate in the United States. Most of these societies attracted microscopists from surrounding cities, but the American Postal Microscopical Club, modelled on the British Postal Microscopical Society, used the postal system to connect microscopists scattered across the country. Club members exchanged microscope slides and notes following a chain-letter system. The main objective of the club was to teach its members how to make permanent slides. Preparation and mounting methods required technical skill, which was, as even club members had to admit, difficult to learn without personal instruction. Yet members developed ways to share craft knowledge through the post. Drawing on the private notes of a member and published reports on the slides circulated, this paper challenges the widespread assumption that the generation of craft knowledge depended on the co-location of artisans. It argues that microscopists' knowledge of preparation methods was intertwined with their skill in building and navigating information infrastructures, and that by tracing these infrastructures we gain a better understanding of how craft knowledge travelled in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how a pair of nineteenth century commodity exchanges—in Chicago and New Orleans—shaped the sociotechnical infrastructures underlying two key types of market information—price quotations and crop statistics. Specifically, the paper investigates why these exchanges saw divergent outcomes, each successfully developing one information infrastructure but not the other. Prior scholarship has understood infrastructural development as the result of idiosyncratic, social structural alignments in actors' resources and desires. This paper, by contrast, examines how such structural elements interacted with practical resources available to exchanges based on their roles within infrastructures. Findings demonstrate that the exchanges gained influence in proportion to their discretion over an infrastructure's everyday operations and the market routines these enabled. This 'infrastructural power', or lack thereof, interacted with social structural resources in two distinct forms— 'feedback' in New Orleans and 'sacrifice' in Chicago—providing or denying each exchange the ability to shape infrastructures to its advantage. These findings suggest that analysts should pay closer attention to market dynamics as they relate to 'infrastructure in action'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourism has become an information-intensive business that heavily relies on ICT to provide information and conduct transactions for consumers of touristic products and services. Thus, ICT infrastructure would play a major role in the development of the tourism sector. This paper aims to investigate the threshold effect of ICT infrastructure on tourism sector development in top10 African tourism destinations including ; Botswana, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda. To do so, a double panel threshold regression model utilized over the period 2004 to 2017. The empirical results revealed a new perspective that there is a double-threshold effect of ICT infrastructure on the development of tourism sector, indicating a nonlinear effect of ICT infrastructure on the development of tourism sector in top 10 African tourism destinations. More specifically, the empirical results reveal that ICT infrastructure weakly and positively derives the number of intentional tourism arrivals and international tourist receipts when the level of ICT infrastructure is less or equal to the first threshold, while it strongly and positively derives the number of intentional tourism arrivals and international tourist when the level of ICT infrastructure is less or equal to the first and second thresholds. Thus, this paper provides important implications for policy makers, in that maximizing the benefits from information technology in developing tourism sector can be achieved when its level between certain critical threshold values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial comes in three parts: encouragement to delve into the start of long-distance telecommunications in Australia; some remarks on telecommunications as infrastructure; and a brief introduction to the papers in this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-city transportation plays an important role in modern cities, and has accumulated massive spatio-temporal data from various sensors by IoT (Internet of things) technologies. Travel characteristics and future trends of highway behind data are valuable for traffic guidance and personalized service. As a routine domain analysis, trend discovery for highway drivers faces challenges in processing efficiency and predictive accuracy. Insufficient profiles of those drivers are available directly, sensible executive latency on huge data is hard to guarantee, and inadequate features among spatio-temporal correlations hinder the analytical accuracy. In this paper, a travel-characteristic based method is proposed to discover the potential trend of payment identity for highway drivers. Considering time, space, subjective preference and objective property, travel characteristics are modeled on monthly data from highway toll stations, through which predictive errors can be reduced by gradient boosting classification. With real-world data of one Chinese provincial highway network, extensive experiments and case studies show that our method has second-level executive latency with more than 85% F1-score for trend discovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicle trajectory prediction is an important decision-making and planning basis for autonomous driving systems that enables them to drive safely and efficiently. To accurately predict vehicle trajectories, the complex representations and dynamic interactions among the elements in a traffic scene are abstracted and modelled. This paper presents vehicle–road relationships net, a deep learning network that extracts features from vehicle–road relationships and models the effects of traffic environments on vehicles. The introduction of geographic highway information and the calculation of spatiotemporal distances with a reference not only unify heterogeneous vehicle–road relationship representations into a time series vector but also reduce the requirement for sensing transient changes in the surrounding area. A hierarchical long short-term memory network extracts environmental features from two perspectives—social interactions and road constraints—and predicts the future trajectories of vehicles by their manoeuvre categories. Accordingly, vehicle–road relationships net fully exploits the contributions of historical trajectories and integrates the effects of road constraints to achieve performance that is comparable to or better than that of state-of-the-art methods on the next-generation simulation dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in infrastructure and structural projects, known as Integrated Structural and Infrastructure Modeling (ISIM), has gained attention in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize the construction industry. By providing a digital representation of the built environment, BIM allows for improved collaboration and communication between project stakeholders, leading to enhanced project outcomes. The ISIM approach is centered on the creation of a digital twin, a three-dimensional model of the infrastructure or structure, which serves as a virtual replica of the physical asset. This digital twin provides a platform for analysis, decision-making, and management throughout the project lifecycle, from design and construction to operation and maintenance. One of the key benefits of the ISIM approach is the ability to optimize the construction process, reducing costs, and improving efficiency. The digital twin allows for the identification of potential issues in the design phase, enabling them to be addressed before construction begins. The model can also be used to simulate different scenarios, providing insights into the most effective construction methods, sequencing, and scheduling. Additionally, the use of ISIM can facilitate collaboration and communication among project stakeholders, including architects, engineers, contractors, and owners. The digital twin provides a shared platform for all stakeholders to access and contribute to, allowing for real-time feedback and decision-making. This increased collaboration can lead to reduced errors, improved quality, and enhanced project outcomes. In this paper the authors propose the example of the Meier bridge in Alessandria starting from the 2D drawings to create the 3D model and link it to the external context using Autodesk Infraworks software. A virtual reality implementation has been considered as useful tool to improve the maintenance management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preventive maintenance practices have been proven to reduce maintenance costs in many industries. In the mining industry, preventive maintenance is the main form of maintenance, especially for mobile equipment. With the increase of sensor data and the installation of wireless infrastructure within underground mines, predictive maintenance practices are beginning to be applied to the mining equipment maintenance process. However, for the transition from preventive to predictive maintenance to succeed, researchers must first understand the maintenance process implemented in mines. In this paper, we conducted interviews with 15 maintenance experts from 7 mining sites (6 gold, 1 diamond) across East-Canada to investigate the maintenance planning process currently implemented in Canadian mines. We documented experts' feedback on the process, their expectations regarding the introduction of predictive maintenance in mining, and the usability of existing computerized maintenance management software (CMMS). From our results, we compiled a summary of actual maintenance practices and showed how they differ from theoretical practices. Finally, we list the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) relevant for maintenance planning and user requirements to improve the usability of CMMS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The object of research are decoys with dynamic attributes. This paper discusses the impact of decoys involving blockchain technologies on the state of information security of the organization and the process of researching cybercrime. This is important because most cybercrimes are detected after the attacker gains access to sensitive data. Through systematic analysis of the literature focused on assessing the capabilities of decoy and blockchain technologies, this work identifies the main advantages of decoys that utilize blockchain technology. To assess the effectiveness of attacker detection and cybercrime analysis, controlled experiments were conducted using a blockchain-based decoy system that we developed aimed at determining network performance. As part of the study reported here, a technique is proposed to detect cybercrime using decoys based on blockchain technology. This technique is based on the fact that the attributes of the system change dynamically. Such a technique has made it possible to obtain a system model that solves the task of detecting decoys by intruders. In addition, the developed scheme reduces the load in contrast to the conventional fixed solution. The results indicate that the response time of services is significantly reduced in the environment of decoys with dynamic attributes. For example, Nginx’s response time in a static host is twice as high as dynamic, and an Apache dynamic server can still respond to an intruder’s attack even if a static server fails. Therefore, the results reported in the article give grounds to assert the possibility of using the solution in the infrastructure of information systems at the public and private levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing is facing its next stage, cybermanufacturing, founded upon advanced communication, computation, and control infrastructure. Cybermanufacturing will unleash the potential of multi-modal manufacturing data, and provide a new perspective called computation service, as a part of service-oriented architecture (SOA), where on-demand computation requests throughout manufacturing operations are seamlessly satisfied by data analytics and machine learning. However, the complexity of information technology infrastructure leads to fundamental challenges in modeling and analysis under cybermanufacturing, ranging from information-poor datasets to a lack of reproducibility of analytical studies. Nevertheless, existing reviews have focused on the overall architecture of cybermanufacturing/SOA or its technical components (e.g., communication protocol), rather than the potential bottleneck of computation service with respect to modeling and analysis. In this paper, we review the fundamental challenges with respect to modeling and analysis in cybermanufacturing. Then, we introduce the existing efforts in computation pipeline recommendation, which aims at identifying an optimal sequence of method options for data analytics/machine learning without time-consuming trial-and-error. We envision computation pipeline recommendation as a promising research field to address the fundamental challenges in cybermanufacturing. We also expect that computation pipeline recommendation can be a driving force to flexible and resilient manufacturing operations in the post-COVID-19 industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a new information system developed as part of the Portuguese R&D project DECIdE. The project aimed at the development of a platform for infrastructure asset management tailored to Portuguese water utilities. The platform allows the integration of different data from several information systems of the water utilities and includes several tools for the performance assessment of the water supply systems in terms of water losses, energy efficiency and quality of service (i.e., water and energy balances and key performance indicators). The developed platform was tested with data from five small to medium size Portuguese water utilities with different maturity levels in terms of technological and human resources. The obtained results are very promising because the platform allows for periodic system performance assessment which constitutes an important part of the infrastructure asset management for small and medium-sized water utilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the continuous evolution of adversary tactics, strategies, and processes, the contemporary digital universe is confronted with new obstacles in defending digital assets ranging from secret information to essential infrastructure. The advanced persistent threat (APT) is a new attack methodology used by modern adversaries in which the attacker employs sophisticated and highly evasive exploits and payloads to achieve long-term persistence and lateral movement to accomplish objectives such as high endurance data collection, disruption, or denial of critical infrastructure services. The payloads employed in these sorts of attacks are sophisticated and include advanced approaches for evading contemporary security solutions that depend heavily on signature and rule-based detection methods. Nowadays, individuals rely on behavior analysis combined with artificial intelligence approaches to determine given sample is malicious or not. This paper presents an innovative multi-dimensional hybrid Bayesian belief network model to classify the given sample as malicious or benign in the APT malware detection domain. It is a hybrid method of three analytical models: static analysis Bayesian belief network (SABBN), dynamic analysis Bayesian belief network (DABBN), and event analysis Bayesian belief network (EABBN) that covers the vast range of malware behavioral traits. The suggested framework detects APT Malware with 92.62 percent accuracy and a 0.0538 percent false-positive rate, which is excellent in an area where security solutions lack trustworthy mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a modified vertically installed planar (VIP) coupler for wideband applications. The proposed 5 GHz unlicensed national information infrastructure (U-NII) band VIP coupler is composed of three via holes and RF patterns adjusting current paths of the coupled lines for the wideband characteristic. In measurements, the proposed VIP coupler exhibits 3-dB bandwidth at 2.67 GHz with a fractional bandwidth of 47.7 % and phase error within ±2.5° at a center frequency of 5.8 GHz. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructing a quasi-natural experiment based on China's National Independent Innovation Demonstration Zone (NIDZ) pilot, this study applies the time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) model to estimate the impact of innovation-driven development on urban carbon emission reduction. We use panel data on 285 cities which covers 95.96% of Chinese cities during the period of 2003 to 2017. Compared with non-pilot cities, our results indicate that total carbon dioxide emissions and emission intensity of pilot cities decreased by 4.8% and 5.8%, respectively. The results suggest that the construction of NIDZs can significantly promote urban carbon emission reductions. Moreover, our mechanism tests indicate that this pilot policy can encourage technological innovation and optimize industrial structure, which in turn suppresses urban carbon dioxide emissions. Additionally, further analysis shows that the policy effect increases over years and is stronger in urban areas with higher levels of human capital, government finance, and information infrastructure. This study enriches the relevant research on carbon emission reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Terrorist attacks have contributed significantly to using wireless technologies to identify concrete destruction survivors. A dynamic ad hoc mobile network (MANET) consists of wireless linked nodes, which route hop‐by‐hop without the support of a fixed infrastructure acquires information from trapped survivors. The energy efficiency that extends the lifespan of the network is an essential prerequisite of MANET. Researchers have suggested many strategies to accomplish this purpose and a cluster of these techniques in MANETs are used to provide an energy‐efficient approach. In this paper we are proposing a red deer multi‐objective constraint applied for an energy efficient QoS routing (RD‐MOCER) algorithm to the number of clusters in an ad hoc network and the energy dispensing in nodes to provide an energy effective solution and to minimise network traffic. Intracluster and intercluster traffic is handled by the cluster heads in the proposed approach. The algorithm suggested takes account of mobile nodes' node degrees, transmitting capacity and battery power usage. This approach gives a variety of options at a time, the key benefit of which is that the ideal Pareto front results in these solutions. We correlate the findings with two other well‐known methods of clustering; MOPSO and MOEAQ‐based clustering with different results. We conduct detailed simulations to demonstrate that the solution proposed is an effective and stronger solution to clustering in ad hoc cell networks than the other two techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological growth is realizing an ever more intelligent and convenient future. However, is this future equal, and what role does service design play in addressing, or exacerbating, these inequalities? The relationship between technology and inequality is fluid, moving from the elimination of existing inequalities to the creation of new ones, and service design has the potential to impact this bidirectional relationship. On the other hand, the current literature fails to clearly identify service design’s contribution to the technology-inequality-design nexus. This paper develops a framework to do so. Drawing on the four dimensions of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) 4 model, this paper uses double diamond design process and methods, including user journey, problem framing, and prototyping, etc. to propose a novel framework incorporating four dimensions of service design and their links to inequality. The framework is then demonstrated through an application to autonomous vehicle technology. More broadly, the framework can be used by service designers and practitioners to identify different dimensions of hidden inequality within service design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the enactment of the Information Infrastructure for the management of migrants in Italy. The recent migration crisis required e-government tools to deal with the management of migrants in Italy, and this paper critically explores how the relevant Italian Authorities put in place a purpose-built government solution, the Information Infrastructure, to better manage and allocate migrants in the Italian Territory. This work closely focuses on the functionalities enacted in the Information Infrastructure, and critically analyses its main characteristics and interoperability. This research derives from a case study which enables the phenomenon to be explored from multiple sources and angles. The findings are explored through the lens of the assemblage framework, which helps to uncover the real nature of this Information Infrastructure, identifying it as an assemblage, a heterogeneous composite which results from the encounter of technology with a spectrum of socio-technical dimensions. Looking at this Information Infrastructure as an assemblage will help to unveil the role of mediation between the various interests and dimensions in the making of the assemblage. In particular, we will argue that the interplay of dimensions has led to an Information Infrastructure that is suboptimal and imperfect by contrast with the original plans because some dimensions fail to recognize the effects of the others. Moreover, we aim to demonstrate that the attempts to design an assemblage that is fully controllable a priori failed because an assemblage is always in-the-making and needs to be continuously cultivated by its actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to examine and document the current state of practice of model‐based systems engineering (MBSE), and how organizations look toward the future. The paper is based on a survey of how MBSE has been applied and factors that influenced the perceived benefits and results. The survey was designed to evaluate the maturity and status of the implementation of MBSE (also called model‐centric systems engineering), within industry, academia, and governments. The approach to the survey development is described along with the survey results. The study indicates that one of the main hurdles to introducing a model‐based approach is the lack of clear and adopted organizational structures and an understanding of required conditions and needs at a management level. The survey also indicates that 50–75% of the respondents noted some improvement or a significant improvement across almost all systems engineering tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Newly emerged applications in vehicular networks demand high throughput to transfer large amount of data through both Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure links. One solution which recently draws researchers attention to itself for improving the throughput in this type of network is to deploy some Road-Side-Units (RSUs) in the streets with storage capability and store the data closer to the end users. Consequently, vehicles are able to download their inquired contents from these local RSUs instead of the base station. This will decrease the network traffic of the base station and also the average delay each vehicle has to wait to receive his requested files. The main issue to implement this distributed approach in this type of environment compared to other types of networks is that the fast moving vehicles make the topology of the network highly dynamic. Also due to limited storage capacity of the caches in the RSUs, we should decide on how to distribute the contents in the RSUs to maximize the number of locally satisfied vehicles. In this paper, we address the cache content placement problem in vehicular networks and model it using a game theoretic approach. We show that the proposed game model is a special case of generalized covering games. Considering the hit ratio of the caches as the performance metric in our model, we propose a method to distributively optimize this metric using the RSU's local information. In addition, we propose a combinatorial approach to find efficient file placements in the RSUs using Markov approximation. Empirical evaluations on realistic trace-based simulations show an improvement of 7.5% in the average hit ratio of the proposed method compared to other well-known cache content placement approaches. Newly emerged applications in vehicular networks demand high throughput to transfer large amount of data through both Vehicle-to-Vehicle and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure links. To improve the network throughput, we deploy some Road-Side-Units (RSUs) in the streets with storage capability and store the data closer to the end users. Consequently, vehicles are able to download their inquired contents from these local RSUs instead of the base station. The main issue to implement this distributed approach is that the fast moving vehicles make the topology of the network highly dynamic. Also due to limited storage capacity of the caches in the RSUs, we should decide on how to distribute the contents in the RSUs to maximize the number of locally satisfied vehicles. In this paper, we address the cache content placement problem in vehicular networks and model it using game theoretic approach and Combinatorial approach. We show that the proposed game model is a special case of generalized covering games. Considering the hit ratio of the caches as the performance metric in our model, we propose a method to distributively optimize this metric using the RSU's local information. In addition, we propose a Combinatorial approach to find efficient file placements in the RSUs using Markov approximation. Empirical evaluations on realistic trace-based simulations show an improvement of 7.5% in the average hit ratio of the proposed method compared to other well-known cache content placement approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a report of the IFIP AIMS 2016, which was held at Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany from June 20 to June 23, 2016. AIMS 2016 focused on the theme “Management and Security in the Age of Hyperconnectivity”. The AIMS conference positions itself in the network management community as an educational venue for young researchers and Ph.D. students. The AIMS program included keynotes, technical sessions and Ph.D. Workshop sessions, but also hands-on labs and an educational panel for training young academics. The highlights on each of the parts of the AIMS 2016 program are summarized in this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a key enabling technology for 5G network softwarization, network function virtualization (NFV) provides an efficient paradigm to optimize network resource utility for the benefits of both network providers and users. However, the inherent network dynamics and uncertainties from 5G infrastructure, resources, and applications are slowing down the further adoption of NFV in many emerging networking applications. Motivated by this, in this paper, we investigate the issues of network utility degradation when implementing NFV in dynamic networks, and design a proactive NFV solution from a fully stochastic perspective. Unlike existing deterministic NFV solutions, which assume given network capacities and/or static service quality demands, this paper explicitly integrates the knowledge of influential network variations into a two-stage stochastic resource utilization model. By exploiting the hierarchical decision structures in this problem, a distributed computing framework with two-level decomposition is designed to facilitate a distributed implementation of the proposed model in large-scale networks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution not only improves 3~5 folds of network performance, but also effectively reduces the risk of service quality violation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of information technology infrastructure is encountered with Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), which can launch data destruction, disclosure, modification, and/or Denial of Service attacks by drawing upon vulnerabilities of software and hardware. Moving Target Defense (MTD) is a promising risk mitigation technique that replies to APTs via implementing randomisation and dynamic strategies on compromised assets. However, some MTD techniques adopt the blind random mutation, which causes greater performance overhead and worse defense utility. In this paper, we formulate the cyber-attack and defense as a dynamic partially observable Markov process based on dynamic Bayesian inference. Then we develop an Inference-Based Adaptive Attack Tolerance (IBAAT) system , which includes two stages. In the first stage, a forward–backward algorithm with a time window is employed to perform a security risk assessment. To select the defense strategy, in the second stage, the attack and defense process is modelled as a two-player general-sum Markov game and the optimal defense strategy is acquired by quantitative analysis based on the first stage. The evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm has about 10% security utility improvement compared to the state-of-the-art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Robust infrastructure is essential to enhance urban productivity and support urban development. • Transportation infrastructure enhances urban productivity by promoting economic agglomeration. • Information infrastructure promotes urban productivity through labor mobility and agglomeration effects. • The promotion effect on urban productivity in eastern regions and megacities is more obvious. • Transportation and information infrastructure have positive spatial spillover effects on urban productivity. Improving total factor productivity is an important driving force for achieving high-quality economic development. Based on the panel data of 256 cities in China from 2009 to 2019, this paper investigates the effect of transportation and information infrastructure on urban productivity. The results show that transportation and information infrastructure promote urban productivity, and the effect in eastern regions and megacities is more obvious. The mechanism analysis shows that transportation infrastructure enhances urban productivity by promoting economic agglomeration, and information infrastructure enhances urban productivity by promoting labor mobility, economic agglomeration, financial agglomeration and industrial agglomeration. The spatial spillover effect shows positive spatial autocorrelation of urban productivity. Transportation and information infrastructure have significant positive spatial spillover effects on urban productivity. China should continue to promote the construction of transportation infrastructure, strengthen investment in information infrastructure, and promote the joint construction, sharing, coordination and integration of transportation and information infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction/Background: Safe and quality surgery is crucial for child health. In Rwanda, district hospitals serve as primary entry points for pediatric patients needing surgical care. This paper reports on the organizational readiness and facility capacity to provide pediatric surgery in three district hospitals in rural Rwanda. Methods: We administered the Children's Surgical Assessment Tool, adapted for a Rwandan district hospital, to assess facility readiness across 5 domains (infrastructure, workforce, service delivery, financing, and training) at three Partners in Health supported district hospitals (Kirehe, Rwinkwavu, and Butaro District Hospitals). We used the Safe Surgery Organizational Readiness Tool (SSORT) to measure perceived individual and team readiness to implement surgical quality improvement interventions across 14 domains. Results: None of the facilities had a dedicated pediatric surgeon, and the most common barriers to pediatric surgery were lack of surgeon (68%), lack of physician anesthesiologists (19%), and inadequate infrastructure (17%). There were gaps in operating and recovery room infrastructure and information management for pediatric outpatients and referrals. In SSORT interviews (n = 47), the highest barriers to increasing pediatric surgery capacity were facility capacity (mean score = 2.6 out of 5), psychological safety (median score = 3.0 out of 5), and resistance to change (mean score = 1.5 out of 5 with 5 = no resistance). Conclusions: This study highlights challenges in providing safe and high‐quality surgical care to pediatric patients in three rural district hospitals in Rwanda. It underscores the need for targeted interventions to address facility and organizational barriers prior to implementing interventions to expand pediatric surgical capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a process to develop a CityGML-based 3D city model that, together with results from a flood simulation, can be used to investigate direct and indirect effects of floods on a city, its inhabitants and its critical infrastructure, and to quantify such effects by means of a Flood Resilience Score. In addition, the model can be used as a spatial planning support tool for urban planners to prioritise the redevelopment of certain areas and to test new spatial design decisions. First, a semantic 3D city model is prepared and enriched with additional building and infrastructure information. Then a Flood Resilience Score (FReSco) is defined and computed by quantifying the direct and indirect impacts of flooding on buildings, households, and critical infrastructure points using information from both the 3D city model and the flood simulation results. Lastly, a prototype of a spatial planning support tool is proposed to evaluate the flood resilience of a new environmental plan. As a case study, the neighbourhood of "Nieuw Kralingen" in Rotterdam was chosen. Overall, the outcomes of this work are meant to help cities better understand the impacts of flooding and adjust their urban planning activities accordingly. At the same time, the developed methodology also tests the strengths and limits of CityGML-based 3D city models in combination with openly available data and software. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North Korean cyber-attack groups such as Kimsuky, Lazarus, Andariel, and Venus 121 continue to attempt spear-phishing APT attacks that exploit social issues, including COVID-19. Thus, along with the worldwide pandemic of COVID-19, related threats also persist in cyberspace. In January 2022, a hacking attack, presumed to be Kimsuky, a North Korean cyber-attack group, intending to steal research data related to COVID-19. The problem is that the activities of cyber-attack groups are continuously increasing, and it is difficult to accurately identify cyber-attack groups and attack origins only with limited analysis information. To solve this problem, it is necessary to expand the scope of data analysis by using BGP archive data. It is necessary to combine infrastructure and network information to draw correlations and to be able to classify infrastructure by attack group very accurately. Network-based infrastructure analysis is required in the fragmentary host area, such as malware or system logs. This paper studied cyber ISR and BGP and a case study of cyber ISR visualization for situational awareness, hacking trends of North Korean cyber-attack groups, and cyber-attack tracking. Through related research, we estimated the origin of the attack by analyzing hacking cases through cyber intelligence-based profiling techniques and correlation analysis using BGP archive data. Based on the analysis results, we propose an implementation of the cyber ISR visualization method based on BGP archive data. Future research will include a connection with research on a cyber command-and-control system, a study on the cyber battlefield area, cyber ISR, and a traceback visualization model for the origin of the attack. The final R&D goal is to develop an AI-based cyber-attack group automatic identification and attack-origin tracking platform by analyzing cyber-attack behavior and infrastructure lifecycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Information Technology & Applications is the property of Pan-European University Apeiron and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the UK, the introduction of austerity measures for public services has intensified the thinking around inter-organizational collaboration between emergency services and other public and/or private sector organizations. Theoretically, while collaborative benefits are held up as beacons that drive organizations to participate in inter-organizational arrangements, a high number of such arrangements fail. In this paper, we explored the factors that influenced the collaboration process in the context of developing 'collaborative information infrastructures', from an organizational and collaboration level perspective, via a multiple case study approach. Our findings offer insights into how policymakers and public managers could improve their practices by considering their approach towards, and impact of, these factors when implementing collaborative projects in information technology and information systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of technology in education in Sub-Saharan Africa has been reported to be hindered by many factors including inadequate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, low internet speed, and lack of skills to use educational technologies. This paper aim at evaluating how the available ICT infrastructure at the College of Information and Communication Technologies (CoICT) can support, with acceptable Quality of Service (QoS), the delivery of multimedia applications for eLearning services. The evaluation was performed over a network testbed implemented in a computer laboratory for wired and wireless connections. The testbed consisted of five personal computers (PCs) connected via a switch and a router to the internet for the wired connection. The wireless connection consisted of three PCs and a laptop connected through a switch and a router to the internet via a wireless access point. Four different multimedia applications were run through the PCs, and traffic data was mirrored and captured at one of the PC using Wireshark network analyzer. The traffic included streamed and conversational video and audio using YouTube and Zoom applications, respectively; interactive web browsing using web browsers; bulk file transfer, and a mixture of all applications running on the computers. Traffic data captured during the running of these applications were packet loss, delay, jitter, and throughput. The QoS performance parameters obtained were within the acceptable threshold values as per International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) values. Results revealed that ICT infrastructure at CoICT can support delivery of multimedia content for eLearning purposes for both wired and wireless connections. Having the infrastructure capable of supporting multimedia applications with the acceptable QoS implies that instructors are equipped with a conducive environment that supports multimedia application. Hence, they are expected to use and continue using educational technologies to facilitate teaching and learning processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The academic research into underpricing of initial public offerings (IPOs) offers many explanations, i.e. signalling, financial and market hypothesis. However, another set of information, namely, "Qualitative Factors" (along with financial and others), are largely reported by the issuing firms in the prospectus. However, to the best of the authors' knowledge no such systematic study has been carried out on how firms' qualitative factors impact the IPO valuation. This paper aims to addresses this gap. Design/methodology/approach: Using a sample of 82 IPOs issued from 2014 to 2020, we investigate the issuing firm's pattern of reporting qualitative factors. These qualitative factors are subjected to factor analysis. The authors classify all reported factors across firms into a few categories using principal component analysis. The authors also investigate the impact of these factors on IPO underpricing using OLS regression. Findings: The authors find that the qualitative information relating to market leadership, established brand image and modern scalable information technology infrastructure significantly influences underpricing. The authors also document that market leadership and brand image are the influential reported quality factors that reduce underpricing. Moreover, location advantage, good customer relationship, established relationship with a client, track record of growth and profitability, experienced promoter and management team failed to influence underpricing. Originality/value: The outcome of this piece of research offers additional signalling as an attestation of quality for the issue. The authors further argue that the amount of qualitative information disclosed by the managers in the prospectus to support the pricing should not be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie is the property of Vittorio Klostermann and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Cybersecurity risk is among the top risks that every organization must consider and manage, especially during this time wherein technology has become an integral part of our lives; however, there is no efficient and simplified measurement method that organizations or regulators could use, as frequently as they need, to evaluate and compare the outcome of cybersecurity efforts that have been put in place. Consequently, this has resulted in an absence of critical data for cybersecurity improvement. This research proposes a Cyber Trust Index (CTI), a novel and simplified framework for evaluating, benchmarking, and improving organizations' cybersecurity performance. Methods: The researchers analyzed prominent scientific research papers and widely used security standards to develop baseline security controls that serve as a measurement foundation. Then, they identified Control Enablers and Capability Tiers that were used as base measures and measurement methods. The CTI framework was evaluated by experts and tested with 35 organizations from the critical information infrastructure (CII) sector, as well as other generic sectors, in Thailand to confirm its validity and reliability in real organization settings and identify the priorities and factors that can contribute to better cybersecurity performance. Results: The CTI has two key elements: the baseline controls and rating methods. The baseline controls comprise 12 dimensions, 25 clusters, and 70 controls. The rating methods utilize five control enablers and five capability tiers to compute scores. A binary questionnaire is used to capture data for the rating process. Based on a statistical analysis of CTI results from 35 pilot organizations, 28.57% are in the beginner group with high-risk exposure, 31.43% are in the leader group with low-risk exposure, and 40% of organizations are in between (the intermediate and advanced groups). Two key factors distinguish between the beginner and leader groups: (1) an internal factor, which is the Control Enablers; and (2) an external factor, which is the influence of a cyber regulating body. Our study confirms that Control Enablers in higher Tiers will help organizations achieve better cybersecurity performance (R = 0.98021) and highlights the significance of cyber regulating bodies by showing a shear difference of 197.53% in cyber performance between highly regulated and low-regulated industries. Conclusions: This research reveals key insights into the importance of Control Enablers, which are the internal factors that organizations must leverage to drive better cybersecurity performance, and the positive return on enforcement, which emphasizes the need for cyber regulating bodies. The CTI framework has proven to be valid and efficient for measuring cybersecurity performance. At the very least, a step-wise roadmap is provided for organizations and regulators to adopt and adapt the CTI framework for their cybersecurity measurement and improvement mission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, with the popularization of computer and information network technology, the core business of more and more industries has basically realized informatization office. Although the informatization office has brought a lot of convenience to people, the increasingly complex informatization infrastructure equipment has also buried many hidden dangers for people. More and more security incidents are caused by unfamiliarity with these infrastructures. How to use the information infrastructure correctly has become a problem considered by more and more enterprise information security departments, and the position of IT operation and maintenance is born to solve this hidden danger. The IT (Internet Technology) operation and maintenance personnel of each enterprise formulate a set of operational risk quantitative assessment models for the enterprise based on the internal information infrastructure equipment of the enterprise so that the enterprise staff can use these infrastructure equipment efficiently and safely. This paper focused on the quantitative assessment model of IT operation and maintenance operation risk constructed by the digital twin model. The quantitative assessment model of IT operation and maintenance operation risk constructed by the digital twin model was compared with the quantitative assessment model of IT operation and maintenance operation risk constructed by other traditional models. The comparison results showed that the output results of the evaluation model constructed by the digital twin model were closer to the actual results, and the accuracy rate was 35.9% higher than that of the previous operational risk assessment model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platform like Twitter is one of the primary sources for sharing real-time information at the time of events such as disasters, political events, etc. Detecting the resource tweets during a disaster is an essential task because tweets contain different types of information such as infrastructure damage, resources, opinions and sympathies of disaster events, etc. Tweets are posted related to Need and Availability of Resources (NAR) by humanitarian organizations and victims. Hence, reliable methodologies are required for detecting the NAR tweets during a disaster. The existing works don't focus well on NAR tweets detection and also had poor performance. Hence, this paper focus on detection of NAR tweets during a disaster. Existing works often use features and appropriate machine learning algorithms on several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Recently, there is a wide use of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in text classification problems. However, it requires a large amount of manual labeled data. There is no such large labeled data is available for NAR tweets during a disaster. To overcome this problem, stacking of Convolutional Neural Networks with traditional feature based classifiers is proposed for detecting the NAR tweets. In our approach, we propose several informative features such as aid, need, food, packets, earthquake, etc. are used in the classifier and CNN. The learned features (output of CNN and classifier with informative features) are utilized in another classifier (meta-classifier) for detection of NAR tweets. The classifiers such as SVM, KNN, Decision tree, and Naive Bayes are used in the proposed model. From the experiments, we found that the usage of KNN (base classifier) and SVM (meta classifier) with the combination of CNN in the proposed model outperform the other algorithms. This paper uses 2015 and 2016 Nepal and Italy earthquake datasets for experimentation. The experimental results proved that the proposed model achieves the best accuracy compared to baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vector geographic data are the fundamental achievements of national information infrastructure, and they play an important role in society's development. How to protect the copyright of vector geographic data has become a popular issue in the age of big data, and digital watermarking technology can be used to solve this problem. In this paper, a robust and blind watermarking algorithm for vector geographic data is proposed based on the technology of coordinate mapping and matching detection. First, the basic principle for resisting data translation based on quantization index modulation (QIM) and matching detection was analyzed. Second, a watermarking algorithm for vector geographic data was designed based on coordinate mapping, QIM and matching detection. Finally, we performed experiments to test the robustness and adaptability of the proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed watermarking algorithm is not only robust against the watermarking attacks of data compression, data adding, data deleting, data cropping, feature deleting and data translation but also against composite attack. The proposed algorithm is also suitable for small vector geographic datasets such as point-based data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is expected one of promising network forms for intelligent transportation system which supports road safety applications, in-vehicle entertainment and arriving automatic driving. Establishing and maintaining stable connections in VANETs are challenging on account of the high mobility of vehicles, dynamic vehicle topology, and time-varying vehicle density. Clustering can provide scalability and reliability for VANETs by grouping vehicles with hierarchical structures. However, keeping cluster stable became a hard nut to crack due to high vehicle speed and unpredictable driving pattern. Recent rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) provided an innovative solution for this situation. In this paper, a Naive Bayes Classifier based driving habit prediction scheme for stable clustering is proposed, briefly named NBP. According to driving speed and overtaking decisions, vehicles are classified into two alignments with different driving habit. Specifically, Naive Bayes classifier perform driving habit prediction through several relative independent factors, such as relative velocity, vehicle type, number of lanes traveled. The cluster head candidates will be chosen from alignment with mild driving pattern which will benefit for stable clusters. Combined with clustering design, the proposed method has been proven effective for stable clustering in VANET based on the real data of highways in California. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The knowledge economy is defined, according to the World Bank, through the integration of its four main component elements: education and training, innovation systems, information infrastructure, economic incentives and institutional regime. The first part of the paper reconciles knowledge economy and corporate social entrepreneurship, while the second part focuses on the education and training, and innovation pillars of the knowledge economy, and more specifically it resorts to the framework of corporate social entrepreneurship as a transformational innovation strategy for company growth. The current investigation has been conducted by means of case study method having the following research question: "How does corporate social entrepreneurship manifest in corporations?"., accompanied by secondary research questions such as: "How does the company mobilize its resources to create an innovative product/service/approach in order to tackle the social issue?, How does the company contribute to local development?". The findings revealed that the social issue of high levels of nitrates in the waters inspired the company to combine a testing tool (technological innovation) with marketing communication which eventually resulted in an innovative approach for the company to increase the loyalty of their customers and to reach out for new ones. The present paper has been developed based on the author's doctoral research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Networks are prevalent in many high impact domains. Moreover, cross-domain interactions are frequently observed in many applications, which naturally form the dependencies between different networks. Such kind of highly coupled network systems are referred to as multi-layered networks, and have been used to characterize various complex systems, including critical infrastructure networks, cyber-physical systems, collaboration platforms, biological systems, and many more. Different from single-layered networks where the functionality of their nodes is mainly affected by within-layer connections, multi-layered networks are more vulnerable to disturbance as the impact can be amplified through cross-layer dependencies, leading to the cascade failure to the entire system. To manipulate the connectivity in multi-layered networks, some recent methods have been proposed based on two-layered networks with specific types of connectivity measures. In this paper, we address the above challenges in multiple dimensions. First, we propose a family of connectivity measures (SubLine) that unifies a wide range of classic network connectivity measures. Third, we reveal that the connectivity measures in the SubLine family enjoy diminishing returns property, which guarantees a near-optimal solution with linear complexity for the connectivity optimization problem. Finally, we evaluate our proposed algorithm on real data sets to demonstrate its effectiveness and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The market for new students is highly competitive. For this reason, higher education institutions (HEIs) can no longer rely on traditional strategies to hit enrolment goals. HEIs leadership must leverage new approaches, tools and skills to optimize the enrolment process, monitor the student enrolment campaign and improve marketing strategies to attract suitable students for future campaigns. This paper proposes a solution that facilitates and optimizes these processes. It introduces a model for monitoring student enrolment campaigns and a prototype of a correspondent software tool StEnrAnalyst, designed for the needs of different stakeholder groups (top and middle management, responsible bodies for student enrolment campaigns). StEnrAnalyst allows them to monitor the student enrolment campaign, generate reports for candidate students and enrolled student and make timely data-driven decisions to improve the process of applying and enrolling new students. Experiments with the model and StEnrAnalyst are conducted based on the information infrastructure of a typical Bulgarian university. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benefiting from the large-scale commercial use of 5G, smart campuses have attracted increasing research attention in recent years and are expected to revolutionize traditional campus activities. However, there are some obstacles that hinder the practical deployment of MEC (multi-access edge computing). First, traditional information infrastructures on campus cannot support latency-sensitive and computing-intensive smart applications, such as AR/VR, live interactive lectures and digital twin experiments. In addition, the mixture of old and new applications, isolated data islands and heterogeneous equipment management introduce more challenges. Moreover, the existing MEC framework proposed by ETSI and 3GPP cannot meet the specific deployment requirements of smart campuses, e.g., educational data security, real-time interactive applications, heterogeneous connections, and others. In this paper, we propose a 5G-based architecture for smart education information infrastructure; a new dedicated cloud architecture eMEC (educational multi-access edge computing) is defined. It consists of a UGW (universal access gateway) and an eMEP (educational multi-access edge computing platform), making it possible to satisfy education-specific requirements and long-term evolution. Furthermore, we implement the framework and conduct real-world field tests for eMEC in a university campus. Based on the framework and practical field tests, we also conduct a measurement study to unveil the spatial-temporal characteristics of mobile users in the smart campus and discuss exploiting them for better network performance. The experimental results show that the system achieves satisfactory performance in terms of both throughput and latency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban development has brought about the increasing saturation of urban traffic demand, and traffic congestion has become the primary problem in transportation. Roads are in a state of waiting in line or even congestion, which seriously affects people's enthusiasm and efficiency of travel. This paper mainly studies the discrete domain path planning method based on the flow data. Taking the traffic flow data based on the highway network structure as the research object, this paper uses the deep learning theory technology to complete the path weight determination process, optimizes the path planning algorithm, realizes the vehicle path planning application for the expressway, and carries on the deployment operation in the highway company. The path topology is constructed to transform the actual road information into abstract space that the machine can understand. An appropriate data structure is used for storage, and a path topology based on the modeling background of expressway is constructed to realize the mutual mapping between the two. Experiments show that the proposed method can further reduce the interpolation error, and the interpolation error in the case of random missing is smaller than that in the other two missing modes. In order to improve the real-time performance of vehicle path planning, the association features are selected, the path weights are calculated comprehensively, and the traditional path planning algorithm structure is optimized. It is of great significance for the sustainable development of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a tool for objective evaluation of organisations' information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure development level: Composite Indicator of the Organisational Information and Communication Infrastructure—CIOICTI. Based on separate research in 68 different companies, it aggregates hardware, software and humanware aspects of ICT development in organisations, especially valuing companies with synergetic aspects. It consists of six linear and non-linear indicator components, each designed to evaluate one specific aspect of ICT development, based on the weighted sum principle. The proposed CIOICTI examines ICT infrastructure as a necessary but not sufficient condition for successful ICT usage in business performance improvement. The obtained CIOICTI values are summarised in the distribution and tested for normality. Results are tested on the data from observed companies, averaged according to company size and industry and benchmarked. The proposed composite indicator can be used as an objective tool for researchers and practitioners to assess the level of ICT development for benchmarking with other companies, planning organisational changes or assessing infrastructural requirements for planning and implementation of ICT related projects in a business organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper talks about the situation in India in the travel industry, the degree of approach in the travel industry, patterns and improvements in the tourism market, various battles in India and advances in new products. Chapters that rely on optional information for testing in government annual reports, chapters, websites, distributed and non-distributed archives. The appearance of travel and the development of foreign trade interests have been found to improve significantly. The Indian travel industry scenario had an emotional and concrete rate of development. The most important and obvious achievement through the existence of the travel industry was the establishment of the Indian Tourism Development Corporation (ITDC) in 1966. The National Tourism Development Policy, introduced in 2002, positions the travel industry as a major driver of financial development and sets the standard for preventing significant voluntary improvement in the travel industry. The layout of the travel industry contains seven major zones. Swagat (welcome), Soochna (information), Suvidha (facilitation), Suraksha (security), Sahyog (cooperation), Samrachna (infrastructure development), Safai (cleanliness). These have a detrimental influence on the travel industry’s advancement. Public roadshows and mass media support in chapters, television and external media have attracted public attention to the Atithi Devo Bhavah program. An online home crusade was launched as part of an incredible Indian online campaign to boost the domestic travel industry. Improvements to new items, such as B. Travel industry golf, travel industry cruises, waterway cruises, skiing, paragliders, travel industry adventures such as mountain climbing, travel industry recovery, travel industry well-being, sustainable or ecotourism, Accessibility of the travel industry, etc. According to a survey, the travel industry is growing in the Indian market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from securitization theory and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article examines how the Singaporean government has "securitized" cyberspace governance. It contributes value-add to the existing literature on securitization theory by evaluating the specific backgrounds and preexisting beliefs that securitizing actors bring with them to the securitization process. Taking the case of Singapore, this paper focuses on the military elites turned civilian politicans and policymakers that have been tasked with cyberspace governance. A discourse analysis shows how terminologies describing cyberspace as an "existential" issue and key personnel appointments with significant military backgrounds reflect the prevalance of military elites, terminologies, strategies that have become embedded within domestic cybersecurity governance structures. The use of military-style concepts such as "digital ranges" and "war games" in Singapore mirrors global financial industry trends where military-derived terminology has become widespread in preparing for cyber-attacks on critical information infrastructure. Two key focus areas of cyberspace governance are evaluated: online content regulation of Internet and social media networks, and legislation to protect critical information infrastructure. The paper concludes by discussing a range of concerns raised by the target "audience" of securitization processes, such as civil society and information infrastructure providers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 pandemic is an opportunity to recognize the necessity of information and telecommunications infrastructure which is base of information and telecommunication. This paper discusses the importance of information and telecommunications infrastructure in COVID-19 pandemic and overview proper institutional measures to fulfill state responsibility for establishment and protection of the infrastructure through documentary survey and normative study with juristic consideration. Information and telecommunications infrastructure has critical functions to respond to the pandemic and is one of the key to make digital transformation. A state is responsible for establishment and protection of Information and telecommunications infrastructure. Institutional measures have significance for the state responsibility and they are formed by not only statute but also constitution with making state object provision for establishment and protection of Information and telecommunications infrastructure. This paper shows premise and direction of further studies on related individual legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current distributed control methods have a lack of information exchange infrastructure to enable spatially evolving multiagent formations. Specifically, these methods are designed based on information exchange rules represented by a network having a single layer, where they lead to multiagent formations with fixed, nonevolving spatial properties. For situations where capable agents have to control the resulting formation through these methods, they can often do so if such agents have global information exchange ability. Yet, global information exchange is not practical for cases that have large numbers of agents and low-bandwidth peer-to-peer communications. Motivated from this standpoint, the contribution of this paper is to show how information exchange rules, which are represented by a network having multiple layers (multiplex information networks), can be designed for enabling spatially evolving multiagent formations. In particular, we first consider the formation assignment problem and then the formation tracking problem and introduce new distributed control architectures that allow capable agents to spatially alter the size and the orientation of the resulting formation without requiring global information exchange ability. In addition, tools and methods from differential potential fields are further utilized in order to generalize the proposed distribute control architecture for the formation tracking problem to allow for connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance needed in real-world applications. Stability of the proposed architectures is theoretically analyzed and their efficacy is illustrated on numerical examples and on multiagent formation experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]