Search

First two decades of the twenty-first century are characterised by epidemics of non-communicable diseases such as many hundreds of millions of patients diagnosed with cardiovascular diseases and the type 2 diabetes mellitus, breast, lung, liver and prostate malignancies, neurological, sleep, mood and eye disorders, amongst others. Consequent socio-economic burden is tremendous. Unprecedented decrease in age of maladaptive individuals has been reported. The absolute majority of expanding non-communicable disorders carry a chronic character, over a couple of years progressing from reversible suboptimal health conditions to irreversible severe pathologies and cascading collateral complications. The time-frame between onset of SHS and clinical manifestation of associated disorders is the operational area for an application of reliable risk assessment tools and predictive diagnostics followed by the cost-effective targeted prevention and treatments tailored to the person.This article demonstrates advanced strategies in bio/medical sciences and healthcare focused on suboptimal health conditions in the frame-work of Predictive, Preventive and Personalised Medicine (3PM/PPPM). Potential benefits in healthcare systems and for society at large include but are not restricted to an improved life-quality of major populations and socio-economical groups, advanced professionalism of healthcare-givers and sustainable healthcare economy. Amongst others, following medical areas are proposed to strongly benefit from PPPM strategies applied to the identification and treatment of suboptimal health conditions:Stress overload associated pathologiesMale and female healthPlanned pregnanciesPeriodontal healthEye disordersInflammatory disorders, wound healing and pain management with associated complicationsMetabolic disorders and suboptimal body weightCardiovascular pathologiesCancersStroke, particularly of unknown aetiology and in young individualsSleep medicineSports medicineImproved individual outcomes under pandemic conditions such as COVID-19.

European pharmaceutical companies have a legal requirement to provide non-promotional Medical Information (MI) services to support healthcare professionals (HCPs) who are using their medicinal products. While the industry has self-regulating bodies with established Codes of Practice, these mainly focus on promotional messaging and commercial activities. In the absence of similar frameworks for MI, such services struggle to understand how to meet HCP digital expectations, often in fear of breaching the promotional codes. This is limiting access to the wealth of non-promotional patient-focussed information held within the industry. Meanwhile, a large volume of unregulated, low-quality information can be readily found on the internet. To understand the current status, the Medical Information Leaders in Europe (MILE) industry association performed a benchmarking survey which explored the online MI service provision of 13 mid-large pharmaceutical companies across Europe. This highlighted a great diversity in approach in terms of geographical coverage and content. Visibility and access for HCPs is complex, compromising online engagement and website utilisation. This MILE position paper highlights the critical need to establish a clear governance model, which empowers pharmaceutical company MI functions to provide unbranded, non-promotional, medicinal product information sources to support HCP online information needs. It is essential to build confidence, transparency and trust by establishing a practical quality framework with principles and standards for online MI services for HCPs.

PURPOSE: Main insight of the study was to evaluate the potential of Perionyx excavatus, an indigenous earthworm of India towards bioconversion of toxic paper mill wastes. The study had considered a comprehensive study over succession of different enzymes and microbial biomasses alongside removal of heavy metals to reflect the qualitative enrichment of the toxic waste through valorisation procedure. METHODS: The process of vermicomposting was performed using ratio of paper mill sludge: cow dung: straw as 5:4:1 and Perionyx excavatus for a period of 60 days. Qualitative enrichment was considered through detailed evaluation of physicochemical parameters and succession of 19 enzymes using API ZYM technology. Heavy metal loads in terms of Zn, Cr, Cu, Pb along with bioaccumulation factor (BAF) were considered to establish functional role of earthworm in bioremediation. Microbial succession was measured in terms of PLFA biomarkers. RESULTS: Enzymatic enrichment of different isozymes of esterase, aminopeptidase and glycosyl hydrolase were found in the vermicompost. A significant reduction of heavy metals was noticed in vermicomposting of primary sludge as Zn > Pb > Cr > Cu and secondary sludge as Zn > Pb > Cu > Cr. An increase in density of Gram positive bacterial and fungal populations was found at the end phase of vermicomposting process which supports maturity of vermicompost. CONCLUSION: Presence of different enzyme activities, reduction of heavy metal loads along with rise of eukaryotic PLFA markers, had illustrated the efficiency of vermicomposting as a valorisation procedure in the qualitative enrichment of toxic organic paper mill sludge.

This white paper argues that formal methods need to be better rooted in higher education curricula for computer science and software engineering programmes of study. To this end, it advocates

This study reports the degradation and decolourization capability of a manganese peroxidase enzyme producing bacterium isolated from pulp and paper mill wastewater. The isolate was identified as Bacillus aryabhattai based on biochemical analysis and 16S rRNA gene sequencing. The strain was designated MG966493. This bacterium was able to reduce 67% and 54% colour and lignin, respectively from the pulp and paper mill wastewater after 144 h of treatment at 32 °C, pH 7.6 and 120 rpm. Further, FT-IR analysis showed that during the lignin degradation process a number of metabolites were produced comprising different functional groups such as carbonyl (C = C), carboxyl (-COOH), alkene (C=C), amines (-NH2), sulphonic (-SO3) and nitro (-NO2). In addition, the SEM analysis showed that the bacterial cells exposed to pulp and paper mill wastewater have rough surfaces with reduced size as compared to the unexposed cells with smooth surfaces. This study concluded that the isolated bacterium B. aryabhattai has significant potential for the bioremediation of pulp and paper mill wastewater and thus, can be applied for their treatment at an industrial scale.

Technology is shaping our lives in a multitude of ways. This is fuelled by a technology infrastructure, both legacy and state of the art, composed of a heterogeneous group of hardware, software, services, and organisations. Such infrastructure faces a diverse range of challenges to its operations that include security, privacy, resilience, and quality of services. Among these, cybersecurity and privacy are taking the centre-stage, especially since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. Traditional security and privacy techniques are overstretched and adversarial actors have evolved to design exploitation techniques that circumvent protection. With the ever-increasing complexity of technology infrastructure, security and privacy-preservation specialists have started to look for adaptable and flexible protection methods that can evolve (potentially autonomously) as the adversarial actor changes its techniques. For this, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL) were put forward as saviours. In this paper, we look at the promises of AI, ML, and DL stated in academic and industrial literature and evaluate how realistic they are. We also put forward potential challenges a DL based security and privacy protection system has to overcome. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion on what steps the DL and the security and privacy-preservation community have to take to ensure that DL is not just going to be hype, but an opportunity to build a secure, reliable, and trusted technology infrastructure on which we can rely on for so much in our lives.

Traditionally, the way one evaluates the performance of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system is via a comparison to human performance in specific tasks, treating humans as a reference for high-level cognition. However, these comparisons leave out important features of human intelligence: the capability to transfer knowledge and make complex decisions based on emotional and rational reasoning. These decisions are influenced by current inferences as well as prior experiences, making the decision process strongly subjective and apparently biased. In this context, a definition of compositional intelligence is necessary to incorporate these features in future AI tests. Here, a concrete implementation of this will be suggested, using recent developments in quantum cognition, natural language and compositional meaning of sentences, thanks to categorical compositional models of meaning.

The paper industry is the industry with the third highest energy consumption in the European Union. Using recycled paper instead of fresh fibers for papermaking is less energy consuming and saves resources. However, adhesive contaminants in recycled paper are particularly problematic since they reduce the quality of the resulting paper-product. To remove as many contaminants and at the same time obtain as many valuable fibres as possible, fine screening systems, consisting of multiple interconnected pressure screens, are used. Choosing the best configuration is a non-trivial task: The screens can be interconnected in several ways, and suitable screen designs as well as operational parameters have to be selected. Additionally, one has to face conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present an approach for the multi-criteria optimization of pressure screen systems based on Mixed-Integer Nonlinear Programming. We specifically focus on a clear representation of the trade-off between different objectives.

The decision to implement an orders-based versus an encounters-based imaging workflow poses various implications to image capture and storage. The impacts include workflows before and after an imaging procedure, electronic health record build, technical infrastructure, analytics, resulting, and revenue. Orders-based workflows tend to favor some imaging specialties while others require an encounters-based approach. The intent of this HIMSS-SIIM white paper is to offer lessons learned from early adopting institutions to physician champions and informatics leadership developing strategic planning and operational rollouts for specialties capturing clinical multimedia.

Blockchain technology enables a transaction to be handled in a decentralized fashion. In this position paper, we aim to introduce the background of blockchain technology, discuss one of its important component — smart contract, and present its recent applications in many fields such as cryptocurrency, financial services, risk management, and Internet of Things.

Developing valuable materials from the by-products of paper industry can help to address some environmental and economic issues associated with traditional synthetic composites. Particularly, the management of paper mill sludge (PMS) waste remains an economic and environmental challenge for the pulp and paper industry. 11 million tons of PMS is generated annually in Europe from the wastewater treatment (WWT) process of paper mills. PMS is mostly used in low value applications. However, PMS contains fibers and minerals with physio-chemical properties that exhibit a high potential to substitute some conventional materials in other industries. The research presented in this paper aims to explore new directions for further investigation on PMS material applications by reviewing the literature on PMS materials and subsequently characterizing sludge from 6 different mills. The study shows the technical feasibility, opportunities and technological readiness of fiber and mineral based composites obtained from PMS, such as; cementitious products, polymer reinforcement and fiberboards.

We consider a game-theoretic setting of contention in communication networks. In a contention game each of \(n \ge 2\) identical players has a single information packet that she wants to transmit in a fast and selfish way through one of \(k \ge 1\) multiple-access channels by choosing a protocol. Here, we extend the model and results of the single-channel case studied in [2] by providing equilibria characterizations for more than one channels, and giving specific anonymous, equilibrium protocols with finite and infinite expected latency. For our equilibrium protocols with infinite expected latency, all players, with high probability transmit successfully in optimal time, i.e. \(\varTheta (n/k)\).

Coreference resolution is essential for automatic text understanding to facilitate high-level information retrieval tasks such as text summarisation or question answering. Previous work indicates that the performance of state-of-the-art approaches (e.g. based on BERT) noticeably declines when applied to scientific papers. In this paper, we investigate the task of coreference resolution in research papers and subsequent knowledge graph population. We present the following contributions: (1) We annotate a corpus for coreference resolution that comprises 10 different scientific disciplines from Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM); (2) We propose transfer learning for automatic coreference resolution in research papers; (3) We analyse the impact of coreference resolution on knowledge graph (KG) population; (4) We release a research KG that is automatically populated from 55,485 papers in 10 STM domains. Comprehensive experiments show the usefulness of the proposed approach. Our transfer learning approach considerably outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on our corpus with an F1 score of 61.4 (+11.0), while the evaluation against a gold standard KG shows that coreference resolution improves the quality of the populated KG significantly with an F1 score of 63.5 (+21.8).

Recently, high-speed IPv4 scanners, such as ZMap, have enabled rapid and timely collection of TLS certificates and other security-sensitive parameters. Such large datasets led to the development of the Censys search interface, facilitating comprehensive analysis of TLS deployments in the wild. Several recent studies analyzed TLS certificates as deployed in web servers. Beyond public web servers, TLS is deployed in many other Internet-connected devices, at home and enterprise environments, and at network backbones. In this paper, we report the results of a preliminary analysis using Censys on TLS deployments in such devices (e.g., routers, modems, NAS, printers, SCADA, and IoT devices in general). We compare certificates and TLS connection parameters from a security perspective, as found in common devices with Alexa 1M sites. Our results highlight significant weaknesses, and may serve as a catalyst to improve TLS security for these devices.

With the purpose of delivering more robust systems, this paper revisits the problem of Inverse Uncertainty Quantification that is related to the discrepancy between the measured data at runtime (while the system executes) and the formal specification (i.e., a mathematical model) of the system under consideration, and the value calibration of unknown parameters in the model. We foster an approach to quantify and mitigate system uncertainty during the development cycle by combining Bayesian reasoning and online Model-based testing.

Understanding the current research trends, problems, and their innovative solutions remains a bottleneck due to the ever-increasing volume of scientific articles. In this paper, we propose NLPExplorer, a completely automatic portal for indexing, searching, and visualizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) research volume. NLPExplorer presents interesting insights from papers, authors, venues, and topics. In contrast to previous topic modelling based approaches, we manually curate five course-grained non-exclusive topical categories namely Linguistic Target (Syntax, Discourse, etc.), Tasks (Tagging, Summarization, etc.), Approaches (unsupervised, supervised, etc.), Languages (English, Chinese, etc.) and Dataset types (news, clinical notes, etc.). Some of the novel features include a list of young popular authors, popular URLs and datasets, list of topically diverse papers and recent popular papers. Also, it provides temporal statistics such as yearwise popularity of topics, datasets, and seminal papers. To facilitate future research and system development, we make all the processed dataset accessible through API calls. The current system is available at http://nlpexplorer.org.

The International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP) was established almost sixteen years ago. Based on data from Scopus database, a total of 789 papers have been published in between years of 2002 and 2018. We employed bibliometrics analysis and topic modeling with R/RStudio to analyze these published papers from various dimensions, including the most active authors, collaboration of authorship, most cited papers, used keywords and trends of probable topics from the titles and abstracts of those papers. The results show that the first five years of XP conference cover nearly 40% of the papers published until now and almost 62% of the XP papers have been cited at least once. Mining of XP conference paper titles and abstracts result in these hot research topics: “Coordination”, “Technical Debt”, “Teamwork”, “Startups” and “Agile Practices”, thus strongly focusing on practical issues and problems faced by the practitioners in the industry. The results highlight the most influential researchers and institutions, and the collaboration between the authors in the conference papers. The approach applied in this study can be extended to other software engineering venues and can be applied to large-scale studies.

Although the Domain Name System (DNS) was designed as a naming system, its features have made it appealing to repurpose it for the deployment of novel systems. One important class of such systems are security enhancements, and this work sheds light on their deployment. We show the characteristics of these solutions and measure reliability of DNS in these applications. We investigate the compatibility of these solutions with the Tor network, signal necessary changes, and report on surprising drawbacks in Tor’s DNS resolution.

Although considerable effort is made to secure organisational infrastructures and to protect organizational assets, it is widely acknowledged that it is equally important to ensure that organisations need to define appropriate ways to harden their overall resilience including recovery from security incidents. In this exploratory paper we outline research challenges and we present the motivation and the foundations of a novel framework that is based on security resilience and capability modelling theory.

Many datasets change over time. As a consequence, long-running applications that cache and repeatedly use query results obtained from a SPARQL endpoint may resubmit the queries regularly to ensure up-to-dateness of the results. While this approach may be feasible if the number of such regular refresh queries is manageable, with an increasing number of applications adopting this approach, the SPARQL endpoint may become overloaded with such refresh queries. A more scalable approach would be to use a middle-ware component at which the applications register their queries and get notified with updated query results once the results have changed. Then, this middle-ware can schedule the repeated execution of the refresh queries without overloading the endpoint. In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling refresh queries for a large number of registered queries by assuming an overload-avoiding upper bound on the length of a regular time slot available for testing refresh queries. We investigate a variety of scheduling strategies and compare them experimentally in terms of time slots needed before they recognize changes and number of changes that they miss.

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29883-2_14, E-shopping has grown considerably in the last years, providing customers with convenience, merchants with increased sales, and financial entities with an additional source of income. However, it may also be the source of serious threats to privacy. In this paper, we review the e-shopping process, discussing attacks or threats that have been analyzed in the literature for each of its stages. By showing that there exist threats to privacy in each of them, we argue our following position: “It is not enough to protect a single independent stage, as is usually done in privacy respectful proposals in this context. Rather, a complete solution is necessary spanning the overall process, dealing also with the required interconnections between stages.” Our overview also reflects the diverse types of information that e-shopping manages, and the benefits (e.g., such as loyalty programs and fraud prevention) that system providers extract from them. This also endorses the need for solutions that, while privacy preserving, do not limit or remove these benefits, if we want prevent all the participating entities from rejecting it., This work was supported by project S2013/ICE-3095-CM (CIBERDINE) of the Comunidad de Madrid and MINECO TIN2010-19607, TIN2012-30883, TIN2014-54580-R. The work of Seung Geol Choi was supported in part by the Office of Naval Research under Grant Number N0001415WX01232. The work of Moti Yung was done in part while visiting the Simons Institute for Theory of Computing, UC Berkeley. The work of Jesus Diaz was done in part while visiting the Network Security Lab at Columbia University.

Generally, your paper will become available online as an “in press” pre-print within about a month after you confirm the final printer’s proofs. Depending on how unmodern and unprofessional the publisher is, it can be up to several months before the final print version of your paper becomes available. But when it does, you should read it again. At this point, it is too late to make any further corrections to the printed version, and most publishers will therefore also not alter the electronic version (except in cases of serious ethical, safety, or legal concerns). But journals can and will print a Corrigendum (your fault) or an Erratum (their fault), even for tiny details, especially if an error has meaningful implications [1–4]. So it is worth the effort to check the quality of your final paper, because that is the only version anyone else is ever going to read. Moreover, reading the final printed version (months later) may give you a different impression and/or a feel of satisfaction for your work.

While medical image analysis has seen extensive use of deep neural networks, learning over multiple tasks is a challenge for connectionist networks due to tendencies of degradation in performance over old tasks while adapting to novel tasks. It is pertinent that adaptations to new data distributions over time are tractable with automated analysis methods as medical imaging data acquisition is typically not a static problem. So, one needs to ensure that a continual learning paradigm be ensured in machine learning methods deployed for medical imaging. To explore interpretable lifelong learning for deep neural networks in medical imaging, we introduce a perspective of understanding forgetting in neural networks used in ultrasound image analysis through the notions of attention and saliency. Concretely, we propose quantification of forgetting as a decline in the quality of class specific saliency maps after each subsequent task schedule. We also introduce a knowledge transfer from past tasks to present by a saliency guided retention of past exemplars which improve the ability to retain past knowledge while optimizing parameters for current tasks. Experiments on a clinical fetal echocardiography dataset demonstrate a state-of-the-art performance for our protocols.

Alongside the intensive growth of Online Social Networks (OSNs), privacy has become an important concept and requirement when sharing content online, leading users to enforce privacy often using encryption when sharing content with multiple recipients. Although cryptographic systems achieve common privacy goals such as confidentiality, key privacy, and recipient privacy, they have not been designed aiming at dynamic types of networks. In fact, the interactive nature of OSNs provides adversaries new attack vectors against privacy, and in particular against recipient privacy. We present the notion of frientropy, and argue that privacy of recipients is maintained in OSNs provided that the social graph has a high frientropy, besides the conventional recipient privacy notion. We compute the frientropy for various theoretical settings, and discuss its implications on some practical settings.

The use of touch screen storybooks for children allows reading to be transformed into an interactive multimedia experience, in which text is augmented by animations, sound effects, and games. The present study is a follow-up to an earlier study [1] which found that touch screen storybooks negatively affected child readers’ comprehension but resulted in more emotional engagement. Ross et al.’s earlier study used visual observations to determine the level of emotional engagement. The current study extends those findings to examine the acoustic and prosodic indices of speech whilst children are reading. It was hypothesized that if touch screens were more emotionally engaging, this may express itself in greater pitch variability in the read speech. Also, if reading were more task-focused, then this might express in more careful (and hence more disfluent) paper-based material. Very preliminary analysis on a small selection of speech samples from 5 participants aged 6–7 years in the Ross et al. [1] study show greater pitch range variability with paper-based storybooks as compared to touch-screen interactive versions. On the other hand, there appeared to be less variation in speech and articulation rate in the paper-based books compared to touch screen books. This was also coupled by a tendency for greater overall phonation rate and an increased speech and articulation rate in the paper-based condition, which may reflect a more fluid style for paper-based book reading. Discussion of these preliminary findings focuses on the future lines of enquiry and reflections on children’s reading style using different mediums.

Bed-wetting during normal sleep in children and young people has a significant impact on the child and their parents. The condition is known as nocturnal enuresis and its underlying cause has been subject to different explanatory factors that include, neurological, urological, sleep, genetic and psychosocial influences. Several clinical and technological interventions for managing nocturnal enuresis exist that include the clinician’s opinions, pharmacology interventions, and alarm systems. However, most have failed to produce any convincing results. Clinical information is often subjective and often inaccurate, the use of desmopressin and tricyclic antidepressants only report between 20 % and 40 % success, and alarms only a 50 % success fate. This position paper posits an alternative research idea concerned with the early detection of impending involuntary bladder release. The proposed framework is a measurement and prediction system that processes moisture and bladder volume data from sensors fitted into undergarments that are used by patients suffering with nocturnal enuresis. The proposed framework represents a level of sophistication in nocturnal enuresis treatment not previously considered.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) was introduced with a philosophy of decoupling the control plane from the data plane which facilitates network management while ensuring programmability in order to improve performance and monitoring. OpenFlow which enabled SDN was first introduced to match twelve header fields whilst at current it matches forty one which is expected to grow exponentially. Therefore future networks must have the ability to flexibly parse packets through a common interface. Programming Protocol independent Packet Processing (P4) was introduced to achieve the aforementioned by programming the underlying switch, providing instructions and utilizing APIs to populate the forwarding tables. A P4 programmed switch will forward packets through a parser into multiple stages of match+action tables to find the destination node which is considered the most efficient mechanism for routing. This paper takes into the account the latest platform developed for service providers, Open Networking Operating System (ONOS) to deploy two environments configured in the aforementioned technologies in order to test their performance. Four case studies were drawn which were simulated in Mininet which incorporated SDN + P4 switches. A significant increase of performances were recorded when compared with the performance of cases using SDN only.

Hardware and software lightweight solutions became the mainstream for current and future emerging technologies. Container-based virtualization provides more efficient and faster solutions than traditional virtual machines, offering good scalability, flexibility, and multi-tenancy. They are capable of serving in a heterogeneous and dynamic environment across multiple domains, including IoT, cloud, fog, and multi-access edge computing. In this paper, we propose a lightweight solution for LCC (Live Container Cloud) that permits the user to access live/remote cloud resources faster. LCC can be embedded as a fog/edge node to permit the users to allocate and deallocate cloud resources. The performance of such a containerization technology is presented.

This papers aims to describe the historical introduction of paper prototyping techniques into interface development, what they basically consist of, and how such techniques can be applied on the development of Computer Digital Arts. With some examples applied on Digital Arts graduation courses at the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, this technique has proven to help the development of the artist’s intentionality, rather than blocking creativity. It helped students to focus on important concepts that needed to be transmitted by interaction, while usability made the piece friendly where it needed to be friendly. Thus, young art students have been acting in a traditional way when experimenting with materials, not only physically and visually, but also with the interactive environment that should be considered as material in Computer Digital Arts.

This article describes the designing process of an interactive visualization at BMW. Paper prototyping is introduced as a part of the user-centered-design process and put into practice as a novel method for software development. During the development process paper prototypes have been used as a tool for communicating and testing within the interdisciplinary team of operational experts, visualization experts, designers and software developers. In conclusion the integration of paper prototyping benefits the design process positively. The interactive visualization meets the expectations of the user.

Diverse sustainable supplier selection (SSS) methodologies have been suggested by the practitioners in earlier, to find a solution to the SSS problem. A SSS problem fundamentally is a multi-criteria practice. It is a judgment of tactical significance to enterprises. The nature of this decision usually is difficult and unstructured. Optimization practices might be useful tools for these types of decision-making difficulties. During last few years, Differential Evolution has arisen as a dominating tool used for solving a variety of problems arising in numerous fields. In the current study, we present an approach to find a solution to the SSS problem using Differential Evolution in pulp and paper industry. Hence this paper presents a novel approach is to practice Differential Evolution to select the efficient sustainable suppliers providing the maximum fulfillment for the sustainable criteria determined. Finally, an illustrative example on pulp and paper industry validates the application of the present approach.

Over the last decade, international concerns about climate change have stimulated broad investment in the pursuit of agriculture that is more climate-smart. These concerns are particularly pressing in Africa, where most farmers remain severely impoverished and dependent on rain-fed production systems. This volume collates some of the latest research from agricultural scientists working to speed up the development and adoption of more climate-smart farming systems in eastern and southern Africa. These 25 papers highlight ongoing efforts to better characterise climate risks, develop and disseminate climate-smart varieties and farm management practices, and integrate these technologies into well-functioning value chains. The papers emphasise the additional research efforts needed to improve the understanding and response to climate risk. The expert authors also make suggestions for strengthening the responsiveness of agricultural research and extension systems to future climate changes.

The continuing rise in the popularity of smartphones has led to an accompanying rise in the exposure of users to privacy threats as in the case of unintended leakage of personal information from apps. To improve transparency and the ability of users to control data leakage, the design of privacy-enhancing tools aimed at reducing the burden of informed privacy-decisions should be grounded upon users’ tacit needs and preferences. To this end, the present study explores users’ personal perception and concerns toward privacy and their expectations. Initial recommendations include: (1) consideration of the preferences of users for preserving functionalities of their apps, informing users about both (2) the real benefits and actual possibility of using privacy management tools and (3) suspected applications’ data collection behaviours in a way that matches their real concerns and values.

This paper describes a study comparing the use of paper strips with virtual flight strips depicted on a new user interface, the Ramp Traffic Console (RTC), designed for use by ramp controllers to be used in place of paper strips. A Human-In-the-Loop (HITL) experiment was performed as the fifth in a series of six HITL simulation studies designed to evaluate a pushback Decision Support Tool (DST) concept for Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT). Workload and usability were assessed in post-run and post-study questionnaires. In the RTC virtual flight strip condition, post-run questionnaire results show lower workload ratings across all aspects of workload; additionally, a trend is found toward increased usability ratings. Post-study questionnaire results indicate a preference for RTC over paper strips. Additional research is suggested with more training runs and a greater number of participants to increase statistical power. It is also suggested that this new technology be re-evaluated as a part of the ATD-2 field testing activities.

Authentication protocols based on an asymmetric keypair provide strong authentication as long as the private key remains secret, but may fail catastrophically if the private key is lost or stolen. Even when encrypted with a password, stolen key material is susceptible to offline brute-force attacks. In this paper we demonstrate a method for rate-limiting password guesses on stolen key material, without requiring special hardware or changes to servers. By slowing down offline attacks and enabling easy key revocation our algorithm reduces the risk of key compromise, even if a low-entropy password is used.

We present a scenario where browsers’ network and computation capabilities are used by an attacker without the user’s knowledge. For this kind of abuse, an attacker needs to trigger JavaScript code on the browser, e.g. through an advertisement. However, unlike other Web attacks, e.g. cross-site scripting, the attack can be executed isolated from the Origin of the site visited by the user.

In recent years, the number of papers on Alzheimer’s disease classification has increased dramatically, generating interesting methodological ideas on the use machine learning and feature extraction methods. However, practical impact is much more limited and, eventually, one could not tell which of these approaches are the most efficient. While over 90% of these works make use of ADNI an objective comparison between approaches is impossible due to variations in the subjects included, image pre-processing, performance metrics and cross-validation procedures. In this paper, we propose a framework for reproducible classification experiments using multimodal MRI and PET data from ADNI. The core components are: (1) code to automatically convert the full ADNI database into BIDS format; (2) a modular architecture based on Nipype in order to easily plug-in different classification and feature extraction tools; (3) feature extraction pipelines for MRI and PET data; (4) baseline classification approaches for unimodal and multimodal features. This provides a flexible framework for benchmarking different feature extraction and classification tools in a reproducible manner. Data management tools for obtaining the lists of subjects in AD, MCI converter, MCI non-converters, CN classes are also provided. We demonstrate its use on all (1519) baseline T1 MR images and all (1102) baseline FDG PET images from ADNI 1, GO and 2 with SPM-based feature extraction pipelines and three different classification techniques (linear SVM, anatomically regularized SVM and multiple kernel learning SVM). The highest accuracies achieved were: 91% for AD vs CN, 83% for MCIc vs CN, 75% for MCIc vs MCInc, 94% for AD-A\(\displaystyle \beta \)+ vs CN-A\(\displaystyle \beta \)- and 72% for MCIc-A\(\displaystyle \beta \)+ vs MCInc-A\(\displaystyle \beta \)+. The code will be made publicly available at the time of the conference (https://gitlab.icm-institute.org/aramislab/AD-ML).

This paper puts forward a vision of a universal ontology (UO) aiming at solving, or at least greatly alleviating, the semantic integration problem in the field of conceptual modeling and the understandability problem in the field of the semantic web. So far it has been assumed that the UO is not feasible in practice, but we think that it is time to revisit that assumption in the light of the current state-of-the-art. This paper aims to be a step in this direction. We try to make an initial proposal of a feasible UO. We present the scope of the UO, the kinds of its concepts, and the elements that could comprise the specification of each concept. We propose a modular structure for the UO consisting of four levels. We argue that the UO needs a complete set of concept composition operators, and we sketch three of them. We also tackle a few issues related to the feasibility of the UO, which we think that they could be surmountable. Finally, we discuss the desirability of the UO, and we explain why we conjecture that there are already organizations that have the knowledge and resources needed to develop it, and that might have an interest in its development in the near future.

Developing expertise in EAP writing is a time-consuming endeavour, entailing not only mastery of advanced language forms and functions, but also extensive domain knowledge accumulated through interaction with a large body of reading material. By way of practice, academic writing assignments engage students with textual input from multiple sources to be synthesized, analysed, critically evaluated, responded to and, ultimately, creatively transformed. Writers of academic prose are then not only expected to provide an objective account of the data and perspectives of experts, but also to position themselves in relation to them and mark their own presence in the discourse they create. The experience of many practitioners has shown that projecting one’s own identity in the process of developing a thesis, especially when working with source texts in L2 as reference is one of the most challenging academic literacy tasks for novice writers. Discrepancies between L1 and L2 writing cultures, the learners’ status in the academic discourse community and their rigid conceptions of academic writing, often enhanced by inconsistent advice offered by instructional materials, might contribute to the excessive dependence of inexperienced L2 writers on source material and to linguistic choices which reduce their agency. This paper looks into the distribution, rhetorical functions and semantic connotations of first person pronouns employed as identity signals by undergraduate students in source-based research papers.

The chapter focuses on a cross-national comparison of mediatized schools in Germany and England. Based on the assumption that both school systems follow the same goal of providing good school education, the question arises as to why the mediatized equipment is so different. Our empirical results show that English schools are far more mediatized, exhibiting a higher number of computers, notebooks and tablets in schools as well as digital systems and services. Non-mediatized communication forms dominate in German schools with a high usage of pen and paper or pigeon holes. The different mediatized practices also affect communication with pupils and parents, following the same characteristics as inter-teacher communication. On the other hand, teachers in both countries emphasize the importance of face-to-face contact and direct personal communication. One reason for the differences may be founded in the different educational governance of both countries.

Part 1: The International Cross Domain Conference (CD-ARES 2016); International audience; Peer review is widely viewed as an essential step for ensuring scientific quality of a work and is a cornerstone of scholarly publishing. On the other hand, the actors involved in the publishing process are often driven by incentives which may, and increasingly do, undermine the quality of published work, especially in the presence of unethical conduits. In this work we investigate the feasibility of a tool capable of generating fake reviews for a given scientific paper automatically. While a tool of this kind cannot possibly deceive any rigorous editorial procedure, it could nevertheless find a role in several questionable scenarios and magnify the scale of scholarly frauds.A key feature of our tool is that it is built upon a small knowledge base, which is very important in our context due to the difficulty of finding large amounts of scientific reviews. We experimentally assessed our method 16 human subjects. We presented to these subjects a mix of genuine and machine generated reviews and we measured the ability of our proposal to actually deceive subjects judgment. The results highlight the ability of our method to produce reviews that often look credible and may subvert the decision.

International audience; When developing and maintaining distributed systems, auditing privacy properties gains more and more relevance. Nevertheless, this task is lacking support of automated tools and, hence, is mostly carried out manually. We present a formal approach which enables auditors to model the flow of critical data in order to shed new light on a system and to automatically verify given privacy constraints. The formalization is incorporated into a larger policy analysis and verification framework and overall soundness is proven with Isabelle/HOL. Using this solution, it becomes possible to automatically compute architectures which follow specified privacy conditions or to input an existing architecture for verification. Our tool is evaluated in two real-world case studies, where we uncover and fix previously unknown violations of privacy.

Today, one of the most prevailing ways to inform the public of available prevention methods is through Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) advertisements. As the debate among interested researchers and policymakers continues regarding the pros and cons of DTC advertising, understanding how consumers process these messages, in order to make them more effective, is necessary, if we ever hope to increase prevention behavior and potentially decrease disease cases.

We present a unique approach for integrating research in High Performance Computing (HPC) as well as photovoltaic (PV) solar farming and battery technologies into a container-based compute center designed for a maximum of energy efficiency, performance and extensibility/scalability. We use NVIDIA Jetson TK1 boards to build a considerably dimensioned cluster of 60 low-power GPUs, attach a 7.5 kWp solar farm and a 8 kWh Lithium-Ion battery power supply and integrate everything into a single-container, standalone housing. We demonstrate the success of our system by evaluating the performance and energy efficiency for common versatile dense and sparse linear algebra kernels as well as a full CFD code. By this work we can show, that with current technology, energy consumption-induced follow-up cost of HPC can be reduced to zero.

This paper investigates the user experience design of a smartphone application for the objective assessment of cognitive fatigue. This is as an alternative to using an established paper questionnaire that offers subjective self-assessment. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, challenges relating to the usability and the efficacy of the smartphone assessment tool were explored. Furthermore, to enable validation of the proposed new approach, challenges relating to how best to deliver the traditionally paper-based questionnaire on a smartphone display, while retaining the validity of the measure it affords, had to be addressed. Results show that the smartphone based cognitive testing methods was comparable to outcomes from the pre validated mobile based Mental Fatigue Scale. Participant feedback showed that the smartphone-based approach offered a more acceptable and engaging user experience, while retaining the ability to accurately measure cognitive fatigue.

Meaningless computer generated scientific texts can be used in several ways. For example, they have allowed Ike Antkare to become one of the most highly cited scientists of the modern world. Such fake publications are also appearing in real scientific conferences and, as a result, in the bibliographic services (Scopus, ISI-Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar,...). Recently, more than 120 papers have been withdrawn from subscription databases of two high-profile publishers, IEEE and Springer, because they were computer generated thanks to the SCIgen software. This software, based on a Probabilistic Context Free Grammar (PCFG), was designed to randomly generate computer science research papers. Together with PCFG, Markov Chains (MC) are the mains ways to generated Meaningless texts. This paper presents the mains characteristic of texts generated by PCFG and MC. For the time being, PCFG generators are quite easy to spot by an automatic way, using intertextual distance combined with automatic clustering, because these generators are behaving like authors with specifics features such as a very low vocabulary richness and unusual sentence structures. This shows that quantitative tools are effective to characterize originality (or banality) of authors' language.

This paper introduces the theme of internationalisation in the context of the Bologna Process. It addresses the development of the concept and context of internationalisation, its main trends and issues both in its two components abroad and at home. The paper also introduces and summarizes the eight following papers in the section on internationalisation. The paper ends with the key findings and recommendations of the discussions and papers on internationalisation of higher education from the Bologna Researchers Conference.

Winning the Robocup SPL World Championship is not accomplished in just one year, nor is it just a matter of writing effective software. Our success can also be attributed to the accumulation of experience since 1999, strong institutional support, and dedicated collaborative teamwork. This paper summarises the key contributing innovations from the time the software was rewritten in 2010, and provides some insight into team organisation. In this paper it is not possible to cover all aspects and intricacies of the complex systems comprising the rUNSWift software. We have therefore included an extensive list of references to our technical reports that provide detailed accounts of the research, algorithms and results over the last 5 years. All the reports are available on one website for easy access and make reference to many external publications, including those from other teams in our league.

Despite the fact that improving equity in higher education is a major policy priority of many European governments, the topic of the social dimension within the Bologna process has been described as an agenda that yet to find a means of implementation. This paper briefly reviews the global evidence on improving equity outcomes, and then looks at the possibilities for moving the social dimension agenda forward both in terms of creating public reporting systems and in improving peer learning. The suggests that to the extent the social dimension can be portrayed as an exercise in peer learning it will succeed, and to the extent it is seen as an “accountability tool” for national governments it will fail.

Over the past decade or so, higher education has experience a variety of transformations that brought foreword in policy agenda and institutional governance renewed attention to academic excellence and diversification of mission of higher education institutions. Emergence and influence of university rankings, especially the global ones, has been one of the consequences of those paradigm-shifting developments. They respond to the need for evidence-based and accessible to various stakeholders information. The main purpose of this paper is to present and assess how excellence, diversification and university rankings have found its place in the context of the Bologna Process and the European Higher Education Area.