Search

• 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 realm of healthcare digitalization, the advancement of patient-centred care models hinges crucially on the establishment of inter-organizational information infrastructures (IIs): intricate "systems of systems" designed to facilitate efficient data sharing, consolidation, and utilization. However, closed and siloed health information systems often fragment patient data across multiple repositories, resulting in inefficiencies and limitations in inter-organizational access and decision-making at the population level. Bridging these divides demands the integration of loosely coupled information systems within and across organizations. The ongoing evolution of these IIs is intricately shaped by the complex sociotechnical installed base governing their development. It can be difficult to engage potential participants in building and using an II that spans organisational boundaries particularly in contexts marked by diversity of mission, high organizational autonomy and lacking a single authoritative actor. Through a case study in England's National Health Service, this paper examines the intricate process of mobilizing autonomous organizations to collaborate in developing a shared II for integrated care. In non-hierarchical settings, lacking a clear organizing entity such mobilization requires strategic partnerships and a mix of skills. I introduce the term "collective mobilizer" to represent the collaborative coalition of entities with the capacity to garner sufficient interest among potential constituencies and align visions and resources. By unpicking the role of collective mobilizers, this paper offers insights into the challenges of bootstrapping II development in non-hierarchical contexts and how they may be overcome. [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]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the use of cloud computing in the wireless domain, information technology (IT) possibilities of cloud computing, and the combination of electronic commerce (e-commerce), cloud computing, and broadband infrastructure.

This paper investigates the effects of the Cyclic Delay Diversity (CDD) transmit diversity scheme on DYB-H networks. Transmit diversity improves reception and Quality of Service (QoS) in areas of poor coverage such as sparsely populated or obscured locations. The technique not only provides robust reception in mobile environments thus improving QoS, but it also reduces network costs in terms of the transmit power, number of infrastructure elements, antenna height and the frequency reuse factor over indoor and outdoor environments. In this paper, the benefit and effectiveness of CDD transmit diversity is tackled through simulation results for comparison in several scenarios of coverage in DVB-H networks. The channel model used in the simulations is based on COST207 and a basic radio planning technique is used to illustrate the main principles developed in this paper. The work reported in this paper was supported by the European Commission IST project-PLUTO (Physical Layer DVB Transmission Optimization). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper illustrates a 'bottom-up' model of a civilian technology policy program by recounting the story of the 'genesis' of the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) Information Infrastructure for Healthcare (IIH) focused program beginning with the initial exchange of ideas between members of the private and public sector (industry's submission of 'white papers'; workshops conducted by the ATP; meetings held between individuals from both groups) in which those technologies necessary for the development of a national information infrastructure in healthcare were identified. Included is a discussion of the ATP 'white paper' process in which noted differences existed between what the ATP hoped to gain through this method and how the private sector responded. The ATP review and selection process and the experience of firms, small, medium and large, with ATP projects are also discussed. [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 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]

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]

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.)

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]

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]

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]

The studies presented in the paper aims to address the use of Web assurance seals as a means of easing the fears and concerns of online purchasers and not to explore the expectation gap issue. The first step for firms offering a Web seal is to discover the fears and concerns that consumers have as they contemplate an online purchase. It can help electronic commerce companies ensure that the assurances provided by their seals are relevant and useful to consumers. Emphasis is also given to the impact of the different brands of Web assurance seals on consumer fears and concerns. Researchers did not concern themselves with specific measures of consumer expectations gathered from respondents.

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]

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]

The article presents the author's comments on the paper "Holistic, Continuous Assurance Integration: e-Business Opportunities and Challenges," by M. Greenstein and A.W. Ray, which appeared in volume 16 of "Journal of Information Systems." She thinks that the article brings together a number of interesting issues related to the challenges of providing assurance services for organizations with a significant web-based e-business component. It provides a good overview of specific problems potentially encountered in providing assurance to e-business firms, and works to lay the ground work for future research by providing a series of propositions on how these issues might be addressed.

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]

This paper follows the mutual shaping of data records and citizens as data subjects to illustrate how precarious forms of citizenship emerge in the use of biometrics-based digital technologies for governance. It presents a case of using Aadhaar, India's biometrics-based unique identification project, in the delivery of welfare pensions to the elderly, widows, and the disabled in Rajasthan. In March 2016, pensions of about 757,000 beneficiaries were cancelled for a variety of reasons ranging from the beneficiary is "dead" or "duplicate" to other ineligibility criteria such as age or income. When Right to Information activists organized public hearings on these cancellations, they found many beneficiaries who were alive but declared "dead" on record. This paper explores this case of the "living dead" to conceptualize orphaning from information infrastructures as processes that render citizens residual in the mutual shaping of their lives with their data records. [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]

As mobile and wireless technologies continually improve and become more affordable, reliable, powerful and user-friendly, Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) is expected to become the one of the effective approaches in field-based census data collection even in those countries where access to infrastructure for information and communication technologies is limited. African countries are at such a case. The introduction of electronic data capture into the business cycle of the census provides cost and time savings, and also allows users to take advantage of added features that can be programmed into mobile devices or linked to the data collection process. These features include, among others, integrated maps and Global Positioning System (GPS) and real time monitoring of fieldwork. This paper shows how the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat) has supported the Ethiopia Central Statistics Agency (CSA) in designing and implementing such a monitoring system, which has been fully integrated with the census data collection process managed by CSPro, the public domain software package developed by the U.S. Census Bureau (USCB). The proposed architecture is generalised and provides a simple solution for monitoring electronic data collection operations, particularly in cases where the technical and financial resources to implement such a system from the ground up are lacking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper explores Differential Object Marking in a variety of Asturian (Western Iberian Romance) spoken in western Asturias (northwestern Spain). This ancestral form of speech stands out from Central Asturian and especially from Standard Spanish. For a number of reasons, ranging from profound changes in pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology and information structure to slight but very relevant effects on syntax. The main goal of this study is to examine the special marking of direct objects in order to find out what triggers the distribution of Differential Object Marking in this variety. To this aim, this paper will examine, from a variationist perspective, the influence of a number of semantic and discourse-pragmatic parameters on the marking of direct objects in this Western Asturian language as well as in Standard Spanish 1 and Central Asturian (which is generally considered the normative variety of Asturian). The results obtained from this comparison will allow us to outline the differences between these three varieties in terms of object marking, shedding more light on the origin and function of Differential Object Marking in Spanish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper deals with the role of ICT and the related infrastructures to induce innovations for sustainable rural development. In particular, it focuses on the innovations induced by ICT in farms and in new rural firms, and on how digital infrastructures support and generate social innovation mechanisms, leading to the consolidation of entrepreneurship and dissemination of ICT-based innovation in rural areas. The hypothesis is that the presence of digital infrastructures generates a double effect: overcoming the concept of geographical proximity (relevant for remote rural areas) and promoting social innovation. In particular, this paper examines the role of social innovation to create a new demand for products, services and organisational models for farms and rural enterprises, promoting further innovation. To target the objectives, the work analyses three case studies of new business models (BMs) based on ICT innovation. The analysis focuses on the most important interactions, learning and organisational processes within the new enterprises and among the new farms/enterprises and the other economic and institutional actors, and on how they were shaped and changed by the use of ICT, relating them to a conceptual model. These three cases, although pioneering, are important since they give an original response to some of the main problems and needs of remote and inner rural areas, as for the access to high value segment of food market, the information deliveries about attractiveness of landscape and countryside for foreigners, investors and tourists and the creation of new stable relation with consumers/citizens in the urban areas. The three cases have been analysed with the aim to identify how the ICT, and the related innovations, create an interconnection between four characteristic elements of the BMs (value creation, supply chain, customer interfaces, financial model) and the restructuring of proximity dimensions (cognitive, institutional, social, geographical, organizational). The work shows how these three cases have several communalities, but also different aspects with respect to our objective of analysis: there are different ways in which the four characteristic elements of the BM are constructed and also different in the role that the different dimensions of proximity play in structuring the innovation process in each one of them. More generally, the results of the work also lead to consider a new role for public investments in ICT infrastructures: public administrations should intervene in order to create a coherence within projects of public and private initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to improving information technology, the growing complexity of research problems, and policies designed to foster interdisciplinary research, the practice of science in the United States has recently undergone significant structural change. Using a sample of 110 top US universities observed during the late 20th century we find that knowledge flows, both in total and in their major components, are a significant and positive determinant of research output. Outside knowledge-flows from other universities have increased at a faster rate than inside flows from the same university. Over time, the importance of outside flows for research output has risen, and it has done so at a faster rate than the importance of inside flows has decreased. Thus the overall contribution of knowledge-flows has increased and has shifted towards outside flows. Turning to knowledge-flows by field, we find that interdisciplinary knowledge-flows have increased only slightly relative to same field flows, despite policy initiatives that favor interdisciplinary research. Moreover, the importance of interdisciplinary flows for research output, while positive and statistically highly significant, has stayed about the same, even as same field flows have become more important, probably because of growth in cyber infrastructure. Although a final verdict is yet to be reached, one interpretation is that interdisciplinary research is still in its early stages. While interdisciplinary flows have begun to increase, the resulting discoveries, and their influence on subsequent research, may still lie in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This paper proposes a novel simulation‐based hybrid approach coupled with time‐dependent Bayesian network analysis to model multi‐infrastructure vulnerability over time under physical, spatial, and informational uncertainties while considering cascading failures within and across infrastructure networks. Unlike existing studies that unrealistically assume that infrastructure managers have full knowledge of all the infrastructure systems, the proposed approach considers a realistic scenario where complete information about the infrastructure network topology or the supply–demand flow characteristics is not available while estimating multi‐infrastructure vulnerability. A novel heuristic algorithm is proposed to construct a dynamic fault tree to abstract the network topology of any infrastructure. In addition, to account for the unavailability of exact supply–demand flow characteristics, the proposed approach constructs the interdependence links across infrastructure network systems using different simulated parameters considering the physical, logical, and geographical dependencies. Finally, using parameters for geographical proximity, infrastructure managers' risk perception, and the relative importance of one infrastructure on another, the multi‐infrastructure vulnerability over time is estimated. Results from the numerical experiment show that for an opportunistic risk perception, the interdependencies attribute to redundancies, and with an increase in redundancy, the vulnerability decreases. On the other hand, from a conservative risk perspective, the interdependencies attribute to deficiencies/liabilities, and the vulnerability increases with an increase in the number of such interdependencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of modeling first and then finding a control approach might have made sense when systems were changing on a vast scale, but not in today's world where we are in danger of being run over on a highway called the information highway. The feedback phenomenon, which involves a system's future being influenced by its past, presents a rational conflict in this context. However, we can move beyond these challenges by leveraging the system's inherent ability to randomly repeat and re-create parts, allowing new features to emerge and the best repetition to become the standard. To address the mentioned challenges, this paper proposes a new structure based on bilateral long short-term memory (BiLSTM) to provide supervising feedback on the nonlinear components comprising friction, Coriolis, and Centrifugal forces in addition to gravity for adapting uncertain variations in the robotic system dynamics. A key characteristic of the proposed BiLSTM-based controller is the incorporation of memory. A new formulation is developed for determining when to recover old memories and to what extent, ensuring the controller remains both adaptive and efficient. Furthermore, given that for system identification, speed is vital; the proposed approach has dealt with the speed category by introducing a convex combination of BiLSTM layers. The stability of the whole structure has also been analyzed, and the updated learning rules have been derived. The simulation results show improved tracking performance and learning time compared to alternative approaches. [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]