Search

The emerging paradigm of the Social Internet of Things (SIoT) has transformed the traditional notion of the Internet of Things (IoT) into a social network of billions of interconnected smart objects by integrating social networking facets into the same. In SIoT, objects can establish social relationships in an autonomous manner and interact with the other objects in the network based on their social behaviour. A fundamental problem that needs attention is establishing of these relationships in a reliable and trusted way, i.e., establishing trustworthy relationships and building trust amongst objects. In addition, it is also indispensable to ascertain and predict an object's behaviour in the SIoT network over a period of time. Accordingly, in this paper, we have proposed an efficient time-aware machine learning-driven trust evaluation model to address this particular issue. The envisaged model deliberates social relationships in terms of friendship and community-interest, and further takes into consideration the working relationships and cooperativeness (object-object interactions) as trust parameters to quantify the trustworthiness of an object. Subsequently, in contrast to the traditional weighted sum heuristics, a machine learning-driven aggregation scheme is delineated to synthesize these trust parameters to ascertain a single trust score. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can efficiently segregates the trustworthy and untrustworthy objects within a network, and further provides the insight on how the trust of an object varies with time along with depicting the effect of each trust parameter on a trust score.

Adaptability is a significant property which enables software systems to continuously provide the required functionality and achieve optimal performance. The recognised importance of adaptability makes its evaluation an essential task. However, the various adaptability dimensions and implementation mechanisms make adaptive strategies difficult to evaluate. In service oriented computing, several frameworks that extend the WS-BPEL, the de facto standard in composing distributed business applications, focus on enabling the adaptability of processes. We aim to evaluate the adaptability of processes specified from the extended-BPEL frameworks. In this paper, we propose metrics to measure the adaptability of an AO4BPEL process. The metrics is grounded in the perspective that a process is capable of dynamically adapting to changes in business requirements. This opens potential future work on evaluating the adaptability of processes specified from various aspect-oriented WS-BPEL frameworks., 7 pages conference paper submitted to ACSW 2017

© 2018 IEEE. Social recommendation incorporates the social information of the user, such as friend relationship and trust relationship into the traditional recommendation system. From this point of view, social recommendation expands the function of the traditional recommendation to some extent. However, the existing social recommendation methods mostly focus on the general social relation between users and neglects the refinement of group information based on individual interest and trust. To this end, this paper proposes a novel social recommendation model based on the collective intelligence awareness driven by individual interest and trust. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed social recommendation method based on group information and individual feature outperforms the three baseline methods on the two evaluation metrics MAE and RMSE.

Fateful Ties: A History of America's Preoccupation with China by Gordon H. Chang. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. 314 pp. $32.95 US (cloth). This study offers a sweeping overview of America's relations with China in the last 400 years. Uniquely, the book's focus "is on those Americans whose creative imaginations considered what China meant" for the United States (6). Although the use of previously unknown archival materials is limited, the author's argument is powerful. He contends that the American preoccupation with China from the seventeenth century to the present day has been so fateful that it deeply affected the formation of American identity. Manifest Destiny and the Open Door policy were two of the most important concepts that shaped US foreign relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and both stemmed from American preoccupation with China. While the US inherited the "China mystique" from Europe, China was not just a marketplace to Americans; "the Far East was the reason to reach the far west," to fulfill the nation's Manifest Destiny. To Americans, China was a matter of "mind and spirit more than of the pocketbook." To prove his point the author considers "ways of thinking, values and attitudes, and cultural assumptions rather than the particulars of diplomacy and the politics of policy" (3-6). Thus, the book is filled with direct and indirect quotations from prominent American politicians, missionaries, merchants, writers, philosophers, and entertainers; from George Washington and Alfred Mahan to Shirley MacLaine. The impression the reader is left with is that America's lasting preoccupation with China was almost a romantic infatuation. According to Gordon H. Chang, while Western Europe remains the fulcrum of American foreign policy, "in terms of the perceived future of the nation, no other country looms as importantly as China" (258). Early Americans, such as Benjamin Franklin and Amasa Delano, initially praised China as a place of wealth, culture, and wisdom, which could be emulated by their young nation. This perspective changed, however, around 1840 during the First Opium War and caused China to appear backward, idolatrous, and resistant to change. Nevertheless, Chang argues that China and the US continued to have a special relationship or "spiritual connection" as well as a power over the American imagination (47-51). The US maintained its official position of neutrality during various conflicts between China and the Western powers until the turn of the twentieth century, when Washington's Open Door doctrine intervened and prevented the realization of threats to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity from Western powers and Japan. When Japan invaded China in the 1930s, America consistently and firmly sided with China, a position that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The author writes with obvious sentimentality that "[f]or many, the war and its aftermath confirmed the conviction that the fates of America and China were intimately intertwined" (170). …

In April 2012 the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) adopted certain decisions and recommendations regarding Japan’s 2008 outer continental shelf submission. The Japanese and Chinese differing interpretations of these recommendations demonstrate the still controversial legal status of Oki-no-Tori Shima under Article 121(3) of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Such a contradiction enlarges another dispute on the legal status of the surrounding maritime zone proclaimed by Japan as its Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). This article examines the decisions and recommendations of the CLCS as well as Japan’s Submission so as to clarify the confusing situation. The decisions by the CLCS have wider implications on the unsettled scope of disputes under Rule 46 of and Annex I to the Rules of Procedure (ROP) of the CLCS, affecting submissions by other States. These implications will be explored by this article. Finally, the author offers his views on the future of such confrontational situations.

In this forum, three leading experts on Sino-Soviet relations and Mao Zedong's policy toward the Soviet Union offer their appraisals of Sergey Radchenko's Two Suns in the Heavens, The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967, published by the Woodrow Wilson Center Press. The commentators praise many aspects of Radchenko's book, but Michael Sheng and to a lesser extent Qiang Zhai and Deborah Kaple wonder whether Radchenko has gone too far in downplaying the role of ideology in Mao's foreign policy. Unlike Lorenz Lüthi, who gives decisive weight to ideology in his own book about the Sino-Soviet split, Radchenko argues that a classical realist approach is the best framework for understanding Chinese foreign policy and the rift between China and the Soviet Union. Sheng and Zhai also raise questions about some of the sources used by Radchenko. Replying to the commentaries, Radchenko defends his conception of Mao's foreign policy, arguing that it is a more nuanced view than Sheng and Zhai imply. Radchenko also stresses the inherent shortcomings of the source base scholars are forced to use when analyzing Chinese foreign policy.

Based on recently available new evidence, this study revisits the Gao Gang affair in the early 1950s, with an emphasis on Mao's role in manipulating elite politics as a way of strengthening his charismatic leadership. The CCP elite politics in the early 1950s were in essence "court politics" centered on and manipulated by Mao. Afraid of being sidelined by Beijing's "managerial elite" in economic reconstruction, Mao promoted Gao and other regional leaders, while stripping powers from Liu, Zhou, and their associates. By the end of 1953, Mao started to suspect Gao's loyalty and Gao's promotion backfired. Mao quickly abandoned Gao and isolated him, Gao's downfall was as quick and sudden as his rise. Mao's chief concern was none other than the enhancement and strengthening of the belief in his infallibility, which was the foundation of his charismatic authority.

The Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf (CLCS) was established in accordance with Article 76 of the Law of the Sea Convention. CLCS has the mandate to consider data submitted by coastal states concerning the outer limits of their continental shelf in areas where those limits extend beyond 200 nautical miles and to make recommendations to the submitting state on matters related to the establishment of the limits. For third parties that have actual or potential disputes, unresolved borders, or unresolved land or maritime disputes with the submitting state, the recommendations of the CLCS can be very sensitive. The focus of this article is on the practice of third parties in responding to submissions and how third parties have constructed their Notifications.

This chapter addresses the issue of dispute prevention as the best way to address concerns regarding encroachment, the central issue would be the role played by the Commission on the Limits of Continental Shelf (CLCS). It discusses the CLCS-related rules, including Articles of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), and provisions in the Rules of Procedure of this agency. The connection between Article 76 and provisions of Rules of Procedure will be studied closely. Also to be reviewed are the rules for the CLCS to handle third-party notifications which directly or indirectly challenge the Submissions suspected of encroaching upon the Area. Based on the result of such study, the author will comment on the ways the CLCS had handled situations allegedly encroaching upon the Area and will assess whether the CLCS is competent to offer non-judicial service which may defuse the encroachment dispute. Keywords:CLCS; encroachment dispute; UNCLOS

The United States government's perception of the relations between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Soviet Union greatly influenced Washington's policies toward China in the years following the Second World War. Secretary of State George C. Marshall worried that a pro-Soviet CCP with strong military forces might upset the stability of East Asia and damage U.S. security in the Pacific region. To offset the threat, he tried to disarm the CCP and incorporate it into a reformist government of China which would be influenced by the U.S. and dominated by the Guomindang (GMD). The CCP, however, refused to lay down its arms, and the GMD was unwilling to reform itself along American lines. Between 1948 and 1950, Marshall's successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, saw no chance of rescuing Jiang Jieshi's GMD regime from collapse and preventing the CCP from taking over short of massive U.S. intervention. Among the other reasons for his "hands-off" policy was a belief that China under the CCP would likely become another Titoist Yugoslavia in conflict with the Kremlin. But rather than establish a Titoist China, Mao Zedong instead entered into a Chinese-Soviet military alliance in 1950, the year the Chinese Communist invasion of Korea took place. What went wrong? Encouraged by the Sino-Soviet border clash in 1969 and the Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s, some scholars

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Sino-Soviet conflict intensified and at the same time the Sino-American rapprochement was well under way. When the Americans began to search for an answer to the question of ‘Why Vietnam’, some US foreign relation documents in the later 1940s were released, which indicated that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had made certain friendly overtures toward the United States. Since then, it has become a widely-accepted interpretation among scholars that Washington ‘lost a chance’ to win over the CCP from Moscow in the late 1940s. The fundamental premise of this interpretation is that the CCP earnestly bid for American friendship and support as a counterweight to pressure from the Soviet Union. It is argued that the CCP sincerely sought the US recognition right up to the middle of and that it was only after their bids for American support were rejected by Washington that the Communists had to choose the ‘lean-to-one-side’ policy. In short, Washington's shortsighted policy in 1949 ‘forced Beijing into Moscow's embrace’, and therefore set in motion a train of disastrous events: the Korean War and the Vietnam War. A promising postwar Asian balance in favour of the US was ruined.