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This study sheds light on the effects of community resilience and risk appraisal on climate change adaptation behaviour within the context of the resettlement site of Kannagi Nagar in Chennai, India. The residents of Kannagi Nagar, built on flood-prone marshlands, are exposed to the risks of flooding and water scarcity. Data were collected at the household level through a questionnaire and interviews to investigate activities contributing to community resilience, their interrelatedness, and the influence of community resilience and risk appraisal on household adaptation behaviour. Findings show that community resilience – assessed using the five core dimensions of trust, place attachment, collective efficacy, social networks and social support – significantly and positively influences adaptation actions. This implies that only when the inhabitants of Kannagi Nagar are supported by their social networks and have confidence in their community’s capabilities, can greater risk awareness increase the number of adaptation measures taken.

Writers’ groups, in virtual or physical forms, can create communities of practice, which have been shown to offer emotional support to writers during vulnerable times. Noticing that the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated emotional vulnerability in our undergraduates who were writing 10,000-word reports, we initiated an online writers’ group using the Zoom electronic platform. A focus group held at the closing of the semester revealed that students valued most the feelings of safety nurtured by the group. An examination of the interaction in the sessions, via video recordings, revealed that it was precisely this safety that stimulated critical reflection among participants, which helped them manage their writing processes.

Hunger increases the motivation of an organism to seek out and consume highly palatable energy dense foods. While hunger-sensing Agouti-related peptide (AgRP) neurons influence this process, whether metabolic detection of homeostatic state via metabolic sensing in AgRP neurons potentiates motivation through the midbrain dopamine system is unexplored. Here, we used the AgRP-specific deletion of carnitine acetyltransferase (Crat), a metabolic enzyme regulating glucose and fatty acid oxidation, as a model of impaired metabolic-sensing in AgRP neurons. We then tested the hypothesis that appropriate metabolic-sensing in AgRP neurons is required to increase food reward motivation by modulating accumbal or striatal dopamine release. Electrophysiological studies confirm that Crat deletion in AgRP neurons (KO) impairs normal ex vivo glucose-sensing, and in vivo photometry experiments show that AgRP neurons in KO mice do not exhibit normal responses to repeated palatable food presentation and consumption, highlighting that this model is appropriate to test the hypothesis. Fiber photometry experiments, using the dopamine sensor GRAB-DA, revealed that impaired metabolic-sensing reduces acute dopamine release (seconds) in the nucleus accumbens, but not the dorsal striatum, to palatable food consumption and during operant responding. Positron electron tomography (PET) methods indicated that impaired metabolic-sensing in AgRP neurons suppressed radiolabelled 18F-fDOPA accumulation after ∼30 minutes in the dorsal striatum but not the ventral striatum, suggesting a role for AgRP neurons to restrict a long term post-ingestive dopamine response in the dorsal striatum. Finally, impaired metabolic-sensing in AgRP neurons suppresses motivated operant responding for sucrose rewards. Notably, these behavioural effects are potentiated in the hungry state and therefore highlight that metabolic-sensing in AgRP neurons is required for the appropriate temporal integration and transmission of homeostatic hunger-sensing to dopamine signalling in the striatum.

This paper outlines the development of the “Reader Engagement framework”, a tool for helping emerging writers understand what might keep readers reading – or stop readers from reading – a text. The Reader Engagement framework has been under development for the past five years, primarily in the context of undergraduate English proficiency classes at a large university in Flanders. Using the principles of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2014), a preliminary framework was sketched using as data the margin comments of one reader who noted points of engagement or disengagement while reading student texts. Additional rounds of data collection included the engagement perceptions of student-readers, as well as those of teacher-readers from various disciplines. Thus far 1087 readers have been consulted, and the categories in the framework seem to be largely saturated. Though further refinement is necessary, the framework has been found successful as a teaching tool, and as an assessment and feedback tool. It also seems to have potential for offering writers a new way of conceptualising writing.

Mapping the microscopical organization of the human cerebral cortex provides a basis for multimodal brain atlases, and is indispensable for allocating functional imaging, physiological, connectivity, molecular, or genetic data to anatomically well specified structural entities of human brain organization at micrometer resolution. The analysis of histological sections is still considered a “gold standard” in brain mapping, and compared with other maps, e.g. from neuroimaging studies [1]. But while the spatial patterns of neuronal cells are inherently three-dimensional, such microscopic analysis is usually performed in individual 2D sections. Here we propose an HPC-based workflow that aims to recover the three-dimensional context from a stack of histological sections stained for neuronal cell bodies, imaged under a light microscope. Our aim is to align image data in consecutive sections at the micrometer resolution, where the texture is dominated by small objects like cell bodies, that often do not extend across sections. Therefore we cannot apply classical intensity-based image registration, where similarity of neighboring images is optimized at the pixel level. Our main contribution is a procedure to explicitly detect and match vessel-like structures in the brain tissue, guiding a feature-based image registration algorithm to 3D reconstruct regions of interest in the brain and recover the distribution of neuronal cells. To replace erroneous information in corrupted tissue areas, we further propose a simple predictive algorithm which generates realistic cell detections by learning from intact tissue parts in the local surroundings.

The increased deployment of mobile robots in industry poses higher risks for safety issues and damage of production material caused by abnormal robot behavior. Abnormal behavior can be caused by issues such as operational errors or security weaknesses. Security weaknesses entail attacks that might cause serious harm for humans and production material. One possibility to mitigate such attacks is action authorization. In this paper, we propose an authorization mechanism for actuator actions on mobile robots to prevent adversaries from executing false commands on a robot. The mechanism uses a ticketing system and relies on sensor data as well as plausibility checks. The tickets are issued to specific actuators to authorize the requested action. The sensor data adds to the understanding of the current context and the plausibility checks are used to check that specific actions are allowed to be performed in a given order. Security is further supported by secure elements that protect confidential data from being revealed.

Wireless communication technologies such as WiFi, ZigBee, or Bluetooth often suffer from interference due to many devices using the same, unregulated frequency spectrum. Also, wireless coverage can be insufficient in certain areas of a building. At the same time, eavesdropping a wireless communication outside a building might be easy due to the extended communication range of particular technologies. These issues affect mobile robots and especially industrial mobile robots since the production process relies on dependable and trustworthy communication. Therefore, we present an alternative communication approach that uses Near Field Communication (NFC) to transfer confidential data such as production-relevant information or configuration updates. Due to NFC lacking security mechanisms, we propose a secured communication framework that is supported by dedicated hardware-based secure elements. To show the feasibility of our approach, an Industry 4.0 inspired production process that uses our communication approach is evaluated in simulation.

High tech strategies such as Industry 4.0 and Smart Manufacturing require industrial devices to be connected to the Internet. This movement towards interconnected industrial devices poses significant security risks as confidential data must be transferred and stored using untrustworthy channels and cloud servers. End-to-end private key cryptography is suitable to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity of data. However, private key cryptography has some drawbacks such as the so-called key distribution problem. A possible solution, factory installed keys, are untrustworthy as the two partners relying on end-to-end cryptography can not be sure that no other party is in possession of the used keys. To overcome these problems, the Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) principle based on Near Field Communication (NFC) and dedicated secured hardware is presented in this paper.

PeopleViews is a Human Computation based environment for the construction of constraint-based recommenders. Constraint-based recommender systems support the handling of complex items where constraints (e.g., between user requirements and item properties) can be taken into account. When applying such systems, users are articulating their requirements and the recommender identifies solutions on the basis of the constraints in a recommendation knowledge base. In this paper, we provide an overview of the PeopleViews environment and show how recommendation knowledge can be collected from users of the environment on the basis of micro-tasks. We also show how PeopleViews exploits this knowledge for automatically generating recommendation knowledge bases. In this context, we compare the prediction quality of the recommendation approaches integrated in PeopleViews using a DSLR camera dataset.

15th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Informatics (INDIN 2017) The digital transformation of industrial production is driven by the advance of cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) within which raw materials, machines and operations are interconnected to form a sophisticated network. Making such systems self-adaptable is a priority concern for the future implementation of Industry 4.0 application scenarios. In this position paper, we design a meta-model and use it as a tool to describe an end-to-end communication use case from an ongoing research project. Based on this use case we develop a business process performance and security trade-off model, which shows that maximazing both parameters at the same time is not possible, thus an efficient balance between them has to be achieved. Motivated by the result, we propose self adaptation as a solution towards a flexible and secure end-to-end communication in Industry 4.0. To identify and document the self-adaptation points in a structured methodological and lightweight way we use the bespoken meta-model. Informationstechnologie und Informationsmanagement

Public awareness regarding security aspects in the Internet of Things (IoT) is currently rising due to regular media presence of various IoT-related security breaches. One of the major weaknesses of IoT devices is the absence of appropriate mechanisms for firmware and configuration updates. In addition, improved security concepts often result in poor usability which discourages users from relying on these concepts. Therefore, in this paper, we present an easy-to-use NFC-based configuration approach for IoT devices that is secured by appropriate security measures in software and hardware. Since industrial usage of such a configuration approach entails different requirements than home usage, we present and compare three different configuration processes. The applicability of our approach is demonstrated by two prototypical implementations, as well as a detailed security analysis. We also show that the imposed overhead due to the implemented security measures is negligible for most configuration updates.

The necessity to (re-)configure Internet of Things devices such as smart sensors during their entire lifecycle is becoming more important due to recent attacks targeting these devices. Allowing configuration parameters to be changed in any phase of a smart sensor's lifecycle allows security updates or new key material to be applied. Also, the functionality of a smart sensor can be altered by changing its configuration. The challenges that need to be considered when enabling the configuration of arbitrary parameters are the security and usability of the configuration interface, the secured storage of confidential configuration data, and the attestation of successfully applied configuration updates. Therefore, we present an NFC-based configuration approach that relies on dedicated secured hardware to solve these challenges. In addition to a hardware extension for smart sensors, we also present a secured configuration protocol as well as a two-layer configuration attestation process to verify the correct utilization of all transmitted configuration parameters.

This paper outlines the procedures used in, and evaluates the success of, a pilot writers’ group for MA-level academic writers. After some background on writers’ groups is provided, the activities used in a pilot Writer Development (WD) Workshop, along with the rationale behind the activities, will be described. The usefulness of the activities will then be evaluated from the viewpoint of the student-writers. Results indicate that along with social and affective benefits, the members perceived academic merit in being involved in the group. Most members experienced, at the very least, a heightened awareness of individual writing processes, and of feedback practices and preferences. The activities in the workshops seemed to help the members develop themselves as writers, and an improvement in the quality of written product was perceived by the writers themselves.

Sepsis describes a complex clinical syndrome that results from an infection, setting off a cascade of systemic inflammatory responses that can lead to multiple organ failure and death. Leptin is a 16 kDa adipokine that, among its multiple known effects, is involved in regulating immune function. Here we demonstrate that leptin deficiency inob/obmice leads to higher mortality and more severe organ damage in a standard model of sepsis in mice [cecal ligation and puncture (CLP)]. Moreover, systemic leptin replacement improved the immune response to CLP. Based on the molecular mechanisms of leptin regulation of energy metabolism and reproductive function, we hypothesized that leptin acts in the CNS to efficiently coordinate peripheral immune defense in sepsis. We now report that leptin signaling in the brain increases survival during sepsis in leptin-deficient as well as in wild-type mice and that endogenous CNS leptin action is required for an adequate systemic immune response. These findings reveal the existence of a relevant neuroendocrine control of systemic immune defense and suggest a possible therapeutic potential for leptin analogs in infectious disease.