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Aim: The aims of this study were to (1) formulate a baseline understanding of the performance of the indigenous Cypriot white grape Xynisteri and the red grape Maratheftiko (Vitis vinifera L.), and (2) compare these varieties to Shiraz and Sauvignon blanc grown in a Cypriot vineyard.Materials and results: The investigation involved multiple dry grown vineyards from the Krasochoria region of Lemesos, Cyprus, during the 2017, 2018 and 2019 vintages. Vine performance measurements, including midday stem water potential, stomatal conductance, chlorophyll content, stomata density, vine phenology and vegetative and reproductive measurements, were taken at flowering, veraison and pre-harvest. Xynisteri had the greatest stomatal density, more shoots, more leaves, heavier bunches, greater yield, higher leaf water potential at harvest, and a stomatal conductance equal to Maratheftiko, but greater than that of both Shiraz and Sauvignon blanc. Maratheftiko had the longest shoots, largest shoot diameter and the greatest chlorophyll content out of all four varieties.Conclusions: This study identified the ability of the indigenous Cypriot grape varieties, Xynisteri and Maratheftiko, to better tolerate hot and dry conditions when compared to more commonly cultivated varieties grown in the same environmental conditions.Significance and impact of the study: The changing climate of wine growing regions worldwide is placing great pressure on the resources for sustainable viticulture. Many vineyards in hot climate zones base their businesses on European grape varieties traditionally grown in regions with abundant water resources. It is therefore necessary for the global wine industry to investigate grape varieties that are indigenous to hot climates. The eastern Mediterranean island of Cyprus is one such place, with more than 10 indigenous grape varieties that grow well in a hot climate without irrigation. Consumer studies have demonstrated that wines made from these Cypriot varieties are equally, if not more, acceptable than wines made from more traditional European grapes; therefore, the potential for their use in other hot wine growing regions is promising.

In the past decade, cloud computing has emerged as an economical and practical alternative to in-house datacenters. But due to security concerns, many enterprises are still averse to adopting third party clouds. To mitigate these concerns, several authors have proposed to use partially homomorphic encryption (PHE) to achieve practical levels of confidentiality while enabling computations in the cloud. However, these approaches are either not performant or not versatile enough. We present two novel PHE schemes, an additive and a multiplicative homomorphic encryption scheme, which, unlike previous schemes, are symmetric. We prove the security of our schemes and show they are more efficient than state-of-the-art asymmetric PHE schemes, without compromising the expressiveness of homomorphic operations they support. The main intuition behind our schemes is to trade strict ciphertext compactness for good "relative" compactness in practice, while in turn reaping improved performance. We build a prototype system called Symmetria that uses our proposed schemes and demonstrate its performance improvements over previous work. Symmetria achieves up to 7× average speedups on standard benchmarks compared to asymmetric PHE-based systems.

Leveraging low-cost public clouds for gathering and processing data from large numbers of devices is an appealing approach to unleash the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT). This combination of clouds with the IoT—dubbed Cloud of Things (CoT)—is, however, built on insecure foundations. Public clouds exhibit inherent security vulnerabilities due to multitenancy, and adding resource-constrained IoT devices deployed in the wild further complicates cyber trust. A promising avenue consists in intelligently utilizing partially homomorphic encryption to compute on data in an encrypted form in an untrusted cloud. We summarize experiences gathered while transitioning this vision for confidentiality-preserving CoT to practice for processing continuous queries on streams of sensitive data generated by IoT devices.

In Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication systems, vehicles as well as infrastructure devices can interact and exchange data with each other. This capability is used to implement intelligent transportation systems applications. Data confidentiality and integrity need to be preserved in unverified and untrusted environments. In this paper, we propose a solution that provides (a) role-based and attribute-based access control to encrypted data and (b) encrypted search over encrypted data. Vehicle Records contain sensitive information about the owners and vehicles in encrypted form with attached access control policies and policy enforcement engine. Our solution supports decentralized and distributed data exchange, which is essential in V2X systems, where a Central Authority is not required to enforce access control policies. Furthermore, we facilitate querying encrypted Vehicle Records through Structured Query Language (SQL) queries. Vehicle Records are stored in a database in untrusted V2X cloud environment that is prone to provide the attackers with a large attack surface. Big datasets, stored in cloud, can be used for data analysis, such as traffic pattern analysis. Our solution protects sensitive vehicle and owner information from curious or malicious information cloud administrators. Support of indexing improves performance of queries that are forwarded to relevant encrypted Vehicle Records, which are stored in the cloud. We measure the performance overhead of our security solution based on self-protecting Vehicle Records with encrypted search capabilities in V2X communication systems and analyze the effect of security over safety.

Leptin plays a central role in the control of body weight and energy homeostasis, but is a pleiotropic cytokine with activities on many peripheral cell types. In this review, we discuss the interaction of leptin with its receptor, and focus on the structural and mechanistic aspects of the extracellular aspects of leptin receptor (LR) activation. We provide an extensive overview of all structural information that has been obtained for leptin and its receptor via X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering, homology modeling, and mutagenesis studies. The available knowledge is integrated into putative models toward a recapitulation of the LR activation mechanism.

Cloud computing offers an attractive and cost-efficient computing platform and hence it has been widely adopted by the industry and the government. At the same time, cloud computing poses a serious security challenge because sensitive data must often be outsourced to third party entities that can access the data and perform computations on them. Partial homomorphic encryption is promising for secure computation, since it allows programs to be executed over encrypted data. Despite advances in cryptographic techniques have improved the expressivity of such programs, integration with mainstream languages has seen little progress. To this end, we present SecureScala, a domain-specific language in Scala that allows expressing secure programs without requiring any cryptographic knowledge. SecureScala is based on a novel combination of free monads and free applicative functors and supports parallel execution and static analyzability. We evaluate our approach through several case studies, demonstrate its expressivity, and show that it incurs in limited performance overhead.

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), billions of devices are expected to continuously collect and process sensitive data (e.g., location, personal health). Due to limited computational capacity available on IoT devices, the current de facto model for building IoT applications is to send the gathered data to the cloud for computation. While private cloud infrastructures for handling large amounts of data streams are expensive to build, using low cost public (untrusted) cloud infrastructures for processing continuous queries including on sensitive data leads to concerns over data confidentiality. This paper presents STYX, a novel programming abstraction and managed runtime system, that ensures confidentiality of IoT applications whilst leveraging the public cloud for continuous query processing. The key idea is to intelligently utilize partially homomorphic encryption to perform as many computationally intensive operations as possible in the untrusted cloud. STYX provides a simple abstraction to the IoT developer to hide the complexities of (1) applying complex cryptographic primitives, (2) reasoning about performance of such primitives, (3) deciding which computations can be executed in an untrusted tier, and (4) optimizing cloud resource usage. An empirical evaluation with benchmarks and case studies shows the feasibility of our approach.

INTRODUCTION – Common limits for phenotyping are costs in terms of equipment, specialized researchers, and time. Moreover, phenotyping requires specific methods in relation to the studied traits, and each method is generally designed to highlight very specific characteristics of the singular trait. Thus, the obtained results are not easily comparable between different institutions. However the data sharing is clearly the most powerful approach to limit the costs and efforts optimizing the obtained results in term of number of studied accessions. It should be stressed that funds are another great limit in research, especially in East countries, where the most interesting cultivar variability is preserved. 28 AIMS AND SCOPES – The main purpose of this work is the establishment of a phenotyping network able to produce comparable data among the Pan-European grapevine collections. MATERIALS AND METHODS – Two protocols were proposed: one for phenology and, the other, for enocarpological traits. Data were recorded in two consecutive vintages: 2012 and 2013. Concerning phenology, the extended BBCH scale (universal and flexible) was adapted to our objects by moving it into a chrono- phenological scale. Then, a cubic curve was selected for modelling the phenological courses. Thus, computing for each accession specific coefficients, it was possible to obtain the relative phenograms. Considering the different site climatic conditions, it was possible to spatialize the results, obtaining reference phenological maps. Concerning eno- carpological traits, the attention was focused on characteristics with a clear impact on the production quality, such as berry morphology (weight, diameters, number of seeds …) and composition (sugar, titratable acidity, anthocyanin and phenolic contents …). The protocol was organized to concatenate the data acquisition, with the objective to generate new derived variables. The methods were selected to be easily reproduced in all the involved collections, without the necessity of expensive facilities. RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS – The first year of dataset was used to evaluate the methods. Two publications are already available confirming the protocols quality. Concerning phenology, both the variability between accessions grown into the same collection and the phenological shifts between the reference varieties cultivated in different areas were highlighted by the protocol. Matching climatic and phenological information of reference cultivars, phenophases maps were obtained. The performances obtained by the eno-carpological protocol were satisfactory both in a global point of view and in a singular collection evaluation. The project obtained an impressive participation, considering the volunteer contribution without any material funding to cover the work costs. Twenty-four institutions collaborate to the data collection. 1724 accessions were evaluated: 931 (583 in 2012 and 348 in 2013) for phenology and 793 (424 in 2012 and 369 in 2013) for eno-carpological descriptions. CONCLUSIONS AND POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS – The protocol sharing allows the data comparison among different grapevine collections. The possible future application for this dataset could be related to scientific studies of genetic associations. Moreover, the improved knowledge of minor and neglected cultivars could have a direct impact on the industrial production, giving information concerning new varieties for future introduction in viticultural areas.

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of shopping; grocery shopping. Grocery shopping is an essential and routine type of consumer behavior, which over the last few decades has undergone major changes due to the rapid evolution of technology. E-grocery is the new form of grocery shopping, which allows consumers to order products via the Internet from the convenience of their house. The evolution of online and in-store grocery shopping is largely determined by the motives and the behavior of consumers. The aim of this paper is to investigate and explain Cypriot consumers perceptions and responses towards online grocery shopping. A survey that utilised a self-administered questionnaire for collecting data from respondents, was conducted at the capital of Cyprus; Nicosia. Cypriot consumers are not ready yet to accept e-grocery shopping as an alternative to traditional grocery shopping. Based on the findings of this survey, “the good quality of the products offered” and “a money back guarantee” can be decided upon by the egrocers as it seems to be the better risk relievers. In addition, “the competitive prices of the products”, “safe dealings through the Internet” and “loyalty to well known products” may consist highly effective incentives to increase the number of online shoppers.

Purpose:We aim to highlight for the first time creativity’s vital role not only for Europe's economic prosperity and crisis recovery, but also for our social and individual well-being. This calls for a new approach from the education world which can improve the current university instructional strategies.Methodological approach:The paper seeks to provide some answers/”solutions”, in a synthetic format, focusing on a three dimensions of creativity: (a) where to play the game of creativity; (b) how to deliver creativity to business students, meaning by what structures and methods (Osborn, 1971); and (c) how to win in implementing this game (Porter, 1985). Our paper offers a theoretical framework emerged from literature review and personal business and educational experiences of the authors. This framework becomes essential in promoting a sustainable business world by locking the element of “creativity” as the driving success factor. Findings:Many researchers appeared to focus on making their findings applicable to the entire education system paying little attention to issues specific to the business education sector. Succinctly, the how to do part, provides several realistic insights on how to connect communities into the game of creativity, on the methods required in striving for improvement and in developing responsibility, on balancing creativity with core essentials, promoting excellence and sustainable quality, networking between students, faculty, management and community, improving learning environment, developing staff, teaching, learning competencies and programme curricula under an integrated service vision, anticipating educational future trends in networking and building creative climates and partnerships. Implications for practice:The paper conclusions and recommendations seek to succeed in recognizing a range of good practices through the explicit and implicit identification of core characteristics for creativity in higher education. Eventually, the first mission in wanting to be creative is to really comprehend the problem, knowing all the basic ways to approach it. If you don't know what's inside the box, then you really aren't ready to think outside it.