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Following along the “technology as the solution” line of thought but with the added twist of putting a human in the loop, a team of eight coauthors led by Panagiotis Monachelis proposes to combine peer-to-peer decentralized networks and blockchain technology to address the challenge of misinformation in social media. The authors provide a detailed description of an architecture, embodied in their research project called EUNOMIA, that allows end users to review posts and feed a secure voting system., Full article link: https://www.cutter.com/article/how-trust-stranger

Blockchain-based systems such as the one proposed to support the Bitcoin protocol are primarily used to enable the execution of financial transactions in a decentralized manner. The characteristics of blockchains have inspired the development of new types of applications that are shifting from its original purpose. Besides supporting the recording of crypto-currency transactions blockchains are also being exploited as mediums of recording arbitrary chunks of data. One technique for embedding such data on the public Bitcoin blockchain is using the OP_RETURN opcode creating an unspendable transaction. In this paper, we leverage data retrieved from such transactions to reveal the identity of the transacting entity. In more detail, we cast the problem of identity discovery as a classification problem. An empirical evaluation using various supervised classification models (from Naive Bayes to deep learning) yield up to 99.98% classification accuracy. In addition, it is confirmed that our feature engineering methodology on using the leading characters of the OP_RETURN instruction holds a significant discrimination power when compared against the baseline.

Innovation is a critical component for regional development. Broadband Internet is a promising technology for rural areas. Rural Broadband is an action of strategic importance because of its ability to accelerate the contribution of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to growth and innovation. The ICT industry remains one of the most vibrant and dynamic global markets; as more and more people are getting connected, new solutions and services are being developed and users' online experiences are expanding throughout the world. Rural Broadband Internet and generally ICTs apply to many issues of modern life, such as National Forest Park Tourism. This paper aims to study the adoption of Rural Broadband Internet in the area of Enos (Ainos) National Forest Park in Greece. Furthermore, the websites that promote and advertise the Enos (Ainos) National Forest Park are analyzed. It is also assessed the adoption of Rural Broadband Internet model using applications from these websites and they are classified in the four stages of Rural Broadband Internet adoption. The websites are analyzed as to their qualitative and quantitative characteristics. Then, they are classified in stages starting from a simple presence of the entity in the Internet to the total Rural Broadband Internet integration through the provided services according to content characteristics accomplished by the websites. Finally, some necessary recommendations for optimizations of the websites are made. The findings can be helpful for managers, policy makers, web designers and environmentalists.

Smartphones have become an indispensable part of everyday life. With all of their advanced functionality today, smartphone-users can experience everything from surfing the web to watching movies to social media and gaming, resulting in a radical shift in behavior patterns, lifestyle and status. The current study aims to examine the structural relationship, behavior and preferences among young Cypriots in purchasing and using a smartphone as well as the extend/frequency of working with mobile apps. The foundation of this work uses quantitative research in the form of a survey using a structured questionnaire, with closed-ended questions. The results provide evidence that users do not fully utilize the capabilities and resources of these devices; they are more interested in the design, screen size and type of smartphones, while the main activities are internet related.

The world is in the midst of a knowledge upheaval, complemented by opening up an entirely new panorama in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). The social and economical dividends of ICT appear to be endless with the potential to contribute in achieving significant economic, social, and environmental benefits to challenge the economic recession the world is currently experiencing. Recent and projected developments in the fields of ICT are indeed revolutionary in nature. Their impact in areas such as science and technology, commerce and industry, business, administration, governance, and education will further revolutionize our society. One of the main challenges, however, is in the adoption of these new technologies. This chapter addresses some of these challenges for achieving technological diffusion and for shaping the experience of ICTs and technological innovation that would contribute to a global green economy and a sustainable future. It points to the important role ICT can play in creating employment opportunities, contributing to sustainability, and addressing environmental challenges associated with production, use of, and disposal of products. It is a working hypothesis calling for action by policy-makers, researchers, donors, and entrepreneurs, including social enterprises, to grasp the promises of ICT and conduct further research, policy dialogues, or pilot implementations for contributing to sustainable development and growth enabled by ICT.

In this paper, we propose the design and development of a fault tolerant and recovery scheme for the Message Passing Interface (MPI). The proposed scheme consists of a detection mechanism for detecting process failures, and a recovery mechanism. Two different cases are considered, both assuming the existence of a monitoring process, the Observer which triggers the recovery procedure in case of failure. In the first case, each process keeps a buffer with its own message traffic to be used in case of failure, while the implementor uses periodical tests for notification of failure by the Observer. The recovery function simulates all the communication of the processes with the dead one by re-sending to the replacement process all the messages destined for the dead one. In the second case, the Observer receives and stores all message traffic, and sends to the replacement all the buffered messages destined for the dead process. Solutions are provided to the dead communicator problem caused by the death of a process. A description of the prototype developed is provided along with the results of the experiments performed for efficiency and performance.

Personalized medicine, a discipline enabled by genetic, biopharma, diagnostic, and information and communications (ICT) technologies attempts to tailor disease treatment to individual patients. Personalized medicine is rapidly emerging as a state-of-the-art approach to diagnostics and therapeutics and is beginning to revolutionize our health care system, promising better medicine for all.

The vision of the future health care should be a system in which patient care is consistently improved through the use of information on the individual patient’s genomes and their downstream products. This requires the exploration of strategic relationships among various disciplines such as life sciences, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and information and communication technology, and constellation thinking to propose new ways for the diagnosis and therapy of diseases, integrated with a planned trans-disciplinary scientific approach involving all interested parties. Connecting high-quality trans-disciplinary scientists on a pan-European level through programs such as the Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) can support capacity building and increase the impact of personalized medicine research on regulatory bodies, decision makers, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, and the paying public. Such group effort could enable breakthrough scientific developments leading to new concepts and products and thereby contributing to the strengthening of Europe’s research and innovation capacity while reforming the health care system.

Due to the wide range of services being supported, telecommunications networks are loaded with massive quantities of information. This stimulates extra concern for network survivability. In this paper, we use graph theoretic techniques for addressing network survivability issues by transforming the original network topology onto a trellis graph, which allows the application of computationally efficient methods to find disjoint routing paths. We investigate the time complexity of the new algorithm as well as the time complexity of another algorithm on trellis transformations, presented in our previous work. The two algorithms are compared and evaluated in terms of their time complexity. Conclusions on their performance are drawn which show that the new algorithm has a better performance by a factor of n, where n is the number of nodes in the network.

The creation of the Cyprus research area can be a key component and a critical contributor to the creation of the European Research Area and the strategy defined at Lisbon for making the European Union (EU) the world's most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy. This paper proposes a framework for research in academia that complies with the EU framework with emphasis on the human potential, and infrastructure. A survey has been carried out for identifying problems and potential solutions in giving new momentum to the academic research initiatives, by strengthening efforts, and defining new perspectives for providing the initiatives with more means of implementation. It aims to raise awareness of the academic dimension of research at national and international levels and stimulate a process for bringing together all the parties involved including faculty, industry, administration, and policy makers to launch new cooperation initiatives for both applied and theoretical research.