KAPTUR: technical analysis report

Led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) and funded by the JISC Managing Research Data programme (2011-13) KAPTUR will discover, create and pilot a sectoral model of best practice in the management of research data in the visual arts in collaboration with four institutional partners: Glasgow School of Art; Goldsmiths, University of London; University for the Creative Arts; and University of the Arts London. This report is framed around the research question: which technical system is most suitable for managing visual arts research data? The first stage involved a literature review including information gathered through attendance at meetings and events, and Internet research, as well as information on projects from the previous round of JISCMRD funding (2009-11). During February and March 2012, the Technical Manager carried out interviews with the four KAPTUR Project Officers and also met with IT staff at each institution. This led to the creation of a user requirement document (Appendix A), which was then circulated to the project team for additional comments and feedback. The Technical Manager selected 17 systems to compare with the user requirement document (Appendix B). Five of the systems had similar scores so these were short-listed. The Technical Manager created an online form into which the Project Officers entered priority scores for each of the user requirements in order to calculate a more accurate score for each of the five short-listed systems (Appendix C) and this resulted in the choice of EPrints as the software for the KAPTUR project

Technical Report: CSVM Ecosystem

The CSVM format is derived from CSV format and allows the storage of tabular like data with a limited but extensible amount of metadata. This approach could help computer scientists because all information needed to uses subsequently the data is included in the CSVM file and is particularly well suited for handling RAW data in a lot of scientific fields and to be used as a canonical format. The use of CSVM has shown that it greatly facilitates: the data management independently of using databases; the data exchange; the integration of RAW data in dataflows or calculation pipes; the search for best practices in RAW data management. The efficiency of this format is closely related to its plasticity: a generic frame is given for all kind of data and the CSVM parsers don't make any interpretation of data types. This task is done by the application layer, so it is possible to use same format and same parser codes for a lot of purposes. In this document some implementation of CSVM format for ten years and in different laboratories are presented. Some programming examples are also shown: a Python toolkit for using the format, manipulating and querying is available. A first specification of this format (CSVM-1) is now defined, as well as some derivatives such as CSVM dictionaries used for data interchange. CSVM is an Open Format and could be used as a support for Open Data and long term conservation of RAW or unpublished data.Comment: 31 pages including 2p of Anne

Technical report writing

This manual covers the fundamentals of organizing, writing, and reviewing NASA technical reports. It was written to improve the writing skills of LeRC technical authors and the overall quality of their reports

Global SPACING Constraint (Technical Report)

We propose a new global SPACING constraint that is useful in modeling events that are distributed over time, like learning units scheduled over a study program or repeated patterns in music compositions. First, we investigate theoretical properties of the constraint and identify tractable special cases. We propose efficient DC filtering algorithms for these cases. Then, we experimentally evaluate performance of the proposed algorithms on a music composition problem and demonstrate that our filtering algorithms outperform the state-of-the-art approach for solving this problem

Nonmalleable Information Flow: Technical Report

Noninterference is a popular semantic security condition because it offers strong end-to-end guarantees, it is inherently compositional, and it can be enforced using a simple security type system. Unfortunately, it is too restrictive for real systems. Mechanisms for downgrading information are needed to capture real-world security requirements, but downgrading eliminates the strong compositional security guarantees of noninterference. We introduce nonmalleable information flow, a new formal security condition that generalizes noninterference to permit controlled downgrading of both confidentiality and integrity. While previous work on robust declassification prevents adversaries from exploiting the downgrading of confidentiality, our key insight is transparent endorsement, a mechanism for downgrading integrity while defending against adversarial exploitation. Robust declassification appeared to break the duality of confidentiality and integrity by making confidentiality depend on integrity, but transparent endorsement makes integrity depend on confidentiality, restoring this duality. We show how to extend a security-typed programming language with transparent endorsement and prove that this static type system enforces nonmalleable information flow, a new security property that subsumes robust declassification and transparent endorsement. Finally, we describe an implementation of this type system in the context of Flame, a flow-limited authorization plugin for the Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Human response to vibration in residential environments (NANR209), executive summary

The aim of the Defra-funded project NANR209 ‘Human response to vibration in residential environments’ was to develop exposure-response relationships for vibration experienced in residential environments from sources outside of the residents’ control. The project was performed at the University of Salford between January 2008 and March 2011. The final report was published on the Defra website on 6th September 2012. The NANR209 Final Report consists of the following documents: • Executive summary • Final project report • Technical report 1: Measurement of vibration exposure • Technical report 2: Measurement of response • Technical report 3: Calculation of vibration exposure • Technical report 4: Measurement and calculation of noise exposure • Technical report 5: Analysis of the social survey findings • Technical report 6: Determination of exposure-response relationships This document is the Executive summary

Carbon Free Boston: Technical Summary

Part of a series of reports that includes: Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report; Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report; Carbon Free Boston: Buildings Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Transportation Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Waste Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Energy Technical Report; Carbon Free Boston: Offsets Technical Report; Available at http://sites.bu.edu/cfb/OVERVIEW: This technical summary is intended to argument the rest of the Carbon Free Boston technical reports that seek to achieve this goal of deep mitigation. This document provides below: a rationale for carbon neutrality, a high level description of Carbon Free Boston’s analytical approach; a summary of crosssector strategies; a high level analysis of air quality impacts; and, a brief analysis of off-road and street light emissions.Published versio