1st INCF Workshop on Sustainability of Neuroscience Databases

The goal of the workshop was to discuss issues related to the sustainability of neuroscience databases, identify problems and propose solutions, and formulate recommendations to the INCF. The report summarizes the discussions of invited participants from the neuroinformatics community as well as from other disciplines where sustainability issues have already been approached. The recommendations for the INCF involve rating, ranking, and supporting database sustainability

e-Social Science and Evidence-Based Policy Assessment : Challenges and Solutions

Peer reviewedPreprin

Threats Management Throughout the Software Service Life-Cycle

Software services are inevitably exposed to a fluctuating threat picture. Unfortunately, not all threats can be handled only with preventive measures during design and development, but also require adaptive mitigations at runtime. In this paper we describe an approach where we model composite services and threats together, which allows us to create preventive measures at design-time. At runtime, our specification also allows the service runtime environment (SRE) to receive alerts about active threats that we have not handled, and react to these automatically through adaptation of the composite service. A goal-oriented security requirements modelling tool is used to model business-level threats and analyse how they may impact goals. A process flow modelling tool, utilising Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and standard error boundary events, allows us to define how threats should be responded to during service execution on a technical level. Throughout the software life-cycle, we maintain threats in a centralised threat repository. Re-use of these threats extends further into monitoring alerts being distributed through a cloud-based messaging service. To demonstrate our approach in practice, we have developed a proof-of-concept service for the Air Traffic Management (ATM) domain. In addition to the design-time activities, we show how this composite service duly adapts itself when a service component is exposed to a threat at runtime.Comment: In Proceedings GraMSec 2014, arXiv:1404.163

Methodology for Designing Decision Support Systems for Visualising and Mitigating Supply Chain Cyber Risk from IoT Technologies

This paper proposes a methodology for designing decision support systems for visualising and mitigating the Internet of Things cyber risks. Digital technologies present new cyber risk in the supply chain which are often not visible to companies participating in the supply chains. This study investigates how the Internet of Things cyber risks can be visualised and mitigated in the process of designing business and supply chain strategies. The emerging DSS methodology present new findings on how digital technologies affect business and supply chain systems. Through epistemological analysis, the article derives with a decision support system for visualising supply chain cyber risk from Internet of Things digital technologies. Such methods do not exist at present and this represents the first attempt to devise a decision support system that would enable practitioners to develop a step by step process for visualising, assessing and mitigating the emerging cyber risk from IoT technologies on shared infrastructure in legacy supply chain systems

Planning Rural Water Services in Nicaragua: A Systems-Based Analysis of Impact Factors Using Graphical Modeling

The success or failure of rural water services in the developing world is a result of numerous factors that interact in a complex set of connections that are difficult to separate and identify. This research effort presented a novel means to empirically reveal the systemic interactions of factors that influence rural water service sustainability in the municipalities of Darío and Terrabona, Nicaragua. To accomplish this, the study employed graphical modeling to build and analyze factor networks. Influential factors were first identified by qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing transcribed interviews from community water committee members. Factor influences were then inferred by graphical modeling to create factor network diagrams that revealed the direct and indirect interaction of factors. Finally, network analysis measures were used to identify “impact factors” based on their relative influence within each factor network. Findings from this study elucidated the systematic nature of such factor interactions in both Darío and Terrabona, and highlighted key areas for programmatic impact on water service sustainability for both municipalities. Specifically, in Darío, the impact areas related to the current importance of water service management by community water committees, while in Terrabona, the impact areas related to the current importance of finances, viable water sources, and community capacity building by external support. Overall, this study presents a rigorous and useful means to identify impact factors as a way to facilitate the thoughtful planning and evaluation of sustainable rural water services in Nicaragua and beyond

Ciri-ciri yang mempengaruhi pelatih aliran kemahiran untuk menjadi seorang usahawan : satu tinjauan di Institut Kemahiran Mara Lumut, Manjung Perak

Kajian ini beijudul "Ciri-ciri yang Mempengaruhi Pelatih Aliran Kemahiran Untuk Menjadi Seorang Usahawan : Satu Tinjauan di Institut Kemahiran Mara Lumut, Manjung Perak. Tujuan kajian ini ialah untuk menilai sejauhmana tahap ciriciri usahawan di kaiangan pelatih IKM untuk menjadi seorang usahawan daripada lima aspek ciri-ciri usahawan iaitu kemahiran berkomunikasi, kemahiran berfikir, kemahiran merancang dan mentadbir, bermotivasi dan ilmu dalam bidang keusahawanan. Kajian ini adalah berbentuk deskriptif. Instrumen yang digunakan di dalam kajian adalah borang soal selidik. Sampel kajian terdiri daripada 48 orang pelatih semester akhir kursus Kejuruteraan Awam (Bangunan). Data-data kajian dianalisa dengan menggunakan program SPSS Versi 11.0 for windows dan dianalisis daripada soal selidik ke dalam bentuk min dan frekuensi. Keseluruhan hasil kajian menunjukkan bahawa pelatih-pelatih mempunyai ciri-ciri keusahawanan yang tinggi berdasarkan skor min keseluruhan (skor min = 4.06). Akhir sekali, pengkaji mencadangkan agar diwujudkan satu senarai semak yang boleh digunakan sebagai kriteria untuk menilai sama ada terdapat ciri-ciri usahawan di kaiangan pelatih dan dicadangkan supaya kajian ini dilanjutkan ke seluruh Pusat Latihan Kemahiran yang lain di Malaysia

Benchmarking News Recommendations in a Living Lab

Most user-centric studies of information access systems in literature suffer from unrealistic settings or limited numbers of users who participate in the study. In order to address this issue, the idea of a living lab has been promoted. Living labs allow us to evaluate research hypotheses using a large number of users who satisfy their information need in a real context. In this paper, we introduce a living lab on news recommendation in real time. The living lab has first been organized as News Recommendation Challenge at ACM RecSys’13 and then as campaign-style evaluation lab NEWSREEL at CLEF’14. Within this lab, researchers were asked to provide news article recommendations to millions of users in real time. Different from user studies which have been performed in a laboratory, these users are following their own agenda. Consequently, laboratory bias on their behavior can be neglected. We outline the living lab scenario and the experimental setup of the two benchmarking events. We argue that the living lab can serve as reference point for the implementation of living labs for the evaluation of information access systems