1,305 research outputs found

    Multidisciplinary perspectives on Artificial Intelligence and the law

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    This open access book presents an interdisciplinary, multi-authored, edited collection of chapters on Artificial Intelligence (‘AI’) and the Law. AI technology has come to play a central role in the modern data economy. Through a combination of increased computing power, the growing availability of data and the advancement of algorithms, AI has now become an umbrella term for some of the most transformational technological breakthroughs of this age. The importance of AI stems from both the opportunities that it offers and the challenges that it entails. While AI applications hold the promise of economic growth and efficiency gains, they also create significant risks and uncertainty. The potential and perils of AI have thus come to dominate modern discussions of technology and ethics – and although AI was initially allowed to largely develop without guidelines or rules, few would deny that the law is set to play a fundamental role in shaping the future of AI. As the debate over AI is far from over, the need for rigorous analysis has never been greater. This book thus brings together contributors from different fields and backgrounds to explore how the law might provide answers to some of the most pressing questions raised by AI. An outcome of the Católica Research Centre for the Future of Law and its interdisciplinary working group on Law and Artificial Intelligence, it includes contributions by leading scholars in the fields of technology, ethics and the law.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Design Knowledge for Virtual Learning Companions from a Value-centered Perspective

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    The increasing popularity of conversational agents such as ChatGPT has sparked interest in their potential use in educational contexts but undermines the role of companionship in learning with these tools. Our study targets the design of virtual learning companions (VLCs), focusing on bonding relationships for collaborative learning while facilitating students’ time management and motivation. We draw upon design science research (DSR) to derive prescriptive design knowledge for VLCs as the core of our contribution. Through three DSR cycles, we conducted interviews with working students and experts, held interdisciplinary workshops with the target group, designed and evaluated two conceptual prototypes, and fully coded a VLC instantiation, which we tested with students in class. Our approach has yielded 9 design principles, 28 meta-requirements, and 33 design features centered around the value-in-interaction. These encompass Human-likeness and Dialogue Management, Proactive and Reactive Behavior, and Relationship Building on the Relationship Layer (DP1,3,4), Adaptation (DP2) on the Matching Layer, as well as Provision of Supportive Content, Fostering Learning Competencies, Motivational Environment, and Ethical Responsibility (DP5-8) on the Service Layer

    Resource Allocation in Networking and Computing Systems: A Security and Dependability Perspective

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    In recent years, there has been a trend to integrate networking and computing systems, whose management is getting increasingly complex. Resource allocation is one of the crucial aspects of managing such systems and is affected by this increased complexity. Resource allocation strategies aim to effectively maximize performance, system utilization, and profit by considering virtualization technologies, heterogeneous resources, context awareness, and other features. In such complex scenario, security and dependability are vital concerns that need to be considered in future computing and networking systems in order to provide the future advanced services, such as mission-critical applications. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of existing literature that considers security and dependability for resource allocation in computing and networking systems. The current research works are categorized by considering the allocated type of resources for different technologies, scenarios, issues, attributes, and solutions. The paper presents the research works on resource allocation that includes security and dependability, both singularly and jointly. The future research directions on resource allocation are also discussed. The paper shows how there are only a few works that, even singularly, consider security and dependability in resource allocation in the future computing and networking systems and highlights the importance of jointly considering security and dependability and the need for intelligent, adaptive and robust solutions. This paper aims to help the researchers effectively consider security and dependability in future networking and computing systems.publishedVersio

    Measuring the impact of COVID-19 on hospital care pathways

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    Care pathways in hospitals around the world reported significant disruption during the recent COVID-19 pandemic but measuring the actual impact is more problematic. Process mining can be useful for hospital management to measure the conformance of real-life care to what might be considered normal operations. In this study, we aim to demonstrate that process mining can be used to investigate process changes associated with complex disruptive events. We studied perturbations to accident and emergency (A &E) and maternity pathways in a UK public hospital during the COVID-19 pandemic. Co-incidentally the hospital had implemented a Command Centre approach for patient-flow management affording an opportunity to study both the planned improvement and the disruption due to the pandemic. Our study proposes and demonstrates a method for measuring and investigating the impact of such planned and unplanned disruptions affecting hospital care pathways. We found that during the pandemic, both A &E and maternity pathways had measurable reductions in the mean length of stay and a measurable drop in the percentage of pathways conforming to normative models. There were no distinctive patterns of monthly mean values of length of stay nor conformance throughout the phases of the installation of the hospital’s new Command Centre approach. Due to a deficit in the available A &E data, the findings for A &E pathways could not be interpreted

    Blockchain and Internet of Things in smart cities and drug supply management: Open issues, opportunities, and future directions

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    Blockchain-based drug supply management (DSM) requires powerful security and privacy procedures for high-level authentication, interoperability, and medical record sharing. Researchers have shown a surprising interest in Internet of Things (IoT)-based smart cities in recent years. By providing a variety of intelligent applications, such as intelligent transportation, industry 4.0, and smart financing, smart cities (SC) can improve the quality of life for their residents. Blockchain technology (BCT) can allow SC to offer a higher standard of security by keeping track of transactions in an immutable, secure, decentralized, and transparent distributed ledger. The goal of this study is to systematically explore the current state of research surrounding cutting-edge technologies, particularly the deployment of BCT and the IoT in DSM and SC. In this study, the defined keywords “blockchain”, “IoT”, drug supply management”, “healthcare”, and “smart cities” as well as their variations were used to conduct a systematic search of all relevant research articles that were collected from several databases such as Science Direct, JStor, Taylor & Francis, Sage, Emerald insight, IEEE, INFORMS, MDPI, ACM, Web of Science, and Google Scholar. The final collection of papers on the use of BCT and IoT in DSM and SC is organized into three categories. The first category contains articles about the development and design of DSM and SC applications that incorporate BCT and IoT, such as new architecture, system designs, frameworks, models, and algorithms. Studies that investigated the use of BCT and IoT in the DSM and SC make up the second category of research. The third category is comprised of review articles regarding the incorporation of BCT and IoT into DSM and SC-based applications. Furthermore, this paper identifies various motives for using BCT and IoT in DSM and SC, as well as open problems and makes recommendations. The current study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by offering a complete review of potential alternatives and finding areas where further research is needed. As a consequence of this, researchers are presented with intriguing potential to further create decentralized DSM and SC apps as a result of a comprehensive discussion of the relevance of BCT and its implementation.© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

    CD/CV: Blockchain-based schemes for continuous verifiability and traceability of IoT data for edge-fog-cloud

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    This paper presents a continuous delivery/continuous verifiability (CD/CV) method for IoT dataflows in edge¿fog¿cloud. A CD model based on extraction, transformation, and load (ETL) mechanism as well as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) construction, enable end-users to create efficient schemes for the continuous verification and validation of the execution of applications in edge¿fog¿cloud infrastructures. This scheme also verifies and validates established execution sequences and the integrity of digital assets. CV model converts ETL and DAG into business model, smart contracts in a private blockchain for the automatic and transparent registration of transactions performed by each application in workflows/pipelines created by CD model without altering applications nor edge¿fog¿cloud workflows. This model ensures that IoT dataflows delivers verifiable information for organizations to conduct critical decision-making processes with certainty. A containerized parallelism model solves portability issues and reduces/compensates the overhead produced by CD/CV operations. We developed and implemented a prototype to create CD/CV schemes, which were evaluated in a case study where user mobility information is used to identify interest points, patterns, and maps. The experimental evaluation revealed the efficiency of CD/CV to register the transactions performed in IoT dataflows through edge¿fog¿cloud in a private blockchain network in comparison with state-of-art solutions.This work has been partially supported by the project “CABAHLA-CM: Convergencia Big data-Hpc: de los sensores a las Aplicaciones” S2018/TCS-4423 from Madrid Regional Government, Spain and by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Project “New Data Intensive Computing Methods for High-End and Edge Computing Platforms (DECIDE)”. Ref. PID2019-107858GB-I00; and by the project 41756 “Plataforma tecnológica para la gestión, aseguramiento, intercambio preservación de grandes volúmenes de datos en salud construcción de un repositorio nacional de servicios de análisis de datos de salud” by the PRONACES-CONACYT, Mexic

    Security Technologies and Methods for Advanced Cyber Threat Intelligence, Detection and Mitigation

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    The rapid growth of the Internet interconnectivity and complexity of communication systems has led us to a significant growth of cyberattacks globally often with severe and disastrous consequences. The swift development of more innovative and effective (cyber)security solutions and approaches are vital which can detect, mitigate and prevent from these serious consequences. Cybersecurity is gaining momentum and is scaling up in very many areas. This book builds on the experience of the Cyber-Trust EU project’s methods, use cases, technology development, testing and validation and extends into a broader science, lead IT industry market and applied research with practical cases. It offers new perspectives on advanced (cyber) security innovation (eco) systems covering key different perspectives. The book provides insights on new security technologies and methods for advanced cyber threat intelligence, detection and mitigation. We cover topics such as cyber-security and AI, cyber-threat intelligence, digital forensics, moving target defense, intrusion detection systems, post-quantum security, privacy and data protection, security visualization, smart contracts security, software security, blockchain, security architectures, system and data integrity, trust management systems, distributed systems security, dynamic risk management, privacy and ethics

    DECENTRALIZING THE INTERNET OF MEDICAL THINGS: THE INTERPLANETARY HEALTH LAYER

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    Medical mobile applications have the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry by providing patients with easy access to their personal health information, enabling them to communicate with healthcare providers remotely and consequently improving patient outcomes by providing personalized health information. However, these applications are usually limited by privacy and security issues. A possible solution is to exploit decentralization distributing privacy concerns directly to users. Solutions enabling this vision are closely linked to Distributed Ledger Technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry by creating a secure and transparent system for managing patient data without a central authority. The decentralized nature of the technology allows for the creation of an international data layer that is accessible to authorized parties while preserving patient privacy. This thesis envisions the InterPlanetary Health Layer along with its implementation attempt called Halo Network and an Internet of Medical Things application called Balance as a use case. Throughout the thesis, we explore the benefits and limitations of using the technology, analyze potential use cases, and look out for future directions.Medical mobile applications have the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry by providing patients with easy access to their personal health information, enabling them to communicate with healthcare providers remotely and consequently improving patient outcomes by providing personalized health information. However, these applications are usually limited by privacy and security issues. A possible solution is to exploit decentralization distributing privacy concerns directly to users. Solutions enabling this vision are closely linked to Distributed Ledger Technologies that have the potential to revolutionize the healthcare industry by creating a secure and transparent system for managing patient data without a central authority. The decentralized nature of the technology allows for the creation of an international data layer that is accessible to authorized parties while preserving patient privacy. This thesis envisions the InterPlanetary Health Layer along with its implementation attempt called Halo Network and an Internet of Medical Things application called Balance as a use case. Throughout the thesis, we explore the benefits and limitations of using the technology, analyze potential use cases, and look out for future directions
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