Space Station Freedom data management system growth and evolution report

The Information Sciences Division at the NASA Ames Research Center has completed a 6-month study of portions of the Space Station Freedom Data Management System (DMS). This study looked at the present capabilities and future growth potential of the DMS, and the results are documented in this report. Issues have been raised that were discussed with the appropriate Johnson Space Center (JSC) management and Work Package-2 contractor organizations. Areas requiring additional study have been identified and suggestions for long-term upgrades have been proposed. This activity has allowed the Ames personnel to develop a rapport with the JSC civil service and contractor teams that does permit an independent check and balance technique for the DMS

Blockchain For Food: Making Sense of Technology and the Impact on Biofortified Seeds

The global food system is under pressure and is in the early stages of a major transition towards more transparency, circularity, and personalisation. In the coming decades, there is an increasing need for more food production with fewer resources. Thus, increasing crop yields and nutritional value per crop is arguably an important factor in this global food transition. Biofortification can play an important role in feeding the world. Biofortified seeds create produce with increased nutritional values, mainly minerals and vitamins, while using the same or less resources as non-biofortified variants. However, a farmer cannot distinguish a biofortified seed from a regular seed. Due to the invisible nature of the enhanced seeds, counterfeit products are common, limiting wide-scale adoption of biofortified crops. Fraudulent seeds pose a major obstacle in the adoption of biofortified crops. A system that could guarantee the origin of the biofortified seeds is therefore required to ensure widespread adoption. This trust-ensuring immutable proof for the biofortified seeds, can be provided via blockchain technology

Consulting in computer systems and software

This report aims to describe the work I have done during my project in company. It is part of my second year in the Master of Computer Engineering – Mobile Computing of the School of Technology and Management of the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria. During this experience, I was assigned two missions. The first one is about the study of a S/MIME solution for email security and the second one is about the improvement of Microsoft Office 365 security score. For both missions I had material at my disposal and some instructions were given to me. I began by analysing the situation, and then established a state of the art in terms of technologies used. Then, thanks to my knowledge, I simulated virtual computer networks, tested encryption solutions, determined what were the best security practices, automated my work by scripting, reported the difficulties, and provided a detailed documentation about my work. The solutions produced respond to the problems, and they are functional. For the first mission, client machines can send S/MIME emails in a virtual network. For the second mission, the scripts and the tool provided allow to improve Microsoft Office 365 security score

Optimizing Key Distribution in Peer to Peer Network Using B-Trees

Peer to peer network architecture introduces many desired features including self-scalability that led to achieving higher efficiency rate than the traditional server-client architecture. This was contributed to the highly distributed architecture of peer to peer network. Meanwhile, the lack of a centralized control unit in peer to peer network introduces some challenge. One of these challenges is key distribution and management in such an architecture. This research will explore the possibility of developing a novel scheme for distributing and managing keys in peer to peer network architecture efficiently

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities