687 research outputs found

    A blockchain-based Decentralized System for proper handling of temporary Employment contracts

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    Temporary work is an employment situation useful and suitable in all occasions in which business needs to adjust more easily and quickly to workload fluctuations or maintain staffing flexibility. Temporary workers play therefore an important role in many companies, but this kind of activity is subject to a special form of legal protections and many aspects and risks must be taken into account both employers and employees. In this work we propose a blockchain-based system that aims to ensure respect for the rights for all actors involved in a temporary employment, in order to provide employees with the fair and legal remuneration (including taxes) of work performances and a protection in the case employer becomes insolvent. At the same time, our system wants to assist the employer in processing contracts with a fully automated and fast procedure. To resolve these problems we propose the D-ES (Decentralized Employment System). We first model the employment relationship as a state system. Then we describe the enabling technology that makes us able to realize the D-ES. In facts, we propose the implementation of a DLT (Decentralized Ledger Technology) based system, consisting in a blockchain system and of a web-based environment. Thanks the decentralized application platforms that makes us able to develop smart contracts, we define a discrete event control system that works inside the blockchain. In addition, we discuss the temporary work in agriculture as a interesting case of study.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the "Computing Conference 2018" - 10-12 July 2018 - London, United Kingdo

    Design of a Sustainable Blockchain-Oriented Software for Building Workers Management

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    The building workers sector is one of the most challenging sectors for Human Resources (HR) management. In this work, we propose a solution relying on Blockchain technology and present the design of a Blockchain-Oriented Software system conceived for managing the building workers sector with a focus on workers' safety, and it is guided by sustainable and Agile Methodologies in software design. The proposed approach takes advantage of different features of the Blockchain technology and provides transparency for labor inspectors, grants data integrity and immutability, relies on tamper-proof time stamps for any recorded activity, allows the implementation of Smart Contracts where clauses are automatically respected without the need of a trusted control authority, acknowledges the legal requirements in the field, including the possibility of creating an Operational Safety Plans, which construction companies have to provide, and finally implements the creation of vacant job positions that workers can find and apply to. In order to achieve these goals, we adopt the Blockchain-Oriented Software Engineering (BOSE) methodology to design Blockchain software applications and apply an Agile methodology centered on Blockchain Software development (called ABCDE) for the design and development of the decentralized application. Such a methodology allows us to center the software development around the actors of the system in the specific domain, such as Building Workers, Construction Companies, Labor Inspectors, and so on. In addition, we rely on the software sustainability analysis, based on the five dimensions of sustainability, to evaluate the approach and to avoid mistakes in the system development. We design system elements with specific diagrams, and we divided our system in the on-chain and the out-of-chain components. The implementation of the system, done by using Ethereum and the ERC721 standard, allows us to improve some aspect of the design, to know the deployment and usage costs, and to evaluate the effect of the user interface. Finally, we discuss the effects of our system and its sustainability, and we provide a comparison of our system with a similar per aims but centralized system

    The rise of blockchain technology in agriculture and food supply chains

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    Blockchain is an emerging digital technology allowing ubiquitous financial transactions among distributed untrusted parties, without the need of intermediaries such as banks. This article examines the impact of blockchain technology in agriculture and food supply chain, presents existing ongoing projects and initiatives, and discusses overall implications, challenges and potential, with a critical view over the maturity of these projects. Our findings indicate that blockchain is a promising technology towards a transparent supply chain of food, with many ongoing initiatives in various food products and food-related issues, but many barriers and challenges still exist, which hinder its wider popularity among farmers and systems. These challenges involve technical aspects, education, policies and regulatory frameworks.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

    The promise of blockchain for HRM: A transaction cost theoretical perspective

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    Previous research has shown that implementing blockchain technology in businesses can lead to more secure and efficient processes in various organizational areas, including human resource management. This review paper examines the use of blockchain in human resources departments from the perspective of transaction cost economics theory, which identifies several fundamental variables that increase transaction costs for firms. These variables include bounded rationality, the pervasive possibility of opportunistic behavior, and uncertainty. The paper explores how blockchain implementation, including blockchain-enabled smart contracts, can mitigate these challenges. The paper also identifies some limitations to using blockchain and smart contracts that may increase transaction costs and thus reduce transaction cost savings

    Blockchain inspired secure and reliable data exchange architecture for cyber-physical healthcare system 4.0

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    A cyber-physical system is considered to be a collection of strongly coupled communication systems and devices that poses numerous security trials in various industrial applications including healthcare. The security and privacy of patient data is still a big concern because healthcare data is sensitive and valuable, and it is most targeted over the internet. Moreover, from the industrial perspective, the cyber-physical system plays a crucial role in the exchange of data remotely using sensor nodes in distributed environments. In the healthcare industry, Blockchain technology offers a promising solution to resolve most securities-related issues due to its decentralized, immutability, and transparency properties. In this paper, a blockchain-inspired secure and reliable data exchange architecture is proposed in the cyber-physical healthcare industry 4.0. The proposed system uses the BigchainDB, Tendermint, Inter-Planetary-File-System (IPFS), MongoDB, and AES encryption algorithms to improve Healthcare 4.0. Furthermore, blockchain-enabled secure healthcare architecture for accessing and managing the records between Doctors and Patients is introduced. The development of a blockchain-based Electronic Healthcare Record (EHR) exchange system is purely patient-centric, which means the entire control of data is in the owner's hand which is backed by blockchain for security and privacy. Our experimental results reveal that the proposed architecture is robust to handle more security attacks and can recover the data if 2/3 of nodes are failed. The proposed model is patient-centric, and control of data is in the patient's hand to enhance security and privacy, even system administrators can't access data without user permission

    BlockDiploma – Decentralizing the Norwegian Diploma Registry using Blockchain Technology

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    Academic diplomas are being falsified and potentially resulting in unqualified individuals getting the job, or a better candidate being bypassed by a forger. Secure and reliable verification mechanisms for academic diplomas are needed. Norway has attempted to accomplish this by developing the Diploma registry, a digital solution for sharing academic results. Our research reviews current diploma systems to identify challenges. Following the review, our research effort shifts focus from identifying challenges to attempting to find solutions using blockchain technology. The research is based on the hypothesis that there are challenges with the present solutions, and that those challenges can be resolved by decentralizing the diploma registry using blockchain and peer-to-peer technology. The research is classified as computer research using the engineering method. The first step was to gather and aggregate information about current diploma systems and relevant blockchain proposed solutions. Based upon the information gathered we could identify challenges with the current solutions, and we started to formulate requirements for a blockchain-based one. After formulating our proposal in the form of written requirements, we started to explore how the challenges could be resolved using decentralized technology. Following the exploration of decentralized technologies, we ended up with developing a decentralized application called BlockDiploma. BlockDiploma is built using smart contracts with the Ethereum blockchain, IPFS for decentralized storage and standard web technologies for the user interface. During and after the development we analyzed and evaluated how well it resolved the identified challenges and whether it introduces new challenges. Our conclusion is that there are several issues other than just falsification with the present diploma systems, and that a decentralized diploma registry can in the future be part of the solution to those challenges.Masteroppgave i informatikkINF399MAMN-PROGMAMN-IN

    Revolutionizing Crowdworking Campaigns: Conquering Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard with the Help of Smart Contracts

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    Crowdworking is increasingly being applied by companies to outsource tasks beyond their core competencies flexibly and cost-effectively to an unknown group. However, the anonymous and financially incentivized nature of crowdworkers creates information asymmetries and conflicts of interest, leading to inefficiencies and intensifying the principal-agent problem. Our paper offers a solution to the widespread problem of inefficient Crowdworking campaigns. We first derive the currently applied Crowdworking campaign process based on a qualitative study. Subsequently, we identify the broadest adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the process. We then analyze how the blockchain application of smart contracts can counteract those challenges and develop a process model that maps a Crowdworking campaign using smart contracts. We explain how our developed process significantly reduces adverse selection and moral hazard at each stage. Thus, our research provides approaches to make online labor more attractive and transparent for companies and online workers

    Citrus Groves in the Cloud: Is Cryptocurrency Cloud Mining a Security?

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    Citrus Groves in the Cloud: Is Cryptocurrency Cloud Mining a Security
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