Harnessing Openness to Improve Research, Teaching and Learning in Higher Education

Colleges and universities should embrace the concept of increased openness in the use and sharing of information to improve higher education. That is the core recommendation of this report. The report was produced by CED's Digital Connections Council (DCC), a group of information technology experts that advises CED's business leaders on cutting-edge technologies

Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Security in Internet of Things: networked smart objects.

Internet of Things (IoT) is an innovative paradigm approaching both industries and humans every-day life. It refers to the networked interconnection of every-day objects, which are equipped with ubiquitous intelligence. It not only aims at increasing the ubiquity of the Internet, but also at leading towards a highly distributed network of devices communicating with human beings as well as with other devices. Thanks to rapid advances in underlying technologies, IoT is opening valuable opportunities for a large number of novel applications, that promise to improve the quality of humans lives, facilitating the exchange of services. In this scenario, security represents a crucial aspect to be addressed, due to the high level of heterogeneity of the involved devices and to the sensibility of the managed information. Moreover, a system architecture should be established, before the IoT is fully operable in an efficient, scalable and interoperable manner. The main goal of this PhD thesis concerns the design and the implementation of a secure and distributed middleware platform tailored to IoT application domains. The effectiveness of the proposed solution is evaluated by means of a prototype and real case studies

A literature review of the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education

This review focuses on the use of Web 2.0 tools in Higher Education. It provides a synthesis of the research literature in the field and a series of illustrative examples of how these tools are being used in learning and teaching. It draws out the perceived benefits that these new technologies appear to offer, and highlights some of the challenges and issues surrounding their use. The review forms the basis for a HE Academy funded project, ‘Peals in the Cloud’, which is exploring how Web 2.0 tools can be used to support evidence-based practices in learning and teaching. The project has also produced two in-depth case studies, which are reported elsewhere (Galley et al., 2010, Alevizou et al., 2010). The case studies focus on evaluation of a recently developed site for learning and teaching, Cloudworks, which harnesses Web 2.0 functionality to facilitate the sharing and discussion of educational practice. The case studies aim to explore to what extent the Web 2.0 affordances of the site are successfully promoting the sharing of ideas, as well as scholarly reflections, on learning and teaching

Data trust framework using blockchain and smart contracts

Lack of trust is the main barrier preventing more widespread data sharing. The lack of transparent and reliable infrastructure for data sharing prevents many data owners from sharing their data. Data trust is a paradigm that facilitates data sharing by forcing data controllers to be transparent about the process of sharing and reusing data. Blockchain technology has the potential to present the essential properties for creating a practical and secure data trust framework by transforming current auditing practices and automatic enforcement of smart contracts logic without relying on intermediaries to establish trust. Blockchain holds an enormous potential to remove the barriers of traditional centralized applications and propose a distributed and transparent administration by employing the involved parties to maintain consensus on the ledger. Furthermore, smart contracts are a programmable component that provides blockchain with more flexible and powerful capabilities. Recent advances in blockchain platforms toward smart contracts' development have revealed the possibility of implementing blockchain-based applications in various domains, such as health care, supply chain and digital identity. This dissertation investigates the blockchain's potential to present a framework for data trust. It starts with a comprehensive study of smart contracts as the main component of blockchain for developing decentralized data trust. Interrelated, three decentralized applications that address data sharing and access control problems in various fields, including healthcare data sharing, business process, and physical access control system, have been developed and examined. In addition, a general-purpose application based on an attribute-based access control model is proposed that can provide trusted auditability required for data sharing and access control systems and, ultimately, a data trust framework. Besides auditing, the system presents a transparency level that both access requesters (data users) and resource owners (data controllers) can benefit from. The proposed solutions have been validated through a use case of independent digital libraries. It also provides a detailed performance analysis of the system implementation. The performance results have been compared based on different consensus mechanisms and databases, indicating the system's high throughput and low latency. Finally, this dissertation presents an end-to-end data trust framework based on blockchain technology. The proposed framework promotes data trustworthiness by assessing input datasets, effectively managing access control, and presenting data provenance and activity monitoring. A trust assessment model that examines the trustworthiness of input data sets and calculates the trust value is presented. The number of transaction validators is defined adaptively with the trust value. This research provides solutions for both data owners and data users’ by ensuring the trustworthiness and quality of the data at origin and transparent and secure usage of the data at the end. A comprehensive experimental study indicates the presented system effectively handles a large number of transactions with low latency

Thirty Years of IS Research: Core Artifacts and Academic Identity

This paper puts forward an academic identity for the IS discipline which emerges out of its displayed academic artifacts – namely, papers published in two of the discipline’s major journals (Information Systems Research and MIS Quarterly) between 1977 and 2006. Our study focuses on two specific attributes of these papers: the focal IT Artifact and the IS Theme. An analysis of 1056 papers reveals an academic identity characterized by a relatively persistent focus on a small set of IT Artifacts and a similarly small set of IS Themes. The analysis suggests that our academic identity is indicated by two central and enduring intellectual cores associated with a handful of IT Artifacts and IS Themes, which have captured the attention of IS researchers over three decades. This academic identity may be described as the scientific study of the design, development, and management of information technologies, as well as their use by and impact on individuals, groups, and organizations. Of particular interest are information technologies (and their specific components) that enable communication, collaboration, and decision making. A follow up analysis of the papers published in 2007 and 2008 provides support to the central and enduring nature of our discipline’s intellectual core

Supporting Management lnteraction and Composition of Self-Managed Cells

Management in ubiquitous systems cannot rely on human intervention or centralised decision-making functions because systems are complex and devices are inherently mobile and cannot refer to centralised management applications for reconfiguration and adaptation directives. Management must be devolved, based on local decision-making and feedback control-loops embedded in autonomous components. Previous work has introduced a Self-Managed Cell (SMC) as an infrastructure for building ubiquitous applications. An SMC consists of a set of hardware and software components that implement a policy-driven feedback control-loop. This allows SMCs to adapt continually to changes in their environment or in their usage requirements. Typical applications include body-area networks for healthcare monitoring, and communities of unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) for surveillance and reconnaissance operations. Ubiquitous applications are typically formed from multiple interacting autonomous components, which establish peer-to-peer collaborations, federate and compose into larger structures. Components must interact to distribute management tasks and to enforce communication strategies. This thesis presents an integrated framework which supports the design and the rapid establishment of policy-based SMC interactions by systematically composing simpler abstractions as building elements of a more complex collaboration. Policy-based interactions are realised – subject to an extensible set of security functions – through the exchanges of interfaces, policies and events, and our framework was designed to support the specification, instantiation and reuse of patterns of interaction that prescribe the manner in which these exchanges are achieved. We have defined a library of patterns that provide reusable abstractions for the structure, task-allocation and communication aspects of an interaction, which can be individually combined for building larger policy-based systems in a methodical manner. We have specified a formal model to ensure the rigorous verification of SMC interactions before policies are deployed in physical devices. A prototype has been implemented that demonstrates the practical feasibility of our framework in constrained resources