E-democracy and values in information systems design

In this paper I demonstrate the utility of a Values in Design (VID) perspective for the assessment, the design and development of e-democracy tools. In the first part, I give some background information on Values in Design and Value-Sensitive Design and their relevance in the context of e-democracy. In part 2, I analyze three different e-democracy tools from a VID-perspective. The paper ends with some conclusions concerning the merits of VID for e-democracy as well as some considerations concerning the dual tasks of philosophers in assessing and promoting value-sensitive technology design

On Neural Networks Redundancy and Diversity for Their Use in Safety-Critical Systems

An increasing number of critical functionalities integrated in embedded critical systems rely on deep learning (DL) technology. This article summarizes certain key aspects of DL’s intrinsic stochastic and training-data-dependent nature that are at odds with current domain-specific functional safety standards. We exemplify how redundancy and diversity of neural networks can help to reconcile DL technology and functional safety requirements.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) grant agreement No. 772773 (SuPerCom), the Horizon Europe Programme under the SAFEXPLAIN Project (www.safexplain.eu), grant agreement num.101069595, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant PID2019-107255GBC21/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Exact parallel plurality voting algorithm for totally ordered object space fault-tolerant systems

Plurality voter is one of the commonest voting methods for decision making in highly-reliable applications in which the reliability and safety of the system is critical. To resolve the problem associated with sequential plurality voter in dealing with large number of inputs, this paper introduces a new generation of plurality voter based on parallel algorithms. Since parallel algorithms normally have high processing speed and are especially appropriate for large scale systems, they are therefore used to achieve a new parallel plurality voting algorithm by using (n/log n) processors on EREW shared-memory PRAM. The asymptotic analysis of the new proposed algorithm has demonstrated that it has a time complexity of O (log n) which is less than time complexity of sequential plurality algorithm, i.e. Ω (n log n)

Improving the Reliability of Decision-Support Systems for Nuclear Emergency Management by Leveraging Software Design Diversity

This paper introduces a novel method of continuous verification of simulation software used in decision-support systems for nuclear emergency management (DSNE). The proposed approach builds on methods from the field of software reliability engineering, such as N-Version Programming, Recovery Blocks, and Consensus Recovery Blocks. We introduce a new acceptance test for dispersion simulation results and a new voting scheme based on taxonomies of simulation results rather than individual simulation results. The acceptance test and the voter are used in a new scheme, which extends the Consensus Recovery Block method by a database of result taxonomies to support machine-learning. This enables the system to learn how to distinguish correct from incorrect results, with respect to the implemented numerical schemes. Considering that decision-support systems for nuclear emergency management are used in a safety-critical application context, the methods introduced in this paper help improve the reliability of the system and the trustworthiness of the simulation results used by emergency managers in the decision making process. The effectiveness of the approach has been assessed using the atmospheric dispersion forecasts of two test versions of the widely used RODOS DSNE system

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management