An Efficient Patch Dissemination Strategy for Mobile Networks

Mobile phones and personal digital assistants are becoming increasingly important in our daily life since they enable us to access a large variety of ubiquitous services. Mobile networks, formed by the connection of mobile devices following some relationships among mobile users, provide good platforms for mobile virus spread. Quick and efficient security patch dissemination strategy is necessary for the update of antivirus software so that it can detect mobile virus, especially the new virus under the wireless mobile network environment with limited bandwidth which is also large scale, decentralized, dynamically evolving, and of unknown network topology. In this paper, we propose an efficient semi autonomy-oriented computing (SAOC) based patch dissemination strategy to restrain the mobile virus. In this strategy, some entities are deployed in a mobile network to search for mobile devices according to some specific rules and with the assistance of a center. Through experiments involving both real-world networks and dynamically evolving networks, we demonstrate that the proposed strategy can effectively send security patches to as many mobile devices as possible at a considerable speed and lower cost in the mobile network. It is a reasonable, effective, and secure method to reduce the damages mobile viruses may cause

Standardization Roadmap for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Version 2.0

This Standardization Roadmap for Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Version 2.0 (“roadmap”) is an update to version 1.0 of this document published in December 2018. It identifies existing standards and standards in development, assesses gaps, and makes recommendations for priority areas where there is a perceived need for additional standardization and/or pre-standardization R&D. The roadmap has examined 78 issue areas, identified a total of 71 open gaps and corresponding recommendations across the topical areas of airworthiness; flight operations (both general concerns and application-specific ones including critical infrastructure inspections, commercial services, and public safety operations); and personnel training, qualifications, and certification. Of that total, 47 gaps/recommendations have been identified as high priority, 21 as medium priority, and 3 as low priority. A “gap” means no published standard or specification exists that covers the particular issue in question. In 53 cases, additional R&D is needed. As with the earlier version of this document, the hope is that the roadmap will be broadly adopted by the standards community and that it will facilitate a more coherent and coordinated approach to the future development of standards for UAS. To that end, it is envisioned that the roadmap will continue to be promoted in the coming year. It is also envisioned that a mechanism may be established to assess progress on its implementation

Sustainable Marketing and Strategy

Sustainability comes in many forms and is increasingly linked to strategy and to marketing. Organizations have long since recognized the importance of corporate social responsibility and, hence, it is the upper echelon of the enterprise that is involved in the major decisions in this area. Dedicated and specialized teams are the future of organizational sustainability, and we predict that the next decade will see an exponential increase in sustainable activity and investment. Firms cannot afford to let certain opportunities pass without leaving their mark—a mark which will affect the brand and, more importantly, consumers’ minds and their attitudes towards the market of products and services. The market in general will have to adapt to the circular economy and to the well-being of employees and, indeed, of society and its stakeholders, in order to prosper. We are glad to have made even a small contribution to the growing debate on green and soft issues, such as those contained in this book

Automatic object classification for surveillance videos.

PhDThe recent popularity of surveillance video systems, specially located in urban scenarios, demands the development of visual techniques for monitoring purposes. A primary step towards intelligent surveillance video systems consists on automatic object classification, which still remains an open research problem and the keystone for the development of more specific applications. Typically, object representation is based on the inherent visual features. However, psychological studies have demonstrated that human beings can routinely categorise objects according to their behaviour. The existing gap in the understanding between the features automatically extracted by a computer, such as appearance-based features, and the concepts unconsciously perceived by human beings but unattainable for machines, or the behaviour features, is most commonly known as semantic gap. Consequently, this thesis proposes to narrow the semantic gap and bring together machine and human understanding towards object classification. Thus, a Surveillance Media Management is proposed to automatically detect and classify objects by analysing the physical properties inherent in their appearance (machine understanding) and the behaviour patterns which require a higher level of understanding (human understanding). Finally, a probabilistic multimodal fusion algorithm bridges the gap performing an automatic classification considering both machine and human understanding. The performance of the proposed Surveillance Media Management framework has been thoroughly evaluated on outdoor surveillance datasets. The experiments conducted demonstrated that the combination of machine and human understanding substantially enhanced the object classification performance. Finally, the inclusion of human reasoning and understanding provides the essential information to bridge the semantic gap towards smart surveillance video systems

Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

Proceedings of Papers 2-nd International Scientific Conference MILCON'19

In front of you is the thematic Proceedings, as a collection of papers presented at the 2nd MILCON’19 Conference ''Contemporary education based on ADL'', organized on November 12th 2019, by the Military Academy "General MihailoApostolski" - Skopje associated member of the University ''Goce Delcev'' - Shtip, within the RADLI Project (Regional Advance Distributive Learning Initiative), supported by the Kingdom of Norway and implemented by the Jefferson Institute, USA. The objective of the Conference was to gather educators and trainers from different countries in order to give us the opportunity to increase both knowledge and cooperation within all aspects of advance distributed learning - ADL. Hence, the Proceedings contain 32 papers focused on the contemporary trends in the use of information technology in a pedagogical way, as well as the best practices both from a theoretical point of view, but also from a practical aspect on the topics related to educational programs using blended learning, emerging learning technologies, multiplatform delivery of courseware, motivational and pedagogical learning strategies and other topics related to ADL. This international scientific conference gives us a wonderful opportunity for exchanging experience and knowledge between the scientific workers and the practitioners from North Macedonia, USA, Serbia, Poland, Slovenia, Bosna and Hercegovina and Norway. The papers published in the Proceedings are written by eminent scholars as well as by members of the security system participating in the educational process of the army, police and other security services from different countries. Each paper has been reviewed by international experts competent for the field to which the paper is related. The data and information gained with the empirical research, as well as theoretical thoughts and comparative analyses in the Proceedings will give a significant contribution to the development of the use of ADL in a pedagogical way. We wish to extend our gratitude to all authors and participants to the Conference, as well as to all those who contributed to, or supported the Conference, especially the Kingdom of Norway and the Jefferson Institute, as well as to the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces of the Republic of North Macedoniafor their immense support of the Conference