19,265 research outputs found

    The Last Decade in Review: Tracing the Evolution of Safety Assurance Cases through a Comprehensive Bibliometric Analysis

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    Safety assurance is of paramount importance across various domains, including automotive, aerospace, and nuclear energy, where the reliability and acceptability of mission-critical systems are imperative. This assurance is effectively realized through the utilization of Safety Assurance Cases. The use of safety assurance cases allows for verifying the correctness of the created systems capabilities, preventing system failure. The latter may result in loss of life, severe injuries, large-scale environmental damage, property destruction, and major economic loss. Still, the emergence of complex technologies such as cyber-physical systems (CPSs), characterized by their heterogeneity, autonomy, machine learning capabilities, and the uncertainty of their operational environments poses significant challenges for safety assurance activities. Several papers have tried to propose solutions to tackle these challenges, but to the best of our knowledge, no secondary study investigates the trends, patterns, and relationships characterizing the safety case scientific literature. This makes it difficult to have a holistic view of the safety case landscape and to identify the most promising future research directions. In this paper, we, therefore, rely on state-of-the-art bibliometric tools(e.g., VosViewer) to conduct a bibliometric analysis that allows us to generate valuable insights, identify key authors and venues, and gain a birds eye view of the current state of research in the safety assurance area. By revealing knowledge gaps and highlighting potential avenues for future research, our analysis provides an essential foundation for researchers, corporate safety analysts, and regulators seeking to embrace or enhance safety practices that align with their specific needs and objectives

    A PRISMA-driven systematic mapping study on system assurance weakeners

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    Context: An assurance case is a structured hierarchy of claims aiming at demonstrating that a given mission-critical system supports specific requirements (e.g., safety, security, privacy). The presence of assurance weakeners (i.e., assurance deficits, logical fallacies) in assurance cases reflects insufficient evidence, knowledge, or gaps in reasoning. These weakeners can undermine confidence in assurance arguments, potentially hindering the verification of mission-critical system capabilities. Objectives: As a stepping stone for future research on assurance weakeners, we aim to initiate the first comprehensive systematic mapping study on this subject. Methods: We followed the well-established PRISMA 2020 and SEGRESS guidelines to conduct our systematic mapping study. We searched for primary studies in five digital libraries and focused on the 2012-2023 publication year range. Our selection criteria focused on studies addressing assurance weakeners at the modeling level, resulting in the inclusion of 39 primary studies in our systematic review. Results: Our systematic mapping study reports a taxonomy (map) that provides a uniform categorization of assurance weakeners and approaches proposed to manage them at the modeling level. Conclusion: Our study findings suggest that the SACM (Structured Assurance Case Metamodel) -- a standard specified by the OMG (Object Management Group) -- may be the best specification to capture structured arguments and reason about their potential assurance weakeners

    Mapping the scattered field of research on higher education. A correlated topic model of 17,000 articles, 1991–2018

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    Parallel to the increasing level of maturity of the field of research on higher education, an increasing number of scholarly works aims at synthesising and presenting overviews of the field. We identify three important pitfalls these previous studies struggle with, i.e. a limited scope, a lack of a content-related analysis, and/or a lack of an inductive approach. We take these limitations into account by analysing the abstracts of 16,928 articles on higher education between 1991 and 2018. To investigate this huge collection of texts, we apply topic models, which are a collection of automatic content analysis methods that allow to map the structure of large text data. After an in-depth discussion of the topics differentiated by our model, we study how these topics have evolved over time. In addition, we analyse which topics tend to co-occur in articles. This reveals remarkable gaps in the literature which provides interesting opportunities for future research. Furthermore, our analysis corroborates the claim that the field of research on higher education consists of isolated ‘islands’. Importantly, we find that these islands drift further apart because of a trend of specialisation. This is a bleak finding, suggesting the (further) disintegration of our field

    Credibility of Health Information and Digital Media: New Perspectives and Implications for Youth

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    Part of the Volume on Digital Media, Youth, and Credibility. This chapter considers the role of Web technologies on the availability and consumption of health information. It argues that young people are largely unfamiliar with trusted health sources online, making credibility particularly germane when considering this type of information. The author suggests that networked digital media allow for humans and technologies act as "apomediaries" that can be used to steer consumers to high quality health information, thereby empowering health information seekers of all ages

    Code Smells for Machine Learning Applications

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    The popularity of machine learning has wildly expanded in recent years. Machine learning techniques have been heatedly studied in academia and applied in the industry to create business value. However, there is a lack of guidelines for code quality in machine learning applications. In particular, code smells have rarely been studied in this domain. Although machine learning code is usually integrated as a small part of an overarching system, it usually plays an important role in its core functionality. Hence ensuring code quality is quintessential to avoid issues in the long run. This paper proposes and identifies a list of 22 machine learning-specific code smells collected from various sources, including papers, grey literature, GitHub commits, and Stack Overflow posts. We pinpoint each smell with a description of its context, potential issues in the long run, and proposed solutions. In addition, we link them to their respective pipeline stage and the evidence from both academic and grey literature. The code smell catalog helps data scientists and developers produce and maintain high-quality machine learning application code.Comment: Accepted at CAI

    When Europe encounters urban governance: Policy Types, Actor Games and Mechanisms of cites Europeanization

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    This paper examines European Union (EU) causal mechanisms and policy instruments affecting the urban domain throughout the lenses of the Europeanization approach. Instead of looking at EU instruments that are formally/legally consecrated to cities, we use theoretical public policy analysis to explore the arenas and the causal mechanisms that structure the encounters between the EU and urban systems of governance. Policy instruments are related to policy arenas and in turn to different mechanisms of transmission thus originating a typology of European Policy Modes. The paper focuses on four different EU instruments in the in the macro-area of sustainable development and proposes potential game-theoretical models for each of them. In the conclusions we highlight the differences between this approach and the traditional analysis of EU urban policy, and suggest avenues for future empirical research based on typologies of policy instruments and modes of Europeanization

    Um framework para a avaliação de segurança de hardware

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    Orientador: Ricardo DahabDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: O hardware de sistemas computacionais possui uma função crítica na segurança de sistemas operacionais e aplicativos. Além de prover funcionalidades-padrão, tal como o nível de privilégio de execução, o hardware também pode oferecer suporte a criptografia, boot seguro, execução segura, e outros. Com o fim de garantir que essas funcionalidades de segurança irão operar corretamente quando juntas dentro de um sistema, e de que o sistema é seguro como um todo, é necessário avaliar a segurança da arquitetura de todo sistema, durante o ciclo de desenvolvimento do hardware. Neste trabalho, iniciamos pela pesquisa dos diferentes tipos existentes de vulnerabilidades de hardware, e propomos uma taxonomia para classificá-los. Nossa taxonomia é capaz de classificar as vulnerabilidades de acordo com o ponto no qual elas foram inseridas, dentro do ciclo de desenvolvimento. Ela também é capaz de separar as vulnerabilidades de hardware daquelas de software que apenas se aproveitam de funcionalidades-padrão do hardware. Focando em um tipo específico de vulnerabilidade - aquelas relacionadas à arquitetura - apresentamos um método para a avaliação de sistemas de hardware utilizando a metodologia de Assurance Cases. Essa metodologia tem sido usada com sucesso para a análise de segurança física e, tanto quanto saibamos, não há notícias de seu uso para a análise de segurança de hardware. Utilizando esse método, pudemos identificar corretamente as vulnerabilidades de sistemas reais. Por fim, apresentamos uma prova de conceito de uma ferramenta para guiar e automatizar parte do processo de análise que foi proposto. A partir de uma descrição padronizada de uma arquitetura de hardware, a ferramenta aplica uma série de regras de um sistema especialista e gera um relatório de Assurance Case com as possíveis vulnerabilidades do sistema-alvo. Aplicamos a ferramenta aos sistemas estudados e pudemos identificar com sucesso as vulnerabilidades conhecidas, assim como outras possíveis vulnerabilidadesAbstract: The hardware of computer systems plays a critical role in the security of operating systems and applications. Besides providing standard features such as execution privilege levels, it may also offer support for encryption, secure execution, secure boot, and others. In order to guarantee that these security features work correctly when inside a system, and that the system is secure as a whole, it is necessary to evaluate the security of the architecture during the hardware development life-cycle. In this work, we start by exploring the different types of existing hardware vulnerabilities and propose a taxonomy for classifying them. Our taxonomy is able to classify vulnerabilities according to when they were created during the development life-cycle, as well as separating real hardware vulnerabilities from software vulnerabilities that leverage standard hardware features. Focusing on a specific type of vulnerability - the architecture-related ones, we present a method for evaluating hardware systems using the Assurance Case methodology. This methodology has been used successfully for safety analysis, and to our best knowledge there are no reports of its use for hardware security analysis. Using this method, we were able to correctly identify the vulnerabilities of real-world systems. Lastly, we present the proof-of-concept of a tool for guiding and automating part of the proposed analysis methodology. Starting from a standardized hardware architecture description, the tool applies a set of expert system rules, and generates an Assurance Case report that contains the possible security vulnerabilities of a system. We were able to apply the tool to the studied systems, and correctly identify their known vulnerabilities, as well as other possible vulnerabilitiesMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã
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