Mobile Application to support Scientific Conferences - UO ISEP

This dissertation aims to develop a mobile application for Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP), to support scientific conferences. With the increase in the use of mobile devices and the growing trend of providing mobile applications for scientific conferences, the need for a mobile application that can enhance the conference experience and provide a convenient and user-friendly way to access information about a conference is becoming more important. This application is designed to be used for live conferences and includes features such as an interactive event schedule, speaker bios, ticket management, and rating of events among others. The attendees can have a seamless conference experience and make the most of the time spent at the conference. The application also includes features for conference organizers such as event registration, attendee management, and real-time analytics. Organizers are able to manage attendees, track attendance, and access analytics on attendee behavior and preferences, and use these features to evaluate the success of the conference, gather insights for future conferences, and improve the attendee’s experience. The development of this application is based on best practices and guidelines for the design and development of mobile applications and user-centered design methodologies. The de sign process is based on user research, interviews, and usability testing, to ensure that the application meets the needs and expectations of the users. The impact of this application on the conference experience is evaluated through user test ing and feedback. The evaluation is focused on measuring the usability, usefulness, and user satisfaction of the application. The results of this evaluation are used to improve the application and ensure that it provides a high-quality user experience. Overall, this thesis aims to contribute to the field of mobile applications for conferences by providing a comprehensive solution that can enhance the attendee experience and improve the overall effectiveness of the conference.Esta dissertação tem como objectivo desenvolver uma aplicação móvel para o ISEP com o intuito de auxiliar nas conferências científicas que o mesmo Instituto organiza. Com o aumento do uso de dispositivos móveis e a crescente tendência de fornecer aos visitantes de conferências aplicações móveis, a necessidade de uma aplicação móvel que permita melhorar a experiência e fornecer uma maneira conveniente e amigável de aceder informações sobre uma conferência organizada pelo ISEP é imperativo. A aplicação desenvolvida no âmbito desta dissertação é projectada para ser usada em conferências ao vivo e incluirá recursos como uma programação interactiva de eventos, biografias dos oradores e materiais de apresentação, além de um directório de participantes e oportunidades de networking. Com esta aplicação, o objectivo é que os participantes tenham uma experiência bastante positiva e que consigam aproveitar ao máximo o tempo gasto na conferência. A aplicação também inclui recursos para os organizadores da conferência, como registo de eventos, gestão de participantes e análises em tempo real. Os organizadores podem gerir os participantes, acompanhar a presença e ter acesso a análises sobre o seu comportamento e preferências, usando essa informação para avaliar o sucesso da conferência, coleccionar e analisar métricas relativas à conferência a fim de melhorar a experiência do participante. O desenvolvimento desta aplicação é baseado nas melhores práticas e directrizes para o desenho e desenvolvimento de aplicações móveis e metodologias de desenho centrada na experiência do utilizador. O processo de desenho é baseado em entrevistas com os organizadores actuais de conferências no ISEP e testes de usabilidade, para garantir que a aplicação atenda às necessidades e expectativas dos utilizadores. O impacto desta aplicação na experiência da conferência é avaliado por meio de testes e feedback dos visitantes e organizadores da conferência. A avaliação é focada em medir a usabilidade, utilidade e satisfação dos utilizadores com a aplicação. Os resultados desta avaliação são utilizados para melhorar a aplicação e garantir que esta proporcione uma experiência de utilizador de alta qualidade. Em geral, esta dissertação quer contribuir para o campo de aplicações móveis para conferências científicas, fornecendo uma solução abrangente que possa melhorar a experiência do participante e melhorar a eficácia geral da conferência. Além disso, a dissertação pretende apresentar uma abordagem de desenho centrado no utilizador e que possa ser utilizada como referência para o desenvolvimento de futuras aplicações móveis em outros domínios

Secure and Reliable Resource Allocation and Caching in Aerial-Terrestrial Cloud Networks (ATCNs)

Aerial-terrestrial cloud networks (ATCNs), global integration of air and ground communication systems, pave a way for a large set of applications such as surveillance, on-demand transmissions, data-acquisition, and navigation. However, such networks suffer from crucial challenges of secure and reliable resource allocation and content-caching as the involved entities are highly dynamic and there is no fine-tuned strategy to accommodate their connectivity. To resolve this quandary, cog-chain, a novel paradigm for secure and reliable resource allocation and content-caching in ATCNs, is presented. Various requirements, key concepts, and issues with ATCNs are also presented along with basic concepts to establish a cog-chain in ATCNs. Feed and fetch modes are utilized depending on the involved entities and caching servers. In addition, a cog-chain communication protocol is presented which avails to evaluate the formation of a virtual cog-chain between the nodes and the content-caching servers. The efficacy of the proposed solution is demonstrated through consequential gains observed for signaling overheads, computational time, reliability, and resource allocation growth. The proposed approach operates with the signaling overheads ranging between 30.36 and 303.6 bytes?hops/sec and the formation time between 186 and 195 ms. Furthermore, the overall time consumption is 83.33% lower than the sequential-verification model and the resource allocation growth is 27.17% better than the sequential-verification model. - 2019 IEEE.This work was supported in part by the Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion (IITP) grant through the Korean Government (MSIT) (Rule Specification-Based Misbehavior Detection for IoT-Embedded Cyber-Physical Systems) under Grant 2017-0-00664, and in part by the Soonchunhyang University Research Fund.Scopu

Security and Privacy in Unified Communication

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.The use of unified communication; video conferencing, audio conferencing, and instant messaging has skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, security and privacy considerations have often been neglected. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of security and privacy in Unified Communication (UC). We systematically analyze security and privacy threats and mitigations in a generic UC scenario. Based on this, we analyze security and privacy features of the major UC market leaders and we draw conclusions on the overall UC landscape. While confidentiality in communication channels is generally well protected through encryption, other privacy properties are mostly lacking on UC platforms

From serendipity to sustainable Green IoT: technical, industrial and political perspective

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) has become one of the largest electronics market for hardware production due to its fast evolving application space. However, one of the key challenges for IoT hardware is the energy efficiency as most of IoT devices/objects are expected to run on batteries for months/years without a battery replacement or on harvested energy sources. Widespread use of IoT has also led to a largescale rise in the carbon footprint. In this regard, academia, industry and policy-makers are constantly working towards new energy-efficient hardware and software solutions paving the way for an emerging area referred to as green-IoT. With the direct integration and the evolution of smart communication between physical world and computer-based systems, IoT devices are also expected to reduce the total amount of energy consumption for the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector. However, in order to increase its chance of success and to help at reducing the overall energy consumption and carbon emissions a comprehensive investigation into how to achieve green-IoT is required. In this context, this paper surveys the green perspective of the IoT paradigm and aims to contribute at establishing a global approach for green-IoT environments. A comprehensive approach is presented that focuses not only on the specific solutions but also on the interaction among them, and highlights the precautions/decisions the policy makers need to take. On one side, the ongoing European projects and standardization efforts as well as industry and academia based solutions are presented and on the other side, the challenges, open issues, lessons learned and the role of policymakers towards green-IoT are discussed. The survey shows that due to many existing open issues (e.g., technical considerations, lack of standardization, security and privacy, governance and legislation, etc.) that still need to be addressed, a realistic implementation of a sustainable green-IoT environment that could be universally accepted and deployed, is still missing

Wireless communication, sensing, and REM: A security perspective

The diverse requirements of next-generation communication systems necessitate awareness, flexibility, and intelligence as essential building blocks of future wireless networks. The awareness can be obtained from the radio signals in the environment using wireless sensing and radio environment mapping (REM) methods. This is, however, accompanied by threats such as eavesdropping, manipulation, and disruption posed by malicious attackers. To this end, this work analyzes the wireless sensing and radio environment awareness mechanisms, highlighting their vulnerabilities and provides solutions for mitigating them. As an example, the different threats to REM and its consequences in a vehicular communication scenario are described. Furthermore, the use of REM for securing communications is discussed and future directions regarding sensing/REM security are highlighted

Deploying building information modeling software on Desktop as a Service platform

Desktop as a Service (DaaS) is a novel cloud computing service that provides cloud-based virtual desktops on-demand to end users. The major advantage of DaaS is the capability to quickly deliver expeditious control of a full desktop environment to end users from various device platforms such as Android, iOS, MacOS or Web access from anywhere and at any time. This master thesis is a proof of concept to demonstrate the practicability to deploy the case company's graphics-intensive building information modeling software, Tekla Structures on Amazon Web Services' DaaS solution, named Amazon WorkSpaces. We investigated the whole deployment process of the software to the Amazon WorkSpaces. After clarifying the deployment process, we developed the working prototype consisting of different Amazon Web Services to automate the process. Furthermore, we implemented operational test cases for the prototype and for the Tekla Structures running on Amazon WorkSpaces to determine the feasibility of using this novel cloud service for the production purpose in the case company. In summary, Amazon WorkSpaces is a highly anticipated DaaS solution that can simplify the desktop and software delivery process to the case company's customers. The prototype developed in the thesis can automate the deployment process and launch new Amazon WorkSpaces to a sufficient extent. Moreover, the evaluation shows that the prototype can handle its automation tasks correctly based on the proposed architectural design and the Amazon WorkSpaces with Graphics hardware configuration are capable of operating Tekla Structures impeccably as in physical Windows desktops

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

A proposal for the use of blockchain in the portuguese voting system

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceThe key objective of this proposal is to present one of the problems that the Portuguese economy, as well as other European countries, have been facing in regard to the civil society intervention in the democracy: the decrease of turnover rates in the voting system. The main objective is to propose the use of Blockchain technology in the Portuguese Voting System, as a mechanism to counter this trend. In order to understand how the possible application of a remote e-voting system succeeds, Estonia was selected as the case of study. Its architecture, as well as the legal, social and technological issues and challenges associated are investigated in the light of the information collected in the literature review. Considering the case analysis and discussion, a set of recommendations that purpose the use of a remote electronic voting system in the Portuguese electoral system are presented and a critical analysis about the introduction of a Blockchain algorithm is made. This dissertation concludes about the advantages and disadvantages from the use of this decentralized system when compared with a system involving a third-party as the one used in the Estonian I-Voting. The validation is based on interviews and discussions with professors in the area of information systems and law, and also with a contribution of a Digital adviser of the Estonian e-Governance model

Integrated Sensing and Communications: Towards Dual-functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond

As the standardization of 5G solidifies, researchers are speculating what 6G will be. The integration of sensing functionality is emerging as a key feature of the 6G Radio Access Network (RAN), allowing for the exploitation of dense cell infrastructures to construct a perceptive network. In this IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Commmunications (JSAC) Special Issue overview, we provide a comprehensive review on the background, range of key applications and state-of-the-art approaches of Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC). We commence by discussing the interplay between sensing and communications (S&C) from a historical point of view, and then consider the multiple facets of ISAC and the resulting performance gains. By introducing both ongoing and potential use cases, we shed light on the industrial progress and standardization activities related to ISAC. We analyze a number of performance tradeoffs between S&C, spanning from information theoretical limits to physical layer performance tradeoffs, and the cross-layer design tradeoffs. Next, we discuss the signal processing aspects of ISAC, namely ISAC waveform design and receive signal processing. As a step further, we provide our vision on the deeper integration between S&C within the framework of perceptive networks, where the two functionalities are expected to mutually assist each other, i.e., via communication-assisted sensing and sensing-assisted communications. Finally, we identify the potential integration of ISAC with other emerging communication technologies, and their positive impacts on the future of wireless networks