Geoinformatics in Citizen Science

The book features contributions that report original research in the theoretical, technological, and social aspects of geoinformation methods, as applied to supporting citizen science. Specifically, the book focuses on the technological aspects of the field and their application toward the recruitment of volunteers and the collection, management, and analysis of geotagged information to support volunteer involvement in scientific projects. Internationally renowned research groups share research in three areas: First, the key methods of geoinformatics within citizen science initiatives to support scientists in discovering new knowledge in specific application domains or in performing relevant activities, such as reliable geodata filtering, management, analysis, synthesis, sharing, and visualization; second, the critical aspects of citizen science initiatives that call for emerging or novel approaches of geoinformatics to acquire and handle geoinformation; and third, novel geoinformatics research that could serve in support of citizen science

Improving visualization on code repository issues for tasks understanding

Abstract. Understanding the tasks and bug locating are extremely challenging and time-consuming. Achieving a new state of the art of understanding the tasks or issues and provide a high-level visualization to the users would be an incredible asset to both developers and research communities. Open Github archive are gathered, and the data is programmatically labelled. The Fasttext embedding model was trained to map the words to together based on semantics. Then, both CNN and RNN types of deep learning architectures are trained to classify whether each tokenized instance is a source file attribute or not. The word embedding and LSTM models worked well and did generalize in the real-world usage up to an extent. The models could achieve around 0.80 F1 scores on the test set. Along with the model, the generated usage graphs are presented that are the final output of the thesis work. Some types of issues were suitable for this workflow and did produce reasonable graphs which might be useful for the users to see the big picture of an issue

Security and Privacy for IoT Ecosystems

Smart devices have become an integral part of our everyday life. In contrast to smartphones and laptops, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are typically managed by the vendor. They allow little or no user-driven customization. Users need to use and trust IoT devices as they are, including the ecosystems involved in the processing and sharing of personal data. Ensuring that an IoT device does not leak private data is imperative. This thesis analyzes security practices in popular IoT ecosystems across several price segments. Our results show a gap between real-world implementations and state-of-the-art security measures. The process of responsible disclosure with the vendors revealed further practical challenges. Do they want to support backward compatibility with the same app and infrastructure over multiple IoT device generations? To which extent can they trust their supply chains in rolling out keys? Mature vendors have a budget for security and are aware of its demands. Despite this goodwill, developers sometimes fail at securing the concrete implementations in those complex ecosystems. Our analysis of real-world products reveals the actual efforts made by vendors to secure their products. Our responsible disclosure processes and publications of design recommendations not only increase security in existing products but also help connected ecosystem manufacturers to develop secure products. Moreover, we enable users to take control of their connected devices with firmware binary patching. If a vendor decides to no longer offer cloud services, bootstrapping a vendor-independent ecosystem is the only way to revive bricked devices. Binary patching is not only useful in the IoT context but also opens up these devices as research platforms. We are the first to publish tools for Bluetooth firmware and lower-layer analysis and uncover a security issue in Broadcom chips affecting hundreds of millions of devices manufactured by Apple, Samsung, Google, and more. Although we informed Broadcom and customers of their technologies of the weaknesses identified, some of these devices no longer receive official updates. For these, our binary patching framework is capable of building vendor-independent patches and retrofit security. Connected device vendors depend on standards; they rarely implement lower-layer communication schemes from scratch. Standards enable communication between devices of different vendors, which is crucial in many IoT setups. Secure standards help making products secure by design and, thus, need to be analyzed as early as possible. One possibility to integrate security into a lower-layer standard is Physical-Layer Security (PLS). PLS establishes security on the Physical Layer (PHY) of wireless transmissions. With new wireless technologies emerging, physical properties change. We analyze how suitable PLS techniques are in the domain of mmWave and Visible Light Communication (VLC). Despite VLC being commonly believed to be very secure due to its limited range, we show that using VLC instead for PLS is less secure than using it with Radio Frequency (RF) communication. The work in this thesis is applied to mature products as well as upcoming standards. We consider security for the whole product life cycle to make connected devices and IoT ecosystems more secure in the long term

Analysis of spatio-social relations in a photographic archive (Flickr)

This thesis aims to study and analyse the complex spatio-social relations among social entities who interact together in a spatially structured social group. This aim is approached in three steps: 1. Collecting and classifying spatio-social data, 2. Disambiguating place names that people use to refer to their homes and 3. Analysis of data of this kind (numerical and visual). The source of spatio-social data used in this work is Flickr. Flickr is a yahoo photo sharing site. Users have a social network of friends and a collection of photos on their profiles. According to available statistics1 the Flickr database contains more than three billion photos, out of which a hundred million are geo-tagged. In retrieving data from Flickr database two different samples have been explored. Initially a random collection of photos that have been uploaded in Flickr during the examined periods has been collected on a daily basis. This is followed by much narrower and more precise criteria for the second data sampling that resulted in Flickr sample GB data. The thesis concludes that location dominates a significant pattern in online behavior of social entities who interact together via internet. The core contributions of this thesis are in the areas of: 1. Extracting indicative sample from very large data sets, 2. Disambiguation of place names that people use in their natural language to refer to their home locations and 3. Proposing potential new insights into behaviors of social entities with spatio-social relations. Overall, the popularity of social networking sites and availability of data that can be obtained from the web (whether people provide voluntarily or can be retrieve as a consequence of online interactions) are likely to continue the increasing trend in future. In addition, the realm of spatio-social data analysis and its visualization also continue to expand, as do the types of maps that are achievable, the visualization packages that the maps can be built with, the number of map users and improved gazetteers with more comprehensive coverage of vague terms. Therefore, the developed methods, algorithm and applications in this study can be beneficial to researchers in social and e-social sciences, those who are interested in developing and maintaining social networking sites, geographers who work on disambiguation of fuzzy vernacular geographic terms, visualization and spatial data analysts in general and those who are looking for development and accommodation of better business strategies (i.e. localization and personalization). 1 (http://www.Flickr.com, retrieved 20/07/09