SciTech News Volume 71, No. 1 (2017)

Columns and Reports From the Editor 3 Division News Science-Technology Division 5 Chemistry Division 8 Engineering Division Aerospace Section of the Engineering Division 9 Architecture, Building Engineering, Construction and Design Section of the Engineering Division 11 Reviews Sci-Tech Book News Reviews 12 Advertisements IEEE

Cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin: Charting the Research Landscape

This systematic literature review examines cryptocurrencies (CCs) and Bitcoin. Because cryptocurrency research has not gained much attention from Information Systems (IS) researchers and needs a more vivid discussion, this review summarizes the main concepts of 42 papers and aligns them to IS Research. Although, cryptocurrency research has not reached IS mainstream yet, there is massive potential for multifaceted research ranging from protocol development to designing alternative digital currency schemes. Cryptocurrencies entail a core digital artifact and present a rich phenomenon based on the intertwining of technological artifacts and social contexts. We argue that cryptocurrencies are an alternative payment method that may replace intermediaries with cryptographic methods and should be embedded in the research areas of SIGeBIZ and SIGSEC. At the end of this literature review, we discuss some open research gaps like new business models based on cryptocurrencies or the influence of culture on cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin

A Taxonomy for Management and Optimization of Multiple Resources in Edge Computing

Edge computing is promoted to meet increasing performance needs of data-driven services using computational and storage resources close to the end devices, at the edge of the current network. To achieve higher performance in this new paradigm one has to consider how to combine the efficiency of resource usage at all three layers of architecture: end devices, edge devices, and the cloud. While cloud capacity is elastically extendable, end devices and edge devices are to various degrees resource-constrained. Hence, an efficient resource management is essential to make edge computing a reality. In this work, we first present terminology and architectures to characterize current works within the field of edge computing. Then, we review a wide range of recent articles and categorize relevant aspects in terms of 4 perspectives: resource type, resource management objective, resource location, and resource use. This taxonomy and the ensuing analysis is used to identify some gaps in the existing research. Among several research gaps, we found that research is less prevalent on data, storage, and energy as a resource, and less extensive towards the estimation, discovery and sharing objectives. As for resource types, the most well-studied resources are computation and communication resources. Our analysis shows that resource management at the edge requires a deeper understanding of how methods applied at different levels and geared towards different resource types interact. Specifically, the impact of mobility and collaboration schemes requiring incentives are expected to be different in edge architectures compared to the classic cloud solutions. Finally, we find that fewer works are dedicated to the study of non-functional properties or to quantifying the footprint of resource management techniques, including edge-specific means of migrating data and services.Comment: Accepted in the Special Issue Mobile Edge Computing of the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing journa

Conversations on a probable future: interview with Beatrice Fazi

No description supplie

On the feasibility of collaborative green data center ecosystems

The increasing awareness of the impact of the IT sector on the environment, together with economic factors, have fueled many research efforts to reduce the energy expenditure of data centers. Recent work proposes to achieve additional energy savings by exploiting, in concert with customers, service workloads and to reduce data centers’ carbon footprints by adopting demand-response mechanisms between data centers and their energy providers. In this paper, we debate about the incentives that customers and data centers can have to adopt such measures and propose a new service type and pricing scheme that is economically attractive and technically realizable. Simulation results based on real measurements confirm that our scheme can achieve additional energy savings while preserving service performance and the interests of data centers and customers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

M-STAR: A Modular, Evidence-based Software Trustworthiness Framework

Despite years of intensive research in the field of software vulnerabilities discovery, exploits are becoming ever more common. Consequently, it is more necessary than ever to choose software configurations that minimize systems' exposure surface to these threats. In order to support users in assessing the security risks induced by their software configurations and in making informed decisions, we introduce M-STAR, a Modular Software Trustworthiness ARchitecture and framework for probabilistically assessing the trustworthiness of software systems, based on evidence, such as their vulnerability history and source code properties. Integral to M-STAR is a software trustworthiness model, consistent with the concept of computational trust. Computational trust models are rooted in Bayesian probability and Dempster-Shafer Belief theory, offering mathematical soundness and expressiveness to our framework. To evaluate our framework, we instantiate M-STAR for Debian Linux packages, and investigate real-world deployment scenarios. In our experiments with real-world data, M-STAR could assess the relative trustworthiness of complete software configurations with an error of less than 10%. Due to its modular design, our proposed framework is agile, as it can incorporate future advances in the field of code analysis and vulnerability prediction. Our results point out that M-STAR can be a valuable tool for system administrators, regular users and developers, helping them assess and manage risks associated with their software configurations.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figure