6,831 research outputs found
A Survey on Forensics and Compliance Auditing for Critical Infrastructure Protection
The broadening dependency and reliance that modern societies have on essential services
provided by Critical Infrastructures is increasing the relevance of their trustworthiness. However, Critical
Infrastructures are attractive targets for cyberattacks, due to the potential for considerable impact, not just
at the economic level but also in terms of physical damage and even loss of human life. Complementing
traditional security mechanisms, forensics and compliance audit processes play an important role in ensuring
Critical Infrastructure trustworthiness. Compliance auditing contributes to checking if security measures are
in place and compliant with standards and internal policies. Forensics assist the investigation of past security
incidents. Since these two areas significantly overlap, in terms of data sources, tools and techniques, they can
be merged into unified Forensics and Compliance Auditing (FCA) frameworks. In this paper, we survey the
latest developments, methodologies, challenges, and solutions addressing forensics and compliance auditing
in the scope of Critical Infrastructure Protection. This survey focuses on relevant contributions, capable of
tackling the requirements imposed by massively distributed and complex Industrial Automation and Control
Systems, in terms of handling large volumes of heterogeneous data (that can be noisy, ambiguous, and
redundant) for analytic purposes, with adequate performance and reliability. The achieved results produced
a taxonomy in the field of FCA whose key categories denote the relevant topics in the literature. Also, the
collected knowledge resulted in the establishment of a reference FCA architecture, proposed as a generic
template for a converged platform. These results are intended to guide future research on forensics and
compliance auditing for Critical Infrastructure Protection.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Panacea or producer? Analysing the relationship between international Law and disaster risk
This thesis seeks to critically analyse the relationship between international law and disaster risk.
Despite the increasing global threat that disasters present, international lawâs engagement with
their prevention remains at a relatively nascent stage compared to the development of other
areas of the law. However, the progress that has been made since the United Nationâs
International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the 1990s suggests that international law
is widely viewed as a valuable tool in addressing the issue and reducing the risk of disasters. In
contrast to this, however, relatively little attention has been paid to the ways that international
law itself may also play a role in the creation of disaster risk.
It is here that the project makes an important and original contribution, by interrogating this
presupposition and analysing the ways that international law itself may be culpable in the
creation and exacerbation of risk. Through a novel, compound theoretical lens combining
Marxist and Third World approaches to international law and insights from disaster theory, the
thesis highlights the longstanding complicity of international law in the production of disaster
risk. The thesis draws on understandings of disasters as processes that reach back through time,
and thus begins its analysis with an examination of the early history of international law and the
role of its colonial doctrines in the historic construction of vulnerability and hazards. It then
turns to modern international law, particularly within the realm of international economic law, to
examine the continuing legacies of these early developments and the ongoing role of
international law in disaster risk creation.
Overall, the thesis offers an original contribution to conversations on the connection between
international law and disaster risk. Rather than focusing only on the positive role that
international law can have in the reduction of disaster risk found in the majority of the literature,
it seeks to highlight more pathological aspects of the relationship between the two and the
implications of this. It ultimately concludes that unless the burgeoning field of international
disaster law engages more with such critical accounts of international law and their
understandings of the harm the law produces, then it will remain blind to a major source of
disaster risk creation and be unsuccessful in achieving its normative aims
Organizing sustainable development
The role and meaning of sustainable development have been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. However, there has recently been a dynamic increase in interest in the subject, which results in numerous, in-depth scientific research and publications with an interdisciplinary dimension. This edited volume is a compendium of theoretical knowledge on sustainable development. The context analysed in the publication includes a multi-level and multi-aspect analysis starting from the historical and legal conditions, through elements of the macro level and the micro level, inside the organization. Organizing Sustainable Development offers a systematic and comprehensive theoretical analysis of sustainable development supplemented with practical examples, which will allow obtaining comprehensive knowledge about the meaning and its multi-context application in practice. It shows the latest state of knowledge on the topic and will be of interest to students at an advanced level, academics and reflective practitioners in the fields of sustainable development, management studies, organizational studies and corporate social responsibility
Information actors beyond modernity and coloniality in times of climate change:A comparative design ethnography on the making of monitors for sustainable futures in Curaçao and Amsterdam, between 2019-2022
In his dissertation, Mr. Goilo developed a cutting-edge theoretical framework for an Anthropology of Information. This study compares information in the context of modernity in Amsterdam and coloniality in Curaçao through the making process of monitors and develops five ways to understand how information can act towards sustainable futures. The research also discusses how the two contexts, that is modernity and coloniality, have been in informational symbiosis for centuries which is producing negative informational side effects within the age of the Anthropocene. By exploring the modernity-coloniality symbiosis of information, the author explains how scholars, policymakers, and data-analysts can act through historical and structural roots of contemporary global inequities related to the production and distribution of information. Ultimately, the five theses propose conditions towards the collective production of knowledge towards a more sustainable planet
A Holistic Analysis of Internet of Things (IoT) Security : Principles, Practices, and New Perspectives
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Dataflow Programming and Acceleration of Computationally-Intensive Algorithms
The volume of unstructured textual information continues to grow due to recent technological advancements. This resulted in an exponential growth of information generated in various formats, including blogs, posts, social networking, and enterprise documents. Numerous Enterprise Architecture (EA) documents are also created daily, such as reports, contracts, agreements, frameworks, architecture requirements, designs, and operational guides. The processing and computation of this massive amount of unstructured information necessitate substantial computing capabilities and the implementation of new techniques. It is critical to manage this unstructured information through a centralized knowledge management platform. Knowledge management is the process of managing information within an organization. This involves creating, collecting, organizing, and storing information in a way that makes it easily accessible and usable. The research involved the development textual knowledge management system, and two use cases were considered for extracting textual knowledge from documents. The first case study focused on the safety-critical documents of a railway enterprise. Safety is of paramount importance in the railway industry. There are several EA documents including manuals, operational procedures, and technical guidelines that contain critical information. Digitalization of these documents is essential for analysing vast amounts of textual knowledge that exist in these documents to improve the safety and security of railway operations. A case study was conducted between the University of Huddersfield and the Railway Safety Standard Board (RSSB) to analyse EA safety documents using Natural language processing (NLP). A graphical user interface was developed that includes various document processing features such as semantic search, document mapping, text summarization, and visualization of key trends. For the second case study, open-source data was utilized, and textual knowledge was extracted. Several features were also developed, including kernel distribution, analysis offkey trends, and sentiment analysis of words (such as unique, positive, and negative) within the documents. Additionally, a heterogeneous framework was designed using CPU/GPU and FPGAs to analyse the computational performance of document mapping
Displacement and the Humanities: Manifestos from the Ancient to the Present
This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this recordThis is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/Manifestos Ancient Present)This volume brings together the work of practitioners, communities, artists and other researchers from multiple disciplines. Seeking to provoke a discourse around displacement within and beyond the field of Humanities, it positions historical cases and debates, some reaching into the ancient past, within diverse geo-chronological contexts and current world urgencies. In adopting an innovative dialogic structure, between practitioners on the ground - from architects and urban planners to artists - and academics working across subject areas, the volume is a proposition to: remap priorities for current research agendas; open up disciplines, critically analysing their approaches; address the socio-political responsibilities that we have as scholars and practitioners; and provide an alternative site of discourse for contemporary concerns about displacement. Ultimately, this volume aims to provoke future work and collaborations - hence, manifestos - not only in the historical and literary fields, but wider research concerned with human mobility and the challenges confronting people who are out of place of rights, protection and belonging
Energy storage design and integration in power systems by system-value optimization
Energy storage can play a crucial role in decarbonising power systems by balancing
power and energy in time. Wider power system benefits that arise from these
balancing technologies include lower grid expansion, renewable curtailment, and
average electricity costs. However, with the proliferation of new energy storage
technologies, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify which technologies are
economically viable and how to design and integrate them effectively.
Using large-scale energy system models in Europe, the dissertation shows that solely
relying on Levelized Cost of Storage (LCOS) metrics for technology assessments can
mislead and that traditional system-value methods raise important questions about
how to assess multiple energy storage technologies. Further, the work introduces a
new complementary system-value assessment method called the market-potential
method, which provides a systematic deployment analysis for assessing multiple
storage technologies under competition. However, integrating energy storage in
system models can lead to the unintended storage cycling effect, which occurs in
approximately two-thirds of models and significantly distorts results. The thesis
finds that traditional approaches to deal with the issue, such as multi-stage optimization
or mixed integer linear programming approaches, are either ineffective
or computationally inefficient. A new approach is suggested that only requires
appropriate model parameterization with variable costs while keeping the model
convex to reduce the risk of misleading results.
In addition, to enable energy storage assessments and energy system research around
the world, the thesis extended the geographical scope of an existing European opensource
model to global coverage. The new build energy system model âPyPSA-Earthâ
is thereby demonstrated and validated in Africa. Using PyPSA-Earth, the thesis
assesses for the first time the system value of 20 energy storage technologies across
multiple scenarios in a representative future power system in Africa. The results offer
insights into approaches for assessing multiple energy storage technologies under
competition in large-scale energy system models. In particular, the dissertation
addresses extreme cost uncertainty through a comprehensive scenario tree and finds
that, apart from lithium and hydrogen, only seven energy storage are optimizationrelevant
technologies. The work also discovers that a heterogeneous storage design
can increase power system benefits and that some energy storage are more important
than others. Finally, in contrast to traditional methods that only consider single
energy storage, the thesis finds that optimizing multiple energy storage options
tends to significantly reduce total system costs by up to 29%.
The presented research findings have the potential to inform decision-making processes
for the sizing, integration, and deployment of energy storage systems in
decarbonized power systems, contributing to a paradigm shift in scientific methodology
and advancing efforts towards a sustainable future
The Pragmatic Development of a Carbon Management Framework for UK SMEs
The UK's commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050 is challenged by critics citing current government strategies as inadequate, marked by a lack of concrete action and aspirational guidelines. Notably, businesses, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) which constitute about half of all business emissions, are pivotal to this goal. Yet, existing policies and standards often neglect the significant role of SMEs, who face barriers such as limited knowledge and resources in implementing carbon management practices.
This thesis explores the development of a novel carbon management framework specifically designed for medium-sized organisations in the UK to address these problems. The research adopts a practical approach through collaboration with an industry partner, facilitating a case study for real-world application.
Adopting a mixed-methods research design grounded in pragmatism, the study commenced with a qualitative study in the form of a focus group. This exploratory phase, critical for understanding SME challenges, yielded rich data revealing key management themes in strategy, energy, and data. The framework design was supported by a materiality assessment and input from key stakeholders on three major iterations. The final framework comprises three phases: establishing a baseline carbon footprint, creating a carbon reduction plan, and strategically implementing this plan. The validation process, conducted at Knowsley Safari, successfully tested the initial two phases but faced constraints in fully assessing the third phase due to time limitations.
While the research achieved its primary aim of developing a novel carbon management framework for SMEs, it encountered limitations, notably in time and the generalisability of findings due to reliance on a single case study. Future research could test the framework across diverse SME settings to establish its broader applicability and effectiveness in aiding the UK's net-zero emission goals
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