SDSF : social-networking trust based distributed data storage and co-operative information fusion.

As of 2014, about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day, and 90% of the data in the world was created in the last two years alone. The storage of this data can be on external hard drives, on unused space in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks or using the more currently popular approach of storing in the Cloud. When the users store their data in the Cloud, the entire data is exposed to the administrators of the services who can view and possibly misuse the data. With the growing popularity and usage of Cloud storage services like Google Drive, Dropbox etc., the concerns of privacy and security are increasing. Searching for content or documents, from this distributed stored data, given the rate of data generation, is a big challenge. Information fusion is used to extract information based on the query of the user, and combine the data and learn useful information. This problem is challenging if the data sources are distributed and heterogeneous in nature where the trustworthiness of the documents may be varied. This thesis proposes two innovative solutions to resolve both of these problems. Firstly, to remedy the situation of security and privacy of stored data, we propose an innovative Social-based Distributed Data Storage and Trust based co-operative Information Fusion Framework (SDSF). The main objective is to create a framework that assists in providing a secure storage system while not overloading a single system using a P2P like approach. This framework allows the users to share storage resources among friends and acquaintances without compromising the security or privacy and enjoying all the benefits that the Cloud storage offers. The system fragments the data and encodes it to securely store it on the unused storage capacity of the data owner\u27s friends\u27 resources. The system thus gives a centralized control to the user over the selection of peers to store the data. Secondly, to retrieve the stored distributed data, the proposed system performs the fusion also from distributed sources. The technique uses several algorithms to ensure the correctness of the query that is used to retrieve and combine the data to improve the information fusion accuracy and efficiency for combining the heterogeneous, distributed and massive data on the Cloud for time critical operations. We demonstrate that the retrieved documents are genuine when the trust scores are also used while retrieving the data sources. The thesis makes several research contributions. First, we implement Social Storage using erasure coding. Erasure coding fragments the data, encodes it, and through introduction of redundancy resolves issues resulting from devices failures. Second, we exploit the inherent concept of trust that is embedded in social networks to determine the nodes and build a secure net-work where the fragmented data should be stored since the social network consists of a network of friends, family and acquaintances. The trust between the friends, and availability of the devices allows the user to make an informed choice about where the information should be stored using `k\u27 optimal paths. Thirdly, for the purpose of retrieval of this distributed stored data, we propose information fusion on distributed data using a combination of Enhanced N-grams (to ensure correctness of the query), Semantic Machine Learning (to extract the documents based on the context and not just bag of words and also considering the trust score) and Map Reduce (NSM) Algorithms. Lastly we evaluate the performance of distributed storage of SDSF using era- sure coding and identify the social storage providers based on trust and evaluate their trustworthiness. We also evaluate the performance of our information fusion algorithms in distributed storage systems. Thus, the system using SDSF framework, implements the beneficial features of P2P networks and Cloud storage while avoiding the pitfalls of these systems. The multi-layered encrypting ensures that all other users, including the system administrators cannot decode the stored data. The application of NSM algorithm improves the effectiveness of fusion since large number of genuine documents are retrieved for fusion

Excavating ePortfolios: What Student-Driven Data Reveals about Multimodal Composition and Instruction

The pedagogical practice of asking students to compose in open, online spaces has grown rapidly in recent years along with an increase in institutional and financial support. In fact, in July 2013, the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) announced the “coming of age” of ePortfolios as the percentage of higher education students using ePortfolios rose above the 50% mark in the U.S. (“About”). There are a host of constituent assertions that support the use of open online writing platforms in college-level courses. These claims include that writing publically cultivates digital literacy through broader audience awareness, facilitates interactivity and collaboration between peers, and supports the incorporation and creation of multimedia in the writing process. This dissertation project challenges the assertions about both the benefits and drawbacks of digital writing pedagogy through a mixed methods approach including a survey of first-year students at Macaulay, a distant reading of the student writing contained in the Macaulay ePortfolio archive, a close reading of three student-run ePortfolio sites, and interviews with three students who participated in a self-nominated ePortfolio competition. The results suggest that students need digital literacy training, as well as specific prompt language, in order to utilize the affordances of digital writing platforms

Plug-in healthcare:Development, ruination, and repair in health information exchange

This dissertation explores the work done by people and things in emerging infrastructures for health information exchange. It shows how this work relates to processes of development, production, and growth, as well as to abandonment, ruination, and loss. It argues for a revaluation of repair work: a form of articulation work that attends to gaps and disruptions in the margins of technological development. Often ignored by engineers, policy makers, and researchers, repair sensitizes us to different ways of caring for people and things that do not fit, fall in between categories, and resist social norms and conventions. It reminds us that infrastructures emerge in messy and unevenly distributed sociotechnical configurations, and that technological solutions cannot be simply ‘plugged in’ at will, but require all kinds of work. With that, repair emphasizes the need for more democratic, critical, and reflexive engagements with (and interventions in) health information exchange. Empirically, this study aims to understand how ‘integration’ in health information exchange is done in practice, and to develop concepts and insights that may help us to rethink technological development accordingly. It starts from the premise that the introduction of IT in healthcare is all too often regarded as a neutral process, and as a rational implementation challenge. These widespread views among professionals, managers, and policy makers need to be addressed, as they have very real – and mostly undesirable – consequences. Spanning a period of more than ten years, this study traces the birth and demise of an online regional health portal in the Netherlands (2009-2019). Combining ethnographic research with an experimental form of archive work, it describes sociotechnical networks that expanded, collapsed, and reconfigured around a variety of problems – from access to information and data ownership to business cases, financial sustainability, and regional care. It puts a spotlight on the integration of standards, infrastructures, and users in the portal project, and on elements of collapsing networks that quietly resurfaced elsewhere. The reconstruction of these processes foregrounds different instances of repair work in the portal’s development and subsequent abandonment, repurposing, and erasure. Conceptually, this study contributes to academic debates in health information exchange, including the politics of technology, practices of participatory design, and the role of language in emerging information infrastructures. It latches on to ethnographic studies on information systems and infrastructural work, and brings together insights from actor-network theory, science and technology studies, and figurational sociology to rethink and extend current (reflexive and critical) understandings of technological development. It raises three questions: What work is done in the development and demise of an online health portal? How are relations between people and things shaped in that process? And how can insights from this study help us to understand changing sociotechnical figurations in health information exchange? The final analysis includes five key concepts: the act of building network extensions, the method of tracing phantom networks, the notion of sociotechnical figurations, the logic of plug-in healthcare, and repair as a heuristic device.<br/

Throughput and Fairness Considerations in Overlay Networks for Content Distribution

The Internet has been designed as a best-effort network, which does not provide any additional services to applications using the network. Overlay networks, which form an application layer network on top of the underlying Internet, have emerged as popular means to provide specific services and greater control to applications. Overlay networks offer a wide range of services, including content distribution, multicast and multimedia streaming. In my thesis, I focus on overlay networks for content distribution, used by applications such as bulk data transfer, file sharing and web retrieval. I first investigate the construction of such overlay networks by studying the bootstrapping functionality in an example network (the Gnutella peer-to-peer system). This study comprises the analysis and performance measurements of Gnutella servents and measurement of the GWebCache system that helps new peers find existing peers on the Gnutella network. Next, I look at fairness issues due to the retrieval of data at a client in the form of multipoint-to-point sessions, formed due to the use of content distribution networks. A multipoint-to-point session comprises multiple connections from multiple servers to a single client over multiple paths, initiated to retrieve a single application-level object. I investigate fairness of rate allocation from a session point of view, and propose fairness definitions and algorithms to achieve these definitions. Finally, I consider the problem of designing an overlay network for content distribution, which is fair to competing overlay networks, while maximizing the total end-to-end throughput of the data it carries. As a first step, I investigate this design problem for a single path in an Overlay-TCP network. I propose two schemes that dynamically provision the number of TCP connections on each hop of an Overlay-TCP path to maximize the end-to-end throughput using few extraneous connections. Next, I design an Overlay-TCP network, with the secondary goal of intra-overlay network fairness. I propose four schemes for deciding the number of TCP connections to be used on each overlay hop. I show that one can vary the proportion of sharing between competing overlay networks by varying the maximum number of connections allowed on overlay hops in each competing network.Ph.D.Committee Co-Chair: Ammar, Mostafa; Committee Co-Chair: Zegura, Ellen; Committee Member: Dovrolis, Constantinos; Committee Member: Rabinovich, Misha; Committee Member: Riley, Georg

On Personal Storage Systems: Architecture and Design Considerations

Actualment, els usuaris necessiten grans quantitats d’espai d’emmagatzematge remot per guardar la seva informació personal. En aquesta dissertació, estudiarem dues arquitectures emergents de sistemes d’emmagatzematge d’informació personal: els Núvols Personals (centralitzats) i els sistemes d’emmagatzematge social (descentralitzats). A la Part I d'aquesta tesi, contribuïm desvelant l’operació interna d’un Núvol Personal d’escala global, anomenat UbuntuOne (U1), incloent-hi la seva arquitectura, el seu servei de metadades i les interaccions d’emmagatzematge de dades. A més, proporcionem una anàlisi de la part de servidor d’U1 on estudiem la càrrega del sistema, el comportament dels usuaris i el rendiment del seu servei de metadades. També suggerim tota una sèrie de millores potencials al sistema que poden beneficiar sistemes similars. D'altra banda, en aquesta tesi també contribuïm mesurant i analitzant la qualitat de servei (p.e., velocitat, variabilitat) de les transferències sobre les REST APIs oferides pels Núvols Personals. A més, durant aquest estudi, ens hem adonat que aquestes interfícies poden ser objecte d’abús quan són utilitzades sobre els comptes gratuïts que normalment ofereixen aquests serveis. Això ha motivat l’estudi d’aquesta vulnerabilitat, així com de potencials contramesures. A la Part II d'aquesta dissertació, la nostra primera contribució és analitzar la qualitat de servei que els sistemes d’emmagatzematge social poden proporcionar en termes de disponibilitat de dades, velocitat de transferència i balanceig de la càrrega. El nostre interès principal és entendre com fenòmens intrínsecs, com les dinàmiques de connexió dels usuaris o l’estructura de la xarxa social, limiten el rendiment d’aquests sistemes. També proposem nous mecanismes de manegament de dades per millorar aquestes limitacions. Finalment, dissenyem una arquitectura híbrida que combina recursos del Núvol i dels usuaris. Aquesta arquitectura té com a objectiu millorar la qualitat de servei del sistema i deixa als usuaris decidir la quantitat de recursos utilitzats del Núvol, o en altres paraules, és una decisió entre control de les seves dades i rendiment.Los usuarios cada vez necesitan espacios mayores de almacenamiento en línea para guardar su información personal. Este reto motiva a los investigadores a diseñar y evaluar nuevas infraestructuras de almacenamiento de datos personales. En esta tesis, nos centramos en dos arquitecturas emergentes de almacenamiento de datos personales: las Nubes Personales (centralización) y los sistemas de almacenamiento social (descentralización). Creemos que, pese a su creciente popularidad, estos sistemas requieren de un mayor estudio científico. En la Parte I de esta disertación, examinamos aspectos referentes a la operación interna y el rendimiento de varias Nubes Personales. Concretamente, nuestra primera contribución es desvelar la operación interna e infraestructura de una Nube Personal de gran escala (UbuntuOne, U1). Además, proporcionamos un estudio de la actividad interna de U1 que incluye la carga diaria soportada, el comportamiento de los usuarios y el rendimiento de su sistema de metadatos. También sugerimos mejoras sobre U1 que pueden ser de utilidad en sistemas similares. Por otra parte, en esta tesis medimos y caracterizamos el rendimiento del servicio de REST APIs ofrecido por varias Nubes Personales (velocidad de transferencia, variabilidad, etc.). También demostramos que la combinación de REST APIs sobre cuentas gratuitas de usuario puede dar lugar a abusos por parte de usuarios malintencionados. Esto nos motiva a proponer mecanismos para limitar el impacto de esta vulnerabilidad. En la Parte II de esta tesis, estudiamos la calidad de servicio que pueden ofrecer los sistemas de almacenamiento social en términos de disponibilidad de datos, balanceo de carga y tiempos de transferencia. Nuestro interés principal es entender la manera en que fenómenos intrínsecos, como las dinámicas de conexión de los usuarios o la estructura de su red social, limitan el rendimiento de estos sistemas. También proponemos nuevos mecanismos de gestión de datos para mejorar esas limitaciones. Finalmente, diseñamos y evaluamos una arquitectura híbrida para mejorar la calidad de servicio de los sistemas de almacenamiento social que combina recursos de usuarios y de la Nube. Esta arquitectura permite al usuario decidir su equilibrio entre control de sus datos y rendimiento.Increasingly, end-users demand larger amounts of online storage space to store their personal information. This challenge motivates researchers to devise novel personal storage infrastructures. In this thesis, we focus on two popular personal storage architectures: Personal Clouds (centralized) and social storage systems (decentralized). In our view, despite their growing popularity among users and researchers, there still remain some critical aspects to address regarding these systems. In the Part I of this dissertation, we examine various aspects of the internal operation and performance of various Personal Clouds. Concretely, we first contribute by unveiling the internal structure of a global-scale Personal Cloud, namely UbuntuOne (U1). Moreover, we provide a back-end analysis of U1 that includes the study of the storage workload, the user behavior and the performance of the U1 metadata store. We also suggest improvements to U1 (storage optimizations, user behavior detection and security) that can also benefit similar systems. From an external viewpoint, we actively measure various Personal Clouds through their REST APIs for characterizing their QoS, such as transfer speed, variability and failure rate. We also demonstrate that combining open APIs and free accounts may lead to abuse by malicious parties, which motivates us to propose countermeasures to limit the impact of abusive applications in this scenario. In the Part II of this thesis, we study the storage QoS of social storage systems in terms of data availability, load balancing and transfer times. Our main interest is to understand the way intrinsic phenomena, such as the dynamics of users and the structure of their social relationships, limit the storage QoS of these systems, as well as to research novel mechanisms to ameliorate these limitations. Finally, we design and evaluate a hybrid architecture to enhance the QoS achieved by a social storage system that combines user resources and cloud storage to let users infer the right balance between user control and QoS

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

Proxies: the cultural work of standing in

How those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included—and who is excluded—in the future. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Our world is built on an array of standards we are compelled to share. In Proxies, Dylan Mulvin examines how we arrive at those standards, asking, “To whom and to what do we delegate the power to stand in for the world?” Mulvin shows how those with the power to design technology, in the very moment of design, are allowed to imagine who is included—and who is excluded—in the future. For designers of technology, some bits of the world end up standing in for other bits, standards with which they build and calibrate. These “proxies” carry specific values, even as they disappear from view. Mulvin explores the ways technologies, standards, and infrastructures inescapably reflect the cultural milieus of their bureaucratic homes. Drawing on archival research, he investigates some of the basic building-blocks of our shared infrastructures. He tells the history of technology through the labor and communal practices of, among others, the people who clean kilograms to make the metric system run, the women who pose as test images, and the actors who embody disease and disability for medical students. Each case maps the ways standards and infrastructure rely on prototypical ideas of whiteness, able-bodiedness, and purity to control and contain the messiness of reality. Standards and infrastructures, Mulvin argues, shape and distort the possibilities of representation, the meaning of difference, and the levers of change and social justice

Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge

The intersection of scholarly communication librarianship and open education offers a unique opportunity to expand knowledge of scholarly communication topics in both education and practice. Open resources can address the gap in teaching timely and critical scholarly communication topics—copyright in teaching and research environments, academic publishing, emerging modes of scholarship, impact measurement—while increasing access to resources and equitable participation in education and scholarly communication. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is an open textbook and practitioner’s guide that collects theory, practice, and case studies from nearly 80 experts in scholarly communication and open education. Divided into three parts: *What is Scholarly Communication? *Scholarly Communication and Open Culture *Voices from the Field: Perspectives, Intersections, and Case Studies The book delves into the economic, social, policy, and legal aspects of scholarly communication as well as open access, open data, open education, and open science and infrastructure. Practitioners provide insight into the relationship between university presses and academic libraries, defining collection development as operational scholarly communication, and promotion and tenure and the challenge for open access. Scholarly Communication Librarianship and Open Knowledge is a thorough guide meant to increase instruction on scholarly communication and open education issues and practices so library workers can continue to meet the changing needs of students and faculty. It is also a political statement about the future to which we aspire and a challenge to the industrial, commercial, capitalistic tendencies encroaching on higher education. Students, readers, educators, and adaptors of this resource can find and embrace these themes throughout the text and embody them in their work