Emerging privacy challenges and approaches in CAV systems

The growth of Internet-connected devices, Internet-enabled services and Internet of Things systems continues at a rapid pace, and their application to transport systems is heralded as game-changing. Numerous developing CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicle) functions, such as traffic planning, optimisation, management, safety-critical and cooperative autonomous driving applications, rely on data from various sources. The efficacy of these functions is highly dependent on the dimensionality, amount and accuracy of the data being shared. It holds, in general, that the greater the amount of data available, the greater the efficacy of the function. However, much of this data is privacy-sensitive, including personal, commercial and research data. Location data and its correlation with identity and temporal data can help infer other personal information, such as home/work locations, age, job, behavioural features, habits, social relationships. This work categorises the emerging privacy challenges and solutions for CAV systems and identifies the knowledge gap for future research, which will minimise and mitigate privacy concerns without hampering the efficacy of the functions

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Report on the Information Retrieval Festival (IRFest2017)

The Information Retrieval Festival took place in April 2017 in Glasgow. The focus of the workshop was to bring together IR researchers from the various Scottish universities and beyond in order to facilitate more awareness, increased interaction and reflection on the status of the field and its future. The program included an industry session, research talks, demos and posters as well as two keynotes. The first keynote was delivered by Prof. Jaana Kekalenien, who provided a historical, critical reflection of realism in Interactive Information Retrieval Experimentation, while the second keynote was delivered by Prof. Maarten de Rijke, who argued for more Artificial Intelligence usage in IR solutions and deployments. The workshop was followed by a "Tour de Scotland" where delegates were taken from Glasgow to Aberdeen for the European Conference in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2017

Understanding disease control: influence of epidemiological and economic factors

We present a local spread model of disease transmission on a regular network and compare different control options ranging from treating the whole population to local control in a well-defined neighborhood of an infectious individual. Comparison is based on a total cost of epidemic, including cost of palliative treatment of ill individuals and preventive cost aimed at vaccination or culling of susceptible individuals. Disease is characterized by pre- symptomatic phase which makes detection and control difficult. Three general strategies emerge, global preventive treatment, local treatment within a neighborhood of certain size and only palliative treatment with no prevention. The choice between the strategies depends on relative costs of palliative and preventive treatment. The details of the local strategy and in particular the size of the optimal treatment neighborhood weakly depends on disease infectivity but strongly depends on other epidemiological factors. The required extend of prevention is proportional to the size of the infection neighborhood, but this relationship depends on time till detection and time till treatment in a non-nonlinear (power) law. In addition, we show that the optimal size of control neighborhood is highly sensitive to the relative cost, particularly for inefficient detection and control application. These results have important consequences for design of prevention strategies aiming at emerging diseases for which parameters are not known in advance

Towards reproducible research of event detection techniques for Twitter

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An instinct for detection: psychological perspectives on CCTV surveillance

The aim of this article is to inform and stimulate a proactive, multidisciplinary approach to research and development in surveillance-based detective work. In this article we review some of the key psychological issues and phenomena that practitioners should be aware of. We look at how human performance can be explained with reference to our biological and evolutionary legacy. We show how critical viewing conditions can be in determining whether observers detect or overlook criminal activity in video material. We examine situations where performance can be surprisingly poor, and cover situations where, even once confronted with evidence of these detection deficits, observers still underestimate their susceptibility to them. Finally we explain why the emergence of these relatively recent research themes presents an opportunity for police and law enforcement agencies to set a new, multidisciplinary research agenda focused on relevant and pressing issues of national and international importance