A review on visual privacy preservation techniques for active and assisted living

This paper reviews the state of the art in visual privacy protection techniques, with particular attention paid to techniques applicable to the field of Active and Assisted Living (AAL). A novel taxonomy with which state-of-the-art visual privacy protection methods can be classified is introduced. Perceptual obfuscation methods, a category in this taxonomy, is highlighted. These are a category of visual privacy preservation techniques, particularly relevant when considering scenarios that come under video-based AAL monitoring. Obfuscation against machine learning models is also explored. A high-level classification scheme of privacy by design, as defined by experts in privacy and data protection law, is connected to the proposed taxonomy of visual privacy preservation techniques. Finally, we note open questions that exist in the field and introduce the reader to some exciting avenues for future research in the area of visual privacy.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. This work is part of the visuAAL project on Privacy-Aware and Acceptable Video-Based Technologies and Services for Active and Assisted Living (https://www.visuaal-itn.eu/). This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 861091. The authors would also like to acknowledge the contribution of COST Action CA19121 - GoodBrother, Network on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living (https://goodbrother.eu/), supported by COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) (https://www.cost.eu/)

"Donald Trump is my President!" The Internet Research Agency Propaganda Machine

This article presents a typological study of the Twitter accounts operated by the Internet Research Agency (IRA), a company specialized in online influence operations based in St. Petersburg, Russia. Drawing on concepts from 20th century propaganda theory, we modeled the IRA operations along propaganda classes and campaign targets. The study relies on two historical databases and data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine to retrieve 826 user profiles and 6377 tweets posted by the agency between 2012 and 2017. We manually coded the source as identifiable, obfuscated, or impersonated and classified the campaign target of IRA operations using an inductive typology based on profile descriptions, images, location, language, and tweeted content. The qualitative variables were analyzed as relative frequencies to test the extent to which the IRA’s black, grey, and white propaganda are deployed with clearly-defined targets for short, medium, and long-term propaganda strategies. The results show that source classification from propaganda theory remains a valid framework to understand IRA’s propaganda machine and that the agency operates a composite of different user accounts tailored to perform specific tasks, including openly pro-Russian profiles, local American and German news sources, pro-Trump conservatives, and black lives matter activists

A Value-sensitive Design Perspective of Cryptocurrencies: A Research Agenda

Cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology have begun to transform numerous industries. Although we have seen an uptrend in the types of created cryptocurrencies, it has not yet translated into mainstream adoption., In this paper, we use value-sensitive design principles to identify values among current and potential cryptocurrency adopters. Using Bitcoin as the context for this qualitative research study, we use grounded theory analytical techniques to discover manifested values among users and non-users. We develop a cryptocurrency value-sensitive design framework to summarize our results. As our main contribution, we offer a research agenda based on the cryptocurrency stakeholders’ underlying value system. This agenda can help information systems scholars apply this value-sensitive design perspective to their own cryptocurrency research

Navigating the ethical quandaries of wraparound multi -systemic treatment (MST): A comparative study between in -home and outpatient therapies

Multisystemic treatments (MST) have become a significant force in the mental health community over the past decade. Yet, scant literature is available in regards to differing ethical considerations that may arise when working outside of a traditional office setting. The current research reviewed key ethical issues within the therapeutic relationship (i.e., confidentiality, dual roles), and extended the discussion to pertinent, often unrecognized issues endemic to in-home service modalities (i.e., confidentiality, role confusion, client diffusion, and unintentional witnessing).;More specifically, this research examined whether certain ethical violations are perceived to occur less frequently in outpatient settings compared to in-home settings. It was hypothesized that in-home therapists would report more possible hypothetical experiences with these kinds of violations than their outpatient therapist counterparts. A survey was mailed to agencies that employ both outpatient and in-home therapists in the states of Pennsylvania and Eastern Ohio to test this hypothesis. The therapists had a minimum educational level of a Master\u27s degree.;The study examines those therapists that worked with children under the age of eighteen, using in-home or multisystemic therapy (MST). Likewise, office-based therapists who treated the same age-group were sought to offer balance for data interpretation. Hence, the comparison between office-based and in-home therapist\u27s ethical dilemmas were the primary focus.;Ninety-seven therapists completed the survey and some of the results showed significant differences in both ethical perceptions and supervision standards. In-home therapists noted significantly higher perceived instances of confidentiality (p=.003) and role confusion (p=.04) ethical quandaries than their office-based colleagues. In addition, in-home therapists stated that they received significantly less individual supervision (p=.01) than office-based therapists, used clinical consultation less frequently (p=.01) and were more likely to withhold information from their direct supervisors (p=.03). Years worked in the field, state licensure, and whether or not a therapist had taken an ethics course did not appear to be significant in terms of observing ethical dilemmas in their work

A Taxonomy of Blockchain Technologies: Principles of Identification and Classification

A comparative study across the most widely known blockchain technologies is conducted with a bottom-up approach. Blockchains are deconstructed into their building blocks. Each building block is then hierarchically classified into main and subcomponents. Then, varieties of the subcomponents are identified and compared. A taxonomy tree is used to summarise the study and provide a navigation tool across different blockchain architectural configurations

Designing Monitoring Systems for Continuous Certification of Cloud Services: Deriving Meta-requirements and Design Guidelines

Continuous service certification (CSC) involves the consistently gathering and assessing certification-relevant information about cloud service operations to validate whether they continue to adhere to certification criteria. Previous research has proposed test-based CSC methodologies that directly assess the components of cloud service infrastructures. However, test-based certification requires that certification authorities can access the cloud infrastructure, which various issues may limit. To address these challenges, cloud service providers need to conduct monitoring-based CSC; that is, monitor their cloud service infrastructure to gather certification-relevant data by themselves and then provide these data to certification authorities. Nevertheless, we need to better understand how to design monitoring systems to enable cloud service providers to perform such monitoring. By taking a design science perspective, we derive universal meta-requirements and design guidelines for CSC monitoring systems based on findings from five expert focus group interviews with 33 cloud experts and 10 one-to-one interviews with cloud customers. With this study, we expand the current knowledge base regarding CSC and monitoring-based CSC. Our derived design guidelines contribute to the development of CSC monitoring systems and enable monitoring-based CSC that overcomes issues of prior test-based approaches

Identifying Website Users by TLS Traffic Analysis: New Attacks and Effective Countermeasures

Websites commonly use HTTPS to protect their users' private data from network-based attackers. By combining public social network profiles with TLS traffic analysis, we present a new attack that reveals the precise identities of users accessing major websites. As a countermeasure, we propose a novel length-hiding scheme that leverages standard TLS padding to enforce website-specific privacy policies. We present several implementations of this scheme, notably a patch for GnuTLS that offers a rich length-hiding API and an Apache module that uses this API to enforce an anonymity policy for sensitive user files. Our implementations are the first to fully exercise the length-hiding features of TLS and our work uncovers hidden timing assumptions in recent formal proofs of these features. Compared to previous work, we offer the first countermeasure that is standards-based, provably secure, and experimentally effective, yet pragmatic, offering websites a precise trade-off between user privacy and bandwidth efficiency.La vaste majorité des applications web repose sur HTTPS pour protéger, sur le réseau, les données privées de leurs utilisateurs. Nous présentons une nouvelle attaque qui, en combinant les données publiques des réseaux sociaux à une analyse de trafic TLS, permet de révéler l'identité des utilisateurs accédant aux sites web les plus populaires. En réponse à cette attaque, nous proposons un nouveau schéma, qui bien que n'utilisant que des fonctionnalités standards de TLS, permet de dissimuler la taille des données transitant et donc d'aiser l'application des politiques de sécurité. Nous avons intégré notre nouveau schéma de dissimulation de taille à GnuTLS via une API de haut niveau. Nous avons fait usage de cette dernière pour le développement d'un module Apache appliquant notre nouveau schéma à un ensemble de fichiers utilisateurs. Ainsi, nous offrons la première contre-mesure ne reposant que sur des fonctionnalités standards, possédant une preuve de sécurité formelle et efficace en pratique, et qui propose donc un bon compromis entre sécurité des utilisateurs et efficacité en terme de taille des données transitant sur le réseau

Democracy Enhancing Technologies: Toward deployable and incoercible E2E elections

End-to-end verifiable election systems (E2E systems) provide a provably correct tally while maintaining the secrecy of each voter's ballot, even if the voter is complicit in demonstrating how they voted. Providing voter incoercibility is one of the main challenges of designing E2E systems, particularly in the case of internet voting. A second challenge is building deployable, human-voteable E2E systems that conform to election laws and conventions. This dissertation examines deployability, coercion-resistance, and their intersection in election systems. In the course of this study, we introduce three new election systems, (Scantegrity, Eperio, and Selections), report on two real-world elections using E2E systems (Punchscan and Scantegrity), and study incoercibility issues in one deployed system (Punchscan). In addition, we propose and study new practical primitives for random beacons, secret printing, and panic passwords. These are tools that can be used in an election to, respectively, generate publicly verifiable random numbers, distribute the printing of secrets between non-colluding printers, and to covertly signal duress during authentication. While developed to solve specific problems in deployable and incoercible E2E systems, these techniques may be of independent interest

Leadership development of physician-trainees

Physicians frequently occupy leadership roles, yet training in leadership development in the medical education continuum is scarce (Angood, 2015; Dhaliwali & Sehgal, 2014; Rotenstein et al., 2018; Varkey et al., 2009). Effective leadership training can guide physician-trainees on a journey toward self- and others- awareness and management utilizing emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2006), integrity, authenticity (Erhard et al., 2010; George, 2003; Snook et al., 2012), communication, teamwork (Hackman, 2012; Larson & LaFasto, 1989), change management (Kotter, 1995; 2012), and systems thinking (Senge, 2006). The call to enhance leadership development of physicians across their education continuum is unmistakable (Blumenthal et al., 2012, Bronson & Ellison, 2015; Onyura et al., 2019; Rotenstein et al., 2018; Sadowski, 2018; Torres-Landa et al., 2021; Varkey et al., 2009). However, intentionally designed longitudinal leadership courses are rarely available in the graduate medical education continuum (Torres-Landa et al., 2021). This study explores the development of transformational leadership (Bass, 1999; Bass & Avolio, 1993) in physician-trainees. The Becoming A Leader (BAL) course offers trainees the opportunity to learn to exercise leadership effectively (Erhard et al., 2010). The qualitative design of the study utilizes secondary narrative data with Bass’ (1999) transformational leadership model as the theoretical framework. Research questions sought resident descriptions of individualized consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation, and idealized influence (Antonakis, 2012; Avolio & Bass, 1991; Bass & Riggio, 2006). Source documents included de-identified pre-existing written perspectives collected from residents throughout and after participation in a year-long course. Data analysis captured rich descriptions. Residents described individualized consideration for themselves and others through the subthemes of self-awareness, self-management, others-awareness and others-management. Second, intellectual stimulation included factors such as being open-minded, challenging your own and others’ beliefs, and encouraging better team performance. Third, residents described their experience with inspirational motivation through the subthemes of simple messaging, a commitment to a shared vision, and the practice of fostering community. Finally, residents described idealized influence through effective role modeling, the importance of taking responsibility, and giving praise. The results of this study indicate that longitudinal leadership training during residency, with frequent self-reflection, can be effective for developing core leadership principles