Handbook on Climate Change and Disaster Resilient Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Practices

This handbook was developed to help governmental and non-governmental agencies involved in safe water delivery, sanitation hygiene at local level, union and ward disaster management committees, to enhance their respective capacities to cope with climate change and disaster risks. It considers the rural context of Bangladesh and provides field-level workers and practitioners practical ideas about water supply, sanitation and hygiene practices in the context of climate change and disaster risk

Integrating information and knowledge for enterprise innovation

It has widely been accepted that enterprise integration, can be a source of socio-technical and cultural problems within organisations wishing to provide a focussed end-to-end business service. This can cause possible “straitjacketing” of business process architectures, thus suppressing responsive business re-engineering and competitive advantage for some companies. Accordingly, the current typology and emergent forms of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technologies are set in the context of understanding information and knowledge integration philosophies. As such, key influences and trends in emerging IS integration choices, for end-to-end, cost-effective and flexible knowledge integration, are examined. As touch points across and outside organisations proliferate, via work-flow and relationship management-driven value innovation, aspects of knowledge refinement and knowledge integration pose challenges to maximising the potential of innovation and sustainable success, within enterprises. This is in terms of the increasing propensity for data fragmentation and the lack of effective information management, in the light of information overload. Furthermore, the nature of IS mediation which is inherent within decision making and workflow-based business processes, provides the basis for evaluation of the effects of information and knowledge integration. Hence, the authors propose a conceptual, holistic evaluation framework which encompasses these ideas. It is thus argued that such trends, and their implications regarding enterprise IS integration to engender sustainable competitive advantage, require fundamental re-thinking

Climate change and disaster impact reduction

Based on papers presented at the 'UK - South Asia Young Scientists and Practitioners Seminar on Climate Change and Disaster Impact Reduction' held at Kathmandu, Nepal on 5-6 June, 2008

Questioning, exploring, narrating and playing in the control room to maintain system safety

Systems whose design is primarily aimed at ensuring efficient, effective and safe working, such as control rooms, have traditionally been evaluated in terms of criteria that correspond directly to those values: functional correctness, time to complete tasks, etc. This paper reports on a study of control room working that identified other factors that contributed directly to overall system safety. These factors included the ability of staff to manage uncertainty, to learn in an exploratory way, to reflect on their actions, and to engage in problem-solving that has many of the hallmarks of playing puzzles which, in turn, supports exploratory learning. These factors, while currently difficult to measure or explicitly design for, must be recognized and valued in design

OnionBots: Subverting Privacy Infrastructure for Cyber Attacks

Over the last decade botnets survived by adopting a sequence of increasingly sophisticated strategies to evade detection and take overs, and to monetize their infrastructure. At the same time, the success of privacy infrastructures such as Tor opened the door to illegal activities, including botnets, ransomware, and a marketplace for drugs and contraband. We contend that the next waves of botnets will extensively subvert privacy infrastructure and cryptographic mechanisms. In this work we propose to preemptively investigate the design and mitigation of such botnets. We first, introduce OnionBots, what we believe will be the next generation of resilient, stealthy botnets. OnionBots use privacy infrastructures for cyber attacks by completely decoupling their operation from the infected host IP address and by carrying traffic that does not leak information about its source, destination, and nature. Such bots live symbiotically within the privacy infrastructures to evade detection, measurement, scale estimation, observation, and in general all IP-based current mitigation techniques. Furthermore, we show that with an adequate self-healing network maintenance scheme, that is simple to implement, OnionBots achieve a low diameter and a low degree and are robust to partitioning under node deletions. We developed a mitigation technique, called SOAP, that neutralizes the nodes of the basic OnionBots. We also outline and discuss a set of techniques that can enable subsequent waves of Super OnionBots. In light of the potential of such botnets, we believe that the research community should proactively develop detection and mitigation methods to thwart OnionBots, potentially making adjustments to privacy infrastructure.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figure

Joint Access-Backhaul Perspective on Mobility Management in 5G Networks

The ongoing efforts in the research development and standardization of 5G, by both industry and academia, have resulted in the identification of enablers (Software Defined Networks, Network Function Virtualization, Distributed Mobility Management, etc.) and critical areas (Mobility management, Interference management, Joint access-backhaul mechanisms, etc.) that will help achieve the 5G objectives. During these efforts, it has also been identified that the 5G networks due to their high degree of heterogeneity, high QoS demand and the inevitable density (both in terms of access points and users), will need to have efficient joint backhaul and access mechanisms as well as enhanced mobility management mechanisms in order to be effective, efficient and ubiquitous. Therefore, in this paper we first provide a discussion on the evolution of the backhaul scenario, and the necessity for joint access and backhaul optimization. Subsequently, and since mobility management mechanisms can entail the availability, reliability and heterogeneity of the future backhaul/fronthaul networks as parameters in determining the most optimal solution for a given context, a study with regards to the effect of future backhaul/fronthaul scenarios on the design and implementation of mobility management solutions in 5G networks has been performed.Comment: IEEE Conference on Standards for Communications & Networking, September 2017, Helsinki, Finlan