Full Paper: Development Of Digital Competences of Business Students Through E-Business Learning Based on CMS Wordpress

Digital competences play an important role in the information society. According to a study conducted at the Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology, however, many students are unable to use many online applications and their abilities are largely limited to social media. In an attempt to broaden the digital competences of economics students, an innovative curriculum has been developed to teach them how to build websites on the WordPress CMS along with an e-shop. This article presents the results of research conducted at 2 Polish universities – the public Bydgoszcz University of Science and Technology and the private WSB University in Warsaw – over the last 4 years. The results of the study indicate that such new skills will allow students to enter the job market (work in CMS-based website administration jobs) or start their own business faster and better (by, for example, reducing the initial cost of setting up a website) and should be further developed. The graduates, who were also included in the additional survey, in several cases confirm that they are able to use their newly acquired competences, which have helped them in their professional and private lives

Physical layer impairments in cascaded multi-degree CDC ROADMs with NRZ and nyquist pulse shaped signals

Nowadays, reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs) are mainly based on broadcast and select (B&S) and route and select (R&S) architectures. Moreover, the most used components to implement the colorless, directionless and contentionless (CDC) ROADM add/drop structures are the multicast switches (MCSs) and the wavelength selective switches (WSSs). In-band crosstalk, amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise accumulation and optical filtering are physical layer impairments (PLIs) that become more enhanced in a CDC ROADM cascade. In this work, we investigate the impact of these PLIs in a cascade of CDC ROADMs based on both B&S and R&S architectures, with MCSs and WSSs-based add/drop structures and for nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and Nyquist pulse shaped signals. We show that the optical filtering impairment is more limiting for a R&S architecture. We also show that the ASE noise accumulation after 32 cascaded ROADMs leads to a 10 dB optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalty. Finally, we conclude that the in-band crosstalk introduced in CDC ROADMs based on B&S is more harmful than with a R&S architecture. An OSNR penalty of 1 dB due to in-band crosstalk, is reached after 13 and 24 cascaded 16-degree CDC ROADMs for, respectively, NRZ and Nyquist pulse shaped signals.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Change Policy or Users? Mitigating the Security Risks of Thermal Attacks

Attacks on passwords by thermal cameras are a poignant example of how emerging technologies can pose unforeseen security risks. Despite being easy to perform and effective, thermal attacks are not commonly understood or counteracted, hence a strategy to mitigate this is required. In this paper, we propose an AI-driven strategy to obfuscate vulnerable interfaces in the view of thermal cameras automatically, then discuss the advantages and limitations of attempting to enforce such a system-centred solution as policy, versus instead attempting to shape user behaviour

A Version-based Approach to Address Flexibility of BPMN Collaborations and Choreographies

Process flexibility is an important issue in the business process management area: it has mainly been investigated in the context of intra-organisational processes but it received little attention in the context of processes crossing the boundaries of companies. This paper addresses the issue of BPMN collaborations and choreographies flexibility, advocating a version-based approach. Indeed versions, which have been recognised as a powerful mechanism to face flexibility of internal processes of companies, are used to address flexibility of processes crossing the boundaries of companies, modelled as collaborations or choreographies in BPMN. Thus this paper extends BPMN collaborations using versions. It also introduces algorithms supporting the mapping from versions of collaborations into versions of choreographies. This paper mainly focuses on static aspects of collaboration and choreography versioning

Conducting and Mitigating Portable Thermal Imaging Attacks on User Authentication using AI-driven Methods

Thermal cameras have become portable enough to integrate into wearables, such as glasses, and can be used maliciously to infer passwords observing heat traces left on keyboards, keypads and screens. While prior work showed how AI-driven approaches can be used to further enhance the effectiveness of these attacks, we use similar approaches to detect vulnerable interfaces and obfuscate heat traces to defend against thermal attacks. At our Augmented Humans 2023 demo, attendees will have the chance to use a thermal camera to observe thermal traces on a keyboard, and observe how machine learning can both automatically identify keys pressed based and identify, then obfuscate, thermal images of a keyboard to prevent thermal attacks. This demo will provoke thought and discussion about the security risks presented by discrete, wearable thermal cameras and how these risks can be mitigated by both designers and users

User profile modelling based on mobile phone sensing and call logs

There are remaining questions concerning user profile modelling in the mobile advertising domain. The research question addressed in this paper is how to design a specific user profile model, that is a simplified model in terms of the amount of user data to be collected, that considers relevant aspects of mobile advertising such as social and personal context, and user privacy preservation. To address this question, a new user profile model consisting of three phases was proposed: (1) data collection, (2) integration and normalization of collected data, and (3) inference of knowledge about the mobile user’s profile. The most significant contributions of the proposed model are a simplified user profile model approach which tackles the dependency on other data sources like OSN platforms and local data gathering and storage that contributes to the user privacy-preserving since the user can exert more control over his/her personal data

Ontologies to Enable Interoperability of Multi-Agent Electricity Markets Simulation and Decision Support

This paper presents the AiD-EM Ontology, which provides a semantic representation of the concepts required to enable the interoperability between multi-agent-based decision support systems, namely AiD-EM, and the market agents that participate in electricity market simulations. Electricity markets’ constant changes, brought about by the increasing necessity for adequate integration of renewable energy sources, make them complex and dynamic environments with very particular characteristics. Several modeling tools directed at the study and decision support in the scope of the restructured wholesale electricity markets have emerged. However, a common limitation is identified: the lack of interoperability between the various systems. This gap makes it impossible to exchange information and knowledge between them, test different market models, enable players from heterogeneous systems to interact in common market environments, and take full advantage of decision support tools. To overcome this gap, this paper presents the AiD-EM Ontology, which includes the necessary concepts related to the AiD-EM multi-agent decision support system, to enable interoperability with easier cooperation and adequate communication between AiD-EM and simulated market agents wishing to take advantage of this decision support toolThis work has received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under project TradeRES (grant agreement No 864276), from FEDER Funds through COMPETE program and from National Funds through (FCT) under projects CEECIND/01811/2017 and UID/EEA/00760/2019. Gabriel Santos was supported by the PhD grant SFRH/BD/118487/2016 from National Funds through FCTinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

CDC ROADM design tradeoffs due to physical layer impairments in optical networks

In this work, we assess the impact of several physical layer impairments (PLIs) on the performance of optical networks based on colorless, directionless and contentionless reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs), through Monte-Carlo simulation, and considering polarization division multiplexing 4 and 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals, at 28 GBaud, for 37.5 GHz optical channels. The PLIs taken into account are the amplified spontaneous emission noise, optical filtering, in-band crosstalk and nonlinear interference noise caused by Kerr effect. A detailed model of the ROADM node is built considering two typical ROADM architectures, broadcast and select (B&S) and route and select (R&S), and two different add/drop structures, multicast switches (MCSs) and wavelength selective switches (WSSs), resulting in four different ROADM node scenarios. Our results have shown that for 16QAM signals, the B&S ROADMs with WSSs-based add/drop structures is the scenario that has the best relation cost/performance, foreseeing its use in metro networks, while for 4QAM signals, the R&S ROADM with WSSs-based add/drop structure scenario allows a larger ROADM cascade at an expectable lower cost anticipating its implementation in long-haul networks

The Automation of the Taxi Industry – Taxi Drivers’ Expectations and Attitudes Towards the Future of their Work

Advocates of autonomous driving predict that the occupation of taxi driver could be made obsolete by shared autonomous vehicles (SAV) in the long term. Conducting interviews with German taxi drivers, we investigate how they perceive the changes caused by advancing automation for the future of their business. Our study contributes insights into how the work of taxi drivers could change given the advent of autonomous driving: While the task of driving could be taken over by SAVs for standard trips, taxi drivers are certain that other areas of their work such as providing supplementary services and assistance to passengers would constitute a limit to such forms of automation, but probably involving a shifting role for the taxi drivers, one which focuses on the sociality of the work. Our findings illustrate how taxi drivers see the future of their work, suggesting design implications for tools that take various forms of assistance into account, and demonstrating how important it is to consider taxi drivers in the co-design of future taxis and SAV services

Towards Next Generation Teaching, Learning, and Context-Aware Applications for Higher Education: A Review on Blockchain, IoT, Fog and Edge Computing Enabled Smart Campuses and Universities

[Abstract] Smart campuses and smart universities make use of IT infrastructure that is similar to the one required by smart cities, which take advantage of Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing solutions to monitor and actuate on the multiple systems of a university. As a consequence, smart campuses and universities need to provide connectivity to IoT nodes and gateways, and deploy architectures that allow for offering not only a good communications range through the latest wireless and wired technologies, but also reduced energy consumption to maximize IoT node battery life. In addition, such architectures have to consider the use of technologies like blockchain, which are able to deliver accountability, transparency, cyber-security and redundancy to the processes and data managed by a university. This article reviews the state of the start on the application of the latest key technologies for the development of smart campuses and universities. After defining the essential characteristics of a smart campus/university, the latest communications architectures and technologies are detailed and the most relevant smart campus deployments are analyzed. Moreover, the use of blockchain in higher education applications is studied. Therefore, this article provides useful guidelines to the university planners, IoT vendors and developers that will be responsible for creating the next generation of smart campuses and universities.Xunta de Galicia; ED431C 2016-045Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/01Agencia Estatal de Investigación de España; TEC2016-75067-C4-1-