Big Data for Social Sciences: Measuring patterns of human behavior through large-scale mobile phone data

Through seven publications this dissertation shows how anonymized mobile phone data can contribute to the social good and provide insights into human behaviour on a large scale. The size of the datasets analysed ranges from 500 million to 300 billion phone records, covering millions of people. The key contributions are two-fold: 1. Big Data for Social Good: Through prediction algorithms the results show how mobile phone data can be useful to predict important socio-economic indicators, such as income, illiteracy and poverty in developing countries. Such knowledge can be used to identify where vulnerable groups in society are, reduce economic shocks and is a critical component for monitoring poverty rates over time. Further, the dissertation demonstrates how mobile phone data can be used to better understand human behaviour during large shocks in society, exemplified by an analysis of data from the terror attack in Norway and a natural disaster on the south-coast in Bangladesh. This work leads to an increased understanding of how information spreads, and how millions of people move around. The intention is to identify displaced people faster, cheaper and more accurately than existing survey-based methods. 2. Big Data for efficient marketing: Finally, the dissertation offers an insight into how anonymised mobile phone data can be used to map out large social networks, covering millions of people, to understand how products spread inside these networks. Results show that by including social patterns and machine learning techniques in a large-scale marketing experiment in Asia, the adoption rate is increased by 13 times compared to the approach used by experienced marketers. A data-driven and scientific approach to marketing, through more tailored campaigns, contributes to less irrelevant offers for the customers, and better cost efficiency for the companies.Comment: 166 pages, PHD thesi

Cooperating broadcast and cellular conditional access system for digital television

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The lack of interoperability between Pay‐TV service providers and a horizontally integrated business transaction model have compromised the competition in the Pay‐TV market. In addition, the lack of interactivity with customers has resulted in high churn rate and improper security measures have contributed into considerable business loss. These issues are the main cause of high operational costs and subscription fees in the Pay‐TV systems. This paper presents a novel end‐to‐end system architecture for Pay‐TV systems cooperating mobile and broadcasting technologies. It provides a cost‐effective, scalable, dynamic and secure access control mechanism supporting converged services and new business opportunities in Pay‐TV systems. It enhances interactivity, security and potentially reduces customer attrition and operational cost. In this platform, service providers can effectively interact with their customers, personalise their services and adopt appropriate security measures. It breaks up the rigid relationship between a viewer and set‐top box as imposed by traditional conditional access systems, thus, a viewer can fully enjoy his entitlements via an arbitrary set‐top box. Having thoroughly considered state‐of‐the‐art technologies currently being used across the world, the thesis highlights novel use cases and presents the full design and implementation aspects of the system. The design section is enriched by providing possible security structures supported thereby. A business collaboration structure is proposed, followed by a reference model for implementing the system. Finally, the security architectures are analysed to propose the best architecture on the basis of security, complexity and set‐top box production cost criteria

Transport Systems: Safety Modeling, Visions and Strategies

This reprint includes papers describing the synthesis of current theory and practice of planning, design, operation, and safety of modern transport, with special focus on future visions and strategies of transport sustainability, which will be of interest to scientists dealing with transport problems and generally involved in traffic engineering as well as design, traffic networks, and maintenance engineers

High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications

This open access book was prepared as a Final Publication of the COST Action IC1406 “High-Performance Modelling and Simulation for Big Data Applications (cHiPSet)“ project. Long considered important pillars of the scientific method, Modelling and Simulation have evolved from traditional discrete numerical methods to complex data-intensive continuous analytical optimisations. Resolution, scale, and accuracy have become essential to predict and analyse natural and complex systems in science and engineering. When their level of abstraction raises to have a better discernment of the domain at hand, their representation gets increasingly demanding for computational and data resources. On the other hand, High Performance Computing typically entails the effective use of parallel and distributed processing units coupled with efficient storage, communication and visualisation systems to underpin complex data-intensive applications in distinct scientific and technical domains. It is then arguably required to have a seamless interaction of High Performance Computing with Modelling and Simulation in order to store, compute, analyse, and visualise large data sets in science and engineering. Funded by the European Commission, cHiPSet has provided a dynamic trans-European forum for their members and distinguished guests to openly discuss novel perspectives and topics of interests for these two communities. This cHiPSet compendium presents a set of selected case studies related to healthcare, biological data, computational advertising, multimedia, finance, bioinformatics, and telecommunications

Fostering Freedom Online: The Role of Internet Intermediaries

“Fostering Freedom Online: the Role of Internet Intermediaries” is the title of a new title in the UNESCO Internet freedom series. With the rise of Internet intermediaries that play a mediating role on the internet between authors of content and audiences, UNESCO took a joint initiative, with the Open Society Foundations, the Internet Society, and Center for Global Communication Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, to examine this recent historical phenomenon and how it impacts on freedom of expression and associated fundamental rights such as privacy. The case study research, collaboratively delivered by 16 international researchers led by Ms Rebecca MacKinnon and Mr Allon Bar, as well as 14 members of International Advisory Committee, covers of three categories of intermediaries: Internet Service Providers (fixed line and mobile) such as Vodafone (UK, Germany, Egypt), Vivo/Telefônica Brasil (Brazil), Bharti Airtel (India, Kenya), Safaricom (Kenya), Search Engines such as Google (USA, EU, India, China, Russia), Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia) and Social Networking Platforms such as Facebook (USA, Germany, India, Brazil, Egypt), Twitter (USA, Kenya), Weibo (China), iWiW (Hungary). The research showed that internet intermediaries are heavily influenced by the legal and policy environments of states, but they do have leeway over many areas of policy and practice affecting online expression and privacy. The findings also highlighted the challenge where many state policies, laws, and regulations are – to varying degrees – poorly aligned with the duty to promote and protect intermediaries’ respect for freedom of expression. It is a resource which enables the assessment of Internet intermediaries’ decisions on freedom of expression, by ensuring that any limitations are consistent with international standards

The Evolving Cyber Threat Landscape during the Coronavirus Crisis

In light of the societal changes wrought by the coronavirus pandemic, this report examines the impact this crisis has had on the general cybersecurity threat landscape during the first two quarters of 2020. This report highlights that the coronavirus pandemic has generated a set of remarkable and psycho-societal, technical, and logistical-economic circumstances upon which malicious actors have capitalized. The analysis of the COVID-19-related cyber threats conducted for this report shows an overarching degree of continuity in terms of the types of attacks, threats actors, and the volume of attacks. Adversarial behavior has, however, changed and evolved in terms of scale, sophistication, targets, and motivation. Based on these findings, this report has developed a range of recommendations for addressing key cybersecurity implications of the pandemic.Vor dem Hintergrund der durch die Corona-Pandemie hervorgerufenen gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen untersucht dieser Bericht die Auswirkungen dieser Krise auf die allgemeine Bedrohungslage im Bereich der Cybersicherheit in den ersten beiden Quartalen des Jahres 2020. Der Bericht hebt hervor, dass die Corona-Pandemie eine Reihe von bemerkenswerten psycho-sozialen, technischen und logistisch-wirtschaftlichen Umständen geschaffen hat, aus denen bösartige Akteure Kapital geschlagen haben. Die für diesen Bericht durchgeführte Analyse der COVID-19-bedingten Cyberbedrohungen zeigt ein grosses Mass an Kontinuität im Bezug auf die Arten von Angriffen, die bedrohenden Akteure und das Ausmass der Angriffe. Das Verhalten der Angreifer hat sich jedoch in Bezug auf Umfang, Raffinesse, Ziele und Motivation verändert und weiterentwickelt. Basierende auf diesen Erkenntnissen hat dieser Bericht eine Reihe von Empfehlungen entwickelt, um die wichtigsten Auswirkungen der Pandemie auf die Cybersicherheit anzugehen