Methodology of the Auditing Measures to Civil Airport Security and Protection

Airports similarly to other companies are certified in compliance with the International Standardization Organization (ISO) standards of products and services (series of ISO 9000 Standards regarding quality management), to coordinate the technical side of standardizatioon and normalization at an international scale. In order for the airports to meet the norms and the certification requirements as by the ISO they are liable to undergo strict audits of quality, as a rule, conducted by an independent auditing organization. Focus of the audits is primarily on airport operation economics and security. The article is an analysis into the methodology of the airport security audit processes and activities. Within the framework of planning, the sequence of steps is described in line with the principles and procedures of the Security Management System (SMS) and starndards established by the International Standardization Organization (ISO). The methodology of conducting airport security audit is developed in compliance with the national programme and international legislation standards (Annex 17) applicable to protection of civil aviation against acts of unlawful interference

Digital Pathology in the Clinic: Training, Validation and Patient Safety

Digital pathology is a technology with the potential to transform the way in which histopathological diagnoses are made and cancer diagnostic services are delivered. Despite this, clinical deployment of digital slides has lagged behind research and educational uses. This thesis describes some of the key barriers to widespread clinical adoption, which largely relate to a lack of guidance and information for pathologists regarding validation, training and patient safety. The evidence base for patient safety was analysed in a novel way to provide the basis for a validation and training protocol which was trialled in real world clinical settings, and guidance documents were developed and disseminated to the clinical pathology community to help with the transition from glass slide to digital slide reporting. In Chapter 1, background information and an overview of the published literature regarding clinical use of digital pathology is provided. In the second chapter, the results of a national survey on access to and usage of digital pathology hardware, in addition to attitudes to digital pathology, is presented. One significant barrier preventing digital pathology adoption has been a lack of widespread acceptance of digital slides as a safe alternative to conventional glass slides. Historically, validation literature investigating the safety of digital pathology as an alternative to conventional light microscopy has focussed on concordance metrics of glass and digital diagnoses, when arguably, it is appreciation of discordant cases that provides the clinical pathologist with the best opportunity to evaluate the scope of safe digital practice in their specialty. Chapter 3 describes a novel study to analyse diagnostic accuracy of whole slide imaging and identify key training and educational targets for novice digital pathologists. Chapter 4 presents the validation and training protocol developed by the author for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, which was subsequently adopted by the Royal College of Pathologists as an example of best practise in digital pathology implementation.1 Chapter 5 describes the deployment of this protocol to train and validate the primary digital diagnosis of cohorts of breast and neuro- pathologists. Chapter 6 introduces modifications of the protocol for use for more niche reporting scenarios: frozen section diagnosis and immunohistochemistry assessment. Chapter 7 responds to concerns in the pathology community regarding accreditation of digital services, and the use of WSI for primary assessment of screening programme specimens. The body of work presented in this thesis has generated multiple peer reviewed publications which have influenced national and international digital pathology guidance. In this time period, enormous progress has been made in converting digital pathology from a niche technology for the early adopter to a mainstream topic at clinical digital pathology conferences, and the number of deployments and planned deployments in the National Health Service and beyond has risen dramatically. The use of digital slides in routine clinical practice represents a major departure from conventional light microscopy working practices, and the author hopes this work will help the pathology community maintain diagnostic quality in a time of change

A taxonomy of asymmetric requirements aspects

The early aspects community has received increasing attention among researchers and practitioners, and has grown a set of meaningful terminology and concepts in recent years, including the notion of requirements aspects. Aspects at the requirements level present stakeholder concerns that crosscut the problem domain, with the potential for a broad impact on questions of scoping, prioritization, and architectural design. Although many existing requirements engineering approaches advocate and advertise an integral support of early aspects analysis, one challenge is that the notion of a requirements aspect is not yet well established to efficaciously serve the community. Instead of defining the term once and for all in a normally arduous and unproductive conceptual unification stage, we present a preliminary taxonomy based on the literature survey to show the different features of an asymmetric requirements aspect. Existing approaches that handle requirements aspects are compared and classified according to the proposed taxonomy. In addition,we study crosscutting security requirements to exemplify the taxonomy's use, substantiate its value, and explore its future directions

An Exploration into the Process of Requirements Elicitation: A Grounded Approach

Requirements elicitation (RE) is a critical phase in information systems development (ISD), having significant impacts on software quality and costs. While it has remained a key topic of interest for IS researchers, a review of the existing literature suggests that there are very few studies examining how the social process associated with RE unfolds. Prior literature acknowledges that this process involves collaboration between RE participants (e.g., user-reps and systems analysts) where knowledge regarding the system requirements is shared, absorbed, and co-constructed, such that shared mental models of the requirements can form. However, collaboration and knowledge sharing within the RE process has been characterized as tenuous in the literature, given that the groups of RE participants bring very different kinds of knowledge into this activity, and trust among the two parties cannot be guaranteed at any point. Despite acknowledgement of the tenuous nature of RE, we are not aware of research that has attempted to present an integrated view of how collaboration, knowledge transfer, and trust influence the RE process. Using data from two different organizations and adopting a grounded approach, this study presents an integrative process model of RE. The study’s findings suggest that RE is composed of four different collaborative states. The study elaborates on the four states, and identifies important factors that tend to trigger transitions from one state to another

An intuitionistic fuzzy based approach to resolve detected ambiguities in the user requirements document

Ambiguous user requirements are usually considered problematic in software engineering. Therefore, many studies have been conducted on its avoidance and detection. However, the detected ambiguities were resolved manually using interviews, brainstorming, and group discussion sessions among the elicitors and stakeholders for whom the software was developed. If not addressed efficiently, it gives rise to the explicit issues of additional time and cost involved and the stakeholders' availability to clarify them during multiple sessions. However, if appropriately addressed, it can reveal some implicit issues, such as tacit knowledge, hesitation, and terminological discrepancies. Identifying these implicit issues is not easy, as it requires expert elicitation skills that usually come with experience. In addition to the increasing demand for an automated approach to address these implicit issues, the recent COVID 19 pandemics has also amplified the demand to address the explicit issue of stakeholder availability. This paper proposes an implementable semi-automated approach to help elicitors address these demands. The proposed approach uses intuitionistic fuzzy logic to address hesitation and statistical functions to identify discordance and tacit knowledge. It also uses the heuristic knowledge gained in each iteration to improve itself. We implemented it in an online tool and conducted controlled experiments to evaluate our approach, and the results were compared. We achieved precision, recall, and F1 score of 0.769, 1, and 0.869, respectively, during our experiments. The results show that the proposed approach may minimize the explicit issues and help novice elicitors address the implicit issues discussed earlier

An Empirical Framework Design to Examine the Improvement in Software Requirements through Negotiation

Negotiation is one promising effort during requirements elicitation process to improve the quality of software requirements. When negotiation is claimed beneficial theoretically, it is important that the deployment of negotiation is examined and the effectiveness of negotiation is evaluated through empirical study. This paper aims at providing an empirical framework design to examine the improvement in software requirements through negotiation. Besides, it elaborates the relevance of negotiation in requirements elicitation process and its effectiveness. An empirical study method is imposed to design the framework. The design is carefully established based the selection of population and participants, the experimental protocol, threats to validity and justification of measures

The business opportunity of Internet of Things to tackle air pollution through traffic management in Europe

With 7 million people dying and $3 billion loss to the global economy each year, air pollution is among the most dangerous threats to human life, to the economy and to the environment. Research has shown that traffic is among the biggest sources of air pollution and that city dwellers are the most affected group. To deal with the problem, governments have started to resort to the use of technologies as Internet of Things (IoT), given their potential to lead to outstanding results. However, research on the use of IoT to address air pollution is scarce. This dissertation aims at studying the status quo of IoT, how it is being implemented to tackle air quality issues in cities and the business opportunity coming from its deployment. Based on ten semi-structured interviews with experts in the fields of IoT, air quality, traffic management and smart cities and a review of the literature available on these fields, this work provides an analysis of a road pricing scheme powered by IoT-sensors, able to considerably reduce key air pollutants. To study its economic impact and prove its effects on key stakeholders, a cost-benefit analysis has been performed. The analysis showed the profitability of the project on the mid-term and positive effects on the society as a whole. On this basis, the research provides governments with the guidelines for a profitable and effective policy implementation harnessing IoT potential to target bad air quality.Com 7 milhões de fatalidades e$3 bilhões de perdas na economia mundial cada ano, a poluição atmosférica está entre as maiores ameaças para a vida humana, economia e o meio ambiente. A literatura tem mostrado que o tráfego está entre as maiores fontes de poluição atmosférica, e que a população residente em centros urbanos está entre os grupos mais afetados. Para enfrentar o problema os governos começaram a recorrer ao uso de tecnologias como Internet of Things (IoT), dado o seu potencial para obter resultados excecionais. Contudo, a investigação para o uso da IoT em relação à poluição atmosférica é escassa. Este estudo pretende refletir sobre o status quo da IoT, como esta tecnologia está a ser implementada para lidar com problemas relacionados com a poluição atmosférica nas cidades, e as oportunidades de negócio provenientes do seu desenvolvimento. Baseado em dez entrevistas semiestruturadas com expertos nas áreas de IoT, qualidade do ar, gestão de tráfego, “Smart cities”, e uma revisão da literatura existente nestas áreas, este trabalho fornece uma análise de um esquema de tarifação rodoviária, proporcionado por sensores-IoT, que permitem uma redução considerável de poluentes atmosféricos em cidades. Para estudar o seu impacto económico e provar o seu impacto nas partes interessadas, foi realizada uma análise custo-benefício. Esta análise mostrou a rentabilidade do projeto a médio-prazo e os seus efeitos positivos na sociedade. A investigação oferece aos governos diretrizes para implementação de políticas rentáveis e eficazes, aproveitando o potencial de IoT para mitigar a má qualidade do ar

Direct and Mediating Influences of User-Developer Perception Gaps in Requirements Understanding on User Participation

User participation is considered an effective way to conduct requirements engineering, but user-developer perception gaps in requirements understanding occur frequently. Since user participation in practice is not as active as we expect and the requirements perception gap has been recognized as a risk that negatively affects projects, exploring whether user-developer perception gaps in requirements understanding will hinder user participation is worthwhile. This will help develop a greater comprehension of the intertwined relationship between user participation and perception gap, a topic that has not yet been extensively examined. This study investigates the direct and mediating influences of user-developer requirements perception gaps on user participation by integrating requirements uncertainty and top management support. Survey data collected from 140 subjects were examined and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results indicate that perception gaps have a direct negative effect on user participation and negate completely the positive effect of top management support on user participation. Additionally, perception gaps do not have a mediating effect between requirements uncertainty and user participation because requirements uncertainty does not significantly and directly affect user participation, but requirements uncertainty indirectly influences user participation due to its significant direct effect on perception gaps. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and limitations and possible future research areas are identified

Designing and assessing a course on prioritization and importance assessment in strategic non-routine requirements engineering processes

In this contribution, we present a course for making stakeholders in requirements engineering (RE) processes aware of the relevance of importance assessment (the thinking process that they go through while assessing requirement weights) and giving them some experience with specific aspects of the importance assessment process. We also analyze the experiences of the participants in five pilot sessions. In RE instruments, elicitation of requirement weights receives much attention. However, the processes that individual stakeholders go through while assessing weights are largely ignored or seen as a ‘black box’. In the course, participants gain experience with some common issues and pitfalls in assessing weights. Issues covered are: completeness and interdependence of requirements, causal relationships and the common denominator, handling ‘irrational’ requirements, and the meaning of ‘importance’ (priority). The course was given in various large organizations in the aerospace sector, and data on participants’ experiences were gathered by means of a standardized questionnaire. The extent to which the participants claimed they learned about the relevance of importance assessment and about how to perform it were, respectively, 2.89 and 2.72 on a scale from 1 to 5. The relevance of the various assignments was rated between 3.74 and 4.00 on a 1–5 scale. Our study indicates that the course, or elements of it, should be embedded in an organization’s work practices in order to achieve lasting effect

European Commission Initiative on Breast Cancer (ECIBC): Plenary 2016

The European Commission Initiative on Breast Cancer (ECIBC) Plenaries are an opportunity to inform representatives from the 28 EU Member States and 7 other countries participating in the ECIBC, as well as patients and other stakeholders, policymakers, and the scientific and health policy communities, about the aims, activities and achievements of the ECIBC. They also provide a platform for the exchange of ideas, feedback and input into the ECIBC. The 2016 ECIBC Plenary, entitled “When science and policy collaborate for health”, took place on 24-25 November in Varese, Italy. Its main focus was the implementation of both the voluntary European Quality Assurance scheme for Breast Cancer Services (European QA scheme) and the European guidelines for breast cancer screening and diagnosis (European Breast Guidelines). In this context, the first concrete results were presented, with the launch of the first four European Breast Guidelines recommendations on screening. The first day of the Plenary was dedicated to the JRC informing the audience about the various tools that ECIBC is developing. The second day instead, gave the floor to the audience, who informed the JRC of their views in terms of the challenges and opportunities related to implementing the ECIBC in the respective European countries. The event opened with welcome speeches from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), a moving presentation from a breast cancer survivor and reflections on how to ensure science makes its way into policy. The JRC and ECIBC working group members then brought the audience up to date with progress on the European QA scheme, the European Breast Guidelines, as well as the Guidelines Platform, the template for training on digital mammography, as well as about how ECIBC plans to monitor its impact. Participants also received in-depth explanations of the accreditation framework selected for the European QA scheme, as well as two countries’ experiences of using the ISO 15189 standard for accreditation, which is foreseen for the European QA scheme. The second day saw a focus on the individual countries represented at the Plenary. Presentations assessed how the European QA scheme could potentially fit into three different health systems (Scotland, the Netherlands, Romania), while a special breakout session gave national representatives from the 27 countries present (out of the 35 countries participating in the ECIBC) the chance to discuss implementation of the European Breast Guidelines and the European QA scheme themselves. The results, collected through questionnaires, fed into a roundtable debate on what needs to be done at European and national level to ensure ECIBC implementation. The meeting was closed by Member of the European Parliament and President of MEPs Against Cancer (MACs), Alojz Peterle. An evaluation of the event revealed that the third ECIBC Plenary met its aims to inform stakeholders: all responding participants felt that the event succeeded in providing a comprehensive overview of how the ECIBC is progressing, and what the challenges are. Discussions also provided the JRC with valuable information and feedback. The fourth ECIBC Plenary will take place once the results from piloting the European QA scheme are available.JRC.F.1-Health in Societ