Incorporating More System-Related Knowledge into Systems Analysis and Design

This paper introduces a new, intuitively straightforward approach for thinking about important aspects of systems that are being analyzed, designed, and constructed. Building on past research highlighting metaphors related to organizations, IS, and projects, it shows how considering common, broadly applicable types of subsystems (not standard IS categories such as MIS and DSS) might provide direction, insight, and useful methods for analysis and design practitioners and researchers. A conceptual model identifies eight types of subsystems that are relevant to most systems in organizations. For each subsystem type, this paper identifies relevant metaphors, concepts, theories, methodologies, success criteria, design tradeoffs, and open-ended questions that could augment current analysis and design practice

Inclusion of an Introduction to Infrastructure Course in a Civil and Environmental Engineering Curriculum

Civil infrastructure refers to the built environment (sometimes referred to as public works) and consists of roads, bridges, buildings, dams, levees, drinking water treatment facilities, wastewater treatment facilities, power generation and transmission facilities, communications, solid waste facilities, hazardous waste facilities, and other sectors. Although there is a need to train engineers who have a holistic view of infrastructure, there is evidence that civil and environmental engineering (CEE) programs have not fully addressed this increasingly recognized need. One effective approach to address this educational gap is to incorporate a course related to infrastructure into the curriculum for first-year or second-year civil and environmental engineering students. Therefore, this study assesses the current status of teaching such courses in the United States and identifies the incentives for, and the barriers against, incorporating an introduction to infrastructure course into schools’ current CEE curricula. Two distinct activities enabled these objectives. First, a questionnaire was distributed to CEE programs across the United States, to which 33 responses were received. The results indicated that although the majority of participants believe that offering such a course will benefit students by increasing the breadth of the curriculum and by providing a holistic view of CEE, barriers such as the maximum allowable credits for graduation, the lack of motivation within a department—either because such a course did not have a champion or because the department had no plans to revise their curriculum—and a lack of expertise among faculty members inhibited inclusion of the course in curricula. Second, three case studies demonstrating successful inclusion of an introduction to infrastructure course into the CEE curriculum were evaluated. Cases were collected from Marquette University, University of Wisconsin-Platteville, and West Point CEE programs, and it was found that the key to success in including such a course is a motivated team of faculty members who are committed to educating students about different aspects of infrastructure. The results of the study can be used as a road map to help universities successfully incorporate an introduction to infrastructure course in their CEE programs

Initial trust establishment for personal space IoT systems

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming a reality with innovative applications, and IoT platforms have been developed to transfer technologies from research to business solutions. With IoT applications, we have greater control over personal devices and achieve more insights into the resource consumption habits; business processes can be streamlined; people are also better connected to each other. Despite the benefits derived from the IoT systems, users are concerned about the trustworthiness of their collected data and offered services. Security controls can prevent user’s data from being compromised during transmission, storage or unauthorized access, but do not provide a guarantee against the misbehaved devices that report incorrect information and poor services or avoid conducting a common task. Establishing trust relationship among devices and continuously monitoring their trust is the key to guarantee a reliable IoT system and hence mitigate user’s concerns. In this dissertation, we propose and investigate a novel initial trust establishment architecture for personal space IoT systems. In the initial trust establishment architecture, we propose a trust evidence generation module based on a challenge-response mechanism to generate the trust evidence relying on the device’s responses to the challenges, a trust knowledge assessment module to obtain the knowledge about the device from the generated trust evidence, and a trust evaluation scheme to quantify the initial trust level of the devices. We design and investigate a challenge-response information design to determine feasible designs of the challenge-response mechanism that ensure meaningful and related trust knowledge about the device’s trustworthiness captured from the challenge-response operations. A new trust-aware communication protocol is designed and implemented by incorporating the proposed initial trust establishment architecture into existing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol to demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed initial trust establishment architecture in practice. In this work, we first study building blocks and possible architectures of the IoT and analyze key requirements of an IoT system. Based on the analysis, we identify the critical role of the initial trust establishment model and the challenges of establishing initial trust in IoT systems due to the lack of knowledge for the trust assessment to work. To address the challenges, we propose a novel initial trust establishment architecture that can generate trust evidence for assessing the initial trust level of new devices by conducting challenge-response operations within a limited time window before they are admitted to the system. We propose three new initial trust establishment models based on the proposed architecture. An implicit relationship between the responses and the challenges is assumed for the system to judge the initial trustworthiness of the devices. The first model assesses the initial trust value based on a probability associated with the device’s behavior captured from the challenge-response process. The second model investigates the initial trust value based on a binary outcome set, and the third model quantifies the initial trust level based on a multiple-component outcome set from the challenge-response process. Subsequently, we propose the challenge-response information design where the challenge-response process is investigated and designed to determine the information space of the challenger’s view on its environment so that the challenge can invite relevant responses from the target environment. Based on the design of the challenge-response mechanism, the system can capture meaningful trust knowledge about the devices from challenge-response operations at their admission phase. We finally design and implement the initial trust-aware BLE protocol which incorporates the proposed initial trust establishment architecture into the existing BLE protocol. The simulation results show the efficiency, feasibility, and dependability of using initial trust-aware BLE protocol for building a trustworthy personal space IoT systems. The novelty of this research lies in assessing the devices’ initial trust level within a limited time window, before their admission to the personal space IoT system, without requiring prior experience or recommendations. The major contribution of this thesis is that it helps the IoT business solution providers to build secure and trustworthy IoT systems by admitting dependable devices, monitoring the trust of admitted devices, detecting maligned devices, and building long-term trust among. As a result, it mitigates the user’s concerns about the trustworthiness of IoT systems and encourages broader adoption of IoT applications

Incorporating characteristics of human creativity into an evolutionary art algorithm (journal article)

A perceived limitation of evolutionary art and design algorithms is that they rely on human intervention; the artist selects the most aesthetically pleasing variants of one generation to produce the next. This paper discusses how computer generated art and design can become more creatively human-like with respect to both process and outcome. As an example of a step in this direction, we present an algorithm that overcomes the above limitation by employing an automatic fitness function. The goal is to evolve abstract portraits of Darwin, using our 2nd generation fitness function which rewards genomes that not just produce a likeness of Darwin but exhibit certain strategies characteristic of human artists. We note that in human creativity, change is less choosing amongst randomly generated variants and more capitalizing on the associative structure of a conceptual network to hone in on a vision. We discuss how to achieve this fluidity algorithmically

Incorporating LCA Method into Asset and Facility Life Cycle Management

With the increasing awareness of sustainable development, incorporation of potential environmental impact into the consideration of asset and facility life cycle management is attracting increasing attention. On the one hand, businesses now widely recognize the needs to actively engage in the sustainability arena. On the other hand, companies are now also increasingly accountable for their impacts on the society, environment and economy. This paper presents an initial framework that takes account of sustainability consequences of the products into asset and facility life cycle management. It is shown that major physical assets and facilities in different areas/sectors may have quite different behaviour, thus requiring the uses of different high-level criteria/factors. The evaluation process to incorporate the environmental LCA concept into asset life cycle management is also developed and discussed

Managing the Ethical Dimensions of Brain-Computer Interfaces in eHealth: An SDLC-based Approach

A growing range of brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies is being employed for purposes of therapy and human augmentation. While much thought has been given to the ethical implications of such technologies at the ‘macro’ level of social policy and ‘micro’ level of individual users, little attention has been given to the unique ethical issues that arise during the process of incorporating BCIs into eHealth ecosystems. In this text a conceptual framework is developed that enables the operators of eHealth ecosystems to manage the ethical components of such processes in a more comprehensive and systematic way than has previously been possible. The framework’s first axis defines five ethical dimensions that must be successfully addressed by eHealth ecosystems: 1) beneficence; 2) consent; 3) privacy; 4) equity; and 5) liability. The second axis describes five stages of the systems development life cycle (SDLC) process whereby new technology is incorporated into an eHealth ecosystem: 1) analysis and planning; 2) design, development, and acquisition; 3) integration and activation; 4) operation and maintenance; and 5) disposal. Known ethical issues relating to the deployment of BCIs are mapped onto this matrix in order to demonstrate how it can be employed by the managers of eHealth ecosystems as a tool for fulfilling ethical requirements established by regulatory standards or stakeholders’ expectations. Beyond its immediate application in the case of BCIs, we suggest that this framework may also be utilized beneficially when incorporating other innovative forms of information and communications technology (ICT) into eHealth ecosystems

Nutrition-sensitive value chains from a smallholder perspective: A framework for project design

"The Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) gratefully acknowledges permission from IFAD to re-publish that work as an Alliance Working Paper, with updated acknowledgements, author information and information on additional resources.