Cloud for Gaming

Cloud for Gaming refers to the use of cloud computing technologies to build large-scale gaming infrastructures, with the goal of improving scalability and responsiveness, improve the user's experience and enable new business models.Comment: Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Newton Lee (Editor). Springer International Publishing, 2015, ISBN 978-3-319-08234-

Olympics Legacy: the London Olympics 2012

The reasons for proposing a London 2012 bid are outlined in the light of London city planning over the past sixty years. The processes influencing the bid for the London 2012 Olympics are investigated in respect of the lessons from Barcelona and Sydney. The role of environmental and landscape improvement is examined and the importance of legacy is described and analysed. The cost of Olympiads since Sydney 2000 are described and compared. Then progress of the London 2012 Olympics development is described relative to regeneration of East London. Finally the effects of current proposals to cut back the costs of the 2012 Olympics are considered. Olympic Games play significant roles in host city’s economy as well as other outcomes such as tourism, culture, unemployment, infrastructure. However the economy can never describe the whole picture of Olympic Games’ gainnings, it is one of the most significant sign before, during and after the event. All of the expenditures have different values at different legacy levels. Although post election budget cut-backs in the United Kingdom have placed a question mark on the costs; the proposed urban legacy make the city beautiful and London East End livable

Olympic rings of steel: Constructing security for 2012 and beyond

Academic and political commentators have commonly sought to understand the Olympics as a cultural dynamic, a "spectacle" that motivates certain actors to project their relative interests in localized spaces and as well on a global scale (Hiller 2006; Boyle and Haggerty 2009b ). Mega-events, as this argument goes, are monumental cultural events (Roche 2000) that rely on the audacity of spectacle to dramatize and condition the cultural, political, legal and economic landscape. Extending these insights into surveillance studies, Boyle and Haggerty (2009b: 259-260) position spectacle and the disciplinary mechanisms of anxieties associated with mega-events to explain the risk management practices of security planners. The dynamic social implications of the spectacle condition dramatic regimes of securitization and surveillance such that sovereign power emanates from the production and consumption of spectacle. In similar fashion Vida Bajc (2007: 1648) writes that security meta-rituals "demonstrate[s] that the process of transformation of [the] public space [of mega-events] from one of routine of daily life into a sterile area [that] has a ritual form [that] .... separates insiders from outsiders and brings about a new socio-political reality." Put another way, the "security-meta ritual" legitimates security and surveillance practices by normalizing the social hierarchies it imposes. Bajc focuses on the over-determination of dividing practices in mega-event security, but the signifying practices associated with capital are absent (perhaps due to her empirical focus on presidential addresses). Klauser (2008: 181) links commercialization and mechanisms of surveillance, but only by foregrounding the significance of "neutralized space" created by granting absolute commercial rights to event sponsors. Neoliberalprivatization and its articulation with security and surveillance, however, cannot be reduced to control over sponsorship rights and consumptive practices in particular urban "zones," nor can it be limited by the methodological temporality of the event itself

Game Theory Meets Network Security: A Tutorial at ACM CCS

The increasingly pervasive connectivity of today's information systems brings up new challenges to security. Traditional security has accomplished a long way toward protecting well-defined goals such as confidentiality, integrity, availability, and authenticity. However, with the growing sophistication of the attacks and the complexity of the system, the protection using traditional methods could be cost-prohibitive. A new perspective and a new theoretical foundation are needed to understand security from a strategic and decision-making perspective. Game theory provides a natural framework to capture the adversarial and defensive interactions between an attacker and a defender. It provides a quantitative assessment of security, prediction of security outcomes, and a mechanism design tool that can enable security-by-design and reverse the attacker's advantage. This tutorial provides an overview of diverse methodologies from game theory that includes games of incomplete information, dynamic games, mechanism design theory to offer a modern theoretic underpinning of a science of cybersecurity. The tutorial will also discuss open problems and research challenges that the CCS community can address and contribute with an objective to build a multidisciplinary bridge between cybersecurity, economics, game and decision theory

Assessing the Olympics: Preliminary Economic Analysis of a Boston 2024 Games Impacts, Opportunities and Risks

The possibility of hosting the Summer Games is sparking significant debate in our community about the potential benefits, costs, and risks associated with hosting the Olympics. With these debates in mind, the Boston Foundation (TBF) commissioned the Economic and Public Policy Research group (EPPR) at the UMass Donahue Institute (UMDI) to perform a detailed economic impact assessment of Boston's proposed 2024 Olympic bid. While the Boston 2024 proposal is a working document and should be thought of as a "proof of concept" rather than a concrete plan, there are still several components of the proposal that can be evaluated at this time. The following report contributes to the public discourse by providing a preliminary assessment of the quantitative short-term economic impacts of hosting the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Boston. In addition, this report highlights several of the potential opportunities, challenges, and risks associated with hosting the Olympic Games that are difficult to quantifiably measure at this time, but require further attention as the Olympic bid evolves over the next couple of years

Going for the Gold: The Economics of the Olympics

In this paper, we explore the costs and benefits of hosting the Olympic Games. On the cost side, there are three major categories: general infrastructure such as transportation and housing to accommodate athletes and fans; specific sports infrastructure required for competition venues; and operational costs, including general administration as well as the opening and closing ceremony and security. Three major categories of benefits also exist: the short-run benefits of tourist spending during the Games; the long-run benefits or the Olympic legacy which might include improvements in infrastructure and increased trade, foreign investment, or tourism after the Games; and intangible benefits such as the feel-good effect or civic pride. Each of these costs and benefits will be addressed in turn, but the overwhelming conclusion is that in most cases the Olympics are a money-losing proposition for host cities; they result in positive net benefits only under very specific and unusual circumstances. Furthermore, the cost-benefit proposition is worse for cities in developing countries than for those in the industrialized world. In closing, we discuss why what looks like an increasingly poor investment decision on the part of cities still receives significant bidding interest and whether changes in the bidding process of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) will improve outcomes for potential hosts