Opportunistic data dissemination in mobile phone sensor networks

Situated communication technologies in emergencies are subject to decay or fail because of their inadequate services. With the advances in tiny-sensor technologies and ubiquity of smart phones, public awareness on urgent situations can be raised in more efficient and distributed ways. We center on opportunistic data dissemination schemes where the objective is to provide an operability among sensing, communication, and data spread. Such mobile networks do not require end-to-end routes or servers; however connectivity and scalability issues may last forever without determinism. We have started implementing context-aware services to understand the mobile phone carriers’ characteristics and routines in order to increase the quality of service in our collaboration and dissemination objectives. We are currently working on real implementation of mobile ad hoc networks and routing algorithms. Besides, we simulate an urban city network with different scenarios and objectives to analyze the open research challenges

Polyphibianism: Evolving Transdisciplinarity into an Imaginary Organism of Living Knowledge

Transdisciplinarity emerged from the urge to grasp the elusive knowledge in the most fertile zone in between and beyond disciplines that escapes even the most elaborate interdisciplinary operations. While interdisciplinary protocol enables experts to operate within foreign disciplines, in the extreme case as diverse as art and science (by inviting artists into scientific departments and vice versa), the production of knowledge remains confined to particular domains. To transcend these confinements and access the knowledge that evades institutionalisation Basarab Nicolescu’s Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity sets up conditions for an open structure to be grown outside the current compartmentalisation into a living knowledge. This thesis imagines a possible evolution of transdisciplinarity into knowledge to be lived internally rather than learnt externally in order to overcome the anxiety in transcending the established culture of disciplinary research. By entering the transdisciplinary zone, the identity of experts-specialists dissolves, even the crudest separation into artists and scientists becomes obsolete. From the illusion of losing control over knowledge arises the fear of a return to archaic, mystic or even shamanic ways of knowing. Far from proposing a return to shamanism in its ancient forms this thesis imagines the way of polyphibianism – an imaginary solution to navigate efficiently the protoplasmic state of knowledge that would be indigenous to culture of disciplinary researchers. With every significant discovery the disciplinary researchers already intuitively trespass into the very zone that the Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity invites them to enter intentionally. From examination of documented introspective inquiries into their act of discovery the thesis infers the necessary sensibilities and adaptabilities of the individuals to cross the borders of their disciplines. Their seemingly lost identity is temporarily restored with the term polyphibian (analogous to amphibian) designating their ability to survive and explore multiple environments. With each change of circumstances in research a polyphibian adapts by swiftly reinventing its instinctive instruments, mutating its organs of knowing, indifferently to conventional habits of thought. Through their introspective writings this thesis investigates the polyphibic aptitude of Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson and Marcel Duchamp to scout at the periphery of physics, metaphysics and ‘pataphysics, to intuitively anticipate the role of chance, chaos and complexity in both arts and sciences. A threshold of complexity has to be surpassed in order to bring the current apparatus of knowledge to life. Bergson’s insight on laughter and dreams suggests how intellect could transcend itself. The thesis proposes to consider laughter as faculty that could induce self-awareness in the intellectual apparatus while dreams are considered to facilitate self-organisation of intellect on higher orders of awareness. In Deleuzian manner of mutating Bergson’s work into Bergsonism, polyphibianism is a mutation in transcribing the code of Creative Evolution where Bergson insisted on interdependency between the theory of knowledge and the theory of evolution. The scholarly dispute on Bergsonian and anti-Bergsonian tendencies present in Marcel Duchamp’s work is revisited in the thesis by interpreting the higher dimensional Bride as a polyphibic organism of living knowledge with access to higher orders of awareness, able to guide the Bachelor’s apparatus of mechanical production and preservation of knowledge out of its predicament. Informed by peculiar Duchampian experiments that challenged both the domain of art and science the research projects in this thesis consist of an intervention at CERN that tested the impenetrability of institutionalised art-science collaborations and installation of the Interval of Suspended Judgement with high mathematical precision at the threshold between physics and ‘pataphysics. With these projects the problems of categorising researchers into artists and scientists are revealed. As Deleuze suggested, to effectively formulate the problem, to realize it in multiplicity of contexts, a new concept must be invented, a new organism must be conceived. This thesis gave birth to an imaginary organism of living knowledge in order to relieve the unnecessary anxieties and to fully engage in transdisciplinary research.Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Sloveni

Gerenciamento de nuvem computacional usando critérios de segurança

Orientador: Paulo Lício de GeusTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: A nuvem computacional introduziu novas tecnologias e arquiteturas, mudando a computação empresarial. Atualmente, um grande número de organizações optam por utilizar arquiteturas computacionais tradicionais por considerarem esta tecnologia não confiável, devido a problemas não resolvidos relacionados a segurança e privacidade. Em particular, quanto á contratação de um serviço na nuvem, um aspecto importante é a forma como as políticas de segurança serão aplicadas neste ambiente caracterizado pela virtualização e serviços em grande escala de multi-locação. Métricas de segurança podem ser vistas como ferramentas para fornecer informações sobre o estado do ambiente. Com o objetivo de melhorar a segurança na nuvem computacional, este trabalho apresenta uma metodologia para a gestão da nuvem computacional usando a segurança como um critério, através de uma arquitetura para monitoramento da segurança com base em acordos de níveis de serviço de segurança Security-SLA para serviços de IaaS, PaaS e SaaS, que usa métricas de segurançaAbstract: Cloud Computing has introduced new technology and architectures that changed enterprise computing. Currently, there is a large number of organizations that choose to stick to traditional architectures, since this technology is considered unreliable due to yet unsolved problems related to security and privacy. In particular, when hiring a service in the cloud, an important aspect is how security policies will be applied in this environment characterized by both virtualization and large-scale multi-tenancy service. Security metrics can be seen as tools to provide information about the status of the environment. Aimed at improving security in the Cloud Computing, this work presents a methodology for Cloud Computing management using security as a criterion, across an architecture for security monitoring based on Security-SLA for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services using security metricsDoutoradoCiência da ComputaçãoDoutor em Ciência da Computação23/200.308/2009FUNDEC

An Embryonics Inspired Architecture for Resilient Decentralised Cloud Service Delivery

Data-driven artificial intelligence applications arising from Internet of Things technologies can have profound wide-reaching societal benefits at the cross-section of the cyber and physical domains. Usecases are expanding rapidly. For example, smart-homes and smart-buildings provide intelligent monitoring, resource optimisation, safety, and security for their inhabitants. Smart cities can manage transport, waste, energy, and crime on large scales. Whilst smart-manufacturing can autonomously produce goods through the self-management of factories and logistics. As these use-cases expand further, the requirement to ensure data is processed accurately and timely is ever crucial, as many of these applications are safety critical. Where loss off life and economic damage is a likely possibility in the event of system failure. While the typical service delivery paradigm, cloud computing, is strong due to operating upon economies of scale, their physical proximity to these applications creates network latency which is incompatible with these safety critical applications. To complicate matters further, the environments they operate in are becoming increasingly hostile. With resource-constrained and mobile wireless networking, commonplace. These issues drive the need for new service delivery architectures which operate closer to, or even upon, the network devices, sensors and actuators which compose these IoT applications at the network edge. These hostile and resource constrained environments require adaptation of traditional cloud service delivery models to these decentralised mobile and wireless environments. Such architectures need to provide persistent service delivery within the face of a variety of internal and external changes or: resilient decentralised cloud service delivery. While the current state of the art proposes numerous techniques to enhance the resilience of services in this manner, none provide an architecture which is capable of providing data processing services in a cloud manner which is inherently resilient. Adopting techniques from autonomic computing, whose characteristics are resilient by nature, this thesis presents a biologically-inspired platform modelled on embryonics. Embryonic systems have an ability to self-heal and self-organise whilst showing capacity to support decentralised data processing. An initial model for embryonics-inspired resilient decentralised cloud service delivery is derived according to both the decentralised cloud, and resilience requirements given for this work. Next, this model is simulated using cellular automata, which illustrate the embryonic concept’s ability to provide self-healing service delivery under varying system component loss. This highlights optimisation techniques, including: application complexity bounds, differentiation optimisation, self-healing aggression, and varying system starting conditions. All attributes of which can be adjusted to vary the resilience performance of the system depending upon different resource capabilities and environmental hostilities. Next, a proof-of-concept implementation is developed and validated which illustrates the efficacy of the solution. This proof-of-concept is evaluated on a larger scale where batches of tests highlighted the different performance criteria and constraints of the system. One key finding was the considerable quantity of redundant messages produced under successful scenarios which were helpful in terms of enabling resilience yet could increase network contention. Therefore balancing these attributes are important according to use-case. Finally, graph-based resilience algorithms were executed across all tests to understand the structural resilience of the system and whether this enabled suitable measurements or prediction of the application’s resilience. Interestingly this study highlighted that although the system was not considered to be structurally resilient, the applications were still being executed in the face of many continued component failures. This highlighted that the autonomic embryonic functionality developed was succeeding in executing applications resiliently. Illustrating that structural and application resilience do not necessarily coincide. Additionally, one graph metric, assortativity, was highlighted as being predictive of application resilience, although not structural resilience

Introspection-based periodicity awareness model for intermittently connected mobile networks

Recently, context awareness in Intermittently Connected Mobile Networks (ICMNs) has gained popularity in order to discover social similarities among mobile entities. Nevertheless, most of the contextual methods depend on network knowledge obtained with unrealistic scenarios. Mobile entities should have a self-knowledge determination in order to estimate their activity routines in a group of communities. This paper presents a periodicity awareness model which relies on introspective spatiotemporal observations. In this model, hourly, daily, and weekly locations of mobile entities are being tracked to predict future trajectories and periodicities within a targeted time period. Realistic simulations are utilized to analyze the predictions in weekly observation sets. The results show that a reasonable accuracy with an increasing level of determination can be obtained which does not require global network knowledge. In this regard, the presented model can give insights for any type of ICMN objectives

Everyday mobilities, place and spirituality: Constructing subjective spiritual geographies in contemporary Bristol, UK

The New Mobilities Paradigm (Urry, 2007) and contemporary geographies understand places as sites of movement and flow that are dynamically related to other spaces (Massey, 1994). However religious places are traditionally treated as static or fixed entities and privilege institutional, rather than personal, spatialities of religion. As contemporary sociologies of religion (Heelas and Woodhead, 2005; Davie, 2006) recognise a shift from communal obligation models of social life to an emphasis on personal fulfilment and wellbeing, geographies of religion (Kong, 2010) have also addressed the individual’s spiritual practices and beliefs outside of the ‘official’ institutional spaces of religion.This research examined the interaction between everyday mobilities and personal spiritual practices of Baptist church and Buddhist meditation centre attendees using a mixed methods approach (participant-observation; questionnaires; diary-interviews) to evidence a variety of practices at home, work, recreation and the journeys made between such sites. Local and global flows of virtual, communicative and imagined mobilities in the churches and meditation centres were also identified.Participants were found to thread together a variety of sites on their everyday time-space paths into what I term ‘subjective spiritual geographies’ in which they could engage and maintain their spiritual practices and beliefs. Participants drew upon a wide range of materials and mobilities in both pre-planned ‘strategic’ and improvised ‘tactical’ sets of response to situations and in doing so created critical spaces of contemporary secular, mobilities infiltrated society.The thesis contributes to existing geographies of religion literature by evidencing the personal spiritual practices of the individual as well as local and global scales of religious places of congregation. It builds upon this literature by suggesting the implication of a range of mobilities is a key component in constructing places for spiritual practices and destabilises assumptions of the identity and distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ spaces

Radio evolution: conference proceedings

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY IN ROMANIA

The purpose of this paper is to identify the main opportunities and limitations of corporate social responsibility (CSR). The survey was defined with the aim to involve the highest possible number of relevant CSR topics and give the issue a more wholesome perspective. It provides a basis for further comprehension and deeper analyses of specific CSR areas. The conditions determining the success of CSR in Romania have been defined in the paper on the basis of the previously cumulative knowledge as well as the results of various researches. This paper provides knowledge which may be useful in the programs promoting CSR.Corporate social responsibility, Supportive policies, Romania

Forms of Memory: The Sonnet in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry

This thesis explores the extraordinary profusion of the sonnet in contemporary British and Irish poetry, focussing in particular on the work of Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson and Alice Oswald. Drawing on critical interventions by Steph Burt, who characterises the sonnet in terms of its longevity rather than any technical feature, and situating the contemporary form within the long durée of its late-eighteenth century revival (especially in Wordsworth’s work), I argue that contemporary poets have taken the sonnet up as a way of writing the past. Chapter one explores the sonnet’s fraught commemorative role in the work of Hill in the 1960s and 1970s in particular in which the form becomes a type of ‘belated witness’ to violent historical traumas. Chapter two considers Heaney, whose early sonnets are also commemorative and historical, but also increasingly, under Wordsworth’s influence, frame their commemorations in more personal, private terms, a shift that culminates in the more spiritual outlook of Heaney’s later sonnets. Chapter three focuses on Muldoon, whose relentless experiments with the sonnet mark him out as perhaps the most significant sonnet writer of the second half of the twentieth century. I read his mix of invention and obsession in relation to the form as an instance of Freudian repetition in which the past is both omnipresent and elusive. Chapter four examines Paterson, and tracks his sometimes contradictory investments in Scottish history alongside his more speculative metaphysical interests, partially derived from his translations of two crucial twentieth-century European sonneteers, Rainer Maria Rilke and Antonio Machado. The fifth and final chapter explores Oswald’s ecological commitments in sonnets marked by the influence of John Clare and Sir Thomas Wyatt. As these disparate examples indicate, the sonnet does not articulate just one past, but multiple overlapping and sometimes competing pasts

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp