Recent advances in security and privacy in big data

Big data has become an important topic in science, engineering, medicine, healthcare, finance, business and ultimately society itself. Big data refers to the massive amount of digital information stored or transmitted in computer systems. Approximately, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. Almost 90% of data in the world today are created in the last two years alone. Security and privacy issues becomes more critical due to large volumes and variety, due to data hosted in large-scale cloud infrastructures, diversity of data sources and formats, streaming nature of data acquisition and high volume inter-cloud migration. In large-scale cloud infrastructures, a diversity of software platforms provides more opportunities to attackers. Traditional security mechanisms, which are usually invented for securing small-scale data, are inadequate. With a rapid growth of big data applications, it has become critical to introduce new security technology to accommodate the need of big data applications. The objective of this special issue is to capture the latest advances in this research field

Unified Description for Network Information Hiding Methods

Until now hiding methods in network steganography have been described in arbitrary ways, making them difficult to compare. For instance, some publications describe classical channel characteristics, such as robustness and bandwidth, while others describe the embedding of hidden information. We introduce the first unified description of hiding methods in network steganography. Our description method is based on a comprehensive analysis of the existing publications in the domain. When our description method is applied by the research community, future publications will be easier to categorize, compare and extend. Our method can also serve as a basis to evaluate the novelty of hiding methods proposed in the future.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 1 table; currently under revie

Virtual Environments for Collaborative Innovation and Learning

Retalis, S., & Sloep, P. B. (2011). Virtual Environments for Collaborative Innovation and Learning. Journal of Universal Computer Science (J.UCS), 17(12), 1634-1637.Networked technologies, especially social software applications, provide new affordances that facilitate collaborative creativity among staff members of organizations. This editorial paper gives an overview of the scope of this special issue which focuses on the design of virtual environments for collaborative innovation and learning

Creating Links into the Future

We are approaching an era where research materials will be stored more and more as digital resources on the World Wide Web. This of course will enable easier access to online publications. As the number of electronic publications expands, it will, however, become a challenge for individuals to find related or relevant papers. Related papers could be papers written by the same team of authors or by one of the authors, or even papers that deal with the same topic but were written by other authors. This, of course, raises the issue of linking to papers forward in time, or as we call it “links into the future”. To be concrete, while reading a paper written in the year 1980, it would be nice to know if the same author has written another related paper in 1990’s or if the same author has written a paper earlier, all this without making an explicit search. Based on the ascertained interest of a person reading a particular paper from a digital repository, an auto-suggestion facility could be useful to indicate papers in the same area, category and subject that might potentially be of interest to the reader. One is typically interested in finding related papers by the same author or by one of the authors of a paper. This feature can be implemented in two ways. The first is by creating links from this paper to all the relevant papers and updating it periodically for new papers appearing on the World Wide Web. Another way is by going through the references of all papers appearing on the WWW. Based on the references, one can create mutual links to the papers that are referred to

Applications of Mash-ups for a Digital Journal

The WWW is currently experiencing a revolutionary growth due to numerous emerging tools, techniques and concepts. Digital journals thus need to transform themselves to cope with this evolution of the web. With their growing information size and access, conventional techniques for managing a journal and supporting authors and readers are becoming insufficient. Journals of the future need to provide innovative administrative tools in helping its managers to ensure quality. They also need to provide better facilities for assisting authors and readers in making decisions regarding their submission of papers and in providing novel navigational features for finding relevant publications and collaborators in particular areas of interest. In this paper, we explore an innovative solution to address these problems by using an emerging Web 2.0 technology. We explore the application of mash-ups for J.UCS - the Journal of Universal Computer Science and encourage readers and authors to try out the applications (see section 11 Conclusions). J.UCS can then serve as a model for contemporary electronic journals

Mashups : Emerging application development paradigm for a digital journal

The WWW is currently experiencing a revolutionary growth due to its increasing participative community software applications. This paper highlights an emerging application development paradigm on the WWW, called mashup. As blogs have enabled anyone to become a publisher, mashups stimulate web development by allowing anyone to combine existing data to develop web applications. Current applications of mashups include tracking of events such as crime, hurricanes, earthquakes, meta-search integration of data and media feeds, interactive games, and as an organizer for web resources. The implications of this emerging web integration and structuring paradigm remains yet to be explored fully. This paper describes mashups from a number of angles, highlighting current developments while providing sufficient illustrations to indicate its potential implications. It also highlights the role of mashups in complementing and enhancing digital journals by providing insights into the quality academic content, extent of coverage, and the enabling of expanded services. We present pioneering initiatives for the Journal of Universal Computer Science in our efforts to harness the collective intelligence of a collaborative scholarly network

Advances of Scientific Research on Technology Enhanced Learning in Social Networks and Mobile Contexts: Towards High Effective Educational Platforms for Next Generation Education

This editorial presents the latest advances of scientific Research on Technology enhanced learning in social networks and mobile contexts. It summarizes the key finding and promotes three main pillars for future scientific contribution to the domain namely: Enabling Technologies, Educational Strategies, and Next Generation Social Networks for Educational Purposes. It can serve as a position document for scientific debate fostering international collaboration and empirical research in the various aspects of the well-defined agenda. It can also serve as a reference edition for researchers interested in the adoption of Social Networks, in the Education Sector