Internet of Things: A Review of Surveys Based on Context Aware Intelligent Services

The Internet of Things (IoT) has made it possible for devices around the world to acquire information and store it, in order to be able to use it at a later stage. However, this potential opportunity is often not exploited because of the excessively big interval between the data collection and the capability to process and analyse it. In this paper, we review the current IoT technologies, approaches and models in order to discover what challenges need to be met to make more sense of data. The main goal of this paper is to review the surveys related to IoT in order to provide well integrated and context aware intelligent services for IoT. Moreover, we present a state-of-the-art of IoT from the context aware perspective that allows the integration of IoT and social networks in the emerging Social Internet of Things (SIoT) term.This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO/FEDER) under the granted Project SEQUOIA-UA (Management requirements and methodology for Big Data analytics) TIN2015-63502-C3-3-R, by the University of Alicante, within the program of support for research, under project GRE14-10, and by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte, Comunidad Valenciana, Spain, within the program of support for research, under project GV/2016/087. This work has also been partially funded by projects from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Competitivity TIN2015-65100-R and DIIM2.0 (PROMETEOII/2014/001)

Data integration support for offshore decommissioning waste management

Offshore oil and gas platforms have a design life of about 25 years whereas the techniques and tools used for managing their data are constantly evolving. Therefore, data captured about platforms during their lifetimes will be in varying forms. Additionally, due to the many stakeholders involved with a facility over its life cycle, information representation of its components varies. These challenges make data integration difficult. Over the years, data integration technology application in the oil and gas industry has focused on meeting the needs of asset life cycle stages other than decommissioning. This is the case because most assets are just reaching the end of their design lives. Currently, limited work has been done on integrating life cycle data for offshore decommissioning purposes, and reports by industry stakeholders underscore this need. This thesis proposes a method for the integration of the common data types relevant in oil and gas decommissioning. The key features of the method are that it (i) ensures semantic homogeneity using knowledge representation languages (Semantic Web) and domain specific reference data (ISO 15926); and (ii) allows stakeholders to continue to use their current applications. Prototypes of the framework have been implemented using open source software applications and performance measures made. The work of this thesis has been motivated by the business case of reusing offshore decommissioning waste items. The framework developed is generic and can be applied whenever there is a need to integrate and query disparate data involving oil and gas assets. The prototypes presented show how the data management challenges associated with assessing the suitability of decommissioned offshore facility items for reuse can be addressed. The performance of the prototypes show that significant time and effort is saved compared to the state-of‐the‐art solution. The ability to do this effectively and efficiently during decommissioning will advance the oil the oil and gas industry’s transition toward a circular economy and help save on cost

Liberating Sexual Harassment Law

Sexual harassment law and the proposed solutions to that paradigm’s deficiencies teach a disheartening and peculiar lesson to women and gender performance minorities: “You may be disadvantaged at work because of your gender or your gender performance nonconformity. Discrimination against you is okay.” This albatross has inexplicably burdened sexual harassment law for the more than thirty-five years since it emerged as a redressable form of unlawful discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Article coherently explains the reason for it. It makes a simple claim: Sexual harassment law has failed to eradicate workplace gender discrimination, not because that goal is beyond its capacity, as is frequently claimed, but because it is beyond its scope. Sexual harassment law might have changed workplace relations (for the better), but it has not made sexual harassment an anomaly because it was not meant to do so. To accomplish its task, the Article reframes the intractability of problems within the sexual harassment paradigm by viewing the law as an educative process structured by a clear curriculum. Drawing together educational literature and sexual harassment discourse, it (1) maps how sexual harassment law conforms to the essential elements of the dominant curriculum model; (2) shows how existing critiques function within that model; and (3) proposes an alternative critique of sexual harassment law that pinpoints the main deficiency of sexual harassment in its conformity to a educational model that serves to maintain the status quo and inhibit, rather than promote, liberatory social change. On this foundation, the Article argues that the challenge is to create a “dialogical” method for law in which the beneficiaries of sexual harassment law are empowered to determine what behaviors serve to entrench their marginalization and, thereby, define their world and the change they want to see in it. Through its reframing of sexual harassment law, this Article liberates sexual harassment law from its reified limitations, creating space for a legal revolution that will liberate workers

Liberating Sexual Harassment Law

Sexual harassment law and the proposed solutions to that paradigm’s deficiencies teach a disheartening and peculiar lesson to women and gender performance minorities: “You may be disadvantaged at work because of your gender or your gender performance nonconformity. Discrimination against you is okay.” This albatross has inexplicably burdened sexual harassment law for the more than thirty-five years since it emerged as a redressable form of unlawful discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Article coherently explains the reason for it. It makes a simple claim: Sexual harassment law has failed to eradicate workplace gender discrimination, not because that goal is beyond its capacity, as is frequently claimed, but because it is beyond its scope. Sexual harassment law might have changed workplace relations (for the better), but it has not made sexual harassment an anomaly because it was not meant to do so. To accomplish its task, the Article reframes the intractability of problems within the sexual harassment paradigm by viewing the law as an educative process structured by a clear curriculum. Drawing together educational literature and sexual harassment discourse, it (1) maps how sexual harassment law conforms to the essential elements of the dominant curriculum model; (2) shows how existing critiques function within that model; and (3) proposes an alternative critique of sexual harassment law that pinpoints the main deficiency of sexual harassment in its conformity to a educational model that serves to maintain the status quo and inhibit, rather than promote, liberatory social change. On this foundation, the Article argues that the challenge is to create a “dialogical” method for law in which the beneficiaries of sexual harassment law are empowered to determine what behaviors serve to entrench their marginalization and, thereby, define their world and the change they want to see in it. Through its reframing of sexual harassment law, this Article liberates sexual harassment law from its reified limitations, creating space for a legal revolution that will liberate workers

Liberating Sexual Harassment Law

Sexual harassment law and the proposed solutions to that paradigm’s deficiencies teach a disheartening and peculiar lesson to women and gender performance minorities: “You may be disadvantaged at work because of your gender or your gender performance nonconformity. Discrimination against you is okay.” This albatross has inexplicably burdened sexual harassment law for the more than thirty-five years since it emerged as a redressable form of unlawful discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This Article coherently explains the reason for it. It makes a simple claim: Sexual harassment law has failed to eradicate workplace gender discrimination, not because that goal is beyond its capacity, as is frequently claimed, but because it is beyond its scope. Sexual harassment law might have changed workplace relations (for the better), but it has not made sexual harassment an anomaly because it was not meant to do so. To accomplish its task, the Article reframes the intractability of problems within the sexual harassment paradigm by viewing the law as an educative process structured by a clear curriculum. Drawing together educational literature and sexual harassment discourse, it (1) maps how sexual harassment law conforms to the essential elements of the dominant curriculum model; (2) shows how existing critiques function within that model; and (3) proposes an alternative critique of sexual harassment law that pinpoints the main deficiency of sexual harassment in its conformity to a educational model that serves to maintain the status quo and inhibit, rather than promote, liberatory social change. On this foundation, the Article argues that the challenge is to create a “dialogical” method for law in which the beneficiaries of sexual harassment law are empowered to determine what behaviors serve to entrench their marginalization and, thereby, define their world and the change they want to see in it. Through its reframing of sexual harassment law, this Article liberates sexual harassment law from its reified limitations, creating space for a legal revolution that will liberate workers

Data integration for offshore decommissioning waste management

Offshore decommissioning represents significant business opportunities for oil and gas service companies. However, for owners of offshore assets and regulators, it is a liability because of the associated costs. One way of mitigating decommissioning costs is through the sales and reuse of decommissioned items. To achieve this effectively, reliability assessment of decommissioned items is required. Such an assessment relies on data collected on the various items over the lifecycle of an engineering asset. Considering that offshore platforms have a design life of about 25 years and data management techniques and tools are constantly evolving, data captured about items to be decommissioned will be in varying forms. In addition, considering the many stakeholders involved with a facility over its lifecycle, information representation of the items will have variations. These challenges make data integration difficult. As a result, this research developed a data integration framework that makes use of Semantic Web technologies and ISO 15926 - a standard for process plant data integration - for rapid assessment of decommissioned items. The proposed solution helps in determining the reuse potential of decommissioned items, which can save on cost and benefit the environment

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Contextual Social Networking

The thesis centers around the multi-faceted research question of how contexts may be detected and derived that can be used for new context aware Social Networking services and for improving the usefulness of existing Social Networking services, giving rise to the notion of Contextual Social Networking. In a first foundational part, we characterize the closely related fields of Contextual-, Mobile-, and Decentralized Social Networking using different methods and focusing on different detailed aspects. A second part focuses on the question of how short-term and long-term social contexts as especially interesting forms of context for Social Networking may be derived. We focus on NLP based methods for the characterization of social relations as a typical form of long-term social contexts and on Mobile Social Signal Processing methods for deriving short-term social contexts on the basis of geometry of interaction and audio. We furthermore investigate, how personal social agents may combine such social context elements on various levels of abstraction. The third part discusses new and improved context aware Social Networking service concepts. We investigate special forms of awareness services, new forms of social information retrieval, social recommender systems, context aware privacy concepts and services and platforms supporting Open Innovation and creative processes. This version of the thesis does not contain the included publications because of copyrights of the journals etc. Contact in terms of the version with all included publications: Georg Groh, [email protected] zentrale Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die vielschichtige Frage, wie Kontexte detektiert und abgeleitet werden können, die dazu dienen können, neuartige kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste zu schaffen und bestehende Dienste in ihrem Nutzwert zu verbessern. Die (noch nicht abgeschlossene) erfolgreiche Umsetzung dieses Programmes führt auf ein Konzept, das man als Contextual Social Networking bezeichnen kann. In einem grundlegenden ersten Teil werden die eng zusammenhängenden Gebiete Contextual Social Networking, Mobile Social Networking und Decentralized Social Networking mit verschiedenen Methoden und unter Fokussierung auf verschiedene Detail-Aspekte näher beleuchtet und in Zusammenhang gesetzt. Ein zweiter Teil behandelt die Frage, wie soziale Kurzzeit- und Langzeit-Kontexte als für das Social Networking besonders interessante Formen von Kontext gemessen und abgeleitet werden können. Ein Fokus liegt hierbei auf NLP Methoden zur Charakterisierung sozialer Beziehungen als einer typischen Form von sozialem Langzeit-Kontext. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf Methoden aus dem Mobile Social Signal Processing zur Ableitung sinnvoller sozialer Kurzzeit-Kontexte auf der Basis von Interaktionsgeometrien und Audio-Daten. Es wird ferner untersucht, wie persönliche soziale Agenten Kontext-Elemente verschiedener Abstraktionsgrade miteinander kombinieren können. Der dritte Teil behandelt neuartige und verbesserte Konzepte für kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste. Es werden spezielle Formen von Awareness Diensten, neue Formen von sozialem Information Retrieval, Konzepte für kontextbewusstes Privacy Management und Dienste und Plattformen zur Unterstützung von Open Innovation und Kreativität untersucht und vorgestellt. Diese Version der Habilitationsschrift enthält die inkludierten Publikationen zurVermeidung von Copyright-Verletzungen auf Seiten der Journals u.a. nicht. Kontakt in Bezug auf die Version mit allen inkludierten Publikationen: Georg Groh, [email protected]

Ferocious Logics: Unmaking the Algorithm

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. And yet this power seems incomprehensible: understood as code, it becomes apolitical; understood as a totality, it becomes overwhelming. This book takes an alternate approach, using it to unravel the operations of Uber and Palantir, Airbnb and Amazon Alexa. Moving off the whiteboard and into the world, the algorithmic must negotiate with frictions - the 'merely' technical routines of distributing data and running tasks coming together into broader social forces that shape subjectivities, steer bodies, and calibrate relationships. Driven by the imperatives of capital, the algorithmic exhausts subjects and spaces, a double move seeking to both exhaustively apprehend them and exhaust away their productivities. But these on-the-ground encounters also reveal that force is never guaranteed. The irreducibility of the world renders logic inadequate and control gives way to contingency

Ferocious Logics

Contemporary power manifests in the algorithmic. And yet this power seems incomprehensible: understood as code, it becomes apolitical; understood as a totality, it becomes overwhelming. This book takes an alternate approach, using it to unravel the operations of Uber and Palantir, Airbnb and Amazon Alexa. Moving off the whiteboard and into the world, the algorithmic must negotiate with frictions—the ‘merely’ technical routines of distributing data and running tasks coming together into broader social forces that shape subjectivities, steer bodies, and calibrate relationships. Driven by the imperatives of capital, the algorithmic exhausts subjects and spaces, a double move seeking to both exhaustively apprehend them and exhaust away their productivities. But these on-the-ground encounters also reveal that force is never guaranteed. The irreducibility of the world renders logic inadequate and control gives way to contingency