MOSDEN: A Scalable Mobile Collaborative Platform for Opportunistic Sensing Applications

Mobile smartphones along with embedded sensors have become an efficient enabler for various mobile applications including opportunistic sensing. The hi-tech advances in smartphones are opening up a world of possibilities. This paper proposes a mobile collaborative platform called MOSDEN that enables and supports opportunistic sensing at run time. MOSDEN captures and shares sensor data across multiple apps, smartphones and users. MOSDEN supports the emerging trend of separating sensors from application-specific processing, storing and sharing. MOSDEN promotes reuse and re-purposing of sensor data hence reducing the efforts in developing novel opportunistic sensing applications. MOSDEN has been implemented on Android-based smartphones and tablets. Experimental evaluations validate the scalability and energy efficiency of MOSDEN and its suitability towards real world applications. The results of evaluation and lessons learned are presented and discussed in this paper.Comment: Accepted to be published in Transactions on Collaborative Computing, 2014. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1310.405

To outsource or not to outsource!

In this article we will take a look at the phenomena of outsourcing as an overarching business concept that is, in short, about contracting of a specific bit of our business to a third part organisation. Consequently, outsourcing is a natural part of the make, share or buy continuum, as illustrated in Figure 1. We would, therefore, argue that outsourcing is not a new business phenomena as it has been commonly practiced since the early times of industrialisation, even though recently it has been enjoying renewed attention fuelled by the globalising forces

Leveraging academic knowledge in the innovation ecosystem

Scientific advancement and advancements in information technology have increased our capability for sharing information, and spreading scientific discoveries throughout society. In the past decade the Dutch government has been trying to stimulate the knowledge economy through various means. Among them the stimulation of the founding of the Dutch Centres for Entrepreneurship, and the Valorisation programme. However, over the years, publication volume has become the main indicator for being a successful scientist. This focus on publications and research disincentivizes scientists from activities that generate more concrete value for society. The Societal Impact Value Cycle seeks to offer scientists and others a toolbox for visualising and understanding the way innovation can be fostered, and how other processes can foster scientific research in return. It also maps the way by which an innovation ecosystem generates socio-economic value from academic activities. It should be noted that not all scientific research leads to innovations that generate value for society, and not all research is intended to change the course of events. Nonetheless, fostering cooperation between research institutes and societal stakeholders, and increasing awareness of how entrepreneurial skills and activities could not only lead to a return on investments necessary for scientific advancement, but also increase the societal impact from academic endeavours. This could benefit our society, and societies worldwide, both socially and economically. This publication will offer valuable insight and an effective toolbox for people interested in socio-economic value creation from scientific research, or, in other words, valorisation. Therewith, it lays at the heart of Stichting Maatschappij en Onderneming’s daily occupations and our close cooperation with the Erasmus University Rotterdam

Federated Access Management for Collaborative Environments

abstract: Access control has been historically recognized as an effective technique for ensuring that computer systems preserve important security properties. Recently, attribute-based access control (ABAC) has emerged as a new paradigm to provide access mediation by leveraging the concept of attributes: observable properties that become relevant under a certain security context and are exhibited by the entities normally involved in the mediation process, namely, end-users and protected resources. Also recently, independently-run organizations from the private and public sectors have recognized the benefits of engaging in multi-disciplinary research collaborations that involve sharing sensitive proprietary resources such as scientific data, networking capabilities and computation time and have recognized ABAC as the paradigm that suits their needs for restricting the way such resources are to be shared with each other. In such a setting, a robust yet flexible access mediation scheme is crucial to guarantee participants are granted access to such resources in a safe and secure manner. However, no consensus exists either in the literature with respect to a formal model that clearly defines the way the components depicted in ABAC should interact with each other, so that the rigorous study of security properties to be effectively pursued. This dissertation proposes an approach tailored to provide a well-defined and formal definition of ABAC, including a description on how attributes exhibited by different independent organizations are to be leveraged for mediating access to shared resources, by allowing for collaborating parties to engage in federations for the specification, discovery, evaluation and communication of attributes, policies, and access mediation decisions. In addition, a software assurance framework is introduced to support the correct construction of enforcement mechanisms implementing our approach by leveraging validation and verification techniques based on software assertions, namely, design by contract (DBC) and behavioral interface specification languages (BISL). Finally, this dissertation also proposes a distributed trust framework that allows for exchanging recommendations on the perceived reputations of members of our proposed federations, in such a way that the level of trust of previously-unknown participants can be properly assessed for the purposes of access mediation.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201