48 research outputs found

    ATHENA Research Book, Volume 2

    Get PDF
    ATHENA European University is an association of nine higher education institutions with the mission of promoting excellence in research and innovation by enabling international cooperation. The acronym ATHENA stands for Association of Advanced Technologies in Higher Education. Partner institutions are from France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal and Slovenia: University of Orléans, University of Siegen, Hellenic Mediterranean University, Niccolò Cusano University, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Polytechnic Institute of Porto and University of Maribor. In 2022, two institutions joined the alliance: the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University from Poland and the University of Vigo from Spain. Also in 2022, an institution from Austria joined the alliance as an associate member: Carinthia University of Applied Sciences. This research book presents a selection of the research activities of ATHENA University's partners. It contains an overview of the research activities of individual members, a selection of the most important bibliographic works of members, peer-reviewed student theses, a descriptive list of ATHENA lectures and reports from individual working sections of the ATHENA project. The ATHENA Research Book provides a platform that encourages collaborative and interdisciplinary research projects by advanced and early career researchers

    Internet of Things and the Law: Legal Strategies for Consumer-Centric Smart Technologies

    Get PDF
    Internet of Things and the Law: Legal Strategies for Consumer-Centric Smart Technologies is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the legal issues in the Internet of Things (IoT). For decades, the decreasing importance of tangible wealth and power – and the increasing significance of their disembodied counterparts – has been the subject of much legal research. For some time now, legal scholars have grappled with how laws drafted for tangible property and predigital ‘offline’ technologies can cope with dematerialisation, digitalisation, and the internet. As dematerialisation continues, this book aims to illuminate the opposite movement: rematerialisation, namely, the return of data, knowledge, and power within a physical ‘smart’ world. This development frames the book’s central question: can the law steer rematerialisation in a human-centric and socially just direction? To answer it, the book focuses on the IoT, the sociotechnological phenomenon that is primarily responsible for this shift. After a thorough analysis of how existing laws can be interpreted to empower IoT end users, Noto La Diega leaves us with the fundamental question of what happens when the law fails us and concludes with a call for collective resistance against ‘smart’ capitalism

    Air Traffic Management Abbreviation Compendium

    Get PDF
    As in all fields of work, an unmanageable number of abbreviations are used today in aviation for terms, definitions, commands, standards and technical descriptions. This applies in general to the areas of aeronautical communication, navigation and surveillance, cockpit and air traffic control working positions, passenger and cargo transport, and all other areas of flight planning, organization and guidance. In addition, many abbreviations are used more than once or have different meanings in different languages. In order to obtain an overview of the most common abbreviations used in air traffic management, organizations like EUROCONTROL, FAA, DWD and DLR have published lists of abbreviations in the past, which have also been enclosed in this document. In addition, abbreviations from some larger international projects related to aviation have been included to provide users with a directory as complete as possible. This means that the second edition of the Air Traffic Management Abbreviation Compendium includes now around 16,500 abbreviations and acronyms from the field of aviation

    Internet of Things and the Law: Legal Strategies for Consumer-Centric Smart Technologies

    Get PDF
    Internet of Things and the Law: Legal Strategies for Consumer-Centric Smart Technologies is the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the legal issues in the Internet of Things (IoT). For decades, the decreasing importance of tangible wealth and power – and the increasing significance of their disembodied counterparts – has been the subject of much legal research. For some time now, legal scholars have grappled with how laws drafted for tangible property and predigital ‘offline’ technologies can cope with dematerialisation, digitalisation, and the internet. As dematerialisation continues, this book aims to illuminate the opposite movement: rematerialisation, namely, the return of data, knowledge, and power within a physical ‘smart’ world. This development frames the book’s central question: can the law steer rematerialisation in a human-centric and socially just direction? To answer it, the book focuses on the IoT, the sociotechnological phenomenon that is primarily responsible for this shift. After a thorough analysis of how existing laws can be interpreted to empower IoT end users, Noto La Diega leaves us with the fundamental question of what happens when the law fails us and concludes with a call for collective resistance against ‘smart’ capitalism

    Analysis and Design of Passive Underwater Acoustic Identification Tags

    Get PDF
    The development of predeployed underwater infrastructures to aid in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) navigation is of keen interest, with the increased use of AUVs for undersea operations. This work presents a class of passive underwater acoustic markers, termed Acoustic IDentification (AID) tags, which are inexpensive to construct, simple to deploy, and reflect unique, engineered acoustic signatures that can be detected by an AUV instrumented with high-frequency SOund NAvigation and Ranging (SONAR) systems. An AID tag is built of layers of materials with different acoustic properties and thicknesses such that a portion of the acoustic energy from an incident pulse from an AUV, for example, is reflected from each interface between two adjacent layers. In this manner, unique acoustic signatures can be generated, similar to an optical barcode. AID tags can be used therefore as geospatial markers to highlight checkpoints in AUV trajectories, or to mark areas of interest underwater. Numerical simulations of the acoustic signatures of two AID tag design iterations i.e. a horizontally stratified AID tag, and a hemispherically stratified AID tag, were experimentally validated using a sub-scale ultrasound setup. Furthermore, an energy based layer optimization strategy was proposed to maximize the strength of reflected AID tag signatures for different source frequency ranges. Subsequently, the detectability of AID tags in the proximity of strong interference such as a hard seabed or another AID tag was quantified, and the detection range of an AID tag was computed based on the standard SONAR equation. Finally, experimental results of hemispherical AID tags interrogated by high-frequency SONAR were presented to demonstrate AID tag performance in realistic deployment scenarios.Ph.D

    Adoption of cloud computing technology for exploration, drilling and production activities: Nigerian upstream oil and gas industry

    Get PDF
    A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The upstream oil and gas industry, which identifies and produces oil and gas, is essential for the generation of energy. This sector has a fragmented pattern of activities and uses real-time information and accurate results for faster and more accurate decision making. Cloud computing offers information technology (IT) services via the internet and the technology offers several benefits such as flexibility, scalability, cost reduction, real-time information, monitoring, collaboration and timely interpretation of exploration and production data. However, the cloud has not yet penetrated the upstream oil and gas sector. Generally, the adoption of cloud computing in the oil and gas industry is less discussed in academia, let alone the upstream oil and gas sector. This research aims to study the adoption of cloud computing in the upstream oil and gas industry, particularly in Nigeria, which is an emerging economy. The decision to adopt cloud computing for exploration, drilling and production is a complex process. A major outcome of the research is the development of a model consisting of factors influencing decision to adopt cloud technology in the upstream oil and gas sector. In addition, the study develops a prototype decision support system (DSS) based on analytical hierarchy process (AHP) which enables decision makers to select an appropriate cloud service model. The developed prototype DSS is described in appendix A. This research adopted a mixed method approach comprising of semi-structured interview which was used to collect qualitative data using NVivo 11 software, and a questionnaire survey which was used to collect quantitative data which was analysed using the Analysis of a Moment Structures (AMOS) based structural equation modelling technique. The findings of this research confirmed the significant factors for cloud computing adoption for exploration, drilling and production activities. This research has both theoretical and practical implications which reinforce the need for cloud technology adoption in the upstream oil and gas sector. In addition, using the research findings to develop a prototype Decision Support System (DSS) is innovative and would be useful to the Nigerian government, cloud service providers and the upstream oil and gas sector. Finally, the study makes recommendations for upstream O&G based on the findings of the study.Nigerian Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF)

    Strategic Latency Unleashed: The Role of Technology in a Revisionist Global Order and the Implications for Special Operations Forces

    Get PDF
    The article of record may be found at https://cgsr.llnl.govThis work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and in part under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The views and opinions of the author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. ISBN-978-1-952565-07-6 LCCN-2021901137 LLNL-BOOK-818513 TID-59693This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in part under Contract W-7405-Eng-48 and in part under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. The views and opinions of the author expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States government or Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC. ISBN-978-1-952565-07-6 LCCN-2021901137 LLNL-BOOK-818513 TID-5969

    BEING PROFILED:COGITAS ERGO SUM

    Get PDF
    Profiling the European citizen: why today's democracy needs to look harder at the negative potential of new technology than at its positive potential

    Model-based Approach for Product Requirement Representation and Generation in Product Lifecycle Management

    Get PDF
    The requirement specification is an official documentation activity, which is a collection of certain information to specify the product and its life-cycle activities in terms of functions, features, performance, constraints, production, maintenance, disposal process, etc. It contains mainly two phases; product requirement generation and representation. Appropriate criteria for the product design and further life-cycle activities are determined based on the requirement specification as well as the interrelations of product requirements with other life-cycle information such as; materials, manufacturing, working environments, finance, and regulations. The determination of these criteria is normally error-prone. It is difficult to identify and maintain the completeness and consistency of the requirement information across the product life-cycle. Product requirements are normally expressed in abstract and conceptual terms with document base representation which yields unstructured and heterogeneous information base and it is unsuitable for intelligent machine interpretations. Most of the time determination of the requirements and development of the requirement specification documents are performed by the designers/engineers based on their own experiences that might lead to incompleteness and inconsistency. This research work proposes a unique model-based product requirement representation and generation architecture to aid designers/engineers to specify product requirements across the product life-cycle. A requirement knowledge management architecture is developed to enhance the capabilities of the current Product Life-cycle Management (PLM) platforms in terms of product requirement representation and generation. After a systematic study on the categorization of product requirements, an ontological framework is developed for the specification of the requirements and related product life-cycle domain information. The ontological framework is embedded in an existing PLM system. A computational platform is developed and integrated into the PLM system for the intelligent machine processing of the product requirements and related information. This architecture supports product requirement representation in terms of the ontological framework and further information retrieval, inference, and requirement text generation activities

    Making Certain: Information and Social Reality

    Get PDF
    This dissertation identifies and explains the phenomenon of the production of certainty in information systems. I define this phenomenon pragmatically as instances where practices of justification end upon information systems or their contents. Cases where information systems seem able to produce social reality without reference to the external world indicate that these systems contain facts for determining truth, rather than propositions rendered true or false by the world outside the system. The No Fly list is offered as a running example that both clearly exemplifies the phenomenon and announces the stakes of my project. After an operationalization of key terms and a review of relevant literature, I articulate a research program aimed at characterizing the phenomenon,its major components, and its effects. Notable contributions of the dissertation include: • the identification of the production of certainty as a unitary, trans-disciplinary phenomenon; • the synthesis of a sociolinguistic method capable of unambiguously identifying a) the presence of this phenomenon and b) distinguishing the respective contributions of systemic and social factors to it; and • the development of a taxonomy of certainty that can distinguish between types of certainty production and/or certainty-producing systems.The analysis of certainty proposed and advanced here is a potential compliment to several existing methods of sociotechnical research. This is demonstrated by applying the analysis of certainty to the complex assemblage of computational timekeeping alongside a more traditional infrastructural inversion. Three subsystems, the tz database, Network Time Protocol, and International Atomic Time, are selected from the assemblage of computational timekeeping for analysis. Each system employs a distinct memory practice, in Bowker’s sense, which licenses the forgetting inherent in the production of the information it contains. The analysis of certainty expands upon the insights provided by infrastructural inversion to show how the production of certainty through modern computational timekeeping practices shapes the social reality of time. This analysis serves as an example for scholars who encounter the phenomenon of the production of certainty in information systems to use the proposed theoretical framework to more easily account for, understand, and engage with it in their work. The dissertation concludes by identifying other sites amenable to this kind of analysis, including the algorithmic assemblages commonly referred to as Artificial Intelligence.Doctor of Philosoph
    corecore