Developing a distributed electronic health-record store for India

The DIGHT project is addressing the problem of building a scalable and highly available information store for the Electronic Health Records (EHRs) of the over one billion citizens of India

Security Management Framework for the Internet of Things

The increase in the design and development of wireless communication technologies offers multiple opportunities for the management and control of cyber-physical systems with connections between smart and autonomous devices, which provide the delivery of simplified data through the use of cloud computing. Given this relationship with the Internet of Things (IoT), it established the concept of pervasive computing that allows any object to communicate with services, sensors, people, and objects without human intervention. However, the rapid growth of connectivity with smart applications through autonomous systems connected to the internet has allowed the exposure of numerous vulnerabilities in IoT systems by malicious users. This dissertation developed a novel ontology-based cybersecurity framework to improve security in IoT systems using an ontological analysis to adapt appropriate security services addressed to threats. The composition of this proposal explores two approaches: (1) design time, which offers a dynamic method to build security services through the application of a methodology directed to models considering existing business processes; and (2) execution time, which involves monitoring the IoT environment, classifying vulnerabilities and threats, and acting in the environment, ensuring the correct adaptation of existing services. The validation approach was used to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing the proposed cybersecurity framework. It implies the evaluation of the ontology to offer a qualitative evaluation based on the analysis of several criteria and also a proof of concept implemented and tested using specific industrial scenarios. This dissertation has been verified by adopting a methodology that follows the acceptance in the research community through technical validation in the application of the concept in an industrial setting.O aumento no projeto e desenvolvimento de tecnologias de comunicação sem fio oferece múltiplas oportunidades para a gestão e controle de sistemas ciber-físicos com conexões entre dispositivos inteligentes e autônomos, os quais proporcionam a entrega de dados simplificados através do uso da computação em nuvem. Diante dessa relação com a Internet das Coisas (IoT) estabeleceu-se o conceito de computação pervasiva que permite que qualquer objeto possa comunicar com os serviços, sensores, pessoas e objetos sem intervenção humana. Entretanto, o rápido crescimento da conectividade com as aplicações inteligentes através de sistemas autônomos conectados com a internet permitiu a exposição de inúmeras vulnerabilidades dos sistemas IoT para usuários maliciosos. Esta dissertação desenvolveu um novo framework de cibersegurança baseada em ontologia para melhorar a segurança em sistemas IoT usando uma análise ontológica para a adaptação de serviços de segurança apropriados endereçados para as ameaças. A composição dessa proposta explora duas abordagens: (1) tempo de projeto, o qual oferece um método dinâmico para construir serviços de segurança através da aplicação de uma metodologia dirigida a modelos, considerando processos empresariais existentes; e (2) tempo de execução, o qual envolve o monitoramento do ambiente IoT, a classificação de vulnerabilidades e ameaças, e a atuação no ambiente garantindo a correta adaptação dos serviços existentes. Duas abordagens de validação foram utilizadas para demonstrar a viabilidade da implementação do framework de cibersegurança proposto. Isto implica na avaliação da ontologia para oferecer uma avaliação qualitativa baseada na análise de diversos critérios e também uma prova de conceito implementada e testada usando cenários específicos. Esta dissertação foi validada adotando uma metodologia que segue a validação na comunidade científica através da validação técnica na aplicação do nosso conceito em um cenário industrial

Technical Risk Management on Enterprise Integration Projects

Enterprise Integration (EI) is essential to organisations wishing to fulfill broader business objectives related to e-business, customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and business-to-business (B2B) commerce. This paper describes and presents the results of a study into practices for managing technical risk on EI projects. In the study, 21 managers participated in a facilitated workshop or interview sessions to identify areas of risk (RAs) associated with EI projects and risk management practices (RMP) for addressing those RAs. Risks were identified in four separate phases in the lifecycle of an EI project, namely the strategy, planning, implementation and rollout phases. Many of the risks identified were not specific to EI projects, but were applicable to large IT projects in general. The paper is primarily concerned with technical risk although some aspects of business and organizational risk are discussed briefly

Internet of Things Applications - From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment

The book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from technology to international cooperation and the global "state of play".The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level. Internet of Things is creating a revolutionary new paradigm, with opportunities in every industry from Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Agriculture, Computer, Electronics Telecommunications, Automotive, Aeronautics, Transportation Energy and Retail to apply the massive potential of the IoT to achieving real-world solutions. The beneficiaries will include as well semiconductor companies, device and product companies, infrastructure software companies, application software companies, consulting companies, telecommunication and cloud service providers. IoT will create new revenues annually for these stakeholders, and potentially create substantial market share shakeups due to increased technology competition. The IoT will fuel technology innovation by creating the means for machines to communicate many different types of information with one another while contributing in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge shared into the Internet of Everything. The success of IoT depends strongly on enabling technology development, market acceptance and standardization, which provides interoperability, compatibility, reliability, and effective operations on a global scale. The connected devices are part of ecosystems connecting people, processes, data, and things which are communicating in the cloud using the increased storage and computing power and pushing for standardization of communication and metadata. In this context security, privacy, safety, trust have to be address by the product manufacturers through the life cycle of their products from design to the support processes. The IoT developments address the whole IoT spectrum - from devices at the edge to cloud and datacentres on the backend and everything in between, through ecosystems are created by industry, research and application stakeholders that enable real-world use cases to accelerate the Internet of Things and establish open interoperability standards and common architectures for IoT solutions. Enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, sensors/actuators, cyber-physical systems, intelligent device management, smart gateways, telematics, smart network infrastructure, cloud computing and software technologies will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from Smart Cities, smart transport, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• Internet of Things in the industrial context: Time for deployment.• Integration of heterogeneous smart objects, applications and services• Evolution from device to semantic and business interoperability• Software define and virtualization of network resources• Innovation through interoperability and standardisation when everything is connected anytime at anyplace• Dynamic context-aware scalable and trust-based IoT Security, Privacy framework• Federated Cloud service management and the Internet of Things• Internet of Things Application

Service-oriented architecture for device lifecycle support in industrial automation

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores Especialidade: Robótica e Manufactura IntegradaThis thesis addresses the device lifecycle support thematic in the scope of service oriented industrial automation domain. This domain is known for its plethora of heterogeneous equipment encompassing distinct functions, form factors, network interfaces, or I/O specifications supported by dissimilar software and hardware platforms. There is then an evident and crescent need to take every device into account and improve the agility performance during setup, control, management, monitoring and diagnosis phases. Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm is currently a widely endorsed approach for both business and enterprise systems integration. SOA concepts and technology are continuously spreading along the layers of the enterprise organization envisioning a unified interoperability solution. SOA promotes discoverability, loose coupling, abstraction, autonomy and composition of services relying on open web standards – features that can provide an important contribution to the industrial automation domain. The present work seized industrial automation device level requirements, constraints and needs to determine how and where can SOA be employed to solve some of the existent difficulties. Supported by these outcomes, a reference architecture shaped by distributed, adaptive and composable modules is proposed. This architecture will assist and ease the role of systems integrators during reengineering-related interventions throughout system lifecycle. In a converging direction, the present work also proposes a serviceoriented device model to support previous architecture vision and goals by including embedded added-value in terms of service-oriented peer-to-peer discovery and identification, configuration, management, as well as agile customization of device resources. In this context, the implementation and validation work proved not simply the feasibility and fitness of the proposed solution to two distinct test-benches but also its relevance to the expanding domain of SOA applications to support device lifecycle in the industrial automation domain

A human centric approach to the Internet of things

This research focuses on human interaction with the IoT, not only from the perspective of the user, but also considering the requirements that smart objects should meet to support human activities. It analyses how the IoT was originally conceived from a technology and data driven approach, and why there is a need to provide an IoT framework that considers humans’ tasks and goals. As such, the nature of the actions and interactions found in a human-based IoT are discussed in the context of social-like collaborations, where actors are in pursue of a common goal. This thesis reframes Human-IoT interaction as a social, collaborative system, described in terms of its capacity to support the activities of the involved social actors in pursuit of a common goal. A structure is proposed to describe the nature of these interactions, and a methodology to model user behaviour based on the tasks and goals supporting a theme is proposed. The methodology is used to analyse the requirements of a domestic IoT system, leading to the implementation of a demonstrator system, and a study to validate the method. This research posits that user experience should inform IoT system design to prevent misunderstanding of its purpose

PREDON Scientific Data Preservation 2014

LPSC14037Scientific data collected with modern sensors or dedicated detectors exceed very often the perimeter of the initial scientific design. These data are obtained more and more frequently with large material and human efforts. A large class of scientific experiments are in fact unique because of their large scale, with very small chances to be repeated and to superseded by new experiments in the same domain: for instance high energy physics and astrophysics experiments involve multi-annual developments and a simple duplication of efforts in order to reproduce old data is simply not affordable. Other scientific experiments are in fact unique by nature: earth science, medical sciences etc. since the collected data is "time-stamped" and thereby non-reproducible by new experiments or observations. In addition, scientific data collection increased dramatically in the recent years, participating to the so-called "data deluge" and inviting for common reflection in the context of "big data" investigations. The new knowledge obtained using these data should be preserved long term such that the access and the re-use are made possible and lead to an enhancement of the initial investment. Data observatories, based on open access policies and coupled with multi-disciplinary techniques for indexing and mining may lead to truly new paradigms in science. It is therefore of outmost importance to pursue a coherent and vigorous approach to preserve the scientific data at long term. The preservation remains nevertheless a challenge due to the complexity of the data structure, the fragility of the custom-made software environments as well as the lack of rigorous approaches in workflows and algorithms. To address this challenge, the PREDON project has been initiated in France in 2012 within the MASTODONS program: a Big Data scientific challenge, initiated and supported by the Interdisciplinary Mission of the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). PREDON is a study group formed by researchers from different disciplines and institutes. Several meetings and workshops lead to a rich exchange in ideas, paradigms and methods. The present document includes contributions of the participants to the PREDON Study Group, as well as invited papers, related to the scientific case, methodology and technology. This document should be read as a "facts finding" resource pointing to a concrete and significant scientific interest for long term research data preservation, as well as to cutting edge methods and technologies to achieve this goal. A sustained, coherent and long term action in the area of scientific data preservation would be highly beneficial