MONICA in Hamburg: Towards Large-Scale IoT Deployments in a Smart City

Modern cities and metropolitan areas all over the world face new management challenges in the 21st century primarily due to increasing demands on living standards by the urban population. These challenges range from climate change, pollution, transportation, and citizen engagement, to urban planning, and security threats. The primary goal of a Smart City is to counteract these problems and mitigate their effects by means of modern ICT to improve urban administration and infrastructure. Key ideas are to utilise network communication to inter-connect public authorities; but also to deploy and integrate numerous sensors and actuators throughout the city infrastructure - which is also widely known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Thus, IoT technologies will be an integral part and key enabler to achieve many objectives of the Smart City vision. The contributions of this paper are as follows. We first examine a number of IoT platforms, technologies and network standards that can help to foster a Smart City environment. Second, we introduce the EU project MONICA which aims for demonstration of large-scale IoT deployments at public, inner-city events and give an overview on its IoT platform architecture. And third, we provide a case-study report on SmartCity activities by the City of Hamburg and provide insights on recent (on-going) field tests of a vertically integrated, end-to-end IoT sensor application.Comment: 6 page

Adding Salt to Pepper: A Structured Security Assessment over a Humanoid Robot

The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently neglected, yet a hacked robot can act as an insider threat in organizations, industries, public spaces, and private homes. In this paper, we perform a structured security assessment of Pepper, a commercial humanoid robot. Our analysis, composed by an automated and a manual part, points out a relevant number of security flaws that can be used to take over and command the robot. Furthermore, we suggest how these issues could be fixed, thus, avoided in the future. The very final aim of this work is to push the rise of the security level of IoT products before they are sold on the public market.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

“Normal citizens” versus “Rowdies”: police categorisations of protesters in Germany

The paper investigates police perceptions of protesters. Based on group discussions with riot police and interviews with high ranking officers, six domains are analysed as dimensions of a risk constellation contributing to the emergence of an enemy image of the protester. The findings suggest that labels describing the “police counterpart” often express distance and opposition (1) and depoliticise demonstrations (2). Furthermore, formal (3) and informal (4) categorisations of protesters as well as the perception of indications of threat in policing practice (5) are examined. Bipolar patterns of classification of protesters were found to be influential. Classifications are partly based in the law and partly in particularistic and normative subcultural attributions of legitimacy which police transfer into their organisational interpretive schemata distinguishing between legality/illegality. For explanatory means the study utilises perspectives of organisational sociology as well as the cultural distance between the police and the protesters (6). This is further elaborated using the social figure of the “normal citizen”, in which specific police conceptions of normality are condensed and which serves as a threshold for the perception of deviant protesters. Besides the implications for theory of democracy of the analysed clichés and enemy images the findings conclusively suggest that the distanced to hostile relationship between the police and some protesters does not merely represent a pedagogical or “practical” problem of the police, but is the expression of a certain conflict structure. In this structure organisational and individual factors on the side of the police as well as their actual conflict experience at demonstrations converge

Waste management companies in Europe 2009

This paper examines the ownership, employment and finances of the major waste companies in Europe, and recent developments in ownership

Containerisation in the Baltic Sea region: development, characteristics and contemporary organisation

The main focus of the paper is on the container system development in the Baltic Sea Region studying cotemporary changes and organisation, as well as explaining the main driving forces of this situation. The Baltic Sea is a transport corridor between Eastern and Western Europe. Over the last decade maritime transport in the Baltic Sea area has changed significantly. The disintegration of the Soviet Union forced Russia to start developing its own Baltic ports and terminals and to find new routes to export its oil and gas. The Baltic ports have welcomed a remarkable growth, especially in oil transportation and containerised flows. The geographical configuration of the region naturally places it away from major global shipping lines. This situation is accentuated by the organisation of maritime regular lines, centred in Northern European ports. For this reason, the regional container network is mainly made up of feeder services

Why espresso? : Explaining changes in European coffee preferences from a production of culture perspective

Since the 1990s supposedly ‘historic’ fault lines separating coffee preferences and practices across the European continent have been broken down. The consumption of Italian-style espresso-based beverages outside the home is now widespread. Much of this is drunk in branded coffee-shop outlets, based on a format popularised in the United States. This article investigates these changes employing the culture of production perspective. It is structured in three parts. The first investigates the formation of quasi-national coffee-drinking styles in the at-home and away-from-home sectors with particular reference to Italy; the second analyses the transformation of out-of-home coffee-drinking in the UK during the 1990s; and the third examines the spread of Italian-style coffee across the European continentPeer reviewe

Muckraker websites (American and European examples)

The goal of the article is to compare contemporary websites used by investigative reporters for organising their inquiries and propagating their outcomes. To achieve that goal, I compare the experiences of American and European muckrakers in conducting investigative activities through websites. I analysed 10 such projects in total, 3 from the USA and 7 from Europe. The discussed criteria include the modes of financing, the size of annual budgets, the modes of operation, and HR policies.The goal of the article is to compare contemporary websites used by investigative reporters for organising their inquiries and propagating their outcomes. To achieve that goal, I compare the experiences of American and European muckrakers in conducting investigative activities through websites. I analysed 10 such projects in total, 3 from the USA and 7 from Europe. The discussed criteria include the modes of financing, the size of annual budgets, the modes of operation, and HR policies