Suburbanization and local governance - positive and negative forms: Olomouc case study

Over the previous 15-20 years (in Czech conditions), suburban processes have substantially influenced the appearance and transformation of municipalities on the fringe of larger cities. And it is not only the morphology of the municipality structure (new housing estates and their urban as well as architectural solutions) that has undergone the transformation, but also the functions municipalities have started to fulfil (the development of civic amenities and services). After such a long period of time, we are capable of identifying negative as well as positive impacts of suburban processes on municipalities, and evaluating the role of local actors (with regard to local governance) in the shaping of suburbias and their appearance (the area urban solution, infrastructure, architecture in terms of housing appearance, etc.). We are also capable of assessing new construction sites based on their location or appearance (housing naturally complementing or suitably extending the municipality built-up area, or, on the contrary, a satellite housing estate built “on a greenfield site”), social climate between old residents and newcomers, etc. The goal of the paper is to present the most significant aspects that have had influence on new housing construction in suburban zone municipalities, and to describe differences in the application of the concept of local governance (at the lowest – microregional, or possibly municipal tier) in positively impacted municipalities as compared with those affected rather negatively. Concentrating on the city of Olomouc and its suburban zone in greater detail, the study shall also outline expected future development

New Waves of IoT Technologies Research – Transcending Intelligence and Senses at the Edge to Create Multi Experience Environments

The next wave of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings new technological developments that incorporate radical advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), edge computing processing, new sensing capabilities, more security protection and autonomous functions accelerating progress towards the ability for IoT systems to self-develop, self-maintain and self-optimise. The emergence of hyper autonomous IoT applications with enhanced sensing, distributed intelligence, edge processing and connectivity, combined with human augmentation, has the potential to power the transformation and optimisation of industrial sectors and to change the innovation landscape. This chapter is reviewing the most recent advances in the next wave of the IoT by looking not only at the technology enabling the IoT but also at the platforms and smart data aspects that will bring intelligence, sustainability, dependability, autonomy, and will support human-centric solutions.acceptedVersio

Blockchain based Decentralized Applications: Technology Review and Development Guidelines

Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology is a disruptive technology that provides the infrastructure for developing decentralized applications enabling the implementation of novel business models even in traditionally centralized domains. In the last years it has drawn high interest from the academic community, technology developers and startups thus lots of solutions have been developed to address blockchain technology limitations and the requirements of applications software engineering. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of DLT solutions analyzing the addressed challenges, provided solutions and their usage for developing decentralized applications. Our study reviews over 100 blockchain papers and startup initiatives from which we construct a 3-tier based architecture for decentralized applications and we use it to systematically classify the technology solutions. Protocol and Network Tier solutions address the digital assets registration, transactions, data structure, and privacy and business rules implementation and the creation of peer-to-peer networks, ledger replication, and consensus-based state validation. Scaling Tier solutions address the scalability problems in terms of storage size, transaction throughput, and computational capability. Finally, Federated Tier aggregates integrative solutions across multiple blockchain applications deployments. The paper closes with a discussion on challenges and opportunities for developing decentralized applications by providing a multi-step guideline for decentralizing the design of traditional systems and implementing decentralized applications.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables, 121 reference

Data security in cloud storage services

Cloud Computing is considered to be the next-generation architecture for ICT where it moves the application software and databases to the centralized large data centers. It aims to offer elastic IT services where clients can benefit from significant cost savings of the pay-per-use model and can easily scale up or down, and do not have to make large investments in new hardware. However, the management of the data and services in this cloud model is under the control of the provider. Consequently, the cloud clients have less control over their outsourced data and they have to trust cloud service provider to protect their data and infrastructure from both external and internal attacks. This is especially true with cloud storage services. Nowadays, users rely on cloud storage as it offers cheap and unlimited data storage that is available for use by multiple devices (e.g. smart phones, tablets, notebooks, etc.). Besides famous cloud storage providers, such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, more and more third-party cloud storage service providers are emerging. These services are dedicated to offering more accessible and user friendly storage services to cloud customers. Examples of these services include Dropbox, Box.net, Sparkleshare, UbuntuOne or JungleDisk. These cloud storage services deliver a very simple interface on top of the cloud storage provided by storage service providers. File and folder synchronization between different machines, sharing files and folders with other users, file versioning as well as automated backups are the key functionalities of these emerging cloud storage services. Cloud storage services have changed the way users manage and interact with data outsourced to public providers. With these services, multiple subscribers can collaboratively work and share data without concerns about their data consistency, availability and reliability. Although these cloud storage services offer attractive features, many customers have not adopted these services. Since data stored in these services is under the control of service providers resulting in confidentiality and security concerns and risks. Therefore, using cloud storage services for storing valuable data depends mainly on whether the service provider can offer sufficient security and assurance to meet client requirements. From the way most cloud storage services are constructed, we can notice that these storage services do not provide users with sufficient levels of security leading to an inherent risk on users\u27 data from external and internal attacks. These attacks take the form of: data exposure (lack of data confidentiality); data tampering (lack of data integrity); and denial of data (lack of data availability) by third parties on the cloud or by the cloud provider himself. Therefore, the cloud storage services should ensure the data confidentiality in the following state: data in motion (while transmitting over networks), data at rest (when stored at provider\u27s disks). To address the above concerns, confidentiality and access controllability of outsourced data with strong cryptographic guarantee should be maintained. To ensure data confidentiality in public cloud storage services, data should be encrypted data before it is outsourced to these services. Although, users can rely on client side cloud storage services or software encryption tools for encrypting user\u27s data; however, many of these services fail to achieve data confidentiality. Box, for example, does not encrypt user files via SSL and within Box servers. Client side cloud storage services can intentionally/unintentionally disclose user decryption keys to its provider. In addition, some cloud storage services support convergent encryption for encrypting users\u27 data exposing it to “confirmation of a file attack. On the other hand, software encryption tools use full-disk encryption (FDE) which is not feasible for cloud-based file sharing services, because it encrypts the data as virtual hard disks. Although encryption can ensure data confidentiality; however, it fails to achieve fine-grained access control over outsourced data. Since, public cloud storage services are managed by un-trusted cloud service provider, secure and efficient fine-grained access control cannot be realized through these services as these policies are managed by storage services that have full control over the sharing process. Therefore, there is not any guarantee that they will provide good means for efficient and secure sharing and they can also deduce confidential information about the outsourced data and users\u27 personal information. In this work, we would like to improve the currently employed security measures for securing data in cloud store services. To achieve better data confidentiality for data stored in the cloud without relying on cloud service providers (CSPs) or putting any burden on users, in this thesis, we designed a secure cloud storage system framework that simultaneously achieves data confidentiality, fine-grained access control on encrypted data and scalable user revocation. This framework is built on a third part trusted (TTP) service that can be employed either locally on users\u27 machine or premises, or remotely on top of cloud storage services. This service shall encrypts users data before uploading it to the cloud and decrypts it after downloading from the cloud; therefore, it remove the burden of storing, managing and maintaining encryption/decryption keys from data owner\u27s. In addition, this service only retains user\u27s secret key(s) not data. Moreover, to ensure high security for these keys, it stores them on hardware device. Furthermore, this service combines multi-authority ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) and attribute-based Signature (ABS) for achieving many-read-many-write fine-grained data access control on storage services. Moreover, it efficiently revokes users\u27 privileges without relying on the data owner for re-encrypting massive amounts of data and re-distributing the new keys to the authorized users. It removes the heavy computation of re-encryption from users and delegates this task to the cloud service provider (CSP) proxy servers. These proxy servers achieve flexible and efficient re-encryption without revealing underlying data to the cloud. In our designed architecture, we addressed the problem of ensuring data confidentiality against cloud and against accesses beyond authorized rights. To resolve these issues, we designed a trusted third party (TTP) service that is in charge of storing data in an encrypted format in the cloud. To improve the efficiency of the designed architecture, the service allows the users to choose the level of severity of the data and according to this level different encryption algorithms are employed. To achieve many-read-many-write fine grained access control, we merge two algorithms (multi-authority ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (MA- CP-ABE) and attribute-based Signature (ABS)). Moreover, we support two levels of revocation: user and attribute revocation so that we can comply with the collaborative environment. Last but not least, we validate the effectiveness of our design by carrying out a detailed security analysis. This analysis shall prove the correctness of our design in terms of data confidentiality each stage of user interaction with the cloud

A Value-sensitive Design Perspective of Cryptocurrencies: A Research Agenda

Cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology have begun to transform numerous industries. Although we have seen an uptrend in the types of created cryptocurrencies, it has not yet translated into mainstream adoption., In this paper, we use value-sensitive design principles to identify values among current and potential cryptocurrency adopters. Using Bitcoin as the context for this qualitative research study, we use grounded theory analytical techniques to discover manifested values among users and non-users. We develop a cryptocurrency value-sensitive design framework to summarize our results. As our main contribution, we offer a research agenda based on the cryptocurrency stakeholders’ underlying value system. This agenda can help information systems scholars apply this value-sensitive design perspective to their own cryptocurrency research

Developer-Planner Interaction in Transportation and Land Use Sustainability, MTI Report 01-21

This study argues that significant unmet demand exists for alternatives to conventional auto-oriented development; and further that planning interventions that restrict densities and land use mixing in developed areas are a major reason that this demand remains unmet. In order to explore these hypotheses, this study carried out two principal investigations. The first is a national survey of developers, randomly selected from the database of the Urban Land Institute in Washington, DC, the premiere national organization of land developers. Overall, the survey reveals considerable interest on the part of the private development community in developing in a fashion that is more compact than regulations currently allow. This interest varied by region, with the greatest interest expressed in the densely settled regions of the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast. Developers in the Southwest and South Central regions (Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana) expressed considerably less interest in developing in a more dense or mixed-use fashion than permitted by current regulation. Similarly, interest in developing more intensely than current regulations permit varied by setting. Little such interest exists for development in rural areas, but developers\u27 interest in such development in inner suburbs was especially keen

Law, Media, & Environmental Policy: A Fundamental Linkage in Sustainable Democratic Governance

The functional linkages between law and media have long been significant in shaping American democratic governance. Over the past thirty-five years, environmental analysis has similarly become essential to shaping international and domestic governmental policy. Environmentalism—focusing as it does on realistic interconnected accounting of the full potential negative consequences as well as benefits of proposed actions, policies, and programs, over the long term as well as the short term, with careful consideration of all realistic alternatives— provides a legal perspective important for societal sustainability. Because environmental values and norms are often in tension with established industrial interests that resist public interest accountability, they are inevitably forced to play on political battlefields dominated by lobbyists’ spin and corporate stratagems for manipulating public perceptions. The press, to which Thomas Jefferson entrusted the critical task of “informing the discretion” of the populace, is a crucially important and often disappointing resource of democratic governance, not least in the area of environmental law. This Essay surveys these problems and explores the potential for environmental lawyers to improve the relationships among environmental analysis, media, and societal governance at both the “micro” level of daily practice and “macro” level of national policy and law-making

Corporate influence and the academic computer science discipline. [4: CMU]

Prosopographical work on the four major centers for computer research in the United States has now been conducted, resulting in big questions about the independence of, so called, computer science

Blockchain, business and the fourth industrial revolution:Whence, whither, wherefore and how?

Blockchain is one the most remarkable technological innovations of the 21st century. The most notable application of blockchain is in the development and operation of cryptocurrencies (e.g. bitcoin, ethereum, among others). Besides the financial services industry, blockchain is also considered in other sectors such as international trade, taxation, supply chain management, business operations and governance. However, blockchain has not been examined comprehensively in all areas of relevant literature. This article conducts a survey of the literature to gain an understanding of the opportunities and issues presented by blockchain in various business functions. The article begins by providing a discussion regarding how the blockchain technology operates. The paper takes a broad focus in its analysis of the prospects of blockchain for various business functions, including banking and the capital markets, corporate governance, international trade, and taxation. The paper demonstrates how organisations and regulators can leverage blockchain to upscale business operations, enhance efficiency and reduce operational costs. The key drawbacks of blockchain that stakeholders need to bear in mind before adopting the technology are also highlighted. The article also reflects on how organisations can tap into blockchain to reap the full potential of the fourth industrial revolution