Architectural evolution through softwarisation: on the advent of software-defined networks

Digital infrastructures characteristically expand and evolve. Their propensity for growth can be attributed to the self-reinforcing mechanism of positive network externalities, in which the value and attractiveness of any digital infrastructure to users, is generated from and sustained as a function of the size of its existing user community. The expansion of any digital infrastructure, though, is ultimately underpinned by an inherent architectural capacity to support unanticipated change, that may include changes to architecture itself. However, as digital infrastructures scale, their usage grows, and they encounter and become entangled with other digital infrastructures. As such, the capacity of digital infrastructure architecture to accommodate change, under conditions of positive network externalities that attract users, conversely leads to intensified social and technical dependencies that eventually resist certain kinds of change. That is, it leads to sociotechnical ossifications. Changing underlying architecture in existing digital infrastructures, thus, becomes increasingly prohibitive over time. Information Systems (IS) research suggests that architectural change or evolution in digital infrastructures occurs primarily via a process of replacement through two means. An existing digital infrastructure is either completely replaced with one that has an evolved architecture, or intermediary transitory gateways are used to facilitate interoperability between digital infrastructures of incompatible architectures. Recognising the sociotechnical ossifications that resist architectural evolution, this literature has also tended to focus more on social activities of cultivating change of which the outcome is architectural evolution in digital infrastructures, than directly on architectural evolution itself. In doing so it has provided only a partial account of underlying architectural evolution in digital infrastructures. The findings of this research come from an embedded case study in which changes to underlying architecture in existing networking infrastructures were made. Networking infrastructures are a prime instance of sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures. The case’s primary data sources included interviews with 39 senior networking and infrastructure virtualisation experts from large Internet and Cloud Service Providers, Standards Development Organisations, Network Equipment Vendors, Network Systems Integrators, Virtualisation Software Technology Organisations, Research Institutes, and as well technical documents. A critical realist analysis was used to uncover generative mechanisms that promote underlying architectural evolution in sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures. This thesis extends IS understanding of architectural evolution in digital infrastructures with the complementary finding of, architectural evolution through softwarisation. In architectural evolution through softwarisation, the architecture of sociotechnically ossified digital infrastructures, is evolved via the exploitation of features inherent to digital entities, which have been overlooked in extant research on architecture in digital infrastructures

Mechanisms of service ecosystem emergence: Exploring the case of public sector digital transformation

This research extends literature on the emergence of service ecosystems by developing new theoretical insight and explanation into how service ecosystems experience change and stability over time. Empirically, our case study focuses on digital transformation in the New Zealand public sector and the enterprise services market in 2010–2017. The exploratory and illustrative study builds on 22 in-depth interviews and extensive document analysis. We reveal three key mechanisms of service ecosystem emergence: compression, ecotonal coupling, and refraction. These mechanisms contribute to overcoming conflationary theorizing and the value of emergence in service research by establishing emergent relationality and a processual intertwining of being and becoming. These become the basis of multi-levelled, multidimensional complexity and cumulative organizing. We conclude the work by discussing the paper’s contribution to service research.</p

Mechanisms of service ecosystem emergence: Exploring the case of pubic sector digital transformation

This research extends literature on the emergence of service ecosystems by developing new theoretical insight and explanation into how service ecosystems experience change and stability over time. Empirically, our case study focuses on digital transformation in the New Zealand public sector and the enterprise services market in 2010–2017. The exploratory and illustrative study builds on 22 in-depth interviews and extensive document analysis. We reveal three key mechanisms of service ecosystem emergence: compression, ecotonal coupling, and refraction. These mechanisms contribute to overcoming conflationary theorizing and the value of emergence in service research by establishing emergent relationality and a processual intertwining of being and becoming. These become the basis of multi-levelled, multidimensional complexity and cumulative organizing. We conclude the work by discussing the paper’s contribution to service research

Design and Implementation of NLP-based Conversational CHATBOT Framework in Higher Education

The increasing use of technology is changing the way students learn and absorb information. Hence, educational institutions also need to accelerate their student communication process to draw the attention of this fast-paced generation. The project here aims to harvest better teacher-student relationships and to prepare students for personalised learning by developing a convincing chatbot to assist pupils in their queries related to common operations in numerical base 2 or binary operations with general information operations. Background research on various web applications and chatbot systems was discussed and analysed before the development of the project. Functional and non-functional requirements were assessed on the priority basis and the respective methodology was devised for the project. Python Flask and MongoDB are used for the backend whereas HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery are used for the frontend of the framework. Deployment is done through Heroku Cloud Platform. Moreover, MongoDB Atlas, NLTK, AWS Lambda Functions, AWS Lex, Boto3, Pymongo and Gunicorn are used as Third-Party Tools and Libraries. Various test cases were verified to check for the functional and non-functional requirements completion. A Likert-scale questionnaire survey was done from 60 engineering students who have studied Introduction to Digital Electronics module after the chatbot deployment and the survey responses were recorded and evaluation of the results were generated. The survey concludes that majority of the participants find the chatbot to be extremely useful and the developed framework generates correct responses, and explanations to the questions. Further to the aforementioned points, future study for the project has been proposed in the paper. AI approach can be used to train the chatbot framework and to provide more accurate answers for students in future. Moreover, the framework can be altered to support advanced parsing techniques in future along with an added voice functionality and multi-language support in the chatbot framework

Cyber Threats and NATO 2030: Horizon Scanning and Analysis

The book includes 13 chapters that look ahead to how NATO can best address the cyber threats, as well as opportunities and challenges from emerging and disruptive technologies in the cyber domain over the next decade. The present volume addresses these conceptual and practical requirements and contributes constructively to the NATO 2030 discussions. The book is arranged in five short parts...All the chapters in this book have undergone double-blind peer review by at least two external experts.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/asbook/1038/thumbnail.jp

Framework for Security Transparency in Cloud Computing

The migration of sensitive data and applications from the on-premise data centre to a cloud environment increases cyber risks to users, mainly because the cloud environment is managed and maintained by a third-party. In particular, the partial surrender of sensitive data and application to a cloud environment creates numerous concerns that are related to a lack of security transparency. Security transparency involves the disclosure of information by cloud service providers about the security measures being put in place to protect assets and meet the expectations of customers. It establishes trust in service relationship between cloud service providers and customers, and without evidence of continuous transparency, trust and confidence are affected and are likely to hinder extensive usage of cloud services. Also, insufficient security transparency is considered as an added level of risk and increases the difficulty of demonstrating conformance to customer requirements and ensuring that the cloud service providers adequately implement security obligations. The research community have acknowledged the pressing need to address security transparency concerns, and although technical aspects for ensuring security and privacy have been researched widely, the focus on security transparency is still scarce. The relatively few literature mostly approach the issue of security transparency from cloud providers’ perspective, while other works have contributed feasible techniques for comparison and selection of cloud service providers using metrics such as transparency and trustworthiness. However, there is still a shortage of research that focuses on improving security transparency from cloud users’ point of view. In particular, there is still a gap in the literature that (i) dissects security transparency from the lens of conceptual knowledge up to implementation from organizational and technical perspectives and; (ii) support continuous transparency by enabling the vetting and probing of cloud service providers’ conformity to specific customer requirements. The significant growth in moving business to the cloud – due to its scalability and perceived effectiveness – underlines the dire need for research in this area. This thesis presents a framework that comprises the core conceptual elements that constitute security transparency in cloud computing. It contributes to the knowledge domain of security transparency in cloud computing by proposing the following. Firstly, the research analyses the basics of cloud security transparency by exploring the notion and foundational concepts that constitute security transparency. Secondly, it proposes a framework which integrates various concepts from requirement engineering domain and an accompanying process that could be followed to implement the framework. The framework and its process provide an essential set of conceptual ideas, activities and steps that can be followed at an organizational level to attain security transparency, which are based on the principles of industry standards and best practices. Thirdly, for ensuring continuous transparency, the thesis proposes an essential tool that supports the collection and assessment of evidence from cloud providers, including the establishment of remedial actions for redressing deficiencies in cloud provider practices. The tool serves as a supplementary component of the proposed framework that enables continuous inspection of how predefined customer requirements are being satisfied. The thesis also validates the proposed security transparency framework and tool in terms of validity, applicability, adaptability, and acceptability using two different case studies. Feedbacks are collected from stakeholders and analysed using essential criteria such as ease of use, relevance, usability, etc. The result of the analysis illustrates the validity and acceptability of both the framework and tool in enhancing security transparency in a real-world environment

Embodying Virtual War: Digital Technology and Subjectivity in the Contemporary War Film

PhDAddressing a perceived absence of critical attention to changes in the war film brought about by the advent of the digital, this thesis aims to construct an original study of contemporary (post-2001) US war cinema by exploring the shifting relationship between embodiment, subjectivity and digital (military-technological) mediation. In order to update the critical framework necessary for comprehending how the war film is altered by the remediation of digitised military interfaces, I draw on a highly diverse set of approaches ranging from journalistic accounts of the wars in Iraq (2003-11) and Afghanistan (2001-present), studies of military technologies from Paul Virilio to Derek Gregory and Pasi Väliaho, as well as film/media studies work on ethics and spectatorship. The corpus is similarly diverse, encompassing mainstream genre films such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012), documentaries, and gallery installations by Omer Fast and Harun Farocki, thus offering a comprehensive and inclusive portrait of contemporary cinematic trends. The thesis begins by identifying the genre’s post-Vietnam turn to embodied, subjective experience and explores the continuation of this tendency through films such as The Hurt Locker (2008) and its complicity with phenomena such as journalistic embedding. Subsequently, I trace how drones and simulations radically alter conventional cinematic constructions of subjective perceptual experience through readings of Omer Fast’s Five Thousand Feet is the Best (2011) and Harun Farocki’s Serious Games (2009-10), noting in particular the emergence of the virtualised yet embodied ‘presence’ of the drone operator and the conditioning of trans-subjective, cybernetic networks via CG simulations. Finally, I turn to the remediation of various digital interfaces in films such as Redacted (2007), comparing the emergent models of military subjectivity discussed in the previous chapters with the spectatorial positions evoked by this hypermediated aesthetic.Arts and Humanities Research Council