79,413 research outputs found
From Social Data Mining to Forecasting Socio-Economic Crisis
Socio-economic data mining has a great potential in terms of gaining a better
understanding of problems that our economy and society are facing, such as
financial instability, shortages of resources, or conflicts. Without
large-scale data mining, progress in these areas seems hard or impossible.
Therefore, a suitable, distributed data mining infrastructure and research
centers should be built in Europe. It also appears appropriate to build a
network of Crisis Observatories. They can be imagined as laboratories devoted
to the gathering and processing of enormous volumes of data on both natural
systems such as the Earth and its ecosystem, as well as on human
techno-socio-economic systems, so as to gain early warnings of impending
events. Reality mining provides the chance to adapt more quickly and more
accurately to changing situations. Further opportunities arise by individually
customized services, which however should be provided in a privacy-respecting
way. This requires the development of novel ICT (such as a self- organizing
Web), but most likely new legal regulations and suitable institutions as well.
As long as such regulations are lacking on a world-wide scale, it is in the
public interest that scientists explore what can be done with the huge data
available. Big data do have the potential to change or even threaten democratic
societies. The same applies to sudden and large-scale failures of ICT systems.
Therefore, dealing with data must be done with a large degree of responsibility
and care. Self-interests of individuals, companies or institutions have limits,
where the public interest is affected, and public interest is not a sufficient
justification to violate human rights of individuals. Privacy is a high good,
as confidentiality is, and damaging it would have serious side effects for
society.Comment: 65 pages, 1 figure, Visioneer White Paper, see
http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
The global cultural commons after Cancun: identity, diversity and citizenship
The cultural politics of global trade is a new and unexplored terrain because the public domain of culture has long been associated with national sovereignty. States everywhere have invested heavily in national identity. But in an age of globalization, culture and sovereignty have become more complex propositions, subject to global pressures and national constraints. This paper argues three main points. First, new information technologies increasingly destabilize traditional private sector models for disseminating culture. At the same time, international legal rules have become more restrictive with respect to investment and national treatment, two areas at the heart of cultural policy.
Second, Doha has significant implications for the future of the cultural commons. Ongoing negotiations around TRIPS, TRIMS, GATS and dispute settlement will impose new restrictions on public authorities who wish to appropriate culture for a variety of public and private ends. Finally, there is a growing backlash against the WTO’s trade agenda for broadening and deepening disciplines in these areas. These issues have become highly politicized and fractious, and are bound to vex future rounds as the global south, led by Brazil, India and China flexes its diplomatic muscle
Collaborative trails in e-learning environments
This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future
Managing a Fleet of Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR) using Cloud Robotics Platform
In this paper, we provide details of implementing a system for managing a
fleet of autonomous mobile robots (AMR) operating in a factory or a warehouse
premise. While the robots are themselves autonomous in its motion and obstacle
avoidance capability, the target destination for each robot is provided by a
global planner. The global planner and the ground vehicles (robots) constitute
a multi agent system (MAS) which communicate with each other over a wireless
network. Three different approaches are explored for implementation. The first
two approaches make use of the distributed computing based Networked Robotics
architecture and communication framework of Robot Operating System (ROS) itself
while the third approach uses Rapyuta Cloud Robotics framework for this
implementation. The comparative performance of these approaches are analyzed
through simulation as well as real world experiment with actual robots. These
analyses provide an in-depth understanding of the inner working of the Cloud
Robotics Platform in contrast to the usual ROS framework. The insight gained
through this exercise will be valuable for students as well as practicing
engineers interested in implementing similar systems else where. In the
process, we also identify few critical limitations of the current Rapyuta
platform and provide suggestions to overcome them.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures, journal pape
EviPlant: An efficient digital forensic challenge creation, manipulation and distribution solution
Education and training in digital forensics requires a variety of suitable
challenge corpora containing realistic features including regular
wear-and-tear, background noise, and the actual digital traces to be discovered
during investigation. Typically, the creation of these challenges requires
overly arduous effort on the part of the educator to ensure their viability.
Once created, the challenge image needs to be stored and distributed to a class
for practical training. This storage and distribution step requires significant
time and resources and may not even be possible in an online/distance learning
scenario due to the data sizes involved. As part of this paper, we introduce a
more capable methodology and system as an alternative to current approaches.
EviPlant is a system designed for the efficient creation, manipulation, storage
and distribution of challenges for digital forensics education and training.
The system relies on the initial distribution of base disk images, i.e., images
containing solely base operating systems. In order to create challenges for
students, educators can boot the base system, emulate the desired activity and
perform a "diffing" of resultant image and the base image. This diffing process
extracts the modified artefacts and associated metadata and stores them in an
"evidence package". Evidence packages can be created for different personae,
different wear-and-tear, different emulated crimes, etc., and multiple evidence
packages can be distributed to students and integrated into the base images. A
number of additional applications in digital forensic challenge creation for
tool testing and validation, proficiency testing, and malware analysis are also
discussed as a result of using EviPlant.Comment: Digital Forensic Research Workshop Europe 201
Proof-of-Prestige: A Useful Work Reward System for Unverifiable Tasks
As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as
utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to
number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such
contexts, users get rewards from the network after they have carried out some
specific task useful for the network. While in some cases the proof of some
utility or service can be proved, the majority of tasks are impossible to
verify. In order to deal with such cases, we design Proof-of-Prestige (PoP) - a
reward system that can run on top of Proof-of-Stake blockchains. PoP introduces
prestige which is a volatile resource and, in contrast to coins, regenerates
over time. Prestige can be gained by performing useful work, spent when
benefiting from services and directly translates to users minting power. PoP is
resistant against Sybil and Collude attacks and can be used to reward workers
for completing unverifiable tasks, while keeping the system free for the
end-users. We use two exemplar use-cases to showcase the usefulness of PoP and
we build a simulator to assess the cryptoeconomic behaviour of the system in
terms of prestige transfer between nodes.Comment: 2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency
(ICBC 2019
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