Bluetooth Smartphone Apps: Are they the most private and effective solution for COVID-19 contact tracing?

Many digital solutions mainly involving Bluetooth technology are being proposed for Contact Tracing Apps (CTA) to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Concerns have been raised regarding privacy, consent, uptake required in a given population, and the degree to which use of CTAs can impact individual behaviours. However, very few groups have taken a holistic approach and presented a combined solution. None has presented their CTA in such a way as to ensure that even the most suggestible member of our community does not become complacent and assume that CTA operates as an invisible shield, making us and our families impenetrable or immune to the disease. We propose to build on some of the digital solutions already under development that, with addition of a Bayesian model that predicts likelihood for infection supplemented by traditional symptom and contact tracing, that can enable us to reach 90% of a population. When combined with an effective communication strategy and social distancing, we believe solutions like the one proposed here can have a very beneficial effect on containing the spread of this pandemic

Code offloading in opportunistic computing

With the advent of cloud computing, applications are no longer tied to a single device, but they can be migrated to a high-performance machine located in a distant data center. The key advantage is the enhancement of performance and consequently, the users experience. This activity is commonly referred computational offloading and it has been strenuously investigated in the past years. The natural candidate for computational offloading is the cloud, but recent results point out the hidden costs of cloud reliance in terms of latency and energy; Cuervo et. al. illustrates the limitations on cloud-based computational offloading based on WANs latency times. The dissertation confirms the results of Cuervo et. al. and illustrates more use cases where the cloud may not be the right choice. This dissertation addresses the following question: is it possible to build a novel approach for offloading the computation that overcomes the limitations of the state-of-the-art? In other words, is it possible to create a computational offloading solution that is able to use local resources when the Cloud is not usable, and remove the strong bond with the local infrastructure? To this extent, I propose a novel paradigm for computation offloading named anyrun computing, whose goal is to use any piece of higher-end hardware (locally or remotely accessible) to offloading a portion of the application. With anyrun computing I removed the boundaries that tie the solution to an infrastructure by adding locally available devices to augment the chances to succeed in offloading. To achieve the goals of the dissertation it is fundamental to have a clear view of all the steps that take part in the offloading process. To this extent, I firstly provided a categorization of such activities combined with their interactions and assessed the impact on the system. The outcome of the analysis is the mapping to the problem to a combinatorial optimization problem that is notoriously known to be NP-Hard. There are a set of well-known approaches to solving such kind of problems, but in this scenario, they cannot be used because they require a global view that can be only maintained by a centralized infrastructure. Thus, local solutions are needed. Moving further, to empirically tackle the anyrun computing paradigm, I propose the anyrun computing framework (ARC), a novel software framework whose objective is to decide whether to offload or not to any resource-rich device willing to lend assistance is advantageous compared to local execution with respect to a rich array of performance dimensions. The core of ARC is the nference nodel which receives a rich set of information about the available remote devices from the SCAMPI opportunistic computing framework developed within the European project SCAMPI, and employs the information to profile a given device, in other words, it decides whether offloading is advantageous compared to local execution, i.e. whether it can reduce the local footprint compared to local execution in the dimensions of interest (CPU and RAM usage, execution time, and energy consumption). To empirically evaluate ARC I presented a set of experimental results on the cloud, cloudlet, and opportunistic domain. In the cloud domain, I used the state of the art in cloud solutions over a set of significant benchmark problems and with three WANs access technologies (i.e. 3G, 4G, and high-speed WAN). The main outcome is that the cloud is an appealing solution for a wide variety of problems, but there is a set of circumstances where the cloud performs poorly. Moreover, I have empirically shown the limitations of cloud-based approaches, specifically, In some circumstances, problems with high transmission costs tend to perform poorly, unless they have high computational needs. The second part of the evaluation is done in opportunistic/cloudlet scenarios where I used my custom-made testbed to compare ARC and MAUI, the state of the art in computation offloading. To this extent, I have performed two distinct experiments: the first with a cloudlet environment and the second with an opportunistic environment. The key outcome is that ARC virtually matches the performances of MAUI (in terms of energy savings) in cloudlet environment, but it improves them by a 50% to 60% in the opportunistic domain

AgriBlock: A Blockchain based Framework for Agricultural Supply Chain Management

To facilitate complex interactions between regional players and the agricultural environment, modern agriculture supply chains have arisen. Supply chain processes that include several parties, such as production, processing, and delivery, interacting with one another. Lack of transparency in the agricultural supply chain is a major contributor to the incidence of fraud in this industry. A lack of openness on the part of organisations leads to worries about potential financial losses, diminishing customer trust, and dwindling brand value. Several fundamental changes to the existing supply chain architecture are required to foster the development of an effective and reliable trade environment. It is widely recognised that blockchain technology has the potential to increase visibility across agricultural and food supply chains. Businesses are using blockchain and IoT to implement more egalitarian, sustainable, and consumer-friendly methods of food production. Based on what we learned, blockchain technology may be useful in the push for a more transparent and responsible food supply chain. The primary goal of this study is to create a decentralised application framework called AgriBlock that can be used for managing the supply chains of agricultural products using blockchain technology. The developed work AgriBlock will aid in making the supply chain process more open and clear to every participant involved

Impact of COVID-19 on iot adoption in healthcare, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, transportation and industrial IoT

COVID-19 has disrupted normal life and has enforced a substantial change in the policies, priorities and activities of individuals, organisations and governments. These changes are proving to be a catalyst for technology and innovation. In this paper, we discuss the pandemic's potential impact on the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) in various broad sectors namely healthcare, smart homes, smart buildings, smart cities, transportation and industrial IoT. Our perspective and forecast of this impact on IoT adoption is based on a thorough research literature review, a careful examination of reports from leading consulting firms and interactions with several industry experts. For each of these sectors, we also provide the details of notable IoT initiatives taken in wake of COVID-19. We also highlight the challenges that need to be addressed and important research directions that will facilitate accelerated IoT adoption.Comment: This is the version accepted at Sensors 202

Reevaluating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: Amending the Statute to Explicitly Address the Cloud

Under the current interpretations of authorization, instances where an individual harmlessly accesses the cloud data of another user could be classified as hacking and a violation of this federal statute. As such, this Note demonstrates that all of the current interpretations of the CFAA are too broad because they could result in this nonsensical outcome. This Note accordingly proposes an amendment to the CFAA specifically addressing user access to data on the cloud. Such an amendment would eliminate the unusual result of innocuous cloud-computing users being deemed hackers under federal law

Cluster-based Epidemic Control Through Smartphone-based Body Area Networks

Increasing population density, closer social contact, and interactions make epidemic control difficult. Traditional offline epidemic control methods (e.g., using medical survey or medical records) or model-based approach are not effective due to its inability to gather health data and social contact information simultaneously or impractical statistical assumption about the dynamics of social contact networks, respectively. In addition, it is challenging to find optimal sets of people to be isolated to contain the spread of epidemics for large populations due to high computational complexity. Unlike these approaches, in this paper, a novel cluster-based epidemic control scheme is proposed based on Smartphonebased body area networks. The proposed scheme divides the populations into multiple clusters based on their physical location and social contact information. The proposed control schemes are applied within the cluster or between clusters. Further, we develop a computational efficient approach called UGP to enable an effective cluster-based quarantine strategy using graph theory for large scale networks (i.e., populations). The effectiveness of the proposed methods is demonstrated through both simulations and experiments on real social contact networks

Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering vol. 365

This book includes the original, peer-reviewed research papers from the 2nd International Conference on Electrical Systems, Technology and Information (ICESTI 2015), held during 9–12 September 2015, at Patra Jasa Resort & Villas Bali, Indonesia. The primary objective of this book is to provide references for dissemination and discussion of the topics that have been presented in the conference. This volume is unique in that it includes work related to Electrical Engineering, Technology and Information towards their sustainable development. Engineers, researchers as well as lecturers from universities and professionals in industry and government will gain valuable insights into interdisciplinary solutions in the field of Electrical Systems, Technology and Information, and its applications. The topics of ICESTI 2015 provide a forum for accessing the most up-to-date and authoritative knowledge and the best practices in the field of Electrical Engineering, Technology and Information towards their sustainable development. The editors selected high quality papers from the conference that passed through a minimum of three reviewers, with an acceptance rate of 50.6 %. In the conference there were three invited papers from keynote speakers, whose papers are also included in this book, entitled: “Computational Intelligence based Regulation of the DC bus in the On-Grid Photovoltaic System”, “Virtual Prototyping of a Compliant Spindle for Robotic Deburring” and “A Concept of Multi Rough Sets Defined on Multi-Contextual Information Systems”. The conference also classified the technology innovation topics into five parts: “Technology Innovation in Robotics, Image Recognition and Computational Intelligence Applications”, “Technology Innovation in Electrical Engineering, Electric Vehicle and Energy Management”, “Technology Innovation in Electronic, Manufacturing, Instrumentation and Material Engineering”, “Technology Innovation in Internet of Things and Its Applications” and “Technology Innovation in Information, Modeling and Mobile Applications”

ENHANCED WEARABLE STRAP FOR FEMININE USING IoT

Women are increasingly experiencing a slew of security difficulties while traveling alone at night, particularly in the IT industry. Despite the benefits of new technologies, the rate of crime against women continues to rise. Despite the fact that numerous security gadgets are available on the market, women are unaware of them and do not use them. We are going to develop a prototype design using IoT. The term "physical objects” that are outfitted with sensors, computing power, software, and other technologies that enable them to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks are referred to as the Internet of Things. Our project's ultimate goal is to give protection to working women and children. The majority of crimes occur as a result of a person's lack of awareness. We plan to keep the person aware throughout by administering a VIBRATION. The device comprises components such as the Start button, Arduino UNO, Panic Button, GSM Neo 6 m, GPS, Pulse Sensor, Vibration Motor, 6V Transformer, and Touch Sensor. The current location is determined using GPRS and GSM Neo 6 m. In emergency cases, a Pulse Sensor detects the person's actual pulse rate. The person must use a Touch Sensor to stop the vibration. If the vibration does not stop within the specified time, it is assumed that the person is not in an active state. The Emergency alert is then sent to the predefined contacts stored on the Arduino board. The transformer with a voltage range of 6v supplies power to the entire device. The future scope of this project is we can collect datasets of all hospitals for emergency purpose, creating offline maps to locate the victim without internet connection. Then the device can also contain Mic and camera to live monitor the consequence