Digital condition monitoring for wider blue economy.

In the process of decommissioning energy systems, condition monitoring is crucial. It can make the health status of offshore oil and gas installations, pipelines, wind farms etc. transparent to policymakers and stakeholders, and aid them in creating a better repurposing plan for the assets that will be decommissioned to create a sustainable ocean economy. In most cases, condition monitoring calls for experienced engineers to perform on-site testing, which raises labour costs as well as commuter carbon emissions (M.J. Hasan & Kim, 2019; Rai et al., 2021). A revolution in decarbonised and sustainable decommissioning may result from further digitalisation of condition monitoring to address this problem. We can gather and manipulte enormous amounts of real-time data, and create a simulated representation of physical assets. We can then quickly predict their health conditions by combining artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and augmented-, virtual- and mixed reality techniques (M.J. Hasan et al., 2019; Yan et al. 2018, 2020, 2021). Digital condition monitoring has social and economic benefits, including: 1) Delivering a plausible innovation that can be successfully used in other UK industries; 2) Opening a new high-tech talent demand market in the UK; 3) Reducing carbon emissions of decommissioning projects, especially for the marine environment; 4) Reshaping the offshore marine environment to benefit the blue economy; 5) Reducing costs across the decommissioning chain, from design and manufacturing to purchasing and maintenance

Checkpointing as a Service in Heterogeneous Cloud Environments

A non-invasive, cloud-agnostic approach is demonstrated for extending existing cloud platforms to include checkpoint-restart capability. Most cloud platforms currently rely on each application to provide its own fault tolerance. A uniform mechanism within the cloud itself serves two purposes: (a) direct support for long-running jobs, which would otherwise require a custom fault-tolerant mechanism for each application; and (b) the administrative capability to manage an over-subscribed cloud by temporarily swapping out jobs when higher priority jobs arrive. An advantage of this uniform approach is that it also supports parallel and distributed computations, over both TCP and InfiniBand, thus allowing traditional HPC applications to take advantage of an existing cloud infrastructure. Additionally, an integrated health-monitoring mechanism detects when long-running jobs either fail or incur exceptionally low performance, perhaps due to resource starvation, and proactively suspends the job. The cloud-agnostic feature is demonstrated by applying the implementation to two very different cloud platforms: Snooze and OpenStack. The use of a cloud-agnostic architecture also enables, for the first time, migration of applications from one cloud platform to another.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures, appears in CCGrid, 201

Transparent authentication methodology in electronic education

In the context of on-line assessment in e-learning, a problem arises when a student taking an exam may wish to cheat by handing over personal credentials to someone else to take their place in an exam, Another problem is that there is no method for signing digital content as it is being produced in a computerized environment. Our proposed solution is to digitally sign the participant’s work by embedding voice samples in the transcript paper at regular intervals. In this investigation, we have demonstrated that a transparent stenographic methodology will provide an innovative and practical solution for achieving continuous authentication in an online educational environment by successful insertion and extraction of audio digital signatures

The AliEn system, status and perspectives

AliEn is a production environment that implements several components of the Grid paradigm needed to simulate, reconstruct and analyse HEP data in a distributed way. The system is built around Open Source components, uses the Web Services model and standard network protocols to implement the computing platform that is currently being used to produce and analyse Monte Carlo data at over 30 sites on four continents. The aim of this paper is to present the current AliEn architecture and outline its future developments in the light of emerging standards.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 10 pages, Word, 10 figures. PSN MOAT00

Chapter 9: Quality Assurance

The OTiS (Online Teaching in Scotland) programme, run by the now defunct Scotcit programme, ran an International e-Workshop on Developing Online Tutoring Skills which was held between 8–12 May 2000. It was organised by Heriot–Watt University, Edinburgh and The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, UK. Out of this workshop came the seminal Online Tutoring E-Book, a generic primer on e-learning pedagogy and methodology, full of practical implementation guidelines. Although the Scotcit programme ended some years ago, the E-Book has been copied to the SONET site as a series of PDF files, which are now available via the ALT Open Access Repository. The editor, Carol Higgison, is currently working in e-learning at the University of Bradford (see her staff profile) and is the Chair of the Association for Learning Technology (ALT)