A study on the geographical distribution of Brazil’s prestigious software developers

Brazil is an emerging economy with many IT initiatives from public and private sectors. To evaluate the progress of such initiatives, we study the geographical distribution of software developers in Brazil, in particular which of the Brazilian states succeed the most in attracting and nurturing them. We compare the prestige of developers with socio-economic data and find that (i) prestigious developers tend to be located in the most economically developed regions of Brazil, (ii) they are likely to follow others in the same state they are located in, (iii) they are likely to follow other prestigious developers, and (iv) they tend to follow more people. We discuss the implications of those findings for the development of the Brazilian software industry.Fernando Figueira Filho, Marcelo Gattermann Perin, Christoph Treude, Sabrina Marczak, Leandro Melo, Igor Marques da Silva and Lucas Bibiano dos Santo

Investigation of the nature of the church through an analysis of selected email-based Christian online communities

This thesis investigates Christian online communities, with special emphasis on studying the nature of community and cyberspace. The purpose is to identify characteristics of community that individuals are seeking to cultivate in the online setting, showing possible implications for individuals in the "real world" church and offline communities. The key research question is: "What does online communication offer individual Christians and groups of Christians? How is the Internet changing Christians' interaction with the real world Christian Church?" The literature review on the topics of community, the Internet and online religion begins with theological definitions of community being combined with Social Network Analysis. Community is defined as a network of relationships between individuals connecting to a common purpose, whose bonds are created and sustained through shared traits and beliefs. The Internet, the "network of all connected networks" and cyberspace, a metaphorical space laden with distinct interpretations of what is real and what is virtual in a technological world, are explored as a space utilising new ways of communicating and being. Online community combines traditional traits of community with a new technological setting and is defined as individuals assembling through Internet technology to form a network of interdependent relationships based on a common vision, care and communication. These explorations provide groundwork for studying online Christian communities, online groups who share a common Christian commitment and unite through a specific faith-based discussion topic. Case study methodology is used to explore three Christian-email communities. They were selected on the basis of common online practices, yet represented diverse theological groups. The Community of Prophecy is a Charismatic-Renewal group focused around the gift of prophecy. The Online Church is an evangelical group of sensory impaired individuals. The Anglican Communion Online is a group with links to the Anglican Church. A three-phase research strategy is employed. Phase one involves participant-observation in selected online communities. Phase two involves distribution and analysis of online questionnaires to online community members. Phase three involves face-to-face interviews. These discussions tested out online observations and investigated how individuals link their online and "real world" communities. Each case study is analysed with data presented under four themes. First, The Online Community and the Online Context examined how each community used Internet technology and adapted to the online environment. Secondly, The Online Community and the Real World investigated how each community links online experiences with real world activities. Thirdly, The Online Community as a Community considered how each online group develops unique patterns of behaviour and a common identity. Finally, The Online Community Reflects on the Church demonstrated how members critique the real world Church community through the positive characteristics of online community they experienced. Through this study three conclusions are drawn. First, online involvement is not causing people to leave their local church or shy away from real world participation. Secondly, people join online communities primarily for relationships not information; relationships often noted as lacking in the offline Church. Thirdly, members' descriptions of online community and reasons they give for online involvement provide a critique of the real world Church. Also the attributes of online community highlighted (relationship, care, value, consistent communication and in-depth/intimate communications) offer a picture of what individuals hope a Christian community of the Church to be like

Open Data for Italian Municipalities: Ontology, Data and WebApps

I Linked Open Data contribuiranno a trasformare l'eGovernment, consentendo alle pubbliche amministrazioni di collegare i propri dati ai dati di altri soggetti. Inoltre, la pubblicazione di Linked Open Data crea nuova conoscenza e incoraggia la creatività e l'innovazione. In questo modo, infatti, i governi possono attivare servizi più efficienti e intelligenti e le organizzazioni e i cittadini possono sviluppare nuove applicazioni e strumenti per lavorare, analizzare e dare un senso ai dati pubblici. In questo contesto, questa tesi presenterà la progettazione e lo sviluppo di un'ontologia per modellare i dati prodotti dai comuni. Inoltre, la tesi presenterà l'RDF Graph Builder, un software che mira a semplificare la pubblicazione di risorse sotto forma di Linked Open Data, e Data Reports, un'applicazione web per la visualizzazione e la consultazione dei Linked Open Data attraverso grafici, tabelle e mappe.Linked Open Data will help transform eGovernment by enabling public administrations to define relationships between data of others. In addition, publishing Linked Open Data creates new knowledge and encourages creativity and innovation. Indeed, governments can activate smarter and more efficient public services and applications, and organizations and citizens can develop new applications and tools in order to work with, analyze, and make sense of the data. In this context, this thesis will present the design and the development of an ontology to model the data produced by municipalities. In addition, the thesis will present the RDF Graph Builder, a software that aims to simplify the publication of resources in the form of Linked Open Data, and Data Reports, a web application to for viewing and consulting Linked Open Data through charts, tables and maps

Charting the Constellation of Science Reform

Over the past decade, a sense of urgency has been building in the scientific community. They have discovered that much of the literature body is unreliable and possibly invalid thanks to weak theory, flawed methods, and shoddy statistics. This is driven by a widespread competitive, secretive approach to research, which, in turn, is fueled by toxic academic incentive structures. Many in the community have decided to address these issues, coming together in what has become known as the ‘scientific reform movement’. While these ‘reformers’ are often spoken of a single, homogeneous entity, my findings underscore the heterogeneity of the reform community. In my dissertation, I explore the scientific reform group using ethnography and social network analysis tools. I primarily studied their online Twitter engagements to understand their culture, practices, and structure. With Wenger’s Community of Practice theory as an interpretive framework, I analyze scientific reform discourse playing out between reformers on Twitter. Using quantitative Twitter friend/follow data, I investigate which reform members engage online, using following behavior to understand aspects of their social structure. I link the quantitative exploration with my qualitative analysis, to conclude that while the reformers are united by their interest in improving science, they are better characterized as a constellation of small communities of practice, each with their own norms, priorities, and unique approach to the group enterprise of scientific reform. My investigation is an exercise in reflexivity as I have studied a community in which I am an active part

Appropriation of privacy management within social networking sites

Social networking sites have emerged as one of the most widely used types of interactive systems, with memberships numbering in the hundreds of millions around the globe. By providing tools for their members to manage an ever-changing set of relationships, social networking sites push a constant expansion of social boundaries. These sites place less emphasis on tools that limit social boundaries to enable privacy. The rapid expansion of online social boundaries has caused privacy shockwaves. Privacy offline is enabled by constraints of time and space. Online, powerful search engines and long term digital storage means private data have no expiration date. Within an online culture of anonymity and fluid self-presentation of identity, social networking sites can be turned into places of perceived safety but with privacy risks that actually extend indefinitely. While these sites do deploy privacy management features, it is not understood how people use social networking sites, how they use privacy management features, and how these two are related. In order to create better privacy mechanisms for social software, designers must first understand how members manage their privacy in the current environment. This dissertation introduces The Social Software Performance Model, which describes relevant factors and their interaction in order to explain patterns of privacy management. The Model is a synthesis of Adaptive Structuration Theory, the Fit Appropriation Model and socio-technical systems theory. Adaptive Structuration Theory attempts to explain appropriation, defined as the process by which people integrate technology into their daily tasks and activities. A central premise of this research is that the appropriation perspective is a valuable lens for teasing apart how members of these sites adopt and adapt privacy management features. Using Adaptive Structuration Theory, this dissertation developed and validated new measures that capture appropriation patterns related to privacy management within social networking sites. The research introduces three independent constructs that measure privacy management appropriation. They are the Use appropriation move, which measures actual use of privacy management features; the Familiarity appropriation move, which measure knowledge of privacy management features; and the Restricted Scope appropriation move, which measures the extent to which members independently limit the scope of their online social network to protect their privacy. Survey data was collected from subjects in two different social networking sites, Facebook and MySpace, and used to evaluate hypotheses developed from The Social Software Performance Model. Using a partial least squares analysis, the research model explained 28.5% of the variance with respect to appropriation of privacy management features. This is a strong result for exploratory research. This research makes a contribution by extending theories to a new context, by applying both the Adaptive Structuration Theory and the Fit Appropriation Model to the use of privacy management in social networking sites. Using types and sub-types of appropriation moves from Adaptive Structuration Theory, new measures were developed and validated. These new measures, with further efforts to establish validity and reliability, can be adapted to understand appropriations for other forms of social software. The main finding of the research is a method to evaluate the effectiveness of different implementations of privacy management within social networking sites. While information system theory has been primarily concerned with systems used in an organizational context, the results of this research shows these theories are relevant to new systems based on social interaction. These new types of social software, generically labeled as Web 2.0, are among the most popular on the Internet. Besides Facebook and MySpace, examples of Web 2.0 include the video sharing site YouTube.com, and the photo sharing site Flickr.com. These sites thrive on intensive social interaction, and are growing in scope and importance. There has been little consensus among researchers as to how to measure the effectiveness of Web 2.0 systems. This lack of consensus presents a strategic opportunity for information systems theory, which has made determinations of effectiveness an important focus. This research has adapted information systems theory to study the effectiveness of privacy management. The development of privacy management has proven to be a difficult problem, and a deeper understanding of its effectiveness is expected to improve the overall design of these systems. By adapting information systems theory to the use of privacy management within social networking sites, this research shows that information systems theory can also be used applied to Web 2.0 applications. This provides a foundation for the further development of methods to measure the effectiveness of additional components within social software

Teak: A Novel Computational And Gui Software Pipeline For Reconstructing Biological Networks, Detecting Activated Biological Subnetworks, And Querying Biological Networks.

As high-throughput gene expression data becomes cheaper and cheaper, researchers are faced with a deluge of data from which biological insights need to be extracted and mined since the rate of data accumulation far exceeds the rate of data analysis. There is a need for computational frameworks to bridge the gap and assist researchers in their tasks. The Topology Enrichment Analysis frameworK (TEAK) is an open source GUI and software pipeline that seeks to be one of many tools that fills in this gap and consists of three major modules. The first module, the Gene Set Cultural Algorithm, de novo infers biological networks from gene sets using the KEGG pathways as prior knowledge. The second and third modules query against the KEGG pathways using molecular profiling data and query graphs, respectively. In particular, the second module, also called TEAK, is a network partitioning module that partitions the KEGG pathways into both linear and nonlinear subpathways. In conjunction with molecular profiling data, the subpathways are ranked and displayed to the user within the TEAK GUI. Using a public microarray yeast data set, previously unreported fitness defects for dpl1 delta and lag1 delta mutants under conditions of nitrogen limitation were found using TEAK. Finally, the third module, the Query Structure Enrichment Analysis framework, is a network query module that allows researchers to query their biological hypotheses in the form of Directed Acyclic Graphs against the KEGG pathways

The Whalesong

Opening the door to opportunity: UAS offers new bachelor degrees -- School's out, get a job -- Coming back to the real world -- Lab side show -- Balance -- The nature of UAS: A farewell from Spanish professor -- Crappy situation -- Troops have to deal with spiders? -- Ski season has closed -- KBJZ 94.1 LPFM: Free to mix it up -- Multi-billion dollar idea -- Semester at sea: a floating campus to discover the world -- UAS students bring home first place -- 7th grade geography-fair judges needed at Dryden -- Campus poll -- Osteosarcoma: A risk worth taking? -- Thank you -- A blocked electro-man -- Informed-Traitor advice -- The Learning Center: Building on a successful past -- Arts & entertainment -- Deer dreams: A memoir -- Celebrating 10 years of study abroad at UAS

Advances in the Convergence of Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence

Blockchain (BC) and artificial intelligence (AI) are currently two of the hottest computer science topics and their future seems bright. However, their convergence is not straightforward, and more research is needed in both fields. Thus, this book presents some of the latest advances in the convergence of BC and AI, gives useful guidelines for future researchers on how BC can help AI and how AI can become smarter, thanks to the use of BC. This book specifically analyzes the past of BC through the history of Bitcoin and then looks into the future: from massive internet-of-things (IoT) deployments, to the so-called metaverse, and to the next generation of AI-powered BC-based cyber secured applications

Evolving Bitcoin Custody

The broad topic of this thesis is the design and analysis of Bitcoin custody systems. Both the technology and threat landscape are evolving constantly. Therefore, custody systems, defence strategies, and risk models should be adaptive too. We introduce Bitcoin custody by describing the different types, design principles, phases and functions of custody systems. We review the technology stack of these systems and focus on the fundamentals; key-management and privacy. We present a perspective we call the systems view. It is an attempt to capture the full complexity of a custody system, including technology, people, and processes. We review existing custody systems and standards. We explore Bitcoin covenants. This is a mechanism to enforce constraints on transaction sequences. Although previous work has proposed how to construct and apply Bitcoin covenants, these require modifying the consensus rules of Bitcoin, a notoriously difficult task. We introduce the first detailed exposition and security analysis of a deleted-key covenant protocol, which is compatible with current consensus rules. We demonstrate a range of security models for deleted-key covenants which seem practical, in particular, when applied in autonomous (user-controlled) custody systems. We conclude with a comparative analysis with previous proposals. Covenants are often proclaimed to be an important primitive for custody systems, but no complete design has been proposed to validate that claim. To address this, we propose an autonomous custody system called Ajolote which uses deleted-key covenants to enforce a vault sequence. We evaluate Ajolote with; a model of its state dynamics, a privacy analysis, and a risk model. We propose a threat model for custody systems which captures a realistic attacker for a system with offline devices and user-verification. We perform ceremony analysis to construct the risk model.Comment: PhD thesi