Interrogating the technical, economic and cultural challenges of delivering the PassivHaus standard in the UK.

A peer-reviewed eBook, which is based on a collaborative research project coordinated by Dr. Henrik Schoenefeldt at the Centre for Architecture and Sustainable Environment at the University of Kent between May 2013 and June 2014. This project investigated how architectural practice and the building industry are adapting in order to successfully deliver Passivhaus standard buildings in the UK. Through detailed case studies the project explored the learning process underlying the delivery of fourteen buildings, certified between 2009 and 2013. Largely founded on the study of the original project correspondence and semi-structured interviews with clients, architects, town planners, contractors and manufacturers, these case studies have illuminated the more immediate technical as well as the broader cultural challenges. The peer-reviewers of this book stressed that the findings included in the book are valuable to students, practitioners and academic researchers in the field of low-energy design. It was launched during the PassivHaus Project Conference, held at the Bulb Innovation Centre on the 27th June 2014

Gaming Business Communities: Developing online learning organisations to foster communities, develop leadership, and grow interpersonal education

This paper explores, through observation and testing, what possibilities from gaming can be extended into other realms of human interaction to help bring people together, extend education, and grow business. It uses through action learning within the safety of the virtual world within Massively Multiplayer Online Games. Further, I explore how the world of online gaming provides opportunity to train a wide range of skills through extending Revans’ (1980) learning equation and action inquiry methodology. This equation and methodology are deployed in relation to a gaming community to see if the theories could produce strong relationships within organisations and examine what learning, if any, is achievable. I also investigate the potential for changes in business (e.g., employee and customer relationships) through involvement in the gaming community as a unique place to implement action learning. The thesis also asks the following questions on a range of extended possibilities in the world of online gaming: What if the world opened up to a social environment where people could discuss their successes and failures? What if people could take a real world issue and re‐create it in the safe virtual world to test ways of dealing with it? What education answers can the world of online gaming provide

Hardware-Assisted Dependable Systems

Unpredictable hardware faults and software bugs lead to application crashes, incorrect computations, unavailability of internet services, data losses, malfunctioning components, and consequently financial losses or even death of people. In particular, faults in microprocessors (CPUs) and memory corruption bugs are among the major unresolved issues of today. CPU faults may result in benign crashes and, more problematically, in silent data corruptions that can lead to catastrophic consequences, silently propagating from component to component and finally shutting down the whole system. Similarly, memory corruption bugs (memory-safety vulnerabilities) may result in a benign application crash but may also be exploited by a malicious hacker to gain control over the system or leak confidential data. Both these classes of errors are notoriously hard to detect and tolerate. Usual mitigation strategy is to apply ad-hoc local patches: checksums to protect specific computations against hardware faults and bug fixes to protect programs against known vulnerabilities. This strategy is unsatisfactory since it is prone to errors, requires significant manual effort, and protects only against anticipated faults. On the other extreme, Byzantine Fault Tolerance solutions defend against all kinds of hardware and software errors, but are inadequately expensive in terms of resources and performance overhead. In this thesis, we examine and propose five techniques to protect against hardware CPU faults and software memory-corruption bugs. All these techniques are hardware-assisted: they use recent advancements in CPU designs and modern CPU extensions. Three of these techniques target hardware CPU faults and rely on specific CPU features: ∆-encoding efficiently utilizes instruction-level parallelism of modern CPUs, Elzar re-purposes Intel AVX extensions, and HAFT builds on Intel TSX instructions. The rest two target software bugs: SGXBounds detects vulnerabilities inside Intel SGX enclaves, and “MPX Explained” analyzes the recent Intel MPX extension to protect against buffer overflow bugs. Our techniques achieve three goals: transparency, practicality, and efficiency. All our systems are implemented as compiler passes which transparently harden unmodified applications against hardware faults and software bugs. They are practical since they rely on commodity CPUs and require no specialized hardware or operating system support. Finally, they are efficient because they use hardware assistance in the form of CPU extensions to lower performance overhead

A design space for RDF data representations

RDF triplestores' ability to store and query knowledge bases augmented with semantic annotations has attracted the attention of both research and industry. A multitude of systems offer varying data representation and indexing schemes. However, as recently shown for designing data structures, many design choices are biased by outdated considerations and may not result in the most efficient data representation for a given query workload. To overcome this limitation, we identify a novel three-dimensional design space. Within this design space, we map the trade-offs between different RDF data representations employed as part of an RDF triplestore and identify unexplored solutions. We complement the review with an empirical evaluation of ten standard SPARQL benchmarks to examine the prevalence of these access patterns in synthetic and real query workloads. We find some access patterns, to be both prevalent in the workloads and under-supported by existing triplestores. This shows the capabilities of our model to be used by RDF store designers to reason about different design choices and allow a (possibly artificially intelligent) designer to evaluate the fit between a given system design and a query workload

Migrating microservices to graph database

Microservice architecture is a popular approach to structuring web backend services. Another emerging trend, after a period of hibernation, is utilizing modern graph database management systems for managing complex, richly connected data. The two approaches have rarely been used in tandem, as microservices emphasize modularization and decoupling of services, while graph data models favor data integration. In this study, literature on microservices and graph databases is reviewed and a synthesis between the two paradigms is presented. Based on the theoretical discussion, a software architecture combining the two elements is formulated and implemented using microservices serving content metadata at Yleisradio, the Finnish national broadcasting company. The architecture design follows the Design Science Research Process model. Finally, the renewed system is evaluated using quantitative and qualitative metrics. The performance of the system is measured using automated API queries and load tests. The new system was compared to an earlier version based on a PostgreSQL database. The tests gave slight indication that the renewed system performed better for complex queries, where a large number of relations were traversed, but worse in terms of throughput under heavy load. Based on the these findings, a number of performance-enhancing optimizations to the system are introduced. Observations and perpectives are also gathered in a project retrospective session. It is concluded that the resulting architecture holds promise for managing complex data rich in relations in a safe manner. In it, the different domains of the knowledge graph are decoupled into distinct named graphs managed by different microservices

SUSMETRO : Impact Assessment Tools for Food Planning in Metropolitan Regions : IA tools and serious gaming in support of sustainability targets for food planning, nature conservation and recreation

By offering a series of decision support tools for stakeholders of metropolitan regions, SUSMETRO facilitates and enables evidence-based decision making by means of ‘serious gaming’. Making use of the Phase 1 thematic maps such as on agricultural competitiveness, nature conservation and recreational values, stakeholders can compare impacts of traditional versus innovative forms of agricultural production. The SUSMETRO Impact Assessment tool provides information on the expected effects of spatial planning with regard to the self-supportive capacities of the region (ecological footprint) and the share of recreational and nature conservation facilities (land use functions), offering cost-benefit calculations regarding the expected economic revenues. The whole process is embedded in a Landscape Character Assessment process and guided by Knowledge Brokerage procedures to strengthen the science-policy interface. In sum, the SUSMETRO approach allows a wide range of stakeholders to co-develop images for sustainable Metropolitan Agriculture

Exploring the motivations and decision making of sustainable entrepreneurs: implications for apparel manufacturing in the United States

There is a growing interest in sustainability in response to what some consider to be the "throwaway" consumer culture of today (Pookulangara & Shephard, 2013). Sustainability is a growing trend across industries and among consumers, as more people consider the implications of their actions for the future. The goal of this thesis is to understand the role of sustainable entrepreneurship within the apparel manufacturing sector. While consumption passed the point of the earth's sustainability in 1978, it does not appear that this trend will end anytime soon. Indeed, during 2010 alone, 13.1 million tons of textile waste was generated in the U.S. (Environmental Protection Agency [EPA], 2012). Rather than focusing solely on profit, the notion of sustainable development encourages a focus on what is known as the "triple bottom line" (Elkington, 1997), which combines economic gain with environmental and social value creation (Hockerts & Wustenhagen, 2010). The purpose of this study is to explore the motivations and decision-making of sustainable apparel entrepreneurs and to investigate their business models with regard to the broader implications they may have for U.S. apparel manufacturing as a whole. Using a case study approach, in-depth interviews were conducted with the founders of six sustainable apparel companies headquartered in the Southeastern United States. Interviews lasted for approximately one to three hours in length, and were recorded with participant's consent. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and interpreted thematically. Three conceptual areas of Philosophy, Positioning, and Production resulted from the analysis. Within these conceptual areas, a total of ten themes surfaced and were used to structure the interpretation. Based on the interpretation, four key drivers of motivation and decision-making were identified: (a) Altruism, (b) Self-Definition, (c) Symbiosis, and (d) Blind Impulse. In addition, four key business model attributes were defined: (a) Product Stewardship, (b) Value Alignment, (c) Strategic Partnerships, and (d) the Triple Bottom Line. Based on the findings, several recommendations for potential startups were made, including the following: (a) align goals, (b) allow for mistakes, (c) make the most of resources, and (d) nurture relationships. Because there is a limited amount of research that explores sustainable apparel entrepreneurs, the results of this study provide an in-depth understanding of the benefits and challenges involved in running a sustainable apparel business. Future empirical research is needed to further investigate sustainable apparel entrepreneurship from other angles, such as across cultures and from other perspectives including those of suppliers and customers. Such research would further enrich our overall understanding of what it means to produce apparel sustainably