Big Data in Critical Infrastructures Security Monitoring: Challenges and Opportunities

Critical Infrastructures (CIs), such as smart power grids, transport systems, and financial infrastructures, are more and more vulnerable to cyber threats, due to the adoption of commodity computing facilities. Despite the use of several monitoring tools, recent attacks have proven that current defensive mechanisms for CIs are not effective enough against most advanced threats. In this paper we explore the idea of a framework leveraging multiple data sources to improve protection capabilities of CIs. Challenges and opportunities are discussed along three main research directions: i) use of distinct and heterogeneous data sources, ii) monitoring with adaptive granularity, and iii) attack modeling and runtime combination of multiple data analysis techniques.Comment: EDCC-2014, BIG4CIP-201

A multi-stakeholder analysis of the economic efficiency of industrial energy efficiency policies: Empirical evidence from ten years of the Italian White Certificate Scheme

© 2019 There is growing interest worldwide in more effective policies to promote industrial energy efficiency and mitigate climate change. The White Certificates Scheme is a market-based mechanism aimed at stimulating the adoption of Energy Efficiency Measures. The Italian White Certificates scheme - one of the most long-standing and articulated - is a successful example of industrial energy efficiency policies, considered an interesting and remarkable case by other countries, especially due to its robustness in terms of the volume of certificates traded. Despite the considerable interest in White Certificates, an in-depth analysis of the economic efficiency of the mechanism from the perspective of different stakeholders is still lacking. To address this gap, this study develops a cost-benefit evaluation framework and a multi-stakeholder economic efficiency analysis of the Italian White Certificates scheme focusing on the Italian State, utilities, players in the energy efficiency value chain, and energy users. Our findings (also corroborated with sensitivity analyses) show that the White Certificates Scheme has led to several positive impacts for almost all stakeholders involved, with the exception of energy utilities that have suffered a major economic loss mainly due to a reduction of energy sold to end users. Such loss is likely to promote a deep change in the role of utilities in the energy market in terms of the services they offer and their business models. Our findings, in addition to providing useful directions for future research, offer interesting insights and implications for policymakers who may take inspiration from the pros and cons of the Italian White Certificates scheme when promoting energy efficiency through incentive mechanisms

Fibre-reinforced geopolymer concretes for sensible heat thermal energy storage: Simulations and environmental impact

Power plants based on solar energy are spreading to accomplish the incoming green energy transition. Besides, affordable high-temperature sensible heat thermal energy storage (SHTES) is required. In this work, the temperature distribution and thermal performance of novel solid media for SHTES are investigated by finite element method (FEM) modelling. A geopolymer, with/without fibre reinforcement, is simulated during a transient charging/discharging cycle. A life cycle assessment (LCA) analysis is also carried out to investigate the environmental impact and sustainability of the proposed materials, analysing the embodied energy, the transport, and the production process. A Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) with the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach, taking into account thermal/environmental performance, is used to select the most suitable material. The results show that the localized reinforcement with fibres increases thermal storage performance, depending on the type of fibre, creating curvatures in the temperature profile and accelerating the charge/discharge. High-strength, high-conductivity carbon fibres performed well, and the simulation approach can be applied to any fibre arrangement/material. On the con-trary, the benefit of the fibres is not straightforward according to the three different scenarios developed for the LCA and MCDM analyses, due to the high impact of the fibre production processes. More investigations are needed to balance and optimize the coupling of the fibre material and the solid medium to obtain high thermal performance and low impacts

Implementing a Digital Strategy:Learning from the Experience of Three Digital Transformation Projects

The rapid growth of digital technologies and the extraordinary amount of data that devices and applications collect each day are increasingly driving companies to radically transform the business architecture through which they create and appropriate value. However, companies may fail to extract value from digital transformation due to the disconnection between strategy formulation and strategy implementation. Through the analysis of three case studies of firms that digitally transformed their business - namely ABB, CNH Industrial, and Vodafone -, this article presents a framework than can help companies implement their digital transformation strategy and thereby renovate their business model

Migration and public finances in the EU

We provide novel and comprehensive evidence on the net fiscal contributions of natives and migrants to the governmental budgets of EU countries. We account for income taxes and cash benefits, along with indirect taxes and in-kind benefits, which are often missing in standard datasets. We find that on average, migrants were net contributors to public finances over the period of 2014–2018 in the EU and, moreover, that they contribute approximately €1.5 thousand more per capita each year than natives. We also show that this difference is partly due to the selection on characteristics that make migrants net fiscal contributors, such as demographic factors and employment probability

Towards a phenotype of the amphibious company:an illustrative case from the chemical industry

The paper explores the phenotype of the amphibious company, which is intended as the fittest economic species in today’s hypercompetitive business arenas and hence the most likely to survive and prosper. Four behavioral traits are proposed and discussed as distinctive of amphibious companies: doing different jobs good, diversifying in multiple market arenas, brokering and bridging across business networks and absorbing knowledge from the outside. The paper illustrates these arguments through a paradigmatic case study of an Italian firm operating in the chemical industry, which has been able to survive a challenging crisis by adopting an amphibious behavior.<br

The Costs, Quality, and Scalability of Blended Learning in Postgraduate Management Education

With its combination of online and face-to-face interaction, blended learning is increasingly being employed in postgraduate education. To date, most empirical research on the topic has focused on the design and relative effectiveness of online versus in-person learning. Meanwhile, any exploration of the costs of its delivery has often been neglected. In this study, we propose a framework to assess the costs and cost-effectiveness of alternative designs of blended postgraduate programs, and then empirically apply it to an innovative blended Master of Business Administration (MBA) course as compared with similar MBAs taught at the same institution, with the differences lying in their proportions of online content and the intensity of their use. We applied the Community of Inquiry framework to show that the program with the most intensive use of online learning is also the most effective in terms of student cognitive gain. However, it is not the most cost-effective when compared to other, less online-intensive alternatives. We also found that this result depends on the scalability constraints imposed by the design of the programs. The implications of the scalability versus the quality versus the costs of blended education are then discussed

Building an outward-oriented social family legacy: rhetorical history in family business foundations

Scholars have recently paid growing attention to the transfer of family legacies across generations, but existing work has been mainly focused on an inward-oriented, intra-family, perspective. In this article, we seek to understand how family firms engage in rhetorical history to transfer their social family legacy to external stakeholders, what we call “outward-oriented social legacy.” By carrying out a 12-months field study in three Italian family business foundations, our findings unveil three distinctive narrative practices—founder foreshadowing, emplacing the legacy within the broader community, and weaving family history with macro—history—that contribute to transferring outward-oriented social legacies

Steroids efficacy in the acute management of seizure clusters in one case of PCDH19 female epilepsy

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Detection of selection signatures for ear carriage in Maltese goat breed

Selection and breeding practices in goats have led to the fixation of several traits. This is probably due to the standardization of several peculiar morphological characteristics that have always been one of the major exclusion criteria of individuals from selection. Among these, ear carriage is one of the most ancient and considered a signature of domestication in several species, such as the dog, pig, sheep and goat (Boyko et al., 2010). The availability of improved genomic analyses tools for goats may provide useful information on genes involved in this trait. By studying, for example, the homozygosity decay of haplotypes (contiguous length of alleles) such information can be detected. In the current study, we focused on the Maltese goat, a breed showing floppy ears, in comparison with other Italian breeds using a goat medium density SNP chip (Nicoloso et al., 2015). A total 48,767 SNP markers for 369 animals belonging to 16 breeds or populations were analyzed. Genotypes were imputed within population excluding markers without known position on the current genome assembly (ARS1, Bickhart et al., 2017). Population analysis using MDS, ADMIXTURE and fastSTRUCTURE confirmed the good differentiation among the populations. Integrated Haplotype Score (iHS, Sabeti et al., 2007) was performed for each population, comparing the regions detected on the Maltese breed with the others considered to detect genes that may be involved into shaping ear morphology. These results may provide new insights into ear carriage phenotype by detecting genes that play a pivotal role in shaping the goat phenotypic diversity