MS

thesisThis thesis reports a study in which the Whiting Q-sort methodology of assessing values and perceptions in relation to patient care has been applied to psychiatric aids in a state mental hospital which conducts a pre-service training program. The aim has been to assess those aspects of nursing care-physical care, supportive emotional care, liaison, and patient education-considered of greater and of lesser importance by a group of psychiatric aids (1) before a pre-service education program, (2) at the end of the pre-service education program, and (3) after the trainees have spent one month caring for mental ill patients

A Sustainable Approach to the Adaptive Reuse of Historic Brick Buildings:Analysis of Energy Efficiency Strategies for Historic Facade Retrofits

There are many historic brick buildings in downtown areas of the U.S. that are awaiting appropriate strategies for their adaptive reuse and preservation. The adaptive reuse method enables the adaptation of existing, obsolete historic buildings into new, mixed-use developments that will play an essential role in enhancing urban environments. However, many of these buildings have poor energy performance. This paper explores sustainable methods to balance between historic preservation and reduction of peak energy loads, through analyzing design strategies and conducting energy simulations for a building in downtown, Austin, TX. Energy retrofits related to windows, high performance of the facades with added insulation, and passive (spatial) interventions are covered in depth. Four retrofit scenarios were applied and simulated using the energy analysis tool in Revit, a popular BIM program. Analyzing the energy consumption data, we compare an existing building’s facade condition to the retrofit scenarios’ energy performances and record the energy performance data. This research proposes energy efficient preservation options for historic buildings and ultimately emphasizes potential values such as balancing the integrity of the original design with energy goals. We explore novel solutions for making historic buildings more sustainable through combining the adaptive reuse method with energy retrofit strategies that play up the historic buildings’ unique passive potentials. The various solutions are found to be highly dependent on the climate

Trust and risk assessment model of popular software based on known vulnerabilities

This paper presents a new concept of an approach to risk assessment which can be done on the basis of publicly available information about vulnerabilities. The presented approach uses also the notion of trust and implements many concepts used in so called trust and reputation management systems (which are widely used in WSN, MANET or P2P networks, but also in e-commerce platforms). The article shows first outcomes obtained from the presented model. The outcomes demonstrate that the model can be implemented in real system to make software management more quantified and objective process, which can have real and beneficial impact on institutional security. In article, however the emphasis was set not on the model itself (which can be easily changed) but on the possibility of finding useful information about vulnerabilities

Two Extensions of Trust Management Languages, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2020, nr 1

This article is focused on the family of role-based trust management languages (RT). Trust management languages are a useful method of representing security credentials and policies in large distributed access control mechanisms. They provide sets of credentials that are assigned to individual roles performed by the specific entities. These credentials provide relevant information about security policies issued by trusted authorities and define user permissions. RT languages describe the individual entities and the roles that these entities play in a given environment. A set of credentials representing a given security policy defines which entity has the necessary rights to access a specific resource and which entity does not have such rights. This study presents the results of research focusing on the potential of the family of RT languages. Its purpose is to show how security policies may be applied more widely by applying an inference system, and then using the extensions of the credentials, by taking into account time-related information or the conditions imposed with regard to the validity of such credentials. Each of these extensions can be used jointly or separately, offering even a wider range of opportunitie

The Interaction Effects in the Relationship Between Urban Form and Sustainable Transportation

The relationship between urban form and sustainable transportation has been extensively explored in the existing literature, and it is generally accepted that an urban form characterized by higher density, mixed land use pattern and higher accessibility could shorten travel distance and encourage people to choose alternative non-auto travel modes, which in turn reduces the fuel consumption and associated GHG emissions. However, the extensive research on urban form and sustainable transportation has only identified significant correlations between individual urban form variables, such as urban density, land use mix or road connectivity and the one or multiple sustainable transportation outcomes, such as travel mode or vehicle miles travelled (VMT), but very limited empirical studies have been identified to examine the interaction effects that may exist between the urban form attributes. This paper proposes the hypothesis that interaction effects exist between urban form attributes when examining their influences on sustainable transportation. Taking all cities in Florida, U.S. as a case, the interaction effects in the relationship between urban form and sustainable transportation are tested with empirical data. The regression results verified our hypothesis that density shows “threshold negative-to-positive” synergy with other urban form variables, indicating that certain theoretical correlations between urban form variables and sustainable transportation outcomes are conditional depending on the interactions between or among urban form attributes. The results may expand the theoretical framework on the topic of land use and transportation and has considerable policy implications for planning support systems

Two Semantics of Trust Management Language with Negation, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2013, nr 4

The family of Role-based Trust management languages is used for representing security policies by defining a formalism, which uses credentials to handle trust in decentralized, distributed access control systems. A credential provides information about the privileges of users and the security policies issued by one or more trusted authorities. The main topic of this paper is RT⊖, a language which provides a carefully controlled form of non-monotonicity. The core part of the paper defines two different semantics of RT⊖ language – a relational, set-theoretic semantics for the language, and an inference system, which is a kind of operational semantics. The set-theoretic semantics maps roles to a set of entity names. In the operational semantics credentials can be derived from an initial set of credentials using a set of inference rules. The soundness and the completeness of the inference system with respect to the set-theoretic semantics of RT⊖ will be proven

How the Role-Based Trust Management Can Be Applied to Wireless Sensor Networks, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2012, nr 4

Trust plays an important role in human life environments. That is why the researchers has been focusing on it for a long time. It allows us to delegate tasks and decisions to an appropriate person. In social sciences trust between humans was studied, but it also was analyzed in economic transactions. A lot of computer scientists from different areas, like security, semantic web, electronic commerce, social networks tried to transfer this concept to their domains. Trust is an essential factor in any kind of network, whether social or computer. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are characterized by severely constrained resources, they have limited power supplies, low transmission bandwidth, small memory sizes and limited energy, therefore security techniques used in traditional wired networks cannot be adopted directly. Some effort has been expended in this fields, but the concept of trust is defined in slightly different ways by different researchers. In this paper we will show how the family of Role-based Trust management languages (RT) can be used in WSN. RT is used for representing security policies and credentials in decentralized, distributed access control systems. A credential provides information about the privileges of users and the security policies issued by one or more trusted authorities

WinoQueer: A Community-in-the-Loop Benchmark for Anti-LGBTQ+ Bias in Large Language Models

We present WinoQueer: a benchmark specifically designed to measure whether large language models (LLMs) encode biases that are harmful to the LGBTQ+ community. The benchmark is community-sourced, via application of a novel method that generates a bias benchmark from a community survey. We apply our benchmark to several popular LLMs and find that off-the-shelf models generally do exhibit considerable anti-queer bias. Finally, we show that LLM bias against a marginalized community can be somewhat mitigated by finetuning on data written about or by members of that community, and that social media text written by community members is more effective than news text written about the community by non-members. Our method for community-in-the-loop benchmark development provides a blueprint for future researchers to develop community-driven, harms-grounded LLM benchmarks for other marginalized communities.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023 (main conference). Camera-ready versio

RTT+ – Time Validity Constraints in RT RTT Language, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2012, nr 2

Most of the traditional access control models, like mandatory, discretionary and role based access control make authorization decisions based on the identity, or the role of the requester, who must be known to the resource owner. Thus, they may be suitable for centralized systems but not for decentralized environments, where the requester and service provider or resource owner are often unknown to each other. To overcome the shortcomings of traditional access control models, trust management models have been presented. The topic of this paper is three different semantics (set-theoretic, operational, and logic- programming) of RTT , language from the family of role-based trust management languages (RT). RT is used for representing security policies and credentials in decentralized, distributed access control systems. A credential provides information about the privileges of users and the security policies issued by one or more trusted authorities. The set-theoretic semantics maps roles to a set of sets of entity names. Members of such a set must cooperate in order to satisfy the role. In the case of logic-programming semantics, the credentials are translated into a logic program. In the operational semantics the credentials can be established using a simple set of inference rules. It turns out to be fundamental mainly in large- scale distributed systems, where users have only partial view of their execution context. The core part of this paper is the introduction of time validity constraints to show how that can make RTT language more realistic. The new language, named RTT+ takes time validity constraints into account. The semantics for RTT+ language will also be shown. Inference system will be introduced not just for specific moment but also for time intervals. It will evaluate maximal time validity, when it is possible to derive the credential from the set of available credentials. The soundness and completeness of the inference systems with the time validity constraints with respect to the set-theoretic semantics of RTT+ will be proven