The parental home as labour market insurance for young Greeks during the crisis

Labour market conditions in Greece have severely deteriorated during the crisis, affecting youths the most. Using the Greek crisis as a case-study, this paper examines the role of the family as a social safety net for its young members. Specifically, we test the relationship between youth labour outcomes and parental coresidence, whether this relationship has become stronger during the crisis, and the degree to which the relationship is causal. Our results confirm that the parental home is a refuge both for jobless youth and for those in poorly paid, insecure jobs, and this role has intensified during the crisis. We find no reverse causality between co-residence and employment status for young men, and significant reverse causality for women. This finding implies that all youths live in the parental home when they are in need themselves, but it is young women not men who live with parents when parents are in need or for cultural reasons

Who saved Greek youth? Parental support to young adults during the great recession

We use data from the Greek Labour Force Survey to calculate, by region and year, the share of youths who coreside with their parents as a proxy of mutual dependence between parents and adult children, and the share of youths who coreside with their parents and also receive cash transfers as a proxy of one-way dependence of youths on parents. Using panel data analysis, we examine the correlation of each variable with the youth unemployment rate. We find that familial interdependence was strong before the crisis and intensified further during the crisis while at the same time it was transformed from two- to one-directional. Parents stepped in to shelter unemployed and vulnerable youths, mostly young men, and did so by providing housing rather than cash

MERLINS : moving target defense enhanced with deep-RL for NFV in-depth security

Moving to a multi-cloud environment and service-based architecture, 5G and future 6G networks require additional defensive mechanisms to protect virtualized network resources. This paper presents MERLINS, a novel architecture generating optimal Moving Target Defense (MTD) policies for proactive and reactive security of network slices. By formally modeling telecommunication networks compliant with Network Function Virtualization (NFV) into a multi-objective Markov Decision Process (MOMDP), MERLINS uses deep Reinforcement Learning (deep-RL) to optimize the MTD strategy that considers security, network performance, and service level requirements. Practical experiments on a 5G testbed showcase the feasibility as well as restrictions of MTD operations and the effectiveness in mitigating malware infections. It is observed that multi-objective RL (MORL) algorithms outperform state-of-the-art deep-RL algorithms that scalarize the reward vector of the MOMDP. This improvement by a factor of two leads to a better MTD policy than the baseline static counterpart used for the evaluation

TopoFuzzer : a network topology fuzzer for moving target defense in the telco cloud

Telecommunication networks are shifting to multi-cloud environments. This trend is expected to shape the standardization and implementation of future networks. Thus, the protection of virtualized services has become more critical. One of the promising methods to secure virtual resources in that setting is Moving Target Defense (MTD). This paper presents the Network Topology Fuzzer (TopoFuzzer) module, enabling different MTD operations that change the topology of a 5G network. An emphasis is given to live re-instantiations and live migrations of running services and, consequently, security gains against Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs). This work utilizes a 5G testbed to evaluate the TopoFuzzer module and MTD operations on Virtual Network Functions (VNFs)

Exploring friendship quality and the practice of savoring in relation to the wellbeing of Greek adults

Previous research findings demonstrate that both savoring ability and the presence of high-quality friendships play a significant role in enhancing one’s overall sense of wellbeing. However, these associations have not been thoroughly investigated within a diverse range of adults across their lifespans, nor have they been explored in the specific cultural context of Greece. Thus, the primary objective of this study was to delve into the relationships between close friendship quality, the utilization of savoring techniques, and wellbeing within the Greek cultural framework. The study involved 771 adults from Greece with an average age of 38.35 years, who completed the McGill Friendship Functions Questionnaire, the PERMA Profiler, and the Abridged Ways of Savoring Checklist. Results revealed that there exists a positive correlation between friendship quality and savoring strategies with overall wellbeing. Moreover, the study identified a significant association wherein a greater employment of savoring strategies was linked to higher levels of friendship quality. While this study contributes valuable insights, it also has limitations that warrant acknowledgment. Furthermore, suggestions for potential future research directions are proposed, and the implications of these findings are discussed in relation to interventions aimed at enhancing both friendships and the practice of savoring across various contexts

Demo: closed-loop security orchestration in the telco cloud for moving target defense

This work presents a Moving Target Defense (MTD) framework for the protection of network slices and virtual resources in a telco cloud environment. The preliminary implementation provides closed-loop security management of services with proactive MTD operations to reduce the success probability of attacks, and reactive MTD operations, empowered by a tampering detection and a traffic-based anomaly detection system. MTD strategies are adaptive and optimized with deep reinforcement learning (deep-RL) for balancing costs, security, and availability goals defined in a Multi-Objective Markov Decision Process (MOMDP)