Eavesdropping Whilst You're Shopping: Balancing Personalisation and Privacy in Connected Retail Spaces

Physical retailers, who once led the way in tracking with loyalty cards and `reverse appends', now lag behind online competitors. Yet we might be seeing these tables turn, as many increasingly deploy technologies ranging from simple sensors to advanced emotion detection systems, even enabling them to tailor prices and shopping experiences on a per-customer basis. Here, we examine these in-store tracking technologies in the retail context, and evaluate them from both technical and regulatory standpoints. We first introduce the relevant technologies in context, before considering privacy impacts, the current remedies individuals might seek through technology and the law, and those remedies' limitations. To illustrate challenging tensions in this space we consider the feasibility of technical and legal approaches to both a) the recent `Go' store concept from Amazon which requires fine-grained, multi-modal tracking to function as a shop, and b) current challenges in opting in or out of increasingly pervasive passive Wi-Fi tracking. The `Go' store presents significant challenges with its legality in Europe significantly unclear and unilateral, technical measures to avoid biometric tracking likely ineffective. In the case of MAC addresses, we see a difficult-to-reconcile clash between privacy-as-confidentiality and privacy-as-control, and suggest a technical framework which might help balance the two. Significant challenges exist when seeking to balance personalisation with privacy, and researchers must work together, including across the boundaries of preferred privacy definitions, to come up with solutions that draw on both technology and the legal frameworks to provide effective and proportionate protection. Retailers, simultaneously, must ensure that their tracking is not just legal, but worthy of the trust of concerned data subjects.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, Proceedings of the PETRAS/IoTUK/IET Living in the Internet of Things Conference, London, United Kingdom, 28-29 March 201

Suburbanization: A Post World War II Phenomenon in the Athens Metropolitan Area, Greece

This article studies the phases of urban development in Athens, the biggest metropolitan center of the country, in combination with the development of the Greek economy during the post world war II era, by applying techniques suggested by the theory of spatial cycle. Before application, an extended reference to the theoretical background will be presented, so that a comprehensive view of the spatial cycle hypothesis is established. Ã short historical analysis of the Greek economy will also be provided, so that the impact of several historical factors on the recent evolution of Athens Metropolitan Area be better understood. Since the beginning of the post-war period, the Athens Metropolitan Area has been going through a certain phase, i.e. the phase of suburbanization. Recently (1981-2001) the afore-mentioned area has shifted from the first stage of this phase to the second, i.e. from relative to absolute decentralization, facing not only a complete loss of core city population but also memorisation, unemployment and other depressive phenomena. As differences among western, southern or northern suburbs appear, an intra-suburb analysis will be carried out in order to identify the direction of urban evolution through time. The recent decline in the development of suburbs, in juxtaposition with the rapid emergence of some independent urban areas outside the Athens Metropolitan Area, provides some evidence of potential movement towards the next phase of disurbanization in the near future.

Information Leakage Attacks and Countermeasures

The scientific community has been consistently working on the pervasive problem of information leakage, uncovering numerous attack vectors, and proposing various countermeasures. Despite these efforts, leakage incidents remain prevalent, as the complexity of systems and protocols increases, and sophisticated modeling methods become more accessible to adversaries. This work studies how information leakages manifest in and impact interconnected systems and their users. We first focus on online communications and investigate leakages in the Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS). Using modern machine learning models, we show that an eavesdropping adversary can efficiently exploit meta-information (e.g., packet size) not protected by the TLS’ encryption to launch fingerprinting attacks at an unprecedented scale even under non-optimal conditions. We then turn our attention to ultrasonic communications, and discuss their security shortcomings and how adversaries could exploit them to compromise anonymity network users (even though they aim to offer a greater level of privacy compared to TLS). Following up on these, we delve into physical layer leakages that concern a wide array of (networked) systems such as servers, embedded nodes, Tor relays, and hardware cryptocurrency wallets. We revisit location-based side-channel attacks and develop an exploitation neural network. Our model demonstrates the capabilities of a modern adversary but also presents an inexpensive tool to be used by auditors for detecting such leakages early on during the development cycle. Subsequently, we investigate techniques that further minimize the impact of leakages found in production components. Our proposed system design distributes both the custody of secrets and the cryptographic operation execution across several components, thus making the exploitation of leaks difficult

Thermofluidic analysis of hydrogen storage tanks

Hydrogen is one of the promising vectors toward a sustainable future. Among the different steps of its implementation, storage plays a key role. This master thesis intends to investigate the thermal and fluidic aspects of this storage technology and to develop a thermodynamic model to assess the response of the tank under different conditions and configurations. To achieve this, a 0-degree model is created in MATLAB with the goal of simulating liquid hy- drogen (LH2) storage conditions. The model uses principles of fluid dynamics, thermodynam- ics, and heat transfer, allowing the simulation of hydrogen behaviour under different storage conditions. In addition, this model should be able to accurately evaluate a variety of data, such as the pressure and temperature values for the different phases and the thermophysical prop- erties. For the latter, this code uses the open-source CoolProp library [7], which has allowed for reliable and flexible extraction of thermophysical data for the fluid in question, hydrogen, or the different isomers observed under cryogenic storage conditions, such as parahydrogen. This model should also be able to simulate different scenarios that a liquid hydrogen storage tank may be subjected to, such as self-pressurisation and isobaric storage with pressure relief. The model and Matlab code are validated against a variety of data extracted from other papers, both experimental and numerical, for the specific storage stages. Then the model is used to create a parametric study for storage conditions. In addition, this thesis does a detailed review of the available literature, aims to examine the state-of-the-art, and investigates in detail different papers and reputable researchers that are also operating in this field. Some additional studies are taking place examining heat transfer correlations and transport phenomena taking place in the storage, as well as the thermal properties of the solid materials that create the storage tank arrangemen

THE EFFECT OF DRAMA IN EDUCATION TOWARDS THE SUBJECT OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

This article aims to fill the bibliographic gap concerning the way physical education teachers may apply drama in education in elementary schools. Drama in education is an educational method which, based on movement, speech and expression, aims at the comprehensive development of a child. The application of its techniques may provide new dimensions and perspectives to the teaching of physical education in elementary school. Article visualizations

Bounded Temporal Fairness for FIFO Financial Markets.

Financial exchange operators cater to the needs of their users while simultaneously ensuring compliance with the financial regulations. In this work, we focus on the operators’ commitment for fair treatment of all competing participants. We first discuss unbounded temporal fairness and then investigate its implementation and infrastructure requirements for exchanges. We find that these requirements can be fully met only under ideal conditions and argue that unbounded fairness in FIFO markets is unrealistic. To further support this claim, we analyse several real-world incidents and show that subtle implementation inefficiencies and technical optimizations suffice to give unfair advantages to a minority of the participants. We finally introduce, ϵ -fairness, a bounded definition of temporal fairness and discuss how it can be combined with non-continuous market designs to provide equal participant treatment with minimum divergence from the existing market operation

Partnering With International Peers to Promote Young Children’s Social and Emotional Learning: Students’ Experiences During an International Service Learning Program

International Service Learning (ISL) has been used increasingly across fields of study in higher education to enhance student’s learning outside the classroom. ISL programs often encourage students to reflect on their experience to promote experiential and transformative learning. Previous research on ISL has found benefits to students’ professional and personal development. While the process may be helpful to participating students, there may be a lack of lasting benefit to the host community. There also is a gap in the literature of how mental wellness services could be delivered using ISL. In hopes to extend program benefits and provide mental wellness services to the host community, a unique ISL program was designed to partner ISL undergraduate students with local undergraduates in delivering socioemotional lessons to local preschoolers. This study used thematic analysis to investigate students’ experiences with an ISL program that utilizes international peer partnership to deliver social and emotional services to young children in China. Written reflections from two cohorts were analyzed, and three themes were identified, highlighting the role of self-perception in adaptation, the process of meaning-making in noting cultural differences, and the social context of growth in multiple areas. These themes corroborated and extended existing ISL literature to show how participants of this peer-partnered mental wellness ISL program experienced growth in similar but also unique ways and what aspects of the program facilitated their growth