On the Design and Implementation of a Blockchain Enabled E-Voting Application within IoT-Oriented Smart Cities

A smart city refers to an intelligent environment obtained by deploying all available resources and recent technologies in a coordinated and smart manner. Intelligent sensors (Internet of Things (IoT) devices) along with 5G technology working mutually are steadily becoming more pervasive and accomplish users' desires more effectively. Among a variety of IoT use cases, e-voting is a considerable application of IoT that relegates it to the next phase in the growth of technologies related to smart cities. In conventional applications, all the devices are often assumed to be cooperative and trusted. However, in practice, devices may be disrupted by the intruders to behave maliciously with the aim of degradation of the network services. Therefore, the privacy and security flaws in the e-voting systems in particular lead to a huge problem where intruders may perform a number of frauds for rigging the polls. Thus, the potential challenge is to distinguish the legitimate IoT devices from the malicious ones by computing their trust values through social optimizer in order to establish a legitimate communication environment. Further, in order to prevent from future modifications of data captured by smart devices, a Blockchain is maintained where blocks of all legitimate IoT devices are recorded. This article has introduced a secure and transparent e-voting mechanism through IoT devices using Blockchain technology with the aim of detecting and resolving the various threats caused by an intruder at various levels. Further, in order to validate the proposed mechanism, it is analyzed against various security parameters such as message alteration, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack and authentication delay

Mode choice and mode commitment in commuters

In New Zealand, like many other developed countries, a majority of trips (67%) involve the use of private cars, producing negative effects on the environment and public health. Interventions aimed to reduce car use can be successful if we not only understand the reasons car users drive but also why other commuters use more sustainable alternatives. Although a range of possible motivating factors have been previously identified in the literature, the significance of the present study was to address the question of whether these motivating factors interact with each other to influence commuters’ intentions to choose a particular mode for their daily commute. A sample of commuters completed an online survey and a subset completed a 1-week travel diary later. Social norms were a significant predictor of drivers’ and car passengers’ intentions to use the car, whereas ease-of-use was a significant predictor of drivers’ intentions to drive and active commuters’ intentions to walk or cycle. All commuters had comparable ecological beliefs and mode-related status which were not related to their intentions to use their travel modes. Although all the commuters were committed to their mode choice for daily commute, drivers and pedestrians were more likely to use only their respective travel modes for daily commute, whereas passengers, bus users, and cyclists were more likely to use a combination of several modes. Future research might productively explore subtypes of car commuters and additional analysis techniques to identify ways of nudging car commuters to reduce their car use in favour of sustainable alternatives

Charge separation relative to the reaction plane in Pb-Pb collisions at sNN=2.76\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}= 2.76 TeV

Measurements of charge dependent azimuthal correlations with the ALICE detector at the LHC are reported for Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76$ TeV. Two- and three-particle charge-dependent azimuthal correlations in the pseudo-rapidity range $|\eta| < 0.8$ are presented as a function of the collision centrality, particle separation in pseudo-rapidity, and transverse momentum. A clear signal compatible with a charge-dependent separation relative to the reaction plane is observed, which shows little or no collision energy dependence when compared to measurements at RHIC energies. This provides a new insight for understanding the nature of the charge dependent azimuthal correlations observed at RHIC and LHC energies.Comment: 12 pages, 3 captioned figures, authors from page 2 to 6, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/286

A note on comonotonicity and positivity of the control components of decoupled quadratic FBSDE

In this small note we are concerned with the solution of Forward-Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (FBSDE) with drivers that grow quadratically in the control component (quadratic growth FBSDE or qgFBSDE). The main theorem is a comparison result that allows comparing componentwise the signs of the control processes of two different qgFBSDE. As a byproduct one obtains conditions that allow establishing the positivity of the control process.Comment: accepted for publicatio

Transverse sphericity of primary charged particles in minimum bias proton-proton collisions at s=0.9\sqrt{s}=0.9, 2.76 and 7 TeV

Measurements of the sphericity of primary charged particles in minimum bias proton--proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=0.9$, 2.76 and 7 TeV with the ALICE detector at the LHC are presented. The observable is linearized to be collinear safe and is measured in the plane perpendicular to the beam direction using primary charged tracks with $p_{\rm T}\geq0.5$ GeV/c in $|\eta|\leq0.8$. The mean sphericity as a function of the charged particle multiplicity at mid-rapidity ($N_{\rm ch}$) is reported for events with different $p_{\rm T}$ scales ("soft" and "hard") defined by the transverse momentum of the leading particle. In addition, the mean charged particle transverse momentum versus multiplicity is presented for the different event classes, and the sphericity distributions in bins of multiplicity are presented. The data are compared with calculations of standard Monte Carlo event generators. The transverse sphericity is found to grow with multiplicity at all collision energies, with a steeper rise at low $N_{\rm ch}$, whereas the event generators show the opposite tendency. The combined study of the sphericity and the mean $p_{\rm T}$ with multiplicity indicates that most of the tested event generators produce events with higher multiplicity by generating more back-to-back jets resulting in decreased sphericity (and isotropy). The PYTHIA6 generator with tune PERUGIA-2011 exhibits a noticeable improvement in describing the data, compared to the other tested generators.Comment: 21 pages, 9 captioned figures, 3 tables, authors from page 16, published version, figures from http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/308