The enterprise blockchain design framework and its application to an e-Procurement ecosystem

The research work of this paper has been partially funded by the project VORTAL INTER DATA (n° 038361), co-financed by Vortal and COMPETE Program P2020. We would also like to thank UNIDEMI, DEMI, and LASI for providing us with the research infrastucture and resources to conduct this research. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Elsevier LtdBlockchain technologies have seen a steady growth in interest from industries as the technology is gaining maturity. It is offering a novel way to establish trust amongst multiple stakeholders without relying or trusting centralised authorities. While its use as a decentralised store of value has been validated through the emergence of cryptocurrencies, its use case in industrial applications with multiple stakeholder ecosystems such as industrial supply chain management, is still at an early stage of design and experimentation where private blockchains are used as opposed to public blockchains. Many enterprise blockchain projects failed to gain traction after initial launches, due to inefficient design, lack of incentives to all stakeholders or simply because the use of blockchain was not really necessary in the first place. There has been a need for a framework that allows blockchain designers and researchers to evaluate scenarios when a blockchain solution is useful and design the key configurations for an enterprise blockchain solution. Literature on blockchain architectures are sparse and only applicable to specific use cases or functionalities. This paper proposes a comprehensive Enterprise Blockchain Design Framework (EBDF), that not only identifies the relevant use cases when a blockchain must be utilised, but also details all the characteristics and configurations for designing an enterprise blockchain ecosystem, applicable to multiple industries. To validate the EBDF, we apply the same to the Vortal e-Procurement ecosystem allowing for multiple platforms to interoperate with greater transparency and accountability over the proposed blockchain framework. In this use case, many vendors bid for procurement procedures, often for publicly managed funds where it is extremely vital that full transparency and accountability is ensured in the entire process. Ensuring that certain digital certification functions, such as timestamps are independent from e-Procurement platform owners has been a challenge. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution for not only ensuring transparency and immutability of records, but also providing for interoperability across different platforms by acting as a trusted third-party. The applied framework is used to design a Hyperledger based blockchain solution with some of the key architectural elements that could fulfil these needs while presenting the advantages of such a solution.publishersversionpublishe

Att handla mot sin vilja - Hur kommer det sig att vi fattar köpbeslut som går emot våra egentliga värderingar och vilka är de bakomliggande faktorerna till detta?

Syfte: Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka vilka bakomliggande faktorer som påverkar konsumenten när hon ska fatta ett köpbeslut. I denna studie riktar vi fokus på köpbeslut där individer ställs inför svåra val vad gäller sin konsumtion, vilket innefattar beslut där de kan behöva gå emot en värdering eller princip. Metod: Vi har använt oss av kvalitativ metod i denna uppsats för att kunna gå på djupet med och förstå individers beteenden. Den kvalitativa undersökningen utgjordes av en fokusgruppintervju med sju deltagare och varade i två timmar. Teoretisk referensram: Teoriavsnittet bygger på olika perspektiv som påverkar konsumenter. Vi har använt oss av teorier från marknadsföring, psykologi och filosofi, hämtade ur både litteratur, artiklar och elektroniska källor. Empiri: För att samla in primärdata använde vi oss av en fokusgruppintervju med sju studenter vid Lunds Universitet. Denna intervju tjänar som underlag för vår analys och våra slutsatser. Intervjun kompletterades med en kortare enkät som deltagarna fick svara på individuellt innan själva intervjun startade. Slutsats: Slutsatsen vi kommit fram till är att det är många faktorer som bidrar till att påverka ett beslut av detta slag. Vi fann att det krävs en större bredd än de teorier som finns på ämnet idag. Därför har vi skapat en ny modell utifrån psykologi, filosofi och marknadsföring som tar med de bakomliggande faktorerna. Denna kallar vi för Beslutsfattande vid värdebaserade köpsituationer

Towards an automated data cleaning with deep learning in CRESST

The CRESST experiment employs cryogenic calorimeters for the sensitive measurement of nuclear recoils induced by dark matter particles. The recorded signals need to undergo a careful cleaning process to avoid wrongly reconstructed recoil energies caused by pile-up and read-out artefacts. We frame this process as a time series classification task and propose to automate it with neural networks. With a data set of over one million labeled records from 68 detectors, recorded between 2013 and 2019 by CRESST, we test the capability of four commonly used neural network architectures to learn the data cleaning task. Our best performing model achieves a balanced accuracy of 0.932 on our test set. We show on an exemplary detector that about half of the wrongly predicted events are in fact wrongly labeled events, and a large share of the remaining ones have a context-dependent ground truth. We furthermore evaluate the recall and selectivity of our classifiers with simulated data. The results confirm that the trained classifiers are well suited for the data cleaning task.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 6 table

Olfactory Receptors in Non-Chemosensory Organs: The Nervous System in Health and Disease

Olfactory receptors (ORs) and down-stream functional signaling molecules adenylyl cyclase 3 (AC3), olfactory G protein \u3b1 subunit (G\u3b1olf), OR transporters receptor transporter proteins 1 and 2 (RTP1 and RTP2), receptor expression enhancing protein 1 (REEP1), and UDP-glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs) are expressed in neurons of the human and murine central nervous system (CNS). In vitro studies have shown that these receptors react to external stimuli and therefore are equipped to be functional. However, ORs are not directly related to the detection of odors. Several molecules delivered from the blood, cerebrospinal fluid, neighboring local neurons and glial cells, distant cells through the extracellular space, and the cells' own self-regulating internal homeostasis can be postulated as possible ligands. Moreover, a single neuron outside the olfactory epithelium expresses more than one receptor, and the mechanism of transcriptional regulation may be different in olfactory epithelia and brain neurons. OR gene expression is altered in several neurodegenerative diseases including Parkinson's disease (PD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP) and sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) subtypes MM1 and VV2 with disease-, region- and subtype-specific patterns. Altered gene expression is also observed in the prefrontal cortex in schizophrenia with a major but not total influence of chlorpromazine treatment. Preliminary parallel observations have also shown the presence of taste receptors (TASRs), mainly of the bitter taste family, in the mammalian brain, whose function is not related to taste. TASRs in brain are also abnormally regulated in neurodegenerative diseases. These seminal observations point to the need for further studies on ORs and TASRs chemoreceptors in the mammalian brain

The use of taxonomic relationships among species in applied ecological research: Baseline, steps forward and future challenges

Taxonomy is more than a mere exercise of nomenclature and classification of biological diversity: it profiles the identity of species by investigating their biological and ecological traits. Taxonomy is intimately related to ecology which, in turn, cannot be a mere exercise in describing ecological patterns, but instead requires deep knowledge of species’ biological structures, roles, interactions and functions. Thus, the study of taxonomic and phylogenetic relatedness of species is of paramount importance in ecological research, enabling insights into potential evolutionary patterns and processes, allowing a more comprehensive view of biodiversity, and providing opportunities to improve the assessment and monitoring of ecological changes in time and space. The work of K. Robert (‘Bob’) Clarke forged new pathways in this direction, providing new ideas and statistical tools to include and exploit taxonomic relationships in applied marine ecological studies and beyond, also inspiring the next generation of ecologists. In this short review, we synthesise the application and development of these tools and concepts in marine biodiversity research over the last three decades and suggest future pathways in this evolving field

Adapting to succeed : Post-transcriptional gene regulation in Salmonella

Salmonella are zoonotic pathogens of worldwide economic and health importance. Both during life outside and inside the host, these pathogens are subject to continuously changing environmental conditions, such as temperature changes, acid stress, nutrient limitations, and others. In order to thrive and survive, Salmonella must respond to these changes by adapting their physiology and morphology through changes in gene expression. RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) often work in concert with small RNAs (sRNAs) to control gene expression at the post-transcriptional level. Their mode of action includes regulation of RNA translation and/or stability, either positive or negative. Recently, ProQ was discovered to be a global RBP with a large repertoire of mRNA and sRNA targets in Salmonella. However, many details regarding ProQ biology are not fully understood, including the requirements for RNA-binding, mechanisms of gene regulation, and ProQ-dependent phenotypic changes. The main purpose of this doctoral thesis was to characterize the RBP ProQ and its regulatory role in Salmonella. First, we developed a method based on saturation mutagenesis coupled to phenotypic sorting and high-throughput sequencing to chart the functionally important regions in ProQ. Our results reveal that both the N-terminal and C-terminal domains are important for ProQ’s gene regulatory function, but the underlying mechanisms differ. Second, we show that ProQ is important for flagellar-mediated motility in Salmonella. More specifically, we show that ProQ and an associated sRNA promotes flagellar gene expression and motility by affecting translation of the master flagellar regulator FlhDC. Finally, we reveal that ProQ induces persister formation in Salmonella and enables a subpopulation of cells to survive high doses of different types of antibiotics through growth arrest. In conclusion, the findings presented herein provide new insights into the role of ProQ as a global post-transcriptional regulator of gene expression in Salmonella. Together, these findings contribute to our understanding of how Salmonella shapes its lifestyle and induces pathogenesis.

Stavningskorrigering i kollaborativt skrivande inom engelskspråkigt projektarbete

In this study it is argued that spelling correction as a collaborative process benefits students. It is also argued that the correction process is a structured process which means that pupils tend to follow a pattern when it comes to who initiates and who executes the correction. As a teacher student within the subject of English as a foreign language, I find it interesting and useful to know more about spelling correction in collaborative writing and what pedagogical implications it has. Correction and repair from a Conversation Analytical point of view is a phenomenon which has been the main object of investigation for many researchers. I noticed that correction is used a lot in written assignments among the students as well as in conversational contexts. In the literature it is also clear that research about written correction is limited and hard to find. Hence, there was a need to investigate this area in the field of correction and repair.The process of spelling correction was investigated using conversation analysis and from a sociocultural point of view the pedagogical implications of this process were considered. The study is based on video-recordings of four pairs in an upper secondary school in Sweden within the subject of English as a foreign language. I found that there is a preference for self correction and that the pupils only intervene in the correction process when necessary. I also found correction to be a collaborative process which benefits the construction of knowledge as students scaffold each other during a correction sequence

Language Properties for Smart Contracts

Arbeit an der Bibliothek noch nicht eingelangt - Daten nicht geprüftAbweichender Titel nach Übersetzung der Verfasserin/des VerfassersBlockchain ist mittlerweile schon quer durch die Gesellschaft fast jedem ein Begriff. Die Blockchain-Technologie, sprich was die Blockchain genau ist, wie sie aufgebaut ist und verwendet werden kann, ist hingegen für viele noch ein Mysterium. Smart Contracts sind Computerprogramme, die auf der Blockchain-Technologie basieren und diese Computerprogramme werden mit Programmiersprachen entwickelt. Stellt man sich die Frage, welche Programmiersprache man am Besten verwendet, so merkt man relativ schnell, dass die Auswahl an verfügbaren Programmiersprachen für Smart Contracts enorm groß ist und kontinuierlich größer wird.Diese Arbeit versucht die Frage zu klären, welche spezifischen Eigenschaften eine Sprache für die Entwicklung von Smart Contracts besitzen muss. Zuerst werden allgemeine Anforderungen an eine Sprache für die Entwicklung von Smart Contracts evaluiert. Im zweiten Schritt werden die identifizierten Anforderungen mit Spracheigenschaften in Beziehung gesetzt, damit geprüft werden kann, ob und inwieweit eine gewählte Programmiersprache für die Entwicklung von Smart Contracts geeignet ist.Mit den Erkenntnissen dieser Arbeit wird am Beispiel der Programmiersprache Solidity, welche als die de facto Standardsprache für Smart Contracts gilt, analysiert, wie geeignet die Sprache für die Entwicklung von Smart Contracts tatsächlich ist.Blockchain has become a household name throughout society. The Blockchain technology, meaning what the Blockchain exactly is, how it is structured and how it can be used, is however still a mystery for many. Smart Contracts are computer programs based on the Blockchain technology and these computer programs are developed with programming languages. If one asks oneself the question, which programming language is best to use, one will notice relatively quickly that the selection of available programming languages for Smart Contracts is enormous and continuously growing.This thesis attempts to answer the question which specific characteristics a language must possess for the development of Smart Contracts. At first, general requirements for a language for the development of Smart Contracts are evaluated. In a second step, the indentified requirements are put in relation to language properties in order to check if and to what extent a chosen programming language is suitable for the development of Smart Contracts.The findings of this work are used to analyse how suitable the programming language Solidity, which is considered the de facto standard language for Smart Contracts, actually is for the development of Smart Contracts.8