Towards Querying in Decentralized Environments with Privacy-Preserving Aggregation

The Web is a ubiquitous economic, educational, and collaborative space. However, it also serves as a haven for personal information harvesting. Existing decentralised Web-based ecosystems, such as Solid, aim to combat personal data exploitation on the Web by enabling individuals to manage their data in the personal data store of their choice. Since personal data in these decentralised ecosystems are distributed across many sources, there is a need for techniques to support efficient privacy-preserving query execution over personal data stores. Towards this end, in this position paper we present a framework for efficient privacy preserving federated querying, and highlight open research challenges and opportunities. The overarching goal being to provide a means to position future research into privacy-preserving querying within decentralised environments

Meaningful call combinations and compositional processing in the Southern Pied Babbler

Language’s expressive power is largely attributable to its compositionality: meaningful words are combined into larger/higher-order structures with derived meaning. Despite its importance, little is known regarding the evolutionary origins and emergence of this syntactic ability. Whilst previous research has demonstrated a rudimentary capability to combine meaningful calls in primates, due to a scarcity of comparative data, it is unclear whether analogue forms might also exist outside of primates. Here we address this ambiguity and provide evidence for rudimentary compositionality in the discrete vocal system of a social passerine, the pied babbler (Turdoides bicolor). Natural observations and predator presentations revealed babblers produce acoustically distinct alert calls in response to close, low-urgency threats, and recruitment calls when recruiting group members during locomotion. Upon encountering terrestrial predators both vocalisations are combined into a ‘mobbing-sequence’, potentially to recruit group members in a dangerous situation. To investigate whether babblers process the sequence in a compositional way, we conducted systematic experiments, playing back the individual calls in isolation, as well as naturally occurring and artificial sequences. Babblers reacted most strongly to mobbing-sequence playbacks, showing a greater attentiveness and a quicker approach to the loudspeaker, compared to individual calls or control sequences. We conclude the sequence constitutes a compositional structure, communicating information on both the context and the requested action. Our work supports previous research suggesting combinatoriality as a viable mechanism to increase communicative output, and indicates that the ability to combine and process meaningful vocal structures, a basic syntax, may be more widespread than previously thought

Legislative Compliance Assessment: Framework, Model and GDPR Instantiation

Legislative compliance assessment tools are commonly used by companies to help them to understand their legal obligations. One of the primary limitations of existing tools is that they tend to consider each regulation in isolation. In this paper, we propose a flexible and modular compliance assessment framework that can support multiple legislations. Additionally, we describe our extension of the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) so that it can be used not only to represent digital rights but also legislative obligations, and discuss how the proposed model is used to develop a flexible compliance system, where changes to the obligations are automatically reflected in the compliance assessment tool. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through the development of a General Data Protection Regulatory model and compliance assessment too

Deep molecular phylogeny of the Pterygota

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Fast charging stations with stationary batteries: A techno-economic comparison of fast charging along highways and in cities

Fast charging infrastructure is widely acknowledged as necessary for the market success of electric vehicles. However, fast charging requires cost intensive infrastructure and grid connections. Accordingly, the risk of sunk cost is high, although fast charging infrastructure might be profitable in the medium to long term. In addition, the demand for fast charging varies greatly and the maximum power of charging stations may only be needed for a short time period per week. Although the profitability of stationary storages and the demand for fast charging have gained broad attention in literature, the specific question of how and under what circumstances stationary batteries can increase the profitability of fast charging stations has not yet been addressed for all potential applications. Here, we analyze the extent to which stationary storages can increase the profitability of fast charging stations by reduced grid connection costs on the one hand and additional revenues from intraday trading of electricity on the other hand. We compare different battery technologies and distinguish two use cases: fast charging in cities and along highways. Our results indicate that the profitability of a stationary storage installed together with a fast charging station depends on various parameters. While for a city fast charging station, intraday trading might lead to lower cost, this is not the case for highway stations since the heavy use motivated by intraday trading can significantly shorten battery life. Our results underline the importance of second life batteries since low-cost batteries have a significant impact on the system’s profitability

Effects of news factors on users’ news attention and selective exposure on a news aggregator website

Do journalistic relevance criteria still matter in digital news environments where news is selected and aggregated by algorithms? This article investigates how news factors (e.g., conflict, power elite) influence users’ news attention and selective exposure on the news aggregator website Google News. Alongside direct effects, the study also examines indirect effects of news factors on users’ news selection processes via media cues of news items on the news aggregator website (e.g., picture, position, and recency). The study relies on the news value theory and analyzes observations of users’ news attention and selective exposure on Google News via eye tracking (N = 47 participants, N = 751 news items). We conducted a content analysis on all news items on Google News that users paid attention to. The results show that news factors do not have direct effects on news attention and selective exposure, but rather indirect effects mediated via media cues of news items. Consequently, the traditional idea of newsworthiness based on professional journalistic norms continues to play a role on a news aggregator where news is selected by algorithms

THE REALLOCATTION OF THE ANT SPECIES Dinoponera lucida EMERY (FORMICIDAE: PONERINAE) POPULATION INCREASING ITS LOCAL GENETIC DIVERSITY

The aim of the current study is to describe the genetic consequences of the reallocation process in order to preserve an entire Dinoponera lucida Emery, 1901 population. The sample collection and the mitochondrial data analysis were conducted before and after the reallocation of nests in two conservation unities in Espírito Santo State, Southeastern Brazil. The data analysis showed that the genetic variability inside the forest fragmentation has considerably increased above the natural levels. The importance of the present study relies on information and notifications about the herein studied populations, which will be provided to future studies

Semiochemical exploitation of host-associated cues by seven Melittobia parasitoid species: Behavioral and phylogenetic implications

Chemical compounds (infochemicals or semiochemicals) play an important role both in intra-specific and inter-specific communication. For example, chemical cues appear to play a key role in the host selection process adopted by insect parasitoids. In recent years significant advances have been made in order to understand the chemical ecology of insect parasitoids. However, little information is available about the evolution of semiochemical use in the host location process of insect parasitoids. Here we investigated the strategy adopted by seven closely related parasitoid species in the genus Melittobia when foraging for four different suitable hosts. By using an integrated approach that combined olfactometer bioassays and phylogenetic investigations, we found that: (1) exploitation of host-derived semiochemicals is widespread in the Melittobia genus; (2) there is specificity of attraction toward the different host species tested; in particular, the early-branching species in the Melittobia genus are attracted to odors associated with leaf cutting bees (Megachile rotundata) whereas the most-diverged species are attracted to odors associated with solitary mud dauber wasps (Trypoxyilon politum). Regardless of the phylogenetic relationships, no Melittobia species exhibited attraction toward odors of factitious laboratory hosts (i.e., the flesh fly Sarcophaga bullata). Interestingly, five Melittobia species are also attracted by odors associated with honeybees hosts which indicate that these parasitoids could be potential pests of honeybees. Our study shed light on the host location within the Melittobia genus and represents a first attempt to understand semiochemical use in an evolutionary perspective in the context of parasitoids' foraging behavior

HDT crypt: Compression and Encryption of RDF Datasets

The publication and interchange of RDF datasets online has experienced significant growth in recent years, promoted by different but complementary efforts, such as Linked Open Data, the Web of Things and RDF stream processing systems. However, the current Linked Data infrastructure does not cater for the storage and exchange of sensitive or private data. On the one hand, data publishers need means to limit access to confidential data (e.g. health, financial, personal, or other sensitive data). On the other hand, the infrastructure needs to compress RDF graphs in a manner that minimises the amount of data that is both stored and transferred over the wire. In this paper, we demonstrate how HDT - a compressed serialization format for RDF - can be extended to cater for supporting encryption. We propose a number of different graph partitioning strategies and discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of each approach