An Exploration Of Parameters Affecting Employee Energy Conversation Behaviour At The Workplace, Towards IOT-Enabled Behavioural Interventions

Energy conservation is one of the widely recognised important means towards addressing CO2 emissions and the resulting global issue of climate change. Furthermore, public buildings have been recognised as contributing significantly to the consumption of energy worldwide. More importantly, occupant behaviour, a factor that needs to be studied further, can have a high impact on the energy consumed within public buildings. Through our study, we have conducted an exploratory study on the parameters affecting employee energy conservation behaviour in public buildings, towards constructing a behavioural model that can be employed in IoT-enabled personalised energy disaggregation initiatives. We propose an extension to an existing model of employee energy behaviour based on Values Beliefs Norms (VBN) theory, with the addition of five parameters – comfort levels, burnout, locus of control, personal disadvantages and energy awareness. In addition, we discriminate between two groups of inter-related energy conservation behaviours at work – popular and unpopular energy conservation behaviours – and explain our resulting behavioural models’ utility towards IoT-enabled energy conservation, within workplaces. We find that promoting employees’ energy awareness levels, as well as positively affecting their environmental worldviews and personal norms are important factors that should be considered in behavioural interventions toward energy conservation at the workplace

A Mechanism that Provides Incentives for Truthful Feedback in Peer-to-Peer Systems

We propose a mechanism for providing the incentives for reporting truthful feedback in a peer-to-peer system for exchanging services (or content). This mechanism is to complement reputation mechanisms that employ ratings' feedback on the various transactions in order to provide incentives to peers for offering better services to others. Under our approach, each of the transacting peers (rather than just the client) submits a rating on the performance of their mutual transaction. If these are in disagreement, then both transacting peers are punished, since such an occasion is a sign that one of them is lying. The severity of each peer's punishment is determined by his corresponding non- credibility metric; this is maintained by the mechanism and evolves according to the peer's record. When under punishment, a peer does not transact with others. We model the punishment effect of the mechanism in a peer-to-peer system as a Markov chain that is experimentally proved to be very accurate. According to this model, the credibility mechanism leads the peer-to-peer system to a desirable steady state isolating liars. Then, we define a procedure for the optimization of the punishment parameters of the mechanism for peer-to-peer systems of various characteristics. We experimentally prove that this optimization procedure is effective and necessary for the successful employment of the mechanism in real peer-to-peer systems. Then, the optimized credibility mechanism is combined with reputation-based policies to provide a complete solution for high performance and truthful rating in peer-to-peer systems. The combined mechanism was experimentally proved to deal very effectively with large fractions of collaborated liar peers that follow static or dynamic rational lying strategies in peer-to-peer systems with dynamically renewed population, while the efficiency loss induced to sincere peers by the presence of liars is diminished. Finally, we describe the potential implementation of the mechanism in real peer-to-peer systems

GridEcon - A Market Place for Computing Resources

This paper discusses the rationales for a Grid market and, in particular, the introduction of a market place for trading commoditized computing resources. The market place proposed makes computing resources from different providers substitutable through virtualization. This includes the definition of a spot and future market as well as the parameters that a market mechanism for computing resources should consider. The above market place is complemented by a set of value-added services (e.g. insurance against resource failures, capacity planning, resource quality assurance, stable price offering) that ensure quality for Grid users over time. The market place technology for all of the above services has been designed by the GridEcon project, contributing to a broader adoption of Grid technology and enabling a service-oriented knowledge utility environment.This work has been funded by the European Commission within the context of the FP6 Project GridEcon, Grid Economics and Business Models, (FP6-2005-IST5-033634)

Managing big, linked, and open earth-observation data: Using the TELEIOS/LEO software stack

Big Earth-observation (EO) data that are made freely available by space agencies come from various archives. Therefore, users trying to develop an application need to search within these archives, discover the needed data, and integrate them into their application. In this article, we argue that if EO data are published using the linked data paradigm, then the data discovery, data integration, and development of applications becomes easier. We present the life cycle of big, linked, and open EO data and show how to support their various stages using the software stack developed by the European Union (EU) research projects TELEIOS and the Linked Open EO Data for Precision Farming (LEO). We also show how this stack of tools can be used to implement an operational wildfire-monitoring service

Neutrinos from Stored Muons nuSTORM: Expression of Interest

The nuSTORM facility has been designed to deliver beams of electron and muon neutrinos from the decay of a stored muon beam with a central momentum of 3.8 GeV/c and a momentum spread of 10%. The facility is unique in that it will: serve the future long- and short-baseline neutrino-oscillation programmes by providing definitive measurements of electron-neutrino- and muon-neutrino-nucleus cross sections with percent-level precision; allow searches for sterile neutrinos of exquisite sensitivity to be carried out; and constitute the essential first step in the incremental development of muon accelerators as a powerful new technique for particle physics. Of the world's proton-accelerator laboratories, only CERN and FNAL have the infrastructure required to mount nuSTORM. Since no siting decision has yet been taken, the purpose of this Expression of Interest (EoI) is to request the resources required to: investigate in detail how nuSTORM could be implemented at CERN; and develop options for decisive European contributions to the nuSTORM facility and experimental programme wherever the facility is sited. The EoI defines a two-year programme culminating in the delivery of a Technical Design Report

nuSTORM - Neutrinos from STORed Muons: Proposal to the Fermilab PAC

The nuSTORM facility has been designed to deliver beams of electron neutrinos and muon neutrinos (and their anti-particles) from the decay of a stored muon beam with a central momentum of 3.8 GeV/c and a momentum acceptance of 10%. The facility is unique in that it will: 1. Allow searches for sterile neutrinos of exquisite sensitivity to be carried out; 2. Serve future long- and short-baseline neutrino-oscillation programs by providing definitive measurements of electron neutrino and muon neutrino scattering cross sections off nuclei with percent-level precision; and 3. Constitutes the crucial first step in the development of muon accelerators as a powerful new technique for particle physics. The document describes the facility in detail and demonstrates its physics capabilities. This document was submitted to the Fermilab Physics Advisory Committee in consideration for Stage I approval