Security in transition : the true meaning of the International Criminal Court

Since the Second World War, the international community has pursued measures to safeguard civilians from certain threats and ensure the protection of basic human liberties. It was the birth of human rights movements, which developed throughout several decades and continues to expand, that slowly led to the formal recognition of human security. This shift is recognized, in theoretical terms, as a movement from realist security perspectives to the creation of a universal phenomenon that is altering standard practices of international relations. One of the most significant changes has been the development of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has created a jurisdiction above that of nations, and independent from any organization. The United States has launched an aggressive opposition campaign and has sought to undermine the Court to protect its power. However, it is overlooking the benefits and significance of the global collaboration and cooperation that is produced within such an unprecedented movement

On the emergence of semantic agreement among rational agents

Today’s complex online applications often require the interaction of multiple (web) services that belong to potentially different business entities. Interoperability is a core element of such an environment, yet not a straightforward one due to the lack of common data semantics. The problem is often approached by means of standardization procedures in a top-down manner with limited adoption in practice. (De facto) standards for semantic interoperability most commonly emerge in a bottom-up approach, i.e., involving the interaction and information exchange among self-interested industrial agents. In this paper, we argue that the emergence of semantic interoperability can be seen as an economic process among rational agents and, although interoperability can be mutually beneficial for the involved parties, it may also be costly and might fail to emerge. As a sample scenario, we consider the emergence of semantic interoperability among rational web service agents in service-oriented architectures (SOAs), and we analyze their individual economic incentives with respect to utility, risk and cost. We model this process as a positive-sum game and study its equilibrium and evolutionary dynamics. According to our analysis, which is also experimentally verified, certain conditions on the communication cost, the cost of technological adaptation, the expected mutual benefit from interoperability, as well as the expected loss from isolation, drive the process

Analyzing the Emergence of Semantic Agreement among Rational Agents

Todays complex online applications often require the interaction of multiple services that potentially belong to different business entities. Interoperability is a core element of such an environment, yet not a straightforward one. In this paper, we argue that the emergence of interoperability is an economic process among rational agents and, although interoperability can be mutually beneficial for the involved parties, it is also costly and may fail to emerge. As a sample scenario, we consider the emergence of semantic interoperability among rational service agents in the service-oriented architectures (SOA) and analyze their individual economic incentives with respect to utility, risk and cost. We model this process as a positive-sum game and study its equilibrium and evolutionary dynamics. According to our analysis, which is also experimentally verified, certain conditions on the communication cost, the cost of technological adaptation, the expected mutual benefit from interoperability as well as the expected loss from isolation drive the process

Evaluation of the Efficiency of Cloud Computing Models in E-learning Services

Although web-based learning has a lot of advantages over other commonly used technologies in the field, it has its own challenges, too. For example, due to lack of scalability at the infrastructure level, the cost of resource management in e-learning systems has increased significantly. Another example is how to achieve efficient resource utilization in these systems. In addition to dealing with these challenges, other costs should be incurred to provide e-learning services, such as maintenance cost of website, and the associated costs with installation and technical support of software packages. In this paper, we discuss that designing e-learning systems based on cloud computing models is an appropriate approach to dealing with the mentioned challenges. To this end, after an introduction to cloud computing models, we design the architecture of an e-learning system based on the models. Then, we implement the proposed architecture using CloudSim as a simulation tool to evaluate the efficiency of the system. The results demonstrate that by taking the proposed approach, while the system achieves an efficient resource utilization, the scalability of e-learning services increases as well

A Self-organized Mechanism of Resource Allocation in P2P Systems

Since the performance of a system of interacting peers depends strongly on their individual contributions, the ratio between their provided and consumed resources should be set in line with the social welfare improvement, without relying on a central coordinator. In this paper, we devise a self-organized mechanism for cooperation policy setting of the interacting peers based on decision-theoretic analysis. By extensive simulation experiments, we demonstrate that when the proposed mechanism is followed, a Pareto optimal equilibrium emerges in the system from fairly coordinated decisions of the rational peers on their cooperation policies