586 research outputs found
Analyzing Remote Server Locations for Personal Data Transfers in Mobile Apps
Abstract
The prevalence of mobile devices and their capability to access high speed internet has transformed them into a portable pocket cloud interface. Being home to a wide range of users' personal data, mobile devices often use cloud servers for storage and processing. The sensitivity of a user's personal data demands adequate level of protection at the back-end servers. In this regard, the European Union Data Protection regulations (e.g., article 25.1) impose restriction on the locations of European users' personal data transfer. The matter of concern, however, is the enforcement of such regulations. The first step in this regard is to analyze mobile apps and identify the location of servers to which personal data is transferred. To this end, we design and implement an app analysis tool, PDTLoc (Personal Data Transfer Location Analyzer), to detect violation of the mentioned regulations. We analyze 1, 498 most popular apps in the EEA using PDTLoc to investigate the data recipient server locations. We found that 16.5% (242) of these apps transfer users' personal data to servers located at places outside Europe without being under the control of a data protection framework. Moreover, we inspect the privacy policies of the apps revealing that 51% of these apps do not provide any privacy policy while almost all of them contact the servers hosted outside Europe
Friends don't lie: inferring personality traits from social network structure
In this work, we investigate the relationships between social network structure and personality; we assess the performances of different subsets of structural network features, and in particular those concerned with ego-networks, in predicting the Big-5 personality traits. In addition to traditional survey-based data, this work focuses on social networks derived from real-life data gathered through smartphones. Besides showing that the latter are superior to the former for the task at hand, our results provide a fine-grained analysis of the contribution the various feature sets are able to provide to personality classification, along with an assessment of the relative merits of the various networks exploited.European Commission (PERSI Project within the Marie Curie COFUND-FP7)Italy. Ministero dell'istruzione, dell'università e della ricerca (FIRB S-PATTERNS project
Quantifying the impact of OSS adoption risks with the help of i* Models
Adopting Open Source Software (OSS) components in organisational settings requires evaluating the possible impact of adoption decisions on business goals. Measures available in OSS, capturing indicators such as the quality of open source code and the activeness of the developing community, can be used as a driver to assess various risks in component adoption. In this paper we illustrate how risk and impact models are used to relate measures obtained from the component under analysis to business goals in i* -based OSS business strategy models.Postprint (author’s final draft
On the Evolution of Dust Mineralogy, From Protoplanetary Disks to Planetary Systems
Mineralogical studies of silicate features emitted by dust grains in
protoplanetary disks and Solar System bodies can shed light on the progress of
planet formation. The significant fraction of crystalline material in comets,
chondritic meteorites and interplanetary dust particles indicates a
modification of the almost completely amorphous ISM dust from which they
formed. The production of crystalline silicates thus must happen in
protoplanetary disks, where dust evolves to build planets and planetesimals.
Different scenarios have been proposed, but it is still unclear how and when
this happens. This paper presents dust grain mineralogy of a complete sample of
protoplanetary disks in the young Serpens cluster. These results are compared
to those in the young Taurus region and to sources that have retained their
protoplanetary disks in the older Upper Scorpius and Eta Chamaeleontis stellar
clusters, using the same analysis technique for all samples. This comparison
allows an investigation of the grain mineralogy evolution with time for a total
sample of 139 disks. The mean cluster age and disk fraction are used as
indicators of the evolutionary stage of the different populations. Our results
show that the disks in the different regions have similar distributions of mean
grain sizes and crystallinity fractions (~10-20%) despite the spread in mean
ages. Furthermore, there is no evidence of preferential grain sizes for any
given disk geometry, nor for the mean cluster crystallinity fraction to
increase with mean age in the 1-8 Myr range. The main implication is that a
modest level of crystallinity is established in the disk surface early on (< 1
Myr), reaching a equilibrium that is independent of what may be happening in
the disk midplane. These results are discussed in the context of planet
formation, in comparison with mineralogical results from small bodies in our
Solar System. [Abridged]Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journa
The potential of soluble human leukocyte antigen molecules for early cancer detection and therapeutic vaccine design
Human leukocyte antigen (HLA) molecules are essential for anti-tumor immunity, as they display tumor-derived peptides to drive tumor eradication by cytotoxic T lymphocytes. HLA molecules are primarily studied as peptide-loaded complexes on cell membranes (mHLA) and much less attention is given to their secretion as soluble HLA–peptide complexes (sHLA) into bodily fluids. Yet sHLA levels are altered in various pathologies including cancer, and are thus of high interest as biomarkers. Disconcordance in results across studies, however, hampers interpretation and generalization of the relationship between sHLA levels and cancer presence, thereby impairing its use as a biomarker. Furthermore, the question remains to what extent sHLA complexes exert immunomodulatory effects and whether shifts in sHLA levels contribute to disease or are only a consequence of disease. sHLA complexes can also bear tumor-derived peptides and recent advancements in mass spectrometry now permit closer sHLA peptide cargo analysis. sHLA peptide cargo may represent a “liquid biopsy” that could facilitate the use of sHLA for cancer diagnosis and target identification for therapeutic vaccination. This review aims to outline the contradictory and unexplored aspects of sHLA and to provide direction on how the full potential of sHLA as a quantitative and qualitative biomarker can be exploited
- …