Touching Space: Distributed Ledger Technology for Tracking and Tracing Certificates

Components built into space vehicles and equipment (space products) must meet different regulatory requirements; in detail, each component must be certified and sustainably traceable at all times. Space engineers have expressed the need for an interoperable system to collect, manage and route certifications for components, parts and materials that go into space products. The lack of a unified approach in the European space industry is a challenge for companies involved in product development. This research proposes an open-source, secure, fast and distributed ledger technology (DLT) based solution that fits into any IT environment and is well adapted to the needs of manufacturing companies in the space sector. The results show that a blockchain-based solution based on 'Hyperledger Fabric' combined with the InterPlanetary File System is viable. The results can guide other researchers and practitioners to consider DLTs when changing their certification management paradigm with suppliers, customers and auditors

Open secure infrastructure to control user access to multimedia content

This paper will start by describing OpenSDRM an open-source framework developed for the IST project MOSES., OpenSDRM is used to control the multimedia content consumption in conjunction with the new IPMPX MPEG-4 proposed standard. This architecture, composed by several building blocks, protects the content flow from creation to final user consumption on a specific device. This paper devotes a special attention to the security aspects of the OpenSDRM processes and functions, describing its communication protocols and message exchanges as well as it introduces the security details about the user's digital wallet.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Open DRM and the future of media

This article offers an analysis of the various methods for implementing interoperable digital rights management platforms.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Childcare Tutors: Profiles, Perspectives and Professional Development Needs

Following decades of limited development, the early years of the 21st century have seen significant developments in Irish childcare policy and practice. Growth in the numbers benefiting from childcare has been accompanied by increasing numbers of childcare practitioners acquiring qualifications. These developments are well documented in a variety of reports and research studies. However, little attention has been paid to the people who teach on these programmes, the childcare tutors. Given the recognition of the importance of quality childcare for healthy child development it is timely to investigate the experience, qualifications and theoretical bases of the tutors who prepare childcare practitioners. This study presents an in-depth profile of a small number of such childcare tutors and maps their working contexts. Original data regarding the provision of childcare training nationally were compiled from a range of sources. Data from semi-structured interviews with childcare tutors and with providers are used to build a profile of these tutors and their continuing professional development needs. The study locates childcare tutors in two distinct domains: childcare and adult education. Recruitment of the childcare tutors in this study points to haphazard, expedient employment practices, low pay and no security of tenure. Low status of both childcare and adult education combined with a sense of isolation among childcare tutors adds to the challenges such workers face. Childcare tutors are confident of their ability to assist their learners develop the caring dimensions of their role. However, they are less certain of their theoretical foundation and subject matter knowledge. Providers express general satisfaction with their childcare courses and tutors. However, they recognise that increasing the work experience element would improve the learning experience. The study concludes with some recommendations for continuing professional development including the need for childcare tutors to organise themselves into a professional support and advocacy group

A Privacy-Friendly Architecture for Mobile Social Networking Applications

The resources and localization abilities available in modern smartphones have provided a huge boost to the popularity of location-based applications. In these applications, users send their current locations to a central service provider and can receive content or an enhanced experience predicated on their provided location. Privacy issues with location- based applications can arise from a central entity being able to store large amounts of information about users (e.g., contact information, attributes) and locations (e.g., available businesses, users present). We propose an architecture for a privacy-friendly location hub to encourage the development of mobile location-based social applications with privacy- preserving features. Our primary goal is to store information such that no entity in our architecture can link a user’s identity to her location. We also aim to decouple storing data from manipulating data for social networking purposes. Other goals include designing an architecture flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases and avoiding considerable client-side computation. Our architecture consists of separate server components for storing information about users and storing information about locations, as well as client devices and optional com- ponents in the cloud for supporting applications. We describe the design of API functions exposed by the server components and demonstrate how they can be used to build some sample mobile location-based social applications. A proof-of-concept implementation is provided with in-depth descriptions of how each function was realized, as well as experi- ments examining the practicality of our architecture. Finally, we present two real-world applications developed on the Android platform to demonstrate how these applications work from a user’s perspective

Certifying Software Component Performance Specifications

In component-based software engineering, performance prediction approaches support the design of business information systems on the architectural level. They are based on behavior specifications of components. This work presents a round-trip approach for using, assessing, and certifying the accuracy of parameterized, probabilistic, deterministic, and concurrent performance specifications. Its applicability and effectiveness are demonstrated using the CoCoME benchmark

Requirement Specification for Station Blackout Gas Turbine Generator in a Nuclear Power Plant

The ultimate purpose of nuclear power plant safety systems is to prevent damage to the reactor and the possible release of radioactive materials into the surroundings following an internal or external event that interrupts normal power plant operation. Different design principles have been developed and they are incorporated to the safety design to ensure the safety functions are performed even if some components or whole systems fail to function as intended. Many nuclear power plant safety systems rely on electrical power to operate. Following a loss of off-site power accident, the power plant electrical systems are supplied by the emergency power sources. Station blackout generators constitute an alternative source for AC power designed for situations where all the main emergency diesel generators a fail to function in accident conditions. To introduce diversity into the emergency power sources, gas turbine generator units are proposed to be used instead of diesel generators as station blackout power sources. Current nuclear regulations regarding the emergency power generating facilities in a nuclear power plants only consider diesel engines for the application. The motivation for this research is the absence of a national or a global standard for the design and acceptance testing of gas turbines in this application. In this thesis the main goal is to determine the requirements for a station blackout gas turbine generator so that it fulfils its role in the overall nuclear power plant safety system design. The requirement specifications composed as part of this thesis covers the requirements for design, operation, maintenance, qualification and testing of the station blackout emergency power facility including the facility layout, gas turbine engine, generator, instrumentation and control systems and auxiliary support systems such as fuel and lubrication systems. The decisions behind the technical or quality requirements will be explained and discussed to justify the chosen requirements