bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Knowledge Infrastructure
Authors: Setunge Sujeeva , Kumar Arun
Published: April 2012

Urban infrastructure along the hard forms such as roads, electricity, water and sewers also includes the soft forms such as research, training, innovation and technology. Knowledge and creativity are keys to soft infrastructure and socioeconomic development. Many city administrations around the world adjust their endogenous development strategies increasingly by investing in soft infrastructure and aiming for a knowledge-based development. At this point, the mapping and management of knowledge assets of cities has become a critical issue for promoting creative urban regions. The chapter scrutinizes the relations between knowledge assets and urban infrastructures and examines the management models to improve soft infrastructure provision.
Sustainable Airport Infrastructure
Authors: Keast Robyn L. , Baker Douglas C. , Brown Kerry
Published: April 2012

Ongoing financial, environmental and political adjustments have shifted the role of large international airports. Many airports are expanding from a narrow concentration on operating as transportation centers to becoming economic hubs. By working together, airports and other industry sectors can contribute to and facilitate not only economic prosperity, but create social advantage for local and regional areas in new ways. This transformation of the function and orientation of airports has been termed the aerotropolis or airport metropolis, where the airport is recognized as an economic centre with land uses that link local and global markets. This chapter contends that the conversion of an airport to a sustainable airport metropolis requires more than just industry clustering and the existence of ‘hard’ physical infrastructure. Attention must also be directed to the creation and on-going development of social infrastructure within proximate areas and the maximization of connectivity flows within and between infrastructure elements. It concludes that the establishment of an interactive and interdependent infrastructure trilogy of hard, soft and social infrastructures provides the necessary balance to the airport metropolis to ensure sustainable development. This chapter provides the start of an operating framework to integrate and harness the infrastructure trilogy to enable the achievement of optimal and sustainable social and economic advantage from airport cities.
City 2.0 as a Platform for Global E-Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Authors: Anttiroiko Ari-Veikko
Published: April 2012

Due to increased cross-boundary flows of resources, local governments have become more concerned with global economic development. In this regard, in this paper, the author discusses how globalisation and related intercity competition pose challenges to the development of cities. The objective is to describe innovative ways of dealing with global intercity competition with special reference to how the tools of City 2.0 may be used to support e-entrepreneurship by connecting local actors to different layers of innovation networks.
An Advanced Triple-Helix Network Model for Smart Cities Performance
Authors: Lombardi Patrizia , Giordano Silvia , Caragliu Andrea , Del Bo Chiara , Deakin Mark , Nijkamp Peter , Kourtit Karima , Farouh Hend
Published: April 2012

The chapter demonstrates that the inclusion of the abovementioned relations in the analytical hierarchy framework is significant, as it allows, for the first time, the opportunity for this network model to capture the triple helix of a smart urban or regional development and to verify whether the transformation of cities it ushers in is not merely based on an index of intellectual capital, but also on a measure of wealth creation whose standards of governance are smart.
SpotTheLink
Authors: Thaler Stefan , Simperl Elena , Siorpaes Katharina , Wölger Stephan
Published: April 2012

A multitude of approaches to match, merge, and integrate ontologies, and more recently, to interlink RDF data sets, have been proposed over the past years, making ontology alignment one of the most active and at the same time mature area of research and development in semantic technologies. While advances in the area cannot be contested, it is equally true that full automation of the ontology-alignment process is far from being feasible; human input is often indispensable for the bootstrapping of the underlying methods, and for the validation of the results. The question of acquiring and leveraging such human input remains largely unaddressed, in particular when it comes to the incentives and motivators that are likely to make users invest their valuable time and effort in alignment tasks such as entity interlinking and schema matching, which can be domain-knowledge-intensive, technical, or both. In this chapter, the authors present SpotTheLink, a game whose purpose addresses this challenge, demonstrating how knowledge-intensive tasks in the area of the Semantic Web can be collaboratively solved by a community of non-experts in an entertaining fashion.
Techniques for Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Palshikar Girish Keshav
Published: April 2012

While building and using a fully semantic understanding of Web contents is a distant goal, named entities (NEs) provide a small, tractable set of elements carrying a well-defined semantics. Generic named entities are names of persons, locations, organizations, phone numbers, and dates, while domain-specific named entities includes names of for example, proteins, enzymes, organisms, genes, cells, et cetera, in the biological domain. An ability to automatically perform named entity recognition (NER) – i.e., identify occurrences of NE in Web contents – can have multiple benefits, such as improving the expressiveness of queries and also improving the quality of the search results. A number of factors make building highly accurate NER a challenging task. Given the importance of NER in semantic processing of text, this chapter presents a detailed survey of NER techniques for English text.
Developing a Web-Based Cooperative Environment to Software Project Development
Authors: Babamir Seyed Morteza
Published: April 2012

A software project is developed by collaboration of some expert people. However, the collaboration puts obstacles in the way of software development when the involved people in the project are scattered over the world. Although Internet has provided a collection of scattered islands in which the denizens of the islands are able to communicate with each other, it lacks full requisite qualifications for the collaboration among the denizens. The emerging idea is that a supportive environment should be developed on the Web for providing full requisite qualifications and facilitating collaboration. Towards providing such an environment, this chapter aims to present a framework exploiting Open Hypermedia System (OHS) and a Web-based collaboration protocol. OHS assists in saving and restoring artifacts constructed by the scattered people, and the protocol provides channels to concurrent communication and distributed authoring among the people.
Knowledge Based Business Intelligence for Business User Information Self-Service
Authors: Mertens Matthias , Krahn Tobias
Published: April 2012

Due to a higher need for healthcare provision, and due to the decreasing number of contributors in the German healthcare system, the market situation has changed over the last years. The resulting competitive and cost pressure forces the executives to tap potentials in a competitive manner. Analytical Information Systems as part of business intelligence can be used to receive information from several integrated data sources that may be used in the decision making process. However, the system’s complexity of use can be seen as problematic so that unskilled business users, unlike power users, are not able to execute analyses for their issues in an adequate way. The focus of the presented approach lies on a semantic metadata layer, which is capable to import and manage modeled semantic metadata. Based on this layer, the metadata is supposed to be used for further analyses support functionalities in order to allow a business user information self-service.
Digital and Inter-Generational Divide
Authors: Ferri Paolo
Published: April 2012

Digital divide can be considered a macro economical index representing the social differences and the separation between the North and the South of the world. Since the first definition of digital divide, it has been shown that it is also a great and unrecognized problem in the developed countries, especially in the field of education. “Digital disconnection” is a key problem for School and University as institutions. In this paper, the above questions are widely analyzed with a special attention on the spreading gap between digital natives (i.e., young students), and digital immigrants (i.e., parents, teachers and policymakers in the school).
Beyond the Media Literacy
Authors: Giovannella Carlo
Published: April 2012

The advent of new media and web technologies made both contents and “containers” more “liquid” and requires an in depth reflection on the multi-facets concept of literacy in which the author tries to develop from an education point of view that can be defined as “experiential”. According to such reflection, in the present scenarios, the “design” becomes central to education, underlining the need of educational activities, which should include among their objectives the dissemination of what one may call “design literacy”.
Integrating Educational and ICT Innovations
Authors: Tateo Luca , Adinolfi Paola
Published: April 2012

The paper explores the effectiveness of a new computer-supported collaborative problem solving educational approach in higher education at a master’s course level. After outlining the technological and pedagogical characteristics of a new digital cooperative environment, as well as the constructivist, learner-centered philosophy of the Daosan Master (Management of Health-care Services) at the University of Salerno, the integration of the educational approach and the technological support is reported and discussed in an exploratory case-study. The authors show that a large number of post-graduate students have been able to participate in a dense collaborative problem solving activity within a relatively short lesson period, working and reflecting on a real problem of healthcare management. This indicates that the experience is effective in fostering reflexivity, collaboration and situated learning in management training.
Free Software Implementation Experiences for the Promotion of the Liquid Society
Authors: Heredero C. De Pablos , Berzosa D. López
Published: April 2012

Information and communication technologies have changed the way in which citizens interact with Public Administrations. Digital literacy is key for the development of the Liquid Society, and Public Administrations must take the lead in promoting more efficient, universal, and user oriented public services. The migration to open source standards allows Public Administration to offer more democratic, universal, and efficient channels for establishing relationships with citizens. In this article, the authors present international experiences that show how certain Public Administrations have migrated to open source software to promote digital literacy in the contexts they are operating. The final results depend on contextual and organizational factors, including the need to change, the political support and the existence of available technological resources, the organizational climate, motivation levels of human resources, and the kind of leadership for the project or the organizational complexity. Change efforts have strategic and organizational impacts that the organization must evaluate beforehand.
An Ontology Driven Multi-Agent Approach to Integrated e-Health Systems
Authors: Ying Weir , Wimalasiri Jaminda S. , Ray Pradeep , Chattopadhyay Subhagata , Wilson Concepción S.
Published: April 2012

One aim of an integrated e-Health system is to improve the quality of healthcare by providing transparent access to patient information. The current health information management environment has numerous systems with varying techniques for representing and managing patient data. The increasing mobility of patients results in patient information being spread across these systems. Presented in this paper is a conceptual architecture for the interoperability of e-Health systems. This architecture uses multiple cooperating software agents that actively access, recognize, and associate the information in distributed, heterogeneous e-health systems. Using a layered ontology structure we show how ontology based multi-agent systems can be used to resolve discrepancies in terminology and/or structure. This involves a case study in a distributed Electronic Health Record (EHR) environment.
Aspects of Information Communications Technology for Better Medical Control
Authors: Nakajima Isao , Tomioka Yasumitsu
Published: April 2012

The 3G mobile phone has propagation problems in urban areas and experiences severe congestion after major disasters in supporting mobile eHealth. We expect a Quasi-zenith satellite with nationwide coverage. In near future, the data transmission of image of pharygoscopy, motion picture of light reflex, 12-leads ECG, automated ultrasonic echo and vital signs from ambulances shall be performed to assist medical control. For example, Thrombolytic agents are reportedly effective even when injected into a vein, if injected in the early stages of acute myocardial infarction, which will reduce medical costs, resulting in high-quality services available uniformly across the nation. This paper describes Japanese aspects of mobile eHealth to support ambulatory applications.
Active Noise Control for Hearing Screening Test
Authors: Azeez Dhifaf , Ali Mohd Alauddin Mohd , Husain Hafizah , Beng Gan Kok , Umat Cila
Published: April 2012

A hearing screening test is a method to determine human ear disorders and conventional audiometers and audiologists are required to perform the test. However, this procedure is difficult to implement, especially in a remote site such as a factory or a school due to the ambient noise that may cause test inaccuracy. In this work, the application of active noise control (ANC) is proposed to reduce the ambient noise using a personal computer in a hearing screening test. The ANC algorithm was simulated in MATLAB software and implemented using a computer with data acquisition modules and LabVIEW software. Results show that anti-noise was successfully generated in the electrical domain but no reduction was observed in the acoustic domain. ANC is a deterministic application that requires a real-time operating system to respond to the input with precisely timed output. To have an effective ANC system, the processing time has to be less than 0.125 ms at 8 KHz sampling rate.
Safety System Design Simulation for Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator using Electrode Contact Test
Authors: Hutabarat Mervin T. , Soedirdjo Subaryani D. H.
Published: April 2012

TENS (Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator) is a therapeutic device used to deliver electric current through one’s skin. As the device is used on the human body, safety concern becomes a matter that needs special attention. One option for electrical safety is testing whether the electrode has attached properly to the skin. The test is done in the interval of the simulator pulse. This option is used to protect users from electrical shock that can be caused from this device. Using 74HC4066 as the analog switch, this design can support the TENS specification.
Non-Compactness Attribute Filtering to Extract Retinal Blood Vessels in Fundus Images
Authors: Purnama I. K. E. , Aryanto K. Y. E. , Wilkinson M. H. F.
Published: April 2012

Retinal blood vessels can give information about abnormalities or disease by examining its pathological changes. One abnormality is diabetic retinopathy, characterized by a disorder of retinal blood vessels resulting from diabetes mellitus. Currently, diabetic retinopathy is one of the major causes of human vision abnormalities and blindness. Hence, early detection can lead to proper treatment, and segmentation of the abnormality provides a map of retinal vessels that can facilitate the assessment of the characteristics of these vessels. In this paper, the authors propose a new method, consisting of a sequence of procedures, to segment blood vessels in a retinal image. In the method, attribute filtering with a so-called Max-Tree is used to represent the image based on its gray value. The filtering process is done using the branches filtering approach in which the tree branches are selected based on the non-compactness of the nodes. The selection is started from the leaves. This experiment was performed on 40 retinal images, and utilized the manual segmentation created by an observer to validate the results. The proposed method can deliver an average accuracy of 94.21%.
An Improved Olympic Hole-Filling Method for Ultrasound Volume Reconstruction of Human Spine
Authors: Dewi D. E. O. , Mengko T. L. R. , Purnama I. K. E. , Veldhuizen A. G. , Wilkinson M. H. F.
Published: April 2012

Hole-filling in ultrasound volume reconstruction using freehand three-dimensional ultrasound estimates the values for empty voxels from the unallocated voxels in the Bin-filling process due to inadequate sampling in the acquisition process. Olympic operator, as a neighbourhood averaging filter, can be used to estimate the empty voxel. However, this method needs improvement to generate a closer estimation of the empty voxels. In this paper, the authors propose an improved Olympic operator for the Hole-filling algorithm, and apply it to generate the volume in a 3D ultrasound reconstruction of the spine. The conventional Olympic operator defines the empty voxels by sorting the neighbouring voxels, removing the n% of the upper and lower values, and averaging them to attain the value to fill the empty voxels. The empty voxel estimation can be improved by thresholding the range width of its neighbouring voxels and adjusting it to the average values. The method is tested on a hole-manipulated volume derived from a cropped 3D ultrasound volume of a part of the spine. The MAE calculation on the proposed technique shows improved result compared to all tested existing methods.
Web 2.0 Teacher Community in a National Health E-Learning Network
Authors: Su Mei-Ju , Lin Jia-Wei , Chen Yen-Ting , Lin Yaw-Jen , Su Yu-Huei , Chen Sao-Jie , Chen Heng-Shuen
Published: April 2012

To create the best e-learning environment, the project of Ministry of Education Taiwan, one of the e-Generation projects, established the digital e-learning web that includes Health, Life, Natural, Science, Arts and Cultural e-learning Networks. The health e-Learning Network combines experts in the field of health and physical education and primary and secondary school teachers to develop practical and high quality e-learning content, while also developing lesson plans and related activities. They can be divided into three areas including health education, medical care and sports and leisure which encompass the “Health e-Learning Network” (HeN). The curriculum of HeN (Chen, 2006) covers seven thematic strands and has lesson plans, material, knowledge, and multimedia learning modules for teachers to utilize during class time. Web2.0 is used to lead into the HeN website, enabling teachers the initiative to participate in e-learning, while also giving users their own initiative to build development, two-way interaction, fast response, and so forth (HeN website: http://health.edu.tw).
Parallel Programming and Its Architectures Based on Data Access Separated Algorithm Kernels
Authors: Liu Dake , Sohl Joar , Wang Jian
Published: April 2012

A novel master-multi-SIMD architecture and its kernel (template) based parallel programming flow is introduced as a parallel signal processing platform. The name of the platform is ePUMA (embedded Parallel DSP processor architecture with Unique Memory Access). The essential technology is to separate data accessing kernels from arithmetic computing kernels so that the run-time cost of data access can be minimized by running it in parallel with algorithm computing. The SIMD memory subsystem architecture based on the proposed flow dramatically improves the total computing performance. The hardware system and programming flow introduced in this article will primarily aim at low-power high-performance embedded parallel computing with low silicon cost for communications and similar real-time signal processing.
A Multidimensional Software Cache for Scratchpad-Based Systems
Authors: Azevedo Arnaldo , Juurlink Ben
Published: April 2012

In many kernels of multimedia applications, the working set is predictable, making it possible to schedule the data transfers before the computation. Many other kernels, however, process data that is known just before it is needed or have working sets that do not fit in the scratchpad memory. Furthermore, multimedia kernels often access two or higher dimensional data structures and conventional software caches have difficulties to exploit the data locality exhibited by these kernels. For such kernels, the authors present a Multidimensional Software Cache (MDSC), which stores 1- 4 dimensional blocks to mimic in cache the organization of the data structure. Furthermore, it indexes the cache using the matrix indices rather than linear memory addresses. MDSC also makes use of the lower overhead of Direct Memory Access (DMA) list transfers and allows exploiting known data access patterns to reduce the number of accesses to the cache. The MDSC is evaluated using GLCM, providing an 8% performance improvement compared to the IBM software cache. For MC, several optimizations are presented that reduce the number of accesses to the MDSC.
Modeling Communication in Multi–Processor Systems–on–Chip Using Modular Connectors
Authors: Tsiopoulos Leonidas , Sere Kaisa , Plosila Juha
Published: April 2012

Formal methods of concurrent programming can be used to develop and verify complex Multi–Processor Systems–On–Chip in order to ensure that these systems satisfy their functional and communication requirements. The authors use the Action Systems formalism and show how asynchronous communication of Multi–Processor Systems–on–Chip can be modeled using generic connectors composed out of simple channel components. The paper proposes a new approach to modeling generic and hierarchical connectors for handling the complexity of on–chip communication and data flow. The authors’ goal is to avoid overloaded bus–based architectures and give a distributed framework. A case study presents the authors’ modeling methodology.
Joint Validation of Application Models and Multi-Abstraction Network-on-Chip Platforms
Authors: Määttä Sanna , Möller Leandro , Indrusiak Leandro Soares , Ost Luciano , Glesner Manfred , Nurmi Jari , Moraes Fernando
Published: April 2012

Application models are often disregarded during the design of multiprocessor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoC). This is due to the difficulties of capturing the application constraints and applying them to the design space exploration of the platform. In this article we propose an application modelling formalism that supports joint validation of application and platform models. To support designers on the trade-off analysis between accuracy, observability, and validation speed, we show that this approach can handle the successive refinement of platform models at multiple abstraction levels. A case study of the joint validation of a single application successively mapped onto three different platform models demonstrates the applicability of the presented approach.
Hierarchical Agent Monitored Parallel On-Chip System
Authors: Guang Liang , Plosila Juha , Isoaho Jouni , Tenhunen Hannu
Published: April 2012

In this paper, the authors present a formal specification of a novel design paradigm, hierarchical agent monitored SoCs (HAMSOC). The paradigm motivates dynamic monitoring in a hierarchical and distributed manner, with adaptive agents embedded for local and global operations. Formal methods are of essential importance to the development of such a novel and complex platform. As the initial effort, functional specification is indispensable to the non-ambiguous system modeling before potential property verification. The formal specification defines the manner by which the system can be constructed with hierarchical components and the representation of run-time information in modeling entities and every type of the monitoring operations. The syntax follows the standard set theory with additional glossary and notations introduced to facilitate practical SoC design process. A case study of hierarchical monitoring for power management in NoC (Network-on-chip), written with the formal specification, is demonstrated.
How Are Professional Skills Acquired?
Authors: Metso Sari , Kianto Aino
Published: April 2012

As firms lose skilled labour force through mass retirement, turnover and economic fluctuations, a pressing concern is how to ensure that the skills of the present-day masters are conveyed to the future professionals. This chapter examines the process of how the skills leading to professional performance are acquired in the context of on-the-job learning and identifies the key factors in this process. Based on an empirical examination of the on-the-job training periods of 20 Finnish vocational college students a model is built, suggesting that there are three different levels of professional performance on a junior’s path towards professionalism. The results suggest that individual activity, critical observation, conscious doing and creativity are crucial in the learning process. The chapter contributes to the emerging discussion on knowledge sharing across generations in organisations.
Assessing Knowledge Assets in Renewable Energy SMEs in Scotland
Authors: Lerro Antonio , Schiuma Giovanni , Huggins Robert , Prokop Daniel , Weir Maria
Published: April 2012

This chapter develops a research protocol to identify a domain of organizational knowledge resources and assets within firms and provides the final main insights of a research project managed by the Intellectual Assets Center in Scotland in order to support the adoption of knowledge asset management initiatives for driving innovation and performance improvement of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) operating in the renewable energy sector. The chapter first presents a methodology for valuing organizational knowledge assets within SMEs operating in the renewable energy industry. Then, an exploratory survey with a sample of 58 organizations from the Scottish renewable energy sector is introduced. Finally, the chapter analyses and discusses the main insights about SMEs’ perception and orientation to identifying, measuring, and managing knowledge, and to qualitatively identify a feasible set of knowledge resources and assets potentially driving performance improvement.
Dynamics in Knowledge
Authors: Sugiyama Shigeki
Published: April 2012

Since the idea of “artificial intelligence with knowledge” had been introduced, so many thoughts, theories, and ideas in various fields of engineering, science, geology, social study, economics, and management methods have been proposed. Those things have been started as an extension of modern engineering control theories and practices. Firstly, expert system by using IF-Then rules came up to at a production spot in manufacturing, and then agent system method by using intelligent software programs for design, planning, scheduling, production, and management in manufacturing. And then after, the idea of “Knowledge” burst into the artificial intelligence field as a real aid for getting any purpose to be accomplished by having augmented the past key knowledge in terms of management (controlling). However, those augmented knowledge methods used to have usages only in a limited small area. In addition to this, lots of works have to be done before making the systems work for a target problem solving. And what is worse, lots of parts of systems have to be customized for a new application. This chapter introduces a new direction and a method in “Knowledge” by inaugurating the brand new idea of “Dynamics in Knowledge,” which will behave more flexibly and intelligently in real usages.
A Multi-Agent Knowledge Management System for Reactive and Proactive Knowledge Supply
Authors: Toledo Carlos M. , Chiotti Omar , Galli María R.
Published: April 2012

This chapter presents an agent-based architecture for integrating organizational knowledge repositories and business processes orchestrated by a workflow management system. This architecture proactively provides relevant knowledge to workflow tasks considering their context, and stores the information generated by its execution for future requirements. It describes components of the architecture, models a multi-agent system that enables the integration, presents a strategy to annotate and retrieval knowledge of non-structured information sources, and defines a new workflow pattern to be used in knowledge intensive tasks in order to make possible the knowledge provision. This architecture allows workers to count, in a proactive way, with all necessary information for the task executions without suspending their activities to retrieve information scattered in the organization. It reduces the wasted time in manual knowledge searches included in mostly knowledge management approaches.
Large-Scale Systems and Society
Authors: Spaanenburg Lambert
Published: April 2012

Large-scale systems pose high demands on computation resources. Where such systems are equipped with a real-time IT infrastructure, one finds distributed sensory systems. For instance, a building structure such as a dike or a skyscraper, with sensors to monitor its health, creates a large-scale system. Typically, complex systems with distributed intelligence are hard to design, test, and maintain by divide-and-conquer. Where design is laborious, schooling is even harder. It is advocated here that cloud-computing provides the required flexibility. Based on this, a teaching format for a cloud-based Master’s course on large-scale systems is introduced.
Cross Layer QoS Implementations
Authors: Dobrota Virgil , Rus Andrei Bogdan
Published: April 2012

Quality of service has been an open issue from the beginning, due to the Internet paradigm of delivering the datagrams as simple as possible, on a hop-by-hop basis. As an answer to the inefficiency of the legacy solutions, rethinking of Internet principles brought among other ideas the self-management. Based on a clean-slate approach applied within FP7-4WARD project, this chapter proposes preliminary design and implementation of a key management capability of the near Future Internet, i.e. Cross-Layer QoS. Its applications are focused on congestion control (triggering activation of network-coding techniques) and QoS-aware routing based on a modified Dijkstra’s algorithm.
Applications of “Cross-Layer” in Video Communications over Wireless Networks
Authors: Fleury Martin , Razavi Rouzbeh , Al-Jobouri Laith , Al-Majeed Salah M. Saleh , Ghanbari Mohammed
Published: April 2012

Because of the impact of noise, interference, fading, and shadowing in a wireless network, there has been a realization that the strict layering of wireline networks may be unsuitable for wireless. It is the volatility over time that demands an adaptive solution and the basis of adaptation must arise by communication of the channel conditions along with the datalink settings. Video communication is particularly vulnerable because, except when reception is decoupled from distribution as in multimedia messaging, there are real-time display and decode deadlines to be met. The predictive nature of video compression also makes it susceptible to temporal error propagation. In this chapter, case studies from the authors’ experiences with broadband wireless access networks and personal area wireless networks serve to illustrate how information exchange across the layers can benefit received video quality. These schemes are all adaptive and serve as a small sample of a much greater population of cross-layer techniques. Given the importance of multimedia communications as an engine of growth for networked communication, “cross-layer” should be the first consideration in designing a video application.
Cross-Layer Design in Cognitive Radio Networks
Authors: Wang Bin , Wu Zhiqiang , Yao Zhongmei
Published: April 2012

Radio spectrum has become a precious resource. Most frequency bands have been allocated for exclusive use in the US. However, studies have shown that a very large portion of the radio spectrum is unused or underused for long periods of time at a given geographic location. Therefore, allowing users without a license to operate in licensed bands while causing no interference to the license holder becomes a promising way to satisfy the fast growing need for spectrum resources. Dynamic spectrum access and cognitive radio are technologies for enabling opportunistic spectrum access and enhancing the efficiency and utilization of the spectrum. A cognitive radio adapts to the environment in which it operates by sensing the spectrum and then opportunistically exploiting unused and/or underused frequency bands in order to achieve certain performance goals. Due to the close coupling and interaction among protocol layers, the optimal design of opportunistic spectrum access and cognitive radio networks calls for a cross-layer approach that integrates signal processing and networking with regulatory policy making. This chapter introduces basic concepts, design issues involved, and some recent development in this emerging technological field. Future research directions are also briefly examined.
Replication Strategies for Video On-Demand over Wireless Mesh Networks
Authors: Duong Trung Q. , Shu Lei , Vo Nguyen-Son , Du Xu , Zepernick Hans-Jürgen , Cheng Wenqing
Published: April 2012

In this chapter, dependencies between the different protocol layers and across the hops through WMNs will be exploited to deliver video streaming with high QoE. Specifically, a cross-layer optimization approach is applied to a replication strategy for video on-demand over WMNs. Additionally, the authors consider a distributed implementation algorithm, namely Mod&Timer, to handle the placement of replicas for saving storage resources of the network. Simulation results are shown to demonstrate that the proposed cross-layer design outperforms many existing schemes in terms of QoE. More importantly, compared to other strategies without cross-layer interaction, the proposed cross-layer design satisfies the heterogeneous bandwidth constraint of end users.
A Distributed and Secure Architecture for Signature and Decryption Delegation through Remote Smart Cards
Authors: Cattaneo Giuseppe , Faruolo Pompeo , Visconti Ivan
Published: April 2012

The established legal value of digital signatures and the growing availability of identity-based digital services are progressively extending the use of smart cards to all citizens, opening new challenging scenarios. Among them, motivated by concrete applications, secure and practical delegation of digital signatures and decryptions is becoming more and more critical. Unfortunately, all secure delegation systems proposed so far include various drawbacks with respect to some of the main functional requirements of any practical system. With the purpose of proposing a truly practical solution for signature and decryption delegation, in this chapter the authors put forth the notion of a “Proxy Smart Card System,” a distributed system that allows a smart card owner to delegate part of its computations to remote users. They first stress the problematic aspects concerning the use of known proxy-cryptography schemes in synergy with current standard technologies, which in turn motivates the need of proxy smart card systems. Then they formalize the security and functional requirements of a proxy smart card system, identifying the involved parties, the adversary model, and the usability properties. Finally, the authors present the design and analysis of a proxy smart card system, which implements the required functionalities outperforming the current state of the art.
Analyzing Information Security Goals
Authors: Kolkowska Ella , Hedström Karin , Karlsson Fredrik
Published: April 2012

One of the problems highlighted within the area of information security is that international standards are implemented in organisations without adopting them to special organisational settings. In this chapter the authors analyse information security goals found in hospital settings. They found that the CIA-triad fails to cover organisational specific information security goals in hospital settings. They found also that information security goals held by information security managers and business managers are not the same, implying that both these groups should be involved in designing of information security goals, in order to find information security goals relevant for the organisation. Finally, the authors found goal maps used in this study for analysis of empirical data, to be a useful tool for analysis and communication of information security goals in an organisation.
A Decision Support System for Privacy Compliance
Authors: Pearson Siani , Sander Tomas
Published: April 2012

Regulatory compliance in areas such as privacy has become a major challenge for organizations. In large organizations there can be hundreds or thousands of projects that involve personal information. Ensuring that all those projects properly take privacy considerations into account is a complex challenge for accountable privacy management. Accountable privacy management requires that an organization makes sure that all relevant projects are in compliance and that there is evidence and assurance that this actually is the case. To date, there has been no suitable automated, scalable support for accountable privacy management; it is such a tool that the authors describe in this chapter. Specifically, they describe a privacy risk assessment and compliance tool which they are developing and rolling out within a large, global company – called HP Privacy Advisor (HP PA) – and its generalisation and extension. The authors also bring out those security, privacy, risk, and trust-related aspects they have been researching related to this work in particular.
SQL Injection Attacks Countermeasures
Authors: Amirtahmasebi Kasra , Jalalinia Seyed Reza
Published: April 2012

Due to the huge growth in the need for using Web applications worldwide, there have been huge efforts from programmers to develop and implement new Web applications to be used by companies. Since a number of these applications lack proper security considerations, malicious users will be able to gain unauthorized access to confidential information of organizations. A concept called SQL Injection Attack (SQLIA) is a prevalent method used by attackers to extract the confidential information from organizations’ databases. They work by injecting malicious SQL codes through the web application, and they cause unexpected behavior from the database. There are a number of SQL Injection detection/prevention techniques that must be used in order to prevent unauthorized access to databases.
Security and Authentication Issues of an Embedded System Designed and Implemented for Interactive Internet Users
Authors: Baruah Siddhartha , Mahanta Anjana Kakoty , Sarma Kanak Ch
Published: April 2012

Though embedded applications were originally built on standalone devices, nowadays these devices require a growing integration with other systems through their interconnection with TCP/IP networks. Web Services, which provide a service oriented distributed architecture for the interconnection of systems through TCP/IP networks, have been widely adopted for the integration of business applications, but this sort of integration is still not widely provided by embedded applications. The present work aims to demonstrate the feasibility of using Web Services for the integration of embedded applications running on heterogeneous architectures. This is achieved through the provision of a support for the development and deployment of web services for embedded applications. Basic objective of the system developed is to monitor and control Humidity and Temperature through Internet using interactive computer front end. The feasibility of this approach in terms of security and authentications of its Internet users is demonstrated by developing an mail server along with application deployed. Mail server keeps track of authorised users’ with login password and email ID in a database table. This information is used to identify authorised users who are allowed to make changes in control parameters of the stated embedded application.
Towards a Framework for Collaborative Enterprise Security
Authors: Misra Janardan
Published: April 2012

The role of human behaviour in enterprise security is one of the little studied aspects. The author proposes a reinforcement model of collaborative security employing basic concepts from game theory, socio-psychology, and probabilistic model-checking. The proposed model aims towards solving the problem of inducing positive network effect to enable user centric monitoring of security violations, in particular, against violations related to ”semantic manipulation” of context dependent logical resources. Preventing such violations using existing security enforcement mechanisms is neither feasible nor cost effective. The author defines a payoff mechanism to formalize the model by stipulating appropriate payoffs as reward, punishment, and community price according to reporting of genuine or false violations, non-reporting of the detected violations, and proactive reporting of vulnerabilities and threats by the users. Correctness properties of the model are defined in terms of probabilistic robustness property and constraints for economic feasibility of the payoffs. For estimating the payoff parameters, system and user behaviours are further modelled in terms of probabilistic finite state machines (PFSM) and likelihood of the success of the model is specified using probabilistic computation tree logic (PCTL). PRISM model checker based automated quantitative analysis elicits the process of the estimation of various parameters in the model using PFSMs and PCTL formulas.
Embedded System Security Risk in a Green-House Environment
Authors: Oraon Trailokya
Published: April 2012

Embedded systems are extensively used in the field of pervasive computing. These systems are used to such an extent that embedded systems are now controlled and monitored from remote locations by using Web services. Internet authorities are able to assign every device a unique Internet protocol address with the introduction of IPv6 on the Web. Peer-to-peer communication between Internet-enabled devices helped Web services to make performance improvement. On the worse side, it created new attacks on the components used in the embedded systems. The chapter discusses the details of security issues on a Web-enabled embedded system used in greenhouse environment. The devices used in greenhouse environment are monitored and controlled by different software components used in the entire system. Various vulnerabilities are introduced during entire development process of the greenhouse environment. The problem is to search the real threats, then define security policies and implement them during development process. The chapter discusses most of the vulnerabilities of a generalized greenhouse project and tries to find out possible security techniques to deal with the vulnerabilities. Instead of showing the design to build a greenhouse embedded system, it shows to introduce security policies at various levels of life-cycle, be it before development, during development, or after development.
Effective Malware Analysis Using Stealth Breakpoints
Authors: Vasudevan Amit
Published: April 2012

Fine-grained malware analysis requires various powerful analysis tools. Chief among them is a debugger that enables runtime binary analysis at the instruction level. One of the important services provided by a debugger is the ability to stop execution of code at arbitrary points during runtime, using breakpoints. Software breakpoints change the code being analyzed so that it can be interrupted during runtime. Most, if not all malware are very sensitive to code modification with self-modifying and/or self-checking capabilities, rendering the use of software breakpoints limited in their scope. Hardware breakpoints on the other hand, use a subset of the CPU registers and exception mechanisms to provide breakpoints that do not entail code modification. However, hardware breakpoints support limited breakpoint ability (typically only 2-4 locations) and are susceptible to various anti-debugging techniques employed by malware. This chapter describes a novel breakpoint technique (called stealth breakpoints) that provides unlimited number of breakpoints which are robust to detection and countering mechanisms. Further, stealth breakpoints retain all the features (code, data and I/O breakpoint abilities) of existing hardware and software breakpoint schemes and enables easy integration with existing debuggers.
Architectures for Enabling Flexible Business Processes
Authors: Overbeek Sietse , Gong Yiwei , Janssen Marijn
Published: April 2012

For decades, information systems have been designed for controlling and managing business processes. In the past, these systems were often monolithic in nature and not made for interacting and communicating with other systems. Today, departments and organizations must collaborate, which requires distributed Web-based systems to support the enactment of flexible business processes. In this paper, four architectures of process management systems are investigated by studying the components and the relationships with the tasks that make up the business processes. These different architectures support automation of non-repetitive, customized processes, and are compared based on dimensions of flexibility. This evaluation showed that the process orchestration architecture scored best, but still has its shortcomings. The results from the comparison are used for developing a research agenda that includes the suggestion to develop reference architecture for connecting individual architectural components.
Managing Collective Intelligence in Semantic Communities of Interest
Authors: Montanelli Stefano , Castano Silvana , Ferrara Alfio , Varese Gaia
Published: April 2012

In this paper, the authors present a reference P2P architecture based on autonomous, self-emerging semantic communities of interest (CoIs) for collective intelligence creation and management. An approach for enabling knowledge organization and management at the level of a single peer is presented in the paper, as well as techniques for supporting a peer to participate to the construction of a shared community vocabulary, according to the terminological preferences automatically extracted from its personal knowledge. Furthermore, an application example in the e-health domain is presented in the framework of the iCoord system for P2P semantic coordination to show the use of a manifesto-based collective intelligence for enforcing effective collaboration in a real case study.