Platform Privacy: The Missing Piece of Data Protection Legislation

After years of deliberation, the EU commission sped up the reform process of a common EU digital policy considerably in 2015 by launching the EU digital single market strategy. In particular, two core initiatives of the strategy were agreed upon: General Data Protection Regulation and the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive law texts. A new initiative was additionally launched addressing the role of online platforms. This paper focuses on the platform privacy rationale behind the data protection legislation, primarily based on the proposal for a new EU wide General Data Protection Regulation. We analyse the legislation rationale from an Information System perspective to understand the role user data plays in creating platforms that we identify as “processing silos”. Generative digital infrastructure theories are used to explain the innovative mechanisms that are thought to govern the notion of digitalization and successful business models that are affected by digitalization. We foresee continued judicial data protection challenges with the now proposed Regulation as the adoption of the “Internet of Things” continues. The findings of this paper illustrate that many of the existing issues can be addressed through legislation from a platform perspective. We conclude by proposing three modifications to the governing rationale, which would not only improve platform privacy for the data subject, but also entrepreneurial efforts in developing intelligent service platforms. The first modification is aimed at improving service differentiation on platforms by lessening the ability of incumbent global actors to lock-in the user base to their service/platform. The second modification posits limiting the current unwanted tracking ability of syndicates, by separation of authentication and data store services from any processing entity. Thirdly, we propose a change in terms of how security and data protection policies are reviewed, suggesting a third party auditing procedure.

Secure Web Service Clients on Mobile Devices

Enterprise apps on mobile devices typically need to communicate with other system components by consuming web services. Since most of the current mobile device platforms (such as Android) do not provide built-in features for consuming SOAP services, extensions have to be designed. Additionally in order to accommodate the typical enhanced security requirements of enterprise apps, it is important to be able to deal with SOAP web service security extensions on client side. In this article we show that neither the built-in SOAP capabilities for Android web service clients are sufficient for enterprise apps nor are the necessary security features supported by the platform as is. After discussing different existing extensions making Android devices SOAP capable we explain why none of them is really satisfactory in an enterprise context. Then we present our own solution which accommodates not only SOAP but also the WS-Security features on top of SOAP. Our solution heavily relies on code generation in order to keep the flexibility benefits of SOAP on one hand while still keeping the development effort manageable for software development. Our approach provides a good foundation for the implementation of other SOAP extensions apart from security on the Android platform as well. In addition our solution based on the gSOAP framework may be used for other mobile platforms in a similar manner.

Architecture for IoT Node and Platform

Only recently, during the past five years, consumer electronics has been evolving rapidly. Many products have started to include “smart home” capabilities, enabling communication and interoperability of various smart devices. Even more devices and sensors can be remote controlled and monitored through cloud services. While the smart home systems have become very affordable to average consumer compared to the early solutions decades ago, there are still many issues and things that need to be fixed or improved upon: energy efficiency, connectivity with other devices and applications, security and privacy concerns, reliability, and response time. This paper focuses on designing Internet of Things (IoT) node and platform architectures that take these issues into account, notes other currently used solutions, and selects technologies in order to provide better solution. The node architecture aims for energy efficiency and modularity, while the platform architecture goals are in scalability, portability, maintainability, performance, and modularity. Moreover, the platform architecture attempts to improve user experience by providing higher reliability and lower response time compared to the alternative platforms. The architectures were developed iteratively using a development process involving research, planning, design, implementation, testing, and analysis. Additionally, they were documented using Kruchten’s 4+1 view model, which is used to describe the use cases and different views of the architectures. The node architecture consisted of energy efficient hardware, FC3180 microprocessor and CC2520 RF transceiver, modular operating system, Contiki, and a communication protocol, AllJoyn, used for providing better interoperability with other IoT devices and applications. The platform architecture provided reliable low response time control, monitoring, and initial setup capabilities by utilizing web technologies on various devices such as smart phones, tablets, and computers. Furthermore, an optional cloud service was provided in order to control devices and monitor sensors remotely by utilizing scalable high performance technologies in the backend enabling low response time and high reliability.

An E-government Interoperability Platform Supporting Personal Data Protection Regulations

Public agencies are increasingly required to collaborate with each other in order to provide high-quality e-government services. This collaboration is usually based on the service-oriented approach and supported by interoperability platforms. Such platforms are specialized middleware-based infrastructures enabling the provision, discovery and invocation of interoperable software services. In turn, given that personal data handled by governments are often very sensitive, most governments have developed some sort of legislation focusing on data protection. This paper proposes solutions for monitoring and enforcing data protection laws within an E-government Interoperability Platform. In particular, the proposal addresses requirements posed by the Uruguayan Data Protection Law and the Uruguayan E-government Platform, although it can also be applied in similar scenarios. The solutions are based on well-known integration mechanisms (e.g. Enterprise Service Bus) as well as recognized security standards (e.g. eXtensible Access Control Markup Language) and were completely prototyped leveraging the SwitchYard ESB product.

Internationalization of IT company: Case study of a Finnish MOOC platform

The interest to small and media size enterprises’ (SMEs) internationalization process is increasing with a growth of SMEs’ contribution to GDP. Internet gives an opportunity to provide variety of services online and reach market niche worldwide. The overlapping of SMEs’ internationalization and online services is the main issue of the research. The most SMEs internationalize according to intuitive decisions of CEO of the company and lose limited resources to worthless attempts. The purpose of this research is to define effective approaches to online service internationalization and selection of the first international market. The research represents single holistic case study of local massive open online courses (MOOCs) platform going global. It considers internationalization costs and internationalization theories applicable to online services. The research includes preliminary screening of the markets and in-depth analysis based on macro parameters of the market and specific characteristics of the customers and expert evaluation of the results. The specific issues as GILT (Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation) approach and Internet-enabled internationalization are considered. The research results include recommendations on international market selection methodology for online services and for effective internationalization strategy development.

IQuOD 4th workshop in Tokyo: Copernicus Marine in situ TAC, a service for operational oceanography

Copernicus is a European system for monitoring the Earth. COPERNICUS-CMEMS products and services are meant to serve all marine applications: Marine resources, Maritime safety, Coastal and Marine Environment, Seasonal Forecast & Climate. The service is ambitious as the ocean is complex and many processes are involved, from physical oceanography, biology, geology, ocean-atmosphere fluxes, solar radiations, moon induced tides, anthropic activity. A multi-platform approach is essential, taking into account sea-level stations, coastal buoys, HF radars, river flows, drifting buoys, sea-mammal or fishes fitted with sensors, vessels, gliders, floats.

Metocean Climate Impact on the Fatigue Assessment of a Jacket-Type Offshore Platform

When the offshore oil and gas supplies exhaust, most offshore platforms are decommissioned and removed. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the fatigue damage that will occur during the service life of a jacket-type offshore platform using different fatigue approaches in particular locations. The locations considered for this metocean climate impact study were Norway (North Sea), Portugal (Atlantic Ocean - Leixões) and Italy (Adriatic Sea). A finite element model was created by the means of Sesam and two different fatigue analysis, deterministic and spectral, were applied. For the fatigue assessment, an appropriate description of the site-specific wave environment, during the jacket platform service life, must be accomplished. This description is usually provided by a wave scatter diagram. Wave scatter diagrams usually represent the long-term wave environment during a (typical) year and are based on several years of site-specific data to ensure that they adequately represent the wave environment at the location of the structure. In this thesis, the comparison between these fatigue approaches will serve as a pilot study for planned reliability analysis in decommissioned offshore platforms in order to maximize the reuse of these platforms for future wind generation systems.

Machine learning as a service for high energy physics (MLaaS4HEP): a service for ML-based data analyses

With the CERN LHC program underway, there has been an acceleration of data growth in the High Energy Physics (HEP) field and the usage of Machine Learning (ML) in HEP will be critical during the HL-LHC program when the data that will be produced will reach the exascale. ML techniques have been successfully used in many areas of HEP nevertheless, the development of a ML project and its implementation for production use is a highly time-consuming task and requires specific skills. Complicating this scenario is the fact that HEP data is stored in ROOT data format, which is mostly unknown outside of the HEP community. The work presented in this thesis is focused on the development of a ML as a Service (MLaaS) solution for HEP, aiming to provide a cloud service that allows HEP users to run ML pipelines via HTTP calls. These pipelines are executed by using the MLaaS4HEP framework, which allows reading data, processing data, and training ML models directly using ROOT files of arbitrary size from local or distributed data sources. Such a solution provides HEP users non-expert in ML with a tool that allows them to apply ML techniques in their analyses in a streamlined manner. Over the years the MLaaS4HEP framework has been developed, validated, and tested and new features have been added. A first MLaaS solution has been developed by automatizing the deployment of a platform equipped with the MLaaS4HEP framework. Then, a service with APIs has been developed, so that a user after being authenticated and authorized can submit MLaaS4HEP workflows producing trained ML models ready for the inference phase. A working prototype of this service is currently running on a virtual machine of INFN-Cloud and is compliant to be added to the INFN Cloud portfolio of services.

An architecture for network acceleration as a service in the cloud continuum

The pervasive availability of connected devices in any industrial and societal sector is pushing for an evolution of the well-established cloud computing model. The emerging paradigm of the cloud continuum embraces this decentralization trend and envisions virtualized computing resources physically located between traditional datacenters and data sources. By totally or partially executing closer to the network edge, applications can have quicker reactions to events, thus enabling advanced forms of automation and intelligence. However, these applications also induce new data-intensive workloads with low-latency constraints that require the adoption of specialized resources, such as high-performance communication options (e.g., RDMA, DPDK, XDP, etc.). Unfortunately, cloud providers still struggle to integrate these options into their infrastructures. That risks undermining the principle of generality that underlies the cloud computing scale economy by forcing developers to tailor their code to low-level APIs, non-standard programming models, and static execution environments. This thesis proposes a novel system architecture to empower cloud platforms across the whole cloud continuum with Network Acceleration as a Service (NAaaS). To provide commodity yet efficient access to acceleration, this architecture defines a layer of agnostic high-performance I/O APIs, exposed to applications and clearly separated from the heterogeneous protocols, interfaces, and hardware devices that implement it. A novel system component embodies this decoupling by offering a set of agnostic OS features to applications: memory management for zero-copy transfers, asynchronous I/O processing, and efficient packet scheduling. This thesis also explores the design space of the possible implementations of this architecture by proposing two reference middleware systems and by adopting them to support interactive use cases in the cloud continuum: a serverless platform and an Industry 4.0 scenario. A detailed discussion and a thorough performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed architecture is suitable to enable the easy-to-use, flexible integration of modern network acceleration into next-generation cloud platforms.

Effect Of Platform Connection And Abutment Material On Stress Distribution In Single Anterior Implant-supported Restorations: A Nonlinear 3-dimensional Finite Element Analysis.

Although various abutment connections and materials have recently been introduced, insufficient data exist regarding the effect of stress distribution on their mechanical performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of different abutment materials and platform connections on stress distribution in single anterior implant-supported restorations with the finite element method. Nine experimental groups were modeled from the combination of 3 platform connections (external hexagon, internal hexagon, and Morse tapered) and 3 abutment materials (titanium, zirconia, and hybrid) as follows: external hexagon-titanium, external hexagon-zirconia, external hexagon-hybrid, internal hexagon-titanium, internal hexagon-zirconia, internal hexagon-hybrid, Morse tapered-titanium, Morse tapered-zirconia, and Morse tapered-hybrid. Finite element models consisted of a 4×13-mm implant, anatomic abutment, and lithium disilicate central incisor crown cemented over the abutment. The 49 N occlusal loading was applied in 6 steps to simulate the incisal guidance. Equivalent von Mises stress (σvM) was used for both the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the implant and abutment in all the groups and the maximum (σmax) and minimum (σmin) principal stresses for the numerical comparison of the zirconia parts. The highest abutment σvM occurred in the Morse-tapered groups and the lowest in the external hexagon-hybrid, internal hexagon-titanium, and internal hexagon-hybrid groups. The σmax and σmin values were lower in the hybrid groups than in the zirconia groups. The stress distribution concentrated in the abutment-implant interface in all the groups, regardless of the platform connection or abutment material. The platform connection influenced the stress on abutments more than the abutment material. The stress values for implants were similar among different platform connections, but greater stress concentrations were observed in internal connections.

Iis--integrated Interactome System: A Web-based Platform For The Annotation, Analysis And Visualization Of Protein-metabolite-gene-drug Interactions By Integrating A Variety Of Data Sources And Tools.

High-throughput screening of physical, genetic and chemical-genetic interactions brings important perspectives in the Systems Biology field, as the analysis of these interactions provides new insights into protein/gene function, cellular metabolic variations and the validation of therapeutic targets and drug design. However, such analysis depends on a pipeline connecting different tools that can automatically integrate data from diverse sources and result in a more comprehensive dataset that can be properly interpreted. We describe here the Integrated Interactome System (IIS), an integrative platform with a web-based interface for the annotation, analysis and visualization of the interaction profiles of proteins/genes, metabolites and drugs of interest. IIS works in four connected modules: (i) Submission module, which receives raw data derived from Sanger sequencing (e.g. two-hybrid system); (ii) Search module, which enables the user to search for the processed reads to be assembled into contigs/singlets, or for lists of proteins/genes, metabolites and drugs of interest, and add them to the project; (iii) Annotation module, which assigns annotations from several databases for the contigs/singlets or lists of proteins/genes, generating tables with automatic annotation that can be manually curated; and (iv) Interactome module, which maps the contigs/singlets or the uploaded lists to entries in our integrated database, building networks that gather novel identified interactions, protein and metabolite expression/concentration levels, subcellular localization and computed topological metrics, GO biological processes and KEGG pathways enrichment. This module generates a XGMML file that can be imported into Cytoscape or be visualized directly on the web. We have developed IIS by the integration of diverse databases following the need of appropriate tools for a systematic analysis of physical, genetic and chemical-genetic interactions. IIS was validated with yeast two-hybrid, proteomics and metabolomics datasets, but it is also extendable to other datasets. IIS is freely available online at: http://www.lge.ibi.unicamp.br/lnbio/IIS/.

[principles Of Universality, Comprehensiveness And Equity In A Hearing Health Care Service].

This article analyzed whether the practices of hearing health care were consistent with the principles of universality, comprehensiveness and equity from the standpoint of professionals. It involved qualitative research conducted at a Medium Complexity Hearing Health Care Center. A social worker, three speech therapists, a physician and a psychologist constituted the study subjects. Interviews were conducted as well as observation registered in a field diary. The thematic analysis technique was used in the analysis of the material. The analysis of interviews resulted in the construction of the following themes: Universality and access to hearing health, Comprehensive Hearing Health Care and Hearing Health and Equity. The study identified issues that interfere with the quality of service and run counter to the principles of Brazilian Unified Health System. The conclusion reached was that a relatively simple investment in training and professional qualification can bring about significant changes in order to promote a more universal, comprehensive and equitable health service.

Hyperhoneycomb Iridate β-li_{2}iro_{3} As A Platform For Kitaev Magnetism.

A complex iridium oxide β-Li_{2}IrO_{3} crystallizes in a hyperhoneycomb structure, a three-dimensional analogue of honeycomb lattice, and is found to be a spin-orbital Mott insulator with J_{eff}=1/2 moment. Ir ions are connected to the three neighboring Ir ions via Ir-O_{2}-Ir bonding planes, which very likely gives rise to bond-dependent ferromagnetic interactions between the J_{eff}=1/2 moments, an essential ingredient of Kitaev model with a spin liquid ground state. Dominant ferromagnetic interaction between J_{eff}=1/2 moments is indeed confirmed by the temperature dependence of magnetic susceptibility χ(T) which shows a positive Curie-Weiss temperature θ_{CW}∼+40  K. A magnetic ordering with a very small entropy change, likely associated with a noncollinear arrangement of J_{eff}=1/2 moments, is observed at T_{c}=38  K. With the application of magnetic field to the ordered state, a large moment of more than 0.35  μ_{B}/Ir is induced above 3 T, a substantially polarized J_{eff}=1/2 state. We argue that the close proximity to ferromagnetism and the presence of large fluctuations evidence that the ground state of hyperhoneycomb β-Li_{2}IrO_{3} is located in close proximity of a Kitaev spin liquid.

A retrospective study of Traumatic Dental Injuries in a Brazilian dental urgency service

Epidemiologic aspects of traumatic dental injuries (TDI) were evaluated in the permanent dentition in a sample of 847 patients treated at the Dental Urgency Service of the Dental School of the Federal University of Goiás, Brazil, between May 2000 and May 2008. The statistical treatment analyzed data from frequency distribution and chi-square test. The level of significance was set at 5% for all analyses. The results showed a higher incident among males (610; 72.01%) with mean age of 6-10 year-old. Uncomplicated crown fracture (without pulp exposure) (502; 26.95%), avulsion (341; 18.30%) and complicated crown fracture (with pulp exposure) (330; 17.71%) were the most prevalent TDI. The prevalence of trauma throughout the years showed proportionality, being observed a larger number of cases between July and September (249; 29.39%). The most affected teeth were the maxillary central incisors (65.65%), followed by the maxillary left lateral incisors (19.67%). In 311 participants (18.25%), only one tooth was involved, while in most patients (536; 81.75%), TDI occurred in more than one tooth. Significant proportion (82.27%) of traumatized teeth presented completely formed root apex. The main etiologic factors involved in TDI were falls (51.71%), traffic accidents (22.90%) and violence (5.67%). Based on the obtained data, it may be concluded that accurate policies of TDI prevention must be established, capable of stimulating the exposure of appropriate protocols for management of these lesions. The prevalence of TDI in Goiânia subpopulation is compared to the prevalence reported in epidemiological studies in others populations.

ScriptLattes: an open-source knowledge extraction system from the Lattes platform

The Lattes platform is the major scientific information system maintained by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). This platform allows to manage the curricular information of researchers and institutions working in Brazil based on the so called Lattes Curriculum. However, the public information is individually available for each researcher, not providing the automatic creation of reports of several scientific productions for research groups. It is thus difficult to extract and to summarize useful knowledge for medium to large size groups of researchers. This paper describes the design, implementation and experiences with scriptLattes: an open-source system to create academic reports of groups based on curricula of the Lattes Database. The scriptLattes system is composed by the following modules: (a) data selection, (b) data preprocessing, (c) redundancy treatment, (d) collaboration graph generation among group members, (e) research map generation based on geographical information, and (f) automatic report creation of bibliographical, technical and artistic production, and academic supervisions. The system has been extensively tested for a large variety of research groups of Brazilian institutions, and the generated reports have shown an alternative to easily extract knowledge from data in the context of Lattes platform. The source code, usage instructions and examples are available at http://scriptlattes.sourceforge.net/.