Van Hoa Nguyen, Yvon Bésanger, Quoc Tuan Tran, Minh Tri Le
As more and more distributed renewable energy resources are integrated to the\ngrid, the traditional consumers have become the prosumers who can sell back\ntheir surplus energy to the others who are in energy shortage. This\npeer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction framework benefits the end users,\nfinancially and in term of energy security; and the network operators, in term\nof flexibility in DRES management, peak load shifting and regulation of\nvoltage/frequency. Environmentally, P2P energy transaction also helps to reduce\ncarbon footprint, reduces DRES payback period and incentivizes the installation\nof DRES. The current centralized market model is no longer suitable and it is\ntherefore necessary to develop an adapted decentralized architecture for the\nadvanced P2P energy transaction framework intra/inter-microgrid. In this paper,\nwe discuss several distributed ledger approaches for such framework:\nBlockchain, Block Lattice and Directed Acyclic Graph (the Tangle). The\ntechnical advantages of these architectures as well as the persistent\nchallenges are then considered.\n
The drastically increasing volume and the growing trend on the types of data have brought in the possibility of realizing advanced applications such as enhanced driving safety, and have enriched existing vehicular services through data sharing among vehicles and data analysis. Due to limited resources with vehicles, vehicular edge computing and networks (VECONs) i.e., the integration of mobile edge computing and vehicular networks, can provide powerful computing and massive storage resources. However, road side units that primarily presume the role of vehicular edge computing servers cannot be fully trusted, which may lead to serious security and privacy challenges for such integrated platforms despite their promising potential and benefits. We exploit consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies to achieve secure data storage and sharing in vehicular edge networks. These technologies efficiently prevent data sharing without authorization. In addition, we propose a reputation-based data sharing scheme to ensure high-quality data sharing among vehicles. A three-weight subjective logic model is utilized for precisely managing reputation of the vehicles. Numerical results based on a real dataset show that our schemes achieve reasonable efficiency and high-level of security for data sharing in VECONs.
Investoren und Vermögensverwalter suchen nach Finanzinstrumenten, die die erwartete Rendite ihrer Investition bei gleichzeitiger Minimierung des potenziellen Risikos erhöhen. In der Praxis diversifizieren Vermögensverwalter ihre Vermögensallokation auf verschiedene Anlageklassen allen voran Aktien, Anleihen und Rohstoffe. In den letzten Jahren gewinnt die neue Anlageklasse der Kryptowährungen immer mehr an Einfluss - Anlagekapital. Die erste unter ihnen, Bitcoin, wurde wegen ihrer Technologie sehr berühmt: dezentrale Datenhaltung, sicheres und schnelles elektronisches Tausch- und Zahlungsmittel. Diese Arbeit konzentriert sich auf die Leistung der Core-Satellite Strategie mit diesen neuen digitalen Währungen als Satellit. Die Herausforderung besteht darin, die Kryptowährungen zu finden, die Abwärtstrends kompensieren kann und dem Anleger bessere Renditen erwirtschaftet. Die Korrelationsstruktur der Kryptowährungen muss untersucht werden, sodass gegenläufige Kryptowährungen ausgewählt werden können. Dazu verwenden wir TEDAS – Tail Event Driven Asset allocation, eine aktive Investitionsstrategie zur Auswahl der Kryptowährungen. Diese Methode untersucht die Abhängigkeit von Kryptowährungen in verschiedenen Quantilen am linken Rand der Verteilung. Die Arbeit vergleicht verschiedene auf TEDAS basierenden Investitionsstrategie.
Doctor of legal sciences, V.M. PASHKOV, Associate professor
The implementation of the health care reform in Ukraine is accompanied by the introduction of new technologies. The use of 3-D technologies in medicine can serve as an example thereof. Although, some innovations provide only the implementation of such technologies in the long run. Thus, the adoption of the Laws of Ukraine "On electronic documents and electronic document circulation", "On State Financial Guarantees of Medical Care of the Population" was a prerequisite for the adoption of the Order of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine "On Amendments to the Order of the Ministry of Health of Ukraine of 19 July 2005 No. 360," as of April 18, 2018, No. 735. In our opinion, the main novelty of this act is an introduction of "electronic recipe", issued under the same rules as the usual recipes by authorized person in the information (information and telecommunication) system of the business entity and signed with an electronic digital signature using the enhanced certificate of a public key via reliable electronic digital signature. At the same time, the business entity is free to decide on using of electronic prescriptions, except when the requirements for mandatory electronic prescription are specified by law. With the consent of the patient, the business entity may provide additional services related to the electronic recipe (recipe notification via mobile phone, e-mail, etc.). For example, medical institutions have to register a declaration between a patient and chosen medical institution (a doctor), and such information allows the National Health Service to keep records for the further financing of such medical facilities. And block-chain could be used to display such information, simultaneously simplifying the process since collecting and sharing of such information is automated and timely. In addition, block-chain is used in the healthcare sector in order to deliver high quality and effective medicines to patients. Some researchers believe that global pharmaceutical supply chains are complex and work with outdated platforms that do not provide effective partner collaboration in complying with regulatory guidelines, so that they cannot guarantee the security of medecines distribution. In this sense, according to experts, block-chain is a decentralized platform for transactions between equal partners in a secure environment protected from unauthorized access. This technology allows to safely performing homogeneous operations with information without intermediaries in displaying all transaction data. The above means that the benefit of using the block-chain system in healthcare is not in doubt, but there is a problem of legal support for such an innovation, and not only in health care, but also in general. Theoretical problems of legal regulation in healthcare and patients’ rights protection attract the attention of many scholars. They were researched, in particular, by R.A. Maydanyk, I.Ya. Senyuta, Z.S. Hladun, I.O Bohomazova, Ye.A. Hriekov, A.O. Harkusha, and others. However, the peculiarities of digital technologies’ use and the use of block-chain in particular has remained unscathed by scolars and medical law specialists. The purpose of this study is to analyze the potential impact of block-chain technology on healthcare, its legal nature and the possibility of legal protection of patients’ rights in the block-chain system. The author of the research used scientific publications of leading experts in the field of medical law, current and prospective Ukrainian legislation. The research is based on an organic combination of general scientific and special-legal research methods. From the experts’ point of view, the block-chain could be used at least in the following spheres. Firstly: as an instrument of patients’ data storage. Till now, for example vaccination records (and almost all medical data in general) have been stored mainly in hard copies, and only in some cases, in electronic databases of medical institutions. In this case, patients do not have any mechanisms for controlling what happens to personal data stored in various medical documents. Theoretically, such data can be transferred to unknown organizations or just being lost as a result of a system failure. Secondly: block-chain can be used for monitoring of the supply of pharmaceutical products, including medicines containing virulent substances. It should be noted that the technology of Supply Chain Management (SCM) has been used for a long time. Supply Chain Management (SCM) – is a relatively new term. This concept is complex and includes earlier used definitions such as ECR (Efficient Customer Response) and DRP (Distribution Resource Planning). Nowadays, the patient cannot track which drug is being sold to him or her, both in independent purchasing and in inpatient treatment. Although, the patient has the right to demand, for example, a quality certificate for a medicinal product, but nobody prevents an unscrupulous vendor or employee of a pharmacy institution from tampering with it. Thirdly: such technologies can be helpful for the execution of smart contracts by legal entities including but not limited to insurance companies. Smart contract is an electronic protocol designed by using a computer code. Using block-chain technologies aims to transfer information and to ensure fulfillment of contract terms by both parties. Smart contracts could be replicated with the direct provision of medical care services between a patient and a health care facility, as well as with settlements between the National Health Service and medical institutions, with doctors of which patients have signed a declaration. But, the most interesting would be the use of such smart contracts for medical insurance (and not only medical). Analysis of the prospects of using the block-chain technology allows us to conclude that the objects of legal relations in this sphere are the following: 1) software; 2) telecommunication networks; 3) information resources, products and services; 4) the rights of patients in healthcare; 6) information security. The entire scope of legal relations in healthcare, including but not limited to block-chain, is private (dispositive) by its legal nature despite the publicity of using block-chain. Nevertheless, that the lack of imperative principles of block-chain implementation in healthcare, including ensuring of patients' rights, can make it impossible to use such up-to-date progressive technologies. Summarizing all mentioned before, it should be noted that it is very likely that the lack of legal clarity and unambiguousness of block-chain technology in healthcare can cause uncertainty in patients’ rights legal protection.
This paper presents an overview of cryptocurrencies and blockchains for policy makers. It begins with an overview of market and industry basics, highlighting general interest in use and potential use cases. The paper then presents nine risks associated with use and development of cryptocurrencies and blockchains. While most of the risks are general to financial technologies, but pronounced and persistent with cryptocurrencies and blockchains, some of the risks are unique to cryptocurrencies and blockchains. The paper then describes three potential opportunities, concluding that, at least today, the risks outweigh the benefits for the continued use and development of cryptocurrencies and blockchains.
Abstract Driven by successful pilot projects in supply chain and logistics, Blockchain has become one of the industry’s latest technology hypes. In this paper, we cut through the hype and shed light on the expectations of industry professionals towards the benefits and challenges of Blockchain. Also, we categorize current Blockchain applications that are expected to provide tangible benefits for supply chain and logistics processes. To explore such potentials, we argue that companies should gain own first-hand experiences through small-scale experiments.
I wish to begin by thanking the people who nominated me for the Leonard medal and the Leonard Medal Committee of the Meteoritical Society for granting me this award. Thanks as well to Francois Robert for doing a fine job on the citation and his kind words. I have been a member of the Meteoritical Society and attended the meetings since I was a postdoctoral fellow at Chicago. The recognition by the society means a great deal to me and it is an honor to receive the Leonard Medal. I know most of the recipients over many decades and I am being included with a prestigious group. My research career in Meteoritics and Planetary Science began with my going to Chicago to work with Bob Clayton on nitrogen isotopes in the solar wind as detected by extraction from lunar samples. It was a lucky break for me that Bob had an opening for a post doc in the window of time when I was graduating and looking. Chicago was, and is, a center of research activity in meteorites and planetary science. My interest in the field dates to my last course at the University of Miami when I took a course titled “Modern Geology” taught by Cesare Emiliani who was a student of Urey's. I had taken all the available physics and chemistry courses and wanted another science course. My interest in geology dated back to my childhood, when I belonged to the Gem and Mineral club at Washington University. This was a first-class organization wherein I learned a lot and attended monthly lectures with my dad and the whole family went on the many field trips they organized. Emiliani's course turned out to be the best course I took and he was an amazing teacher and mentor. It was in this broad ranging course that I learned of the application of both stable and radioactive isotopes to interpret processes in nature, ranging from the age of the Earth to paleoclimates, a field he helped found. It greatly impressed me that one could apply the fundamental physics and chemistry I had learned to quantitatively interpret differing geochemical records. I was struck by Urey's 1947 paper on the thermodynamics of isotopic substances and how one could use the information for. Emiliani brought me to his laboratory and showed me his mass spectrometer built at the University of Chicago before he came to Miami. A second significant impact on my scientific direction resulted from a course I took at Florida State from Gary Brass. He discussed the famous paper of Clayton et al. (1973) on the discovery of oxygen mass independent isotopic anomalies in meteoritic inclusions. I was very impressed with the fact that one could distinguish between nuclear processes and chemical by measurement of the multi-isotopes of oxygen and potentially identify individual grains that may have predated the solar system. As I neared completion of my doctoral work, which was finished at Brookhaven National Laboratory, I wrote to Bob Clayton about the possibility of postdoctoral work with him. I told him that I had experience in measuring oxygen and sulfur isotopes, as well as accelerator use for my PhD dissertation. He had an opening and I was able to join the Chicago group, which I had heard about from Emiliani when he discussed his own classmates’ research (Wasserburg, Craig, Epstein, and Miller) and his work with Urey. My timing for coming to Chicago for meteoritic research could not have been better. Bob Clayton, Larry Grossman, Ed Anders, and Frank Richter were all engaged in meteoritic research; all of whom became Leonard medalists. It provided the opportunity to sit in on graduate courses by S. Chandrasekhar and Dave Schramm as well as geophysical, physical chemical, and astrophysical seminars by the world's best. 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Blockchain is the distributed decentralized ledger that distrusting parties can use to share information and consider as single source of truth. Though finance industry was an early adopter of Blockchain, now it has created a sensation in healthcare and many other verticals alike. In this paper, we present application of Blockchain in healthcare that can bring revolution change in the existing system and change the way the health industry has been working.
To facilitate the widespread adoption of clean energy, we must devise practical economic incentives to deploy clean energy assets while reducing barriers to access that clean energy. While renewable energy credits and carbon offset credits successfully push these goals forward, the associated accounting and management systems still suffer from numerous flaws that drive costs up and slow the monetization of clean energy assets. Blockchain technology has emerged as a promising solution that can provide a secure and transparent distributed ledger, while autonomously executing transactions upon fulfillment of pre-defined criteria (“smart contracts”). As a result, credits can be easily tracked from generation through ownership trades to ultimate redemption. This leaves a simple audit trail, significantly reducing the associated time and cost, and enables producers to monetize their credits immediately after generation. Clean Energy Blockchain Network (CEBN) has recently announced a partnership with the Silicon valley power, where we will apply blockchain technology to simplify their participation in the low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) program. This real-world deployment will demonstrate how blockchain technology can dramatically simplify extremely complex trading environments and enable the practical implementation of valuable programs such as LCFS that financially incentivize clean energy production and use.
Oct 8, 2018·Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Joint Conference and 2018 International Symposium on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Wearable Computers
Danwei Liang, Jian An, Jindong Cheng, Yang He · 5 authors
In most crowdsensing systems, the quality of the collected data is varied and difficult to evaluate while the existing crowdsensing quality control methods are mostly based on a central platform, which is not completely trusted in reality and results in fraud and other problems. To solve these questions, a novel crowdsensing quality control model is proposed in this paper. First, the idea of blockchain is introduced into this model. The credit-based verifier selection mechanism and twice consensuses are proposed to realize the non-repudiation and non-tampering of information in crowdsensing. Then, the quality grading evaluation (QGE) is put forward, in which the method of truth discovery and the idea of fuzzy theories are combined to evaluate the quality of sensing data, and the garbled circuit is used to ensure that evaluation criteria can not be leaked. Finally, the Experiments show that our model is feasible in time and effective in quality evaluation.
La technologie Blockchain, support de Bitcoin, se diffuse récemment à des activités extra financières variées et suscite un intérêt dans de nombreux secteurs d’activité. Cet article vise à discuter des conséquences à attendre de cette technologie pour les métiers du champ CCA. Plus précisément, nous chercherons, dans une approche prospective, à présenter cette technologie et à en illustrer les aspects novateurs, qui influenceront ces activités dans les années à venir.
We are pleased to publish the second issue of the Global Journal on Quality and Safety in Healthcare (JQSH). In this issue, we would like to discuss the similarities and differences between research and quality improvement (QI) projects in health care. Imagine you are working in a hospital or a department within a hospital and you want to improve an aspect of health-care quality and safety by focusing on the issue of medication errors. Given that situation, you decide to implement a “zero harm” rule because of medication errors. The question is will this be a QI or a research project? In another example, you are a resident working in an oncology department and you noticed that most patients receiving certain chemotherapeutic agents had neuropathy complications, so you decided to collaborate with the physical therapist on a project to compare patients who received chemotherapy drugs and exercise with those who did not exercise. Again, the question is will this be a research project or a QI project? Regardless of the answer, it is important to implement the project systematically. If your project is focused on QI, then you should consult the QI specialists in your hospital who can help you to use the appropriate QI methodology, which includes Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycles. If your project qualifies as research, then you should consult a research methodologist and biostatistician regarding study design, sample size, and others and work with the institutional review board (IRB) to provide guidance and templates.Many health professionals do not know how a research project differs from a QI project and when they complement each other.[1–3] Our traditional thinking is that quality and safety improvement in health care as well as the effectiveness of an intervention can only be studied in the form of a traditional scientific research project, as it has its own well-established rigorous approach. We may be ignorant or unaware of how to use the QI scientific approach to study the performance of a health-care system.[4,5] The problem lies within our frame of thinking because we are prioritizing the proof of effectiveness over bringing about and sustaining improvement. We use the results of pre-assessment and post-assessment research as the gold standard for evidence-based policy and practice, whereas in reality, sustaining the improvement is continuous and more dynamic.[1,6]Research projects are question-driven and focus on providing proof of effectiveness. The main purpose of research is to generate new generalizable knowledge about a particular subject to a study population, where the study results often end up published in academic journals. In this case, researchers must follow a strict study protocol approved by the IRB, including obtaining the consent from study participants before starting the project and report any deviation from the protocol to the IRB, if needed.[7–9] However, QI projects are data-driven and focus on showing sustained improvement to a specific process and system or outcomes within a health-care organization using, if possible, the research evidence generated as the basis for developing the improvement interventions.[10] A QI project does not aim to generate new knowledge as a research project does, rather, it generates several learning lessons as to what actually works and does not work and why. A QI project produces empirical evidence to benefit other organizations within a similar context and setting, which are interested in replicating the change to improve a process or system using the rapid PDSA cycle approach.[11] Through cycles of testing, we learn what is going to improve and why, without the need to generalize the results to another context, as research projects usually aim to do. Also in QI projects, the measurement framework is not about pre and post. It is about continually measuring the metric of interest that you want to improve and coming up with not just one intervention but multiple interventions based on learning from prior PDSA cycles. At the end, you reach the point of realizing sustained improvement through a series of interventions that were informed by testing in the actual system that you want to improve. The PDSA cycle is repeated, and new changes are made to continue to improve a process and, ultimately, the outcome. The essential measurements included in a QI project are process measures, outcomes measures, and balancing measures, which are used to show that the improvement occurs over time. Data from QI activities are usually aggregated and presented in run/control charts, histograms, and line graphs, whereas data from research are analyzed using statistical tests such as t-test, chi-square test, and regression analysis, and then aggregated and presented in appropriate tables and/or graphs.Typically, QI results are shared within the organization and might be implemented in other departments. The lessons learned from QI activities can be published; however, it must be clear to the readers that the project was for QI, not traditional research. Although a QI project does not require IRB approval, some organizations have QI committees that approve and coordinate QI project activities, and some organizations require articles to be approved before submitting for publication.In summary, the sustained improvement realized in a QI project can be complemented and validated with a thorough research-based assessment of effectiveness.[12] We should not consider the proof of effectiveness the same as the proof of sustained improvement, but they both are very important. I would like to emphasize that both research and QI projects use scientific and systematic approaches, albeit different, but both methods are scientific and rigorous in their own ways. The aims, methods, and outcomes in research and QI projects are quite different. Hence, understanding the differences and similarities between research and QI projects will help to determine the right approach when designing and implementing the right project for the right purpose using the right method. Table 1 is a snapshot comparison between QI and research with more focus on the project's aim and method aspects.In research projects, we can be guided by asking the following: Do we have a clear question to be investigated and answered?What do we hope to accomplish by answering the question?What is currently known about the topic?What are the risks and benefits for patients involved with the study of this topic?What type of study design will be used (observational vs. experimental)?How will the data be analyzed and presented (statistical tests, P-values, etc.)?In QI projects, we can ask the following: What is the magnitude of the quality problem based on available data?What types of quality tools have been used to measure and assess the problem?What is the measurement plan to be used during implementation of the project?What types of changes/interventions will be tested during the PDSA cycles?Has the proposed change/intervention been used in other health-care settings or reported in the literature?Will the results of this project directly improve patient-care outcomes or processes?Is the organization's management supportive of the project and willing to dedicate employee's time and supplies to do the project?What is the sustainability plan for the results?
Open access
Health Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
Bahl and Bird’s book aims ambitiously to be a panacea for all that is unwell in fiscal decentralisation. It maps the appropriate fiscal structures and relationships between central and local govern...
The paper analyzes the relationship between the most popular cryptocurrencies and a range of selected fiat currencies, in order to identify any pattern and/or causality between the series. Cryptocurrencies are a hot topic in Finance due to their strict relationship with the Blockchain system they originate from and therefore are normally considered as part of the ongoing, world-wide financial revolution. This innovative study investigates this relationship for the first time by thoroughly investigating the data, their features, and the way they are interconnected. Results show very interesting results in terms of how concentrated the causality effect on some specific cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies is. The outcome is a clear and possibly explainable relationship between cryptocurrencies and Asian markets, while envisioning some kind of Asian effect.
Decentralization, which has backed the hyper growth of many blockchains, comes at the cost of scalability. To understand this fundamental limitation, this paper proposes a quantitative measure of blockchain decentralization, and discusses its implications to various trust models and consensus algorithms. Further, we identify the major challenges in blockchain decentralization. Our key findings are that true decentralization is hard to achieve due to the skewed mining power and that a fully decentralized blockchain inherently limits scalability as it incurs a throughput upper bound and prevents scaling smart contract execution. To address these challenges, we outline three research directions to explore the trade-offs between decentralization and scalability.
The cryptocurrency market is unique on many levels: Very volatile, frequently changing market structure, emerging and vanishing of cryptocurrencies on a daily level. Following its development became a difficult task with the success of cryptocurrencies (CCs) other than Bitcoin. For fiat currency markets , the IMF offers the index SDR and, prior to the EUR, the ECU existed, which was an index representing the development of European currencies. Index providers decide on a fixed number of index constituents which will represent the market segment. It is a challenge to fix a number and develop rules for the constituents in view of the market changes. In the frequently changing CC market, this challenge is even more severe. A method relying on the AIC is proposed to quickly react to market changes and therefore enable us to create an index, referred to as CRIX, for the cryptocurrency market. CRIX is chosen by model selection such that it represents the market well to enable each interested party studying economic questions in this market and to invest into the market. The diversified nature of the CC market makes the inclusion of altcoins in the index product critical to improve tracking performance. We have shown that assigning optimal weights to altcoins helps to reduce the tracking errors of a CC portfolio, despite the fact that their market cap is much smaller relative to Bitcoin. The codes used here are available via www.quantlet.de .
Blockchain has become another new information revolution after the Internet, and to a certain extent, like the Internet, will change the existing production relations and business logic. With the advent of blockchain, smart contracts have become one of the most sought-after technologies. Its high customizability becomes the key to implement blockchain technology in multiple fields ranging from financial services, life sciences and healthcare to energy resources and voting. However, due to the infancy, challenges are put forward as smart contracts widespread deployment. This study aims to contribute a comprehensive overview on smart contract within blockchain technology. Based on systematic mapping study, we offer a broad perspective of current academic research and application areas of smart contracts. First, by using bibliometric mining on 158 smart contract-related papers, we identified publication profiles, research hot trends and research topic clustering. Then, we provide a summary of the areas where smart contracts are used and analyze the pain points, they address. Finally, we identify the bottlenecks that need to be broken and propose research outlook for the future development of this topic. This paper is aimed at providing helpful guidance and reference for future research efforts.
This paper explores whether and how technological innovation, in conjunction with policy measures, can improve the process of correspondent banking cross-border payments. The paper builds on the empirical validation of existing shortcomings in this area of business by using a questionnaire and industry expert focus group sessions. Having identified the key areas of concern (e.g. cost, transparency, speed), several new network models for cross-border payments are assessed, in terms of their ability to address existing problems. Among the possible models, we also explore the use of innovative technologies such as distributed ledger technology (DLT). As a final step, we evaluate the different models and complement our findings with policy recommendations, in particular with a view to further streamlining Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) and Counter-Terrorist-Financing (CTF) as well as conduct of business rules in payments and supporting information sharing on suspicious transactions between institutions globally.