The penetration of renewable energy resources and demand response programs causes several management issues, such as network instability. Several research projects are currently investigating and surveying several methods to enhance the network reliability. This paper represents a smart model of community grid that contains a central management unit and several consumers, producers and prosumers. In the proposed model, the community manager is able to control the consumption and generation of the resources by establishing contracts with its members. The community manager utilizes a single period optimization problem for minimizing its operation costs by applying different types of demand response programs and the use of renewable resources. In the case study, an internal low voltage distribution network of a real university campus is considered as the community grid, in order to test and validate the proposed model.
Paula Peña, Rocío Aznar, Rosa Montañés, Rafael Alonso
The project presented has been financed by Government of Aragon and is part of the ''Open Data'' initiative promoted by that organization. Given the amount of unstructured information related to the Government of Aragon currently published on the Internet, with slightly or no standardization and decentralized, it emerges the need to gather it systematically to be offered to all interested collectives from a single access point in a public and structured way. Within this context, ''Aragon Open Data'' project aims to collect, organize, store and maintain updated, Administration''s web information by means of human language and semantic technologies. Firstly, crawling is performed over websites in order to retrieve textual data over which Natural Language Processing (NLP) and ontology-based techniques are applied. Thereafter, results are stored into NoSQL databases, allowing future open access and simple data exploitation. NLP techniques used in the project involve named-entities recognition and classification (NERC) and texts semantic classification and summarization.
Elli Androulaki, Christian Cachin, Angelo De, Eleftherios Kokoris Kogias
Sharding, or partitioning the system’s state so that different subsets of participants handle it, is a proven approach to building distributed systems whose total capacity scales horizontally with the number of participants. Many distributed ledgers have adopted this approach to increase their performance, however, they focus on the permissionless setting that assumes the existence of a strong adversary. In this paper, we deploy channels for permissioned blockchains. Our first contribution is to adapt sharding on asset-management applications for the permissioned setting, while preserving liveness and safety even on transactions spanning across-channels. Our second contribution is to leverage channels as a confidentiality boundary, enabling different organizations and consortia to preserve their privacy within their channels and still be part of a bigger collaborative ecosystem. To make our system concrete we map it on top of Hyperledger Fabric.
Fear of stigmatization and discrimination from colleagues, friends and family drives patients with various type of mental health problems away from a traditional face-to-face therapy and enforces them to look for an alternative treatment methods. Internet-based mental health therapy helps patients to get their needed therapies and support from healthcare professional and peers, or as a part of automated online form of therapy. Conducting Internet based therapy anonymously is vital for the patient privacy. However, lack of trust, access permission, ownership control and traceability undermines patient safety and security. Blockchain technology is an innovative technology initially designed for a cryptocurrency. However, with the introduction of programming blockchain and smart contracts, the technology has extended its importance to other areas for developing decentralized application (DApp), such as mental health related information management, which is the primary focus of this thesis. Privacy and security are very crucial for patient safety and to preserve patient’s medical history from adversaries. Sharing of private medical information online between the patient and their respective provider contains sensitive information that can easily be compromised if a proper security measure is not put in place. Blockchain is consensus-based peer-to-peer distributed ledger technology that stores and maintains an updated copy of all transactions within the network. It makes trust more transparent and traceable by keeping auditable-logs of all transactions in the form of blocks. In this thesis, Blockchain and its underlying technology are studied, and a prototype has been developed to explore the potential of the blockchain technology. Furthermore, we explore alternative distributed ledger technologies and their respective security models such as consensus protocols, cryptographic techniques, privacy and scalability. The prototype was proposed based on Ethereum blockchain.
Open access
Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
Cryptocurrencies have been in vogue ever since Bitcoin first appeared in 2008. From that moment on, a new potential market started evolving and is nowadays a daily topic for everyone involved in the financial and monetary markets. Cryptocurrencies presented themselves as a viable alternative to traditional currencies, with a lot of new interesting features, but also several aspects that split the opinions between those who understand it as a great alternative for the future and the more skeptical ones who still question its legality and use. Nowadays, cryptocurrency is one of the most interesting topics in the financial markets due to all the controversy associated, as well as the public acceptance, responsible for the huge prices that these coins have been reaching. In this dissertation, we aim to analyze every aspect concerning cryptocurrencies. With the intention to clarify the most important details about this new market, all these details have been scrutinized, from the several different types of cryptocurrencies and its behavior, to the factors that have an impact in cryptocurrencies prices. Cryptocurrency is still a trendy and unknown subject to many people, and that was the motivation and the main objective of this dissertation, to clarify everyone about this topic before thinking of investing in any of these new cryptocurrencies.
Traditional customer loyalty programs in the FastMoving Consumer Goods industry have several bottlenecks such as lost paper-based coupons and payback process complications. This paper presents the design of a blockchain-based customer loyalty program called Promotion Asset Exchange (PAX) framework, to solve bottlenecks in the traditional customer loyalty programs. PAX framework adopts the smart contracts of blockchain technology by using PAX token to digitalize transaction processes. It provides improved usability for users and more detailed information to be gathered from manufacturing companies' perspective.
With the development of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology, the notion of smart city concept comes to reality. Smart city covers a broad range of scenarios for citizens in their everyday life, such as smart home, smart traffic and smart healthcare. However, considering the IoT technology itself still under security threats, smart city security and resilience is a critical factor for truly embracing the smart age of everyday life. Current technology has a difficult time providing security in smart city architectures because of its decentralized and distributed nature. As a recently new technology, Blockchain uses a decentralized and distributed security approach to adding security to a decentralized and distributed IoT system. This paper presents a blockchain based solution to provide security and resilience in smart cities and analyze potential security concerns in the integration of blockchain technology into smart city infrastructure. Each of the concerns are discussed in detail.
Ross Guttromson, Stephen Verzi, Lon Andrew Dawson, Drew Levin · 10 authors
This project explored coupling modeling and analysis methods from multiple domains to address complex hybrid (cyber and physical) attacks on mission critical infrastructure. Robust methods to integrate these complex systems are necessary to enable large trade-space exploration including dynamic and evolving cyber threats and mitigations. Reinforcement learning employing deep neural networks, as in the AlphaGo Zero solution, was used to identify "best" (or approximately optimal) resilience strategies for operation of a cyber/physical grid model. A prototype platform was developed and the machine learning (ML) algorithm was made to play itself in a game of 'Hurt the Grid'. This proof of concept shows that machine learning optimization can help us understand and control complex, multi-dimensional grid space. A simple, yet high-fidelity model proves that the data have spatial correlation which is necessary for any optimization or control. Our prototype analysis showed that the reinforcement learning successfully improved adversary and defender knowledge to manipulate the grid. When expanded to more representative models, this exact type of machine learning will inform grid operations and defense - supporting mitigation development to defend the grid from complex cyber attacks! This same research can be expanded to similar complex domains.
Open access
Smart Grid Security and Resilience
Distributed and Parallel Computing Systems
Infrastructure Resilience and Vulnerability Analysis
In this paper, we explore the attack surfaces in open source permissioned blockchain project Hyperledger Fabric that can be exploited and compromised through cryptographic tactics. Attacks such as insider threats, DNS attacks, private key attacks, and certificate authority (CA) attacks are proposed and discussed. Points in transaction flow where the proposed attacks are threats to the permissioned blockchain are specified and analyzed. Key management systems are discussed, and a deep analysis of Hierarchical Deterministic wallets is conducted. The Membership Service Provider (MSP) proves to be a centralizing aspect of an otherwise decentralized system and proves to be a weakness of the permissioned blockchain network.
This paper build the foundations of a simulation tool for blockchain-based applications. It takes advantage of the huge expressiveness and extensibility of PyCATSHOO framework to deal with the important variability of blockchain implémentations and properties of interest. A simple stochastic model of generic blockchain-style distributed consensus system and associated performance indicators are proposed (performance in terms of consistency and ability to discard double-spending attacks). Monte Carlo simulations are applied to assess the indicators and determine their sensitivity to the variation of input parameters.
Students at the University of Wyoming designed two blockchain-based voting systems during a class offered only once at the University. The first system (re-use) branched Ethereum to leverage its security and privacy benefits. The second system (re-invent) created a new blockchain voting system which used two separate chains, one for validating voters and another for securing votes. This research looked at the benefits and flaws of current election systems as well as benefits and flaws of blockchain technology to improve upon the current election infrastructure. These systems aim to provide integrity, privacy and security to its users. Further, they strive to be fault-tolerant. Finally, these systems could be extended to mobile voting platforms and smart contracts. Based on current decentralized services, this research demonstrates a proof-of-concept that elections could benefit from blockchain-based systems. These types of systems would be ideal in smart cities to ensure the reliability of the voting procedure.
Panayiotis Christodoulou, Klitos Christodoulou, Andreas S. Andreou
A prototypical smart contract (wrapped as a decentralized application) is presented for investigating the potential benefits for applying Blockchain for Logistics. The decentralized application proposed exposes the various design challenges that programmers are likely to face when realizing the implementation of the application. The proposed methodology utilises the implementation of a dedicated smart contract that was developed based on a special-purpose structure for satisfying the requirements of the usecase. The evaluation was based on the execution of each of the functions measuring the gas costs and execution time. The prototype design was deployed and evaluated on a real-world Blockchain framework and can be considered as a first solution to how the Blockchain technology can be utilized within Logistics to overcome any barriers that may exist between professionals. In this paper we present a real implementation of a smart contract for the Logistics industry. The proposed dApp provides a live example of how Blockchain can be utilized within Logistics as it enables users to send and track products.
Sofia Alexaki, George Alexandris, Vasilios Katos, Nikolaos E. Petroulakis
Circular, data-driven healthcare is increasingly being considered as an effective model to provide efficient, cost-effective and sustainable healthcare services in the future. Central to this model is the service-dominant “building-block”-type provision of care services to patients, paired with the collaboration of healthcare providers through a common infrastructure. This combination enables the forming of a decentralized, holistic care cycle. Sharing of patient medical informationis pivotal towards reaching this goal; however, preserving medical record integrity and privacy, while at the same time allowing provider interoperability are often conflicting requirements. Blockchains and Smart Contracts can provide the underlying technology to support the decentralized care cycle by addressing patient privacy and medical record integrity, while simultaneously offering efficient interoperability between providers. To demonstrate how this could be achieved, a conceptual medical record access and sharing mechanism is presented which is suitable for a system operating within a regulated healthcare jurisdiction.
George Alexandris, Vassilis Katos, Sofia Alexaki, George Hatzivasilis
Implementing a circular economy business model which is profitable for businesses operating physical assets, while at the same time does not conflict with strategic goals of environmental policies can be a complex and risky undertaking for a single entity, especially if the asset operator is a small-to-medium enterprise (SMEs). To mitigate this, a collaborative circular economy business model is proposed, where the circular economy cycle is materialized by assets transitioning between asset operators on a demanddriven approach. Demand itself is partially based on the asset's state, which is described by its circular properties (location, condition, availability). The asset state and its transition between operators can be monitored by auditors and governmental regulators to ensure asset integrity and compliance with environmental targets. This common view of asset state between all parties can be enabled by blockchains and smart contracts, which can provide the underlying technology to share data with integrity, while simultaneously offering more efficient interoperability between participants. To demonstrate how this could be achieved, a conceptual asset record access and sharing mechanism is presented which is suitable for regulated environmental jurisdictions.
This project was focused on designing a tool for optimizing complex transactions in a traditional bank accounts, Bitcoin wallet accounts and Bitcoin exchanges. The challenges include transference fees eroding the amounts transferred, Bitcoin volatility and arbitrage. The tool should support hundreds of accounts with each account identifi ed by a bank or exchange, and a currency. The basic user-case, we call it Debit Scenario, appears when an account consumes it capital and has very little funding (sink or demand account), then the user set a minimum funding for the account, and we need to balance all the accounts of the network, using many currency circulations though many paths to satisfy the specifi ed funding limits. Another user case, we called it Custodian Scenario, is when certain accounts (i.e. supply or non-custodians) has upper limit on the amount of capital so we need to distribute the excess value in other accounts (i.e. demand or custodians) of the network. The problem was modelled as a multi-commodity min-cost max- flow problem with specifi c constraints including arbitrage information, and solved with linear programming. Simple and complex numerical scenarios are presented too.
Bitcoin is part of a wider range of opportunities to creating cryptocurrencies based on blockchains. Research has shown that the existing cryptocurrencies are very volatile and often illiquid. A cryptocurrency endorsed by a Central Bank, as the starter of a private blockchain, will most likely show more stability. It may even take the form of legal tender. However, since almost all countries have their own currency already, the governments will not feel the need for an additional currency. One exception is Palestine. It enjoyed the privilege of having its own currency in the past. The purpose of this research is the evaluation of the feasibility of a cryptocurrency as legal tender. The authors recommend a new Palestinian Pound built on a private blockchain using Hyperledger. In practice it would not differ from any other fiat (legal) currency. The current weakness of not having its own currency could be turned into a strength by becoming the most advanced economy where transactions are transparent and efficient. This paper fills a research gap by analyzing the opportunities of a cryptocurrency that is actual legal tender and endorsed by a monetary authority.
Distributed Ledgers, such as blockchains implement business collaboration processes in the form of smart contracts (SCs). Blockchain technology and smart contracts have received significant attention as they exhibit autonomy, decentralization, trust, and transparency over peer-to-peer networks while moving the assets digitally among peers without a third-party such as lawyers in conventional contracts (CCs). Smart contracts are computerized scripts or protocols that execute contractual clauses when certain pre-defined conditions meet and thereby digitally enforce the negotiation and performance of a contract. Smart contracts, although, being self-executable and self-enforceable, are irreversible once written and lack contractual flexibility in the face of a contingency. A high degree of automation is sought to manifest blockchain enabled smart contracts into the so-called self-aware contracts (SAC) that can be aware of its internal contextual environment and the external environment or real-world events. This Ph.D. work aims to develop the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model based multi-agent system on the top of the blockchain technology-enabled smart contracts to yield the so-called self-aware contracts. This research follows the guidelines of Design Science Research (DSR) methodology.
Recently, there is a growing trend towards machine learning models that run on client devices such as smartphones, with constraints such as model size and time. Often, the user data on client devices is considered private and so cannot be uploaded to an external server for processing and running the model. Blockchain provides a new way of sharing data that is secure and decentralized. In this paper, we provide a way to use blockchain to run a machine learning model in a decentralized way using various nodes to compute part of the learning task. We apply our system in a smart home IoT setting to generate user customizations based on user activity prediction for IoT devices. We use distributed association rule mining to generate the rules of user activity from the device logs. We describe the system architecture and simulate the system using Ethereum based tools.
Nota: Currently, the implementation of smart contracts is growing at impressive speeds, the \nnew blockchain technology and the proven accuracy of the data it offers means that more and \nmore private and public institutions adhere to this type of technology with the aim of take \nadvantage of all the benefits they offer. \nA specific problem that we face at the moment is the price variation in terms of the value of the \ncryptocurrencies used in the Smart Contracts, the so-called volatility, which directly affects the \nrate of adoption of the user who is accustomed to agree a value and receive the same agreed \nvalue, when cryptocurrencies are used to deploy intelligent contracts, the resulting values to \ncomply with them, is usually a different value from the agreed one. \nTo solve this problem, we propose the creation of a Token fixed to the anchored value of a \nstable currency, such as Dollar USD, Euro EUR, GBP Pound Sterling, etc., in this work a token \nwill be created with parity 1: 1 With the value of the dollar and how the network used for \ndevelopment is Ethereum, it has been named Ethereum-USA, USA, because it is the place \nwhere the American Dollar was originally used, and its symbol will be "E-USA”. \nThe Tokens have been created through intelligent contracts through Solidity and the TestNet \nRopsten test network has been used. \nThe present work presents a particular and novel tonic that justifies its creation, using the \nvarious cryptographic techniques that maintain the security of the network, the intelligent \ncontract that creates and uses the Tokens valued at $ 1 usd for the payment of services and \nsuppliers for the value of salaries quoted in Ecuador on the date of implementation. The same \nthat will be paid each end of the month. And for security and veracity, its support in the \nblockchain.
Ferdinando Bosco, Vincenzo Croce, Giuseppe Raveduto
In the last years the interest around blockchain technologies is increasing. The peculiarity of this technology is to offer some relevant features as decentralization, transparency and reliability by design. Initially the application field was principally the financial one, but over the time many others have been investigated. In this paper we are reporting a real case of study in the financial sector, applied to the renewable energy exchange in a local district. In particular, this study reports the development of a Financial Platform, based on a private implementation of Ethereum blockchain, that enables a series of services for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) investments. The Platform implements a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trustable energy marketplace, price-based, addressing both the RES Financial investors and the district energy prosumers. The amounts of energy exchanged and their monetary counter values are represented by specific “tokens”, automatically exchanged by participants to track and record trades, ensuring auditability. The financial services offered to the investors range from an investment performance monitoring to more complex models of shared revenues and equity. The marketplace and all the participants within the microgrid are nodes of the blockchain. All the platform features were implemented exploiting Ethereum smart contracts, ensuring trustworthiness and transparency.
Jakub S. Beneš’s Workers and Nationalism seeks to explain “how the workers that made up one of Europe’s largest Social Democratic movements came to embrace nationalism” (2)—an answer to the enduring question of the paradoxical relationship between socialism and nationalism. The center of Beneš’s story is found not in parliamentary speeches or theoretical treatises or even on the factory floor, as in most works, but in the literary columns of Social Democratic newspapers and in orations on the streets. Indeed, Workers and Nationalism is “a much more cultural answer to the question of how workers in . . . [Habsburg Austria’s] Social Democratic movement became ethnic nationalists” (8). Beneš highlights the significance of print and oral culture, portraying workers as readers and as the authors of a tremendous body of poetry and prose. Their short stories spoke to class-based injustices, and their poems, songs, and orations marked May Day celebrations and other occasions; these provide the book’s main source base. The strong literary bent in Austrian Social Democracy allowed workers to meet in genuinely cultural associations, maintaining institutions and relationships even in the decades of the late nineteenth century when Social Democracy was politically repressed. Rather than fight workers’ growing national allegiances or many of their Catholic beliefs, Beneš explains, Austrian Social Democracy simply adopted them. Practices like these had the added benefit of shielding Social Democrats from some charges of national indifference or more subversive radicalism.The period from 1905 to 1907 saw “the active seizure of universal voting rights by the social working classes” in Austria (100), putting the critical years for the development of Austrian Social Democracy a full decade earlier than in several other countries. From a marginalized subculture in the 1890s facing explicit governmental suppression, the Austrian Social Democratic Party rather suddenly became the most popular voice for Austria’s democratization. In 1897, workers had gained limited voting rights in a small new curia (a division of the Austrian electorate) and sent over a dozen delegates to the Austrian parliament. They built on that political momentum, Beneš explains, to argue for more sweeping electoral reform. In the late fall of 1905, more and more Austrians flocked to the Social Democratic suffrage movement, not only previously apolitical workers but also state employees and some professionals. On November 28, 1905, Social Democrats held a coordinated peaceful general strike and mass demonstrations on Vienna’s main ring road, in Prague’s Old Town Square, and in several other industrial towns. Because of this widespread popular pressure, legislation for nearly universal male suffrage passed just over a year later, and Social Democrats won 23 percent of the popular vote and a sixth of the parliamentary seats in the subsequent election. “By 1905, workers saw parliamentary democracy as a panacea to cure all varieties of social exclusion,” Beneš concludes, and with their euphoric victories at the polls in 1907, “many appear to have thought that the revolution need go no further” (142).Despite these successes, national chauvinism, the logistical difficulties of coordinating across languages, and strong preferences for a decentralized party all worked against a unified Social Democratic movement going forward. Both Czech and German Social Democrats increasingly argued that “their movement constituted the only site of genuine national loyalty” (144), prompting an ethnonational split. But even as Czech-and German-speaking Social Democrats embraced nationalism, different class interests and middle-class snobbery still prevented workers’ political alliance with bourgeois nationalist parties. “Workers,” Beneš finds, “seemed to feel no heightened affinity with their co-nationals among the middle classes and even continued to regard workers of the other nationalities as natural allies, even if they proceeded separately,” or, as they styled it, “autonomously” (3). They embraced national heroes like Jan Hus and Richard Wagner, respectively, as socialist icons, and appropriated national high culture. “Nationally hued Social Democratic events” challenged bourgeois claims to nationalism as well as rigid socialist internationalism. Czech Social Democrats, in particular, sincerely considered autonomous Czech-language socialist organizations a “logical extension of proletarian internationalism” (175) rather than, as some previous scholarship has suggested, a straying from socialist principles by elites or, as Engels argued, a contradiction.The conflation of national and social aims was, Beneš admits, sometimes discomfiting. Both sides slipped into national insensitivity, evident in policy issues (like the battle for more Czech-language schools in Bohemia and the working-class suburbs of Vienna) and in popular literature. Significantly, Beneš finds that neither Czech nor German Social Democrats compromised working-class politics to ally with any of the empire’s bourgeois nationalist parties. German and Czech Social Democrats largely supported Austria-Hungary’s efforts in World War I, with party leaders encouraging a “hibernation” phase until after the war; contributing to, rather than subverting, the war effort, they reasoned, would do the most to assure the expansion of social democracy in the conflict’s aftermath. It was only in the very late stages of the war that Czech Social Democrats joined the Czech Socialist Party in a socialist council to strategize for a new post-imperial political landscape. Social Democrats had fought for change under the imperial Austrian parliament, which no longer existed in its prewar form. But their 1907 achievement of universal male suffrage, notably, carried over into Habsburg Austria’s successor states.Beneš’s cultural history of Austrian Social Democracy leaves various areas sparsely treated. Universal male suffrage was, needless to say, a monumental goal and achievement, but we learn almost nothing about the Social Democrats’ platform and political objectives beyond suffrage and an eight-hour workday. We learn almost nothing, either, about their lives as workers, what sorts of grievances compelled them to political action, and what they hoped to achieve.What readers do take away from Workers and Nationalism is that Austria and 1905 matter a great deal in considering the development of European Social Democracy comparatively and that workers rather easily reconciled socialism and nationalism. “Workers who embraced an uncompromising nationalism in the years after 1905 saw no contradiction between this and their allegiance to the internationalist socialist movement. Independently pursuing social justice as a bounded national collective while not denying parallel aspiration to other national groupings seemed natural and desirable. Democracy was the door to realizing a more just national community,” they believed, “and socialism held the key” (241).
Olga B. Mora, Rogelio Rivera, Víctor M. Larios, J. Raul Beltran-Ramirez · 6 authors
In today Smart Cities, the automation strategy based on massive IoT devices deployment to gather Big Data to get insights into city behavior to improve its services. The Smart IoT devices interconnected to the Cyberinfrastructure in a Smart City can be exposed to security threats. To overcome failures and Cyberinfrastructure hacker's attacks, surveillance systems to monitor every citizen activity, compromise their privacy rights. We propose in this paper a use case where Blockchain is a promise to conciliate security versus privacy. Moreover, we discuss how we can start implementing a control access system integrating Blockchain, and we discuss benefits and challenges briefly.
In todays digital environment, the voting system move from paper based to a digital system. A digital e-voting system have many properties such as transparency, decentralization, irreversibility, and non-repudiation. The growth in digital e-voting system arises many security and transparency issues. In this paper, we used the blockchain technology in digital e-voting system to solve the security issues and fulfill the system requirements. It offers new opportunities to deploy a secure e-voting system in any organization or country. The solution is far better as compared to other solution because, it is a decentralized system, contain the results in the form of bit-coins, having different locations. We will also analyze the security of our proposed voting system, which shows our protocol is more secure as compared to other solutions.
Internet Traffic Analysis and Secure E-voting
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques