1,720,960 research outputs found
Blockchain-based Privacy Enforcement in the IoT domain
No full textThe Internet of Things (IoT) pervades our lives every day and has given end users the opportunity of accessing personalized and advanced services based on the analysis of the sensed data. However, IoT services are also characterized by new challenges related to security and privacy because end users often share sensitive data with different consumers without precise knowledge of how they will be managed and used. To cope with these issues, we propose a blockchain-based privacy enforcement framework where users can define how their data can be used and check if their will is respected without relying on a centralized manager. The preliminary tests we performed, simulating different scenarios, show the feasibility of our approach
Blockchain-based controlled information sharing in inter-organizational workflows
No full textNowadays, organizations need to set higher and higher business goals in order to cope with market requirements. Indeed, a widespread strategy for organizations is to join in inter-organizational processes, which set collaborations and resource sharing among involved organizations. However, the possible lack of trust among the organizations poses relevant issues on the processing of sensitive resources. A promising approach to cope with this issue is leveraging on blockchain technology. Thanks to its design and consensus algorithm, blockchain provides a trustworthy infrastructure that allows partners involved in the collaboration to monitor and perform audits on the workflow transitions. In general, the focus of the existing blockchain-based workflow management solutions is mainly workflow coordination. However, a challenging characteristic of some workflows is that they require the exchange of a big amount of data that has to be managed off-chain, that is, directly exchanged between data producer and consumer. This off-chain data sharing should be secured and controlled such to follow the workflow execution.To cope with this challenge, in this paper, we propose a controlled information sharing in inter-organizational workflows enforced via smart contracts. Smart contracts are designed to coordinate the workflow execution, as well as to deploy a set of authorizations granting access only to the task executor and only to those resources needed for task execution and only during the task activation. We have also run a set of experiments to show the feasibility of our approach
A Blockchain-based Framework in Support of Privacy Preferences Enforcement for Scientific Workflows
No full textScientific workflows are today a vital tool for computational science, enabling the definition and execution of complex applications in heterogeneous and often distributed environments. A key characteristic of scientific workflow applications is that they often require the massive processing of an enormous amount of data that, in many cases, convey personal information. To allow an efficient and transparent privacy compliance check process, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-based solution coupled with an ad-hoc index structure that makes it possible an efficient compliance check for a massive amount of data.Invited Pape
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
AgriChain: Blockchain Syntactic and Semantic Validation for Reducing Information Asymmetry In Agri-Food
No full textInformation asymmetry affects the actors of all the segments of the agri-food supply chain and can
arise many problems in the market along the production chain. Transactions of agri-food products are
asymmetric because suppliers and buyers have different levels of knowledge on the provenance, value,
quality, and freshness of food. Collusive relations among the agri-food chain actors, especially between
controllers companies and controlled ones, can cause market failures as they influence customers’
purchase decisions and severe health accidents when food safety is compromised. This paper proposes
using blockchain technology to combat information asymmetry and collusive relations. In addition to
transparency, cryptography and trusts, which are natively provided by the blockchain, our approach
provides a twofold mechanism for validating crowd sensed data: first, a lightweight syntax validation is
run before writing data in the blockchain (providing accountability also thanks to immutability); then, a
dedicated smart contract runs semantic validation in scenarios with multiple data sources. This semantic
validation may reveal collusive behaviours, downgrade colluding nodes and exclude or down-weight
their data in future validations. The smart contract seals data that pass both validations adding metadata
on data quality. Results prove the feasibility of our solution on Hyperledger Fabric under the assumption
that the majority of nodes are honest. Experimental results demonstrate that our implementation of the
twofold validation using smart contracts scales well with the dimension of the blockchain state. Our
mechanism may greatly impact Product Certification and Designation of Origin as it may be applied to
check specific requirements for raw materials, products, and production processes and protect from the
collusion of controlling consortia and certification bodie
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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