1,720,957 research outputs found
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
Confidential discovery of IoT devices through blockchain
No full textSelection criteria regulating IoT device discovery involve confidentiality issue on the information the constraints convey. A promising approach to cope with this issue is leveraging on blockchain technology and smart contracts to implement the overall discovery process deployment. However, due to the blockchain design, data within the blockchain is public and smart contracts cannot access data outside the blockchain, unless through the exploitation of Oracles. On the one hand, this brings benefits of trust decentralization, transparency, and accountability of the discovery process. On the other hand, it carries serious consequences on confidentiality and privacy as well as on Oracles trustworthiness. For these reasons, in this paper, we investigate how to ensure data confidentiality during the discovery process of IoT devices on blockchain even in the presence of an untrusted Oracle
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
A blockchain-based trustworthy certification process for composite services
No full textLack of trustworthiness is a major limit of microservice-based systems, where service composition is mainly driven by functional requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach where composite service certification meets blockchain, to support continuous and trustworthy verification of non-functional requirements. A certification process for composite services is then introduced at the basis of an audit process aiming to support certificates with stable properties. Trustworthiness is built on the blockchain, used as a platform for coordinating collaboration among involved parties such as service orchestrators, certification authorities, and auditors
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
New vistas on synaptic plasticity: the receptor mosaic hypothesis of the engram.
No full textThe concepts of coexistence of transmitters and of receptor-receptor interactions have increased our understanding of the integrative processes regulating synaptic homeostasis and synaptic plasticity. Depending upon the ionotropic or metabotropic characteristics of the cotransmitter, it may be mainly involved in synaptic homeostasis or synaptic plasticity, respectively. A chemical trace of the postsynaptic activity can be obtained because of the plasticity of the receptor molecules. Thus, the heuristic hypothesis is introduced that islands of receptors located on postsynaptic membranes of local circuits can be formed by means of receptor-receptor interactions favouring ordered electrotonic sequences in the local circuits. This hypothesis has been named the receptor mosaic hypothesis of the engram. The islands or clusters of receptors can then store specific and complex information and when activated by the transmitters they may induce unique changes in ion permeability and cell metabolism which, at the local circuit level, can mimic exactly a previous electrotonic sequence. They can therefore represent at least part of the engram. This hypothesis is introduced against the background of the possible existence of different types of encodings of memory
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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