— Current research shows that visual accessibility assessment in the built environment typically considers objectively measurable parameters. However, considering subjective visual perception for architectural characteristics is extremely important. Visual perception can vary depending on environmental factors and personal factors and is particularly relevant for people with low to mild visual impairments. This explorative research studied the current state of the art of tools and systems that support the assessment of visual accessibility and investigated new ways of experiencing visual accessibility in the built environment. After identifying gaps in the current scenario, the Cambridge simulation glasses were selected as a tool to simulate visual impairments and therefore experience visual accessibility in the built environment. A pilot study was conducted by navigating a publicly accessible building and experiencing how clearly visible certain architectural characteristics were, while walking with and without wearing the glasses. The goal of this study was to understand their potential use in different settings and explore how to offer an empathic experience of visual accessibility with a low-cost tool for different stakeholders.
This study attempted to identify the information gap about Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services in the era of digital transformation. To this end, we analyzed differences in perception of predicting future issues about IoT devices and services, and analyzed differences in the need for digital technology and help in life according to perceptions and experience of using IoT devices and services. Also, the level of education and demand for education were analyzed. A survey was conducted from February 15th to March 7th
As modern vehicles are complex IoT devices with intelligence capable to connect to an external infrastructure and use Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, there is a need to secure the communication to avoid being a target for cyber-attacks. Also, the organs of the car (sensors, communication, and control) each could have a vulnerability, that leads to accidents or potential deaths. Manufactures of cars have a huge responsibility to secure the safety of their costumers and should not skip the important security research, instead making sure to implement important security measures, which makes your car less likely to be attacked. This paper covers the relevant attacks and threats to modern vehicles and presents a security analysis with potential countermeasures. We discuss the future of modern and autonomous vehicles and conclude that more countermeasures must be taken to create a future and safe concept.
The Very Large Internet of Things (VLIoT) workshop aims at discussing the solutions of problems arising especially for large-scale Internet-of-Things (IoT) configurations. After online conferences and workshops are becoming the normal mode for running scientific events, after continuously monitoring the global COVID-19 pandemic this year with falling incidence rates in the last times due to vaccination successes, the workshop changes the format the first time to a hybrid event. This ensures that still problems are overcome like travel restrictions, but offers face-to-face discussions among those going to the local event. A hybrid format has still chances like an increased number of participants, less travel burdens and saving budget, but offers the possibility for going to the local event already for a large portion of the participants. Hence we received many high-quality submissions, from which we accepted 9 to be introduced in this editorial.
As Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are becoming part of our lives, there is a growing interest to enable using them in our daily lives even for micropayments. This interest stems from many factors including privacy, convenience and overhead/fraud that comes with credit cards. In this regard, Internet of Things (IoT) devices can also benefit from this feature for enabling touchless payments for users. However, there is even a bigger opportunity there considering the nature and diversity of very large-scale unattended IoT devices. The integration of any IoT device with blockchain including cryptocurrencies and smart contracts can trigger a machine-to-machine (M2M) economy revolution by streamlining business among IoT devices. Under such a future business model, IoT devices can autonomously request a service and make a payment in return. Such a large-scale ecosystem should rely on various components thus requiring a paradigm shift on the current design and understanding of the IoT systems. In particular, decentralized architecture of blockchain with cryptocurrency and smart contract capability can be a key enabler. In this vision paper, we advocate the need and necessary elements of a M2M crypto economy infrastructure and investigate the role of blockchain in realizing this vision. We specifically focus on the advantages and challenges of blockchain-based systems along with the existing proposed solutions. We then offer several future directions in creating such a M2M economy.
In recent years, cloud computing has developed into one of the fastest growing areas in the IT industry and a key driver for achieving an organization’s mission. Some examples of cloud computing are: Google apps, data centre services, infrastructure, software, virtualization and platform-as-a-service. Microsoft, HPE, IBM, Amazon Web Services, Google, SalesForce, NetSuite, and VMware are some of the leading cloud computing companies. Despite the numerous benefits of cloud computing, it presents many unique security issues and challenges due to which companies are concerned about the security of their data once it leaves the firewall. Nowadays, security is a top concern for IT professionals worldwide and want to ensure their cloud data to be prevented from being leaked, stolen or deleted. This article seeks to present a comprehensive picture of cloud computing security, as well as identify and analyse the most vulnerable security concerns and cloud computing threats, so that end users and service providers are aware of the important security concerns and threats associated with cloud computing.
Internet of things devices are increasingly replacing expensive monitoring devices in many environments such as healthcare. People can eventually own their data, collected from smart personal devices, store them in a variety of cloud services, and make them available to service providers of their choice. In such cases, whenever service providers use these data to provide appropriate services, the data owner may become responsible for ensuring the integrity of data retrieved from multiple points. We present a Hierarchical Data Integrity (HDI) approach to verify if the data, sent by monitoring devices to the cloud, remain unchanged. It is hierarchical as follows: there is a quick verification of the integrity of recent health data (in less than 1 ms), followed if necessary by a low overhead secure option for verifying the integrity of both recent and historical data (still only in 6:1 ms). Further, the hierarchy allows granular identification of data units that fail integrity checks, without requiring any key sharing. It is possible for a data owner to periodically (randomly) use a more secure process to verify the integrity of data. This reduces the computation, storage, and time of integrity verification as shown by analysis, simulation, and hardware implementation.
This paper proposes a low-cost, easy-to-use, IoT and cloud-based system solution for environmental data monitoring in real-time through the combination of Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing technology via Arduino IDE. This paper is present a low implementation cost Data Collection Circuit (DCC) using AT-Arduino commands-based microcontroller ESP8266 and custom IoT device for environment data collection from any physical circumstances. This paper has the scope to introduce the NoSQL, scalable, serverless, real-time database that is Google's firebase, to store the sensor data for real-time monitoring and management of the database. This paper is giving access to environmental information about a UK university library during busy exam weeks includes the major atmosphere parameters: temperature and humidity, which has a massive effect on the Earth's weather, human physical and mental health. The data can be monitored in the firebase database through terminal devices like Laptop, Smart Phone and Tablet which is endowed with the internet facility. This paper is also present a designed and developed Android App using the MIT App Inventor tool for synchronizing the firebase cloud data on it and monitoring these data in real-time from anywhere in the world in no time.
Sea ice is a very important part of the frozen circle. In these years of research, a lot of research on sea ice is realized through microwave remote sensing. Because microwave remote sensing is not easily affected by clouds and light, it is widely used in this field. The design of this paper will classify Arctic sea ice based on microwave remote sensing data. Based on the characteristics of high stability of microwave radiometer, this paper studies the characteristics of sea ice types in the whole Arctic region in January 2017, and uses high-resolution AMSR-E / AMSR2 data in 89Hz frequency band. Data in this frequency band are not easily affected by clouds and water vapor, while data in low frequency band are less affected by clouds and water vapor. Over the years, a lot of research has been done on the use of low frequency band at home and abroad. For this design, the research on the 89GHz frequency band we used is of great significance. We used the high resolution characteristics of multi-year ice and one-year ice in the 89GHz frequency band, the brightness temperature difference of one-year ice, multi-year ice and sea water is analyzed, and the method of using brightness temperature difference to distinguish sea ice species is determined. The fine tree theory in MATALAB decision tree is used to generate classification results.
Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications demand data stream processing with low latency and high processing power. Although the cloud naturally provides huge processing capacity, high latency to move data to the datacenter is prohibitive. Edge computing is a recent paradigm where part of computing and storage resources are pushed from the cloud to the edge of the network. In edge computing, edge providers manage their resources near to IoT devices to meet low latency application requirements and reduce the network core bandwidth. To reach the maximum potential of edge computing, a big challenge is to promote the cooperation between edge providers. Currently, edge computing architectures are severely limited for providing cooperation mechanisms between distinct edge providers. In this paper, we propose a edge federation to leverage the cooperation between different edge providers. The edge federation uses interest information propagated in data streams that travel between edge providers to allow an stakeholder to react to inefficient resource allocation and service provision. The main objective of the federation is to create a consortium of edge providers to provide cooperation mechanisms and define and standardize the application interests. The proposed edge federation is (i) data-centric, since edge providers can share common interests and data and, thus, establish cooperation to increase the capacity to provide services for applications; (ii) distributed, since no assumption is made concerning the geo-location of the edge providers and their logical connections; (iii) opportunistic, because an edge provider can react dynamically to the environment change ; (iv) scalable, since the edge provider has the ability to analyze a data flow passing by its infrastructure and make decisions to increase network performance locally, which impacts the global performance
