Hugo Dias

FoTSeC — Human Security in Fog of Things

Today’s devices, which make up the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), are becoming increasingly more heterogeneous, mobile and intelligent. They represent an untapped computational resource that is available on site. By taking advantage of these devices we reduce the need for distant service providers: direct communication with neighbour devices becomes key for handling local tasks and information. Thus, the traditional cloud is “descending” to the network edge and becoming “diffused” among the client devices in both mobile and wired networks. Since single individuals are now becoming walking sensor networks, with many types of devices (smart-shirts, smartphones, smart glasses, smart watches…), human behavior begins to have a significant impact on the availability of resources. This means that security risks rise tremendously in these distributed clouds.The objective of this paper is to present an analysis of security in the future Internet - an Internet that integrates the concepts of Fog of Things (FoT) and Human in the Loop (HiTL). This paper also describes our model and the platform that we implemented for the evaluation tests.

Tech4SocialChange: Technology for All

Universities and other educational institutions are sometimes accused of not being involved in real world problems, focusing more on the scientifically value of the work produced and not on the humanitarian value. A way of encapsulating the second with the first is the main goal of the Tech4SocialChange that is described here. An innovative database/repository of challenges with real impact in the world is created and given access to people with skills and knowledge to tackle them. Also the work made by researches can be stored and used in a project and the researcher gets recognition for it by becoming referenced in that project. A web application has been built as a prototype for this process and can be accessed in www.tech4socialchange.org. It has been planned and developed by a team of students and researchers of the Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra and is currently being constantly altered according to feedback received by the testers in the same team. This paper presents an application that aims to help people that face certain challenges every day and motivate those that have the skillset, to tackle these challenges, into doing so.