Office layout affecting privacy,interaction, and acoustic quality in LEED-certified buildings

The study investigated differences in worker satisfaction and perceived job performance regarding privacy, interaction, and acoustic quality issues in personal workspaces between five office types in LEED-certified buildings. It finds that people in high cubicles showed significantly lower satisfaction and job performance in relation to visual privacy and interaction with co-workers than both enclosed private and enclosed shared office types. They also showed significantly lower satisfaction with noise level and sound privacy and lower job performance perceived by acoustic quality than enclosed private, enclosed shared, and bullpen types. The bullpen type, open-plan office without partitions, presented significantly higher satisfaction with noise level and higher performance perceived by acoustic quality than both high and low cubicles. Considering the bullpen type also showed higher satisfaction with sound privacy than the high cubicle type, high partitions don't seem to contribute to creating workspaces where people can have a secure conversation. The bullpen type didn't show any difference from the enclosed shared type in all privacy, interaction, and acoustic quality questions, indicating it may be a good option for a small office space instead of the enclosed shared type.     

Assessing mobile phone communication utility preferences in a social support network

While it is generally accepted that the mobile cell phone has become ubiquitous within society for communicating, the actual use of the utilities on a phone have not been reported. Understanding how communication patterns are changing in society as a result of the mobile cell phone will enable the development and/or modification of existing cell phone utilities, the concept of privacy, and a mobile literacy research domain. To explore mobile cell phone utility use, 99 people completed a mobile phone usage questionnaire. Key results from the questionnaire are physical location when using a mobile cell phone, the length of communication episodes, the usage of phone utilities and existing privacy concerns related to mobile cell phones.     

十合院——一种居住新模式的探索

建筑师通过对十户联拼住宅设计的分析，探索了一种新型低层高密度的居住方式，并在空间组合方式上尝试融入传统空间体系与序列．实体营造中尝试了预制混凝土的多种使用方法。     

PAACP: A portable privacy-preserving authentication and access control protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks

Recently, several studies addressed security and privacy issues in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Most of them focused on safety applications. As VANETs will be available widely, it is anticipated that Internet services could be accessed through VANETs in the near future. Thus, non-safety applications for VANETs would rise in popularity. This paper proposes a novel portable privacy-preserving authentication and access control protocol, named PAACP, for non-safety applications in VANETs. In addition to the essential support of authentication, key establishment, and privacy preservation, PAACP is developed to provide sophisticated differentiated service access control, which will facilitate the deployment of a variety of non-safety applications. Besides, the portability feature of PAACP can eliminate the backend communications with service providers. Therefore, better performance and scalability can be achieved in PAACP.     

安庆市福利中心老年公寓的设计探索

21世纪的中国已经进入老龄化社会,老年公寓的建设方兴未艾该文以安庆市福利中心老年公寓的方案设计为例,以满足老人心理及行为需求为目标,引入"家"的概念,提出了老年公寓空间环境的综合设计方法和策略.     

Thoughts on k-anonymization

k-Anonymity is a method for providing privacy protection by ensuring that data cannot be traced to an individual. In a k-anonymous dataset, any identifying information occurs in at least k tuples. To achieve optimal and practical k-anonymity, recently, many different kinds of algorithms with various assumptions and restrictions have been proposed with different metrics to measure quality. This paper evaluates a family of clustering-based algorithms that are more flexible and even attempts to improve precision by ignoring the restrictions of user-defined Domain Generalization Hierarchies. The evaluation of the new approaches with respect to cost metrics shows that metrics may behave differently with different algorithms and may not correlate with some applications’ accuracy on output data.     

The VALU3S ECSEL project: Verification and validation of automated systems safety and security

Manufacturers of automated systems and their components have been allocating an enormous amount of time and effort in R&D activities, which led to the availability of prototypes demonstrating new capabilities as well as the introduction of such systems to the market within different domains. Manufacturers need to make sure that the systems function in the intended way and according to specifications. This is not a trivial task as system complexity rises dramatically the more integrated and interconnected these systems become with the addition of automated functionality and features to them. This effort translates into an overhead on the V&V (verification and validation) process making it time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we present VALU3S, an ECSEL JU (joint undertaking) project that aims to evaluate the state-of-the-art V&V methods and tools, and design a multi-domain framework to create a clear structure around the components and elements needed to conduct the V&V process. The main expected benefit of the framework is to reduce time and cost needed to verify and validate automated systems with respect to safety, cyber-security, and privacy requirements. This is done through identification and classification of evaluation methods, tools, environments and concepts for V&V of automated systems with respect to the mentioned requirements. VALU3S will provide guidelines to the V&V community including engineers and researchers on how the V&V of automated systems could be improved considering the cost, time and effort of conducting V&V processes. To this end, VALU3S brings together a consortium with partners from 10 different countries, amounting to a mix of 25 industrial partners, 6 leading research institutes, and 10 universities to reach the project goal.     

Users’ Preferences for Smart Home Automation – Investigating Aspects of Privacy and Trust

Smart home automation provides residents with relief and convenience in everyday life and allows for self-determined aging in place. Yet, market penetration is offset by user concerns related to privacy and trust issues: With increasing system complexity, users may perceive a loss of control and fear technical unreliability. While barriers to acceptance in terms of privacy and trust are well understood when considered separately, they are hardly investigated in conjunction so far. We conducted a quantitative study using Adaptive Choice-Based Conjoint Analysis via an online questionnaire. We explored how aspects of privacy and trust determine the willingness to use smart homes from the perspective of (future) users (n = 137, 18 to 64 years of age), and also with respect to the level of automation and application field. Results show that semi-automated systems are rather preferred than fully automated smart home technology. The perceived reliability of automation is the most important acceptance determinant, followed by the location of data storage. Whereas the awareness to use (e.g., recommendations), the type of data, and application field are less important factors for the overall willingness to use smart homes. Findings inform scientists in the field of human-automation interaction and technical developers of smart home automation for technology innovation adapted to user needs.     

Potential pitfalls of smart city development: A study on parking mobile applications (apps) in Hong Kong

Smart cities are built upon information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enable a broad range of advanced services. Through a comprehensive literature review, this study identified four pitfalls brought by the pervasive application of ICT, including information insecurity, privacy leakage, information islands, and digital divide. Therefore, a questionnaire survey together with 27 interviews was conducted in Hong Kong to investigate how the public perceived these pitfalls within the context of mobile apps providing real-time parking information which form a major part of smart mobility. System insecurity and privacy leakage were found to arouse worries among the app-users while their awareness of protecting personal data was found to have room for improvement. Islands of real-time parking information occur as a result of the lack of collaboration among private carpark operators. Digital divide existed widely among the disadvantaged groups and the problem cannot be solved by mere provision of ICT facilities. Overall, technologies alone cannot make a city smart or smarter. It is the suitable way in which ICTs are used to serve all citizens that matters.     

A time-aware searchable encryption scheme for EHRs

Despite the benefits of EHRs (Electronic Health Records), there is a growing concern over the risks of privacy exposure associated with the technologies of EHR storing and transmission. To deal with this problem, a time-aware searchable encryption with designated server is proposed in this paper. It is based on Boneh's public key encryption with keyword search and Rivest's timed-release cryptology. Our construction has three features: the user cannot issue a keyword search query successfully unless the search falls into the specific time range; only the authorized user can generate a valid trapdoor; only the designated server can execute the search. Applying our scheme in a multi-user environment, the number of the keyword ciphertexts would not increase linearly with the number of the authorized users. The security and performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is securer and more efficient than the existing similar schemes.