by Darko Brodić and Alessia Amelio

We present an analysis of the extremely low frequency magnetic field radiation produced by laptop computers in normal conditions and under stress.

by Harry Rudin

The IFIP (International Federation for Information Processing) Technical Committee 6 (TC6) held its spring 2015 meeting in Toulouse just before its 2015 Networking conference. At the meeting, the TC6 Chairman, Aiko Pras, announced continued progress with the TC6 open digital library: http://dl.ifip.org/. It is now truly operational.

by Matteo Cossale, Rolf Clauberg, Andreas Doering, Ronald Luijten, Bruno Michel and Stephan Paredes

A prototype of the world’s first water-cooled 64-bit microserver, which is roughly the size of a smartphone, is part of the proposed IT roadmap for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), an international consortium to build the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope.

by Rolf Blom and Oliver Schwarz

With commodity operating systems failing to establish unbreakable isolation of processes, there is a need for stronger separation mechanisms. A recently launched open source project aims at applying virtualization to achieve such isolation on the widespread embedded ARM architectures. Strong assurance is established by formal verification and common criteria certification. Coexisting guest systems are able to run unmodified on the multicore platform, in a resource and cost efficient manner. The solution is rounded anchored in a secure boot process.

by Kaveri Bhuyan and Kjetil Uhlen

To meet the future challenges for sustainable energy systems, the operation and control of smart grids will require a System of Systems (SoS) approach, which takes into account the combined complexities of power grids and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructures. This encompasses a Wide Area Monitoring Systems (WAMS) approach. The basic building block of WAMS is the Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs). Based on wide area information from PMU, it is possible to monitor and observe the state of the power system in real-time. Applications utilizing PMU measurements are being developed for secure operation of power systems.

by Mariagrazia Fugini, Federica Cirilli and Paolo Locatelli

The Italian Project “Digital Support and Social Innovation in Controlled Environments - Attiv@bili”, funded by the Region of Lombardy, proposes innovative organizational and ICT models for the care of frail individuals (e.g. the elderly and people with disabilities). These individuals require both health and social services (integrated care), preferably at home.

by Jasmina Bogojeska, Ioana Giurgiu, David Lanyi and Dorothea Wiesmann

As IT infrastructures become more heterogeneous — with cloud and local servers increasingly intermingling in multi-vendor datacentre infrastructure environments — CIOs and senior IT decision makers are struggling to optimize the cost of technology refreshes. They need to be able to justify the cost of technology refresh, manage the risk of service disruption introduced by change and balance this activity against business-led IT changes.

by Stijn de Gouw and Frank de Boer

In 2013, whilst trying to prove the correctness of TimSort - a broadly applied sorting algorithm - the CWI Formal Methods Group, in collaboration with SDL, Leiden University and TU Darmstadt, instead identified an error in it, which could crash programs and threaten security. Our bug report with an improved version, developed in February 2015, has led to corrected versions in major programming languages and frameworks.

by Michael Baentsch and the IBM LRSC Team

The major challenges in turning the IoT (Internet of Things) vision into a reality are manifold: end-device power consumption, wireless range and penetration, coordination and control, and security. The Semtech LoRa(tm) modulation scheme enables extremely energy-efficient end devices that communicate wirelessly over distances of up to 40km in a single hop. The IBM Long-Range Signaling and Control (LRSC) software enables deploying and securely operating large-scale multi-tenant networks based on LoRa.

by Nadir Guetmi, Moulay Driss Mechaoui and Abdessamad Imine

Designing reliable and resilient collaborative applications has become a hot topic in mobile cloud computing, raising challenging issues such as data management and failure recovery.

by Pavel A. Mozolyako and Nikolai N. Osipov

Probability estimates for different prognoses in the medical field may be achieved by means of a global system of weighted expert assessments. The system, based on the concept of a virtual prediction market, will allow aggregation of the intuitive opinions of various experts about outcomes of a medical case.

by Peter Kieseberg, Olga E. Segou and Fabio Roli

The CyberROAD project – a collaboration between several major European research institutions, companies and stakeholders - develops a European research roadmap for researching and fighting cybercrime and cyberterrorism.