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In recent years the number of Internet-connected devices (aka as Internet of Things (IoT)) has increased dramatically. IoT Manufacturers have launched into the market a variety of IoT products to make a profit, while users buy them for the convenience of the technology. Despite IoT technology’s benefits to society, infected IoT devices with malicious software (malware) are a serious security concern. For instance, in 2016, we witnessed one of the largest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks facilitated by IoT devices. This attack disrupted major well-known websites, including Twitter, Spotify, Github, and others.Infected IoT devices cause negative externalities. A negative externality is the cost that third parties, who are neither the seller nor the buyer of IoT devices, must incur to protect themselves against DDoS attacks.In the traditional personal computer world, compromised machines can be remedied with self-service solutions like antivirus. However, there is a lack of such tools to help users remove malicious software once it has taken hold for the wide variety of IoT devices. This, in turn, creates usability issues for users in the IoT space. To remediate infected IoT devices, users may need to take different actions. These actions depend on the device type, its manufacturer, patches or software updates available, and available settings of the device.Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (referred interchangeably as intermediaries in this dissertation) have undertaken the task of notifying users about infected IoT devices in their home network. These types of notifications can aid the threat detection mechanisms of infected IoT devices for users.Considering that the IoT technology has certain limitations, and users will have to deal with infected IoT devices, and the aforementioned actors are involved, we set ourselves to answer the following research question: How can users mitigate infected IoT devices? And what role can manufacturers and intermediaries play in supporting them? To answer this question in short users require information and actionable advice to take appropriate actions. Manufacturers need to improve security practices, such as removing default credentials from the setup process of IoT devices. ISPs can facilitate threat detection through notifications and DNS-based prevention. The results of this dissertation, suggest that governments should incentivize intermediaries and manufacturers to address this issues, and collaboration among stakeholders is essential since users alone cannot mitigate infected IoT devices even though they are motivated.

Sensory data profoundly influences the quality of detected events in a distributed complex event processing system (DCEP). Since each sensor's status is unstable at runtime, a single sensing assignment is often insufficient to fulfill the consumer's quality requirements. In this paper, we study in the context of AQuA-CEP the problem of dynamic quality monitoring and adaptation of complex event processing by active integration of suitable data sources. To support this, in AQuA-CEP, queries to detect complex events are supplemented with consumer-definable quality policies that are evaluated and used to autonomously select (or even configure) suitable data sources of the sensing infrastructure. In addition, we studied different forms of expressing quality policies and analyzed how it affects the quality monitoring process. Various modes of evaluating and applying quality-related adaptations and their impacts on correlation efficiency are addressed, too. We assessed the performance of AQuA-CEP in IoT scenarios by utilizing the notion of the quality policy alongside the query processing adaptation using knowledge derived from quality monitoring. The results show that AQuA-CEP can improve the performance of DCEP systems in terms of the quality of results while fulfilling the consumer's quality requirements. Quality-based adaptation can also increase the network's lifetime by optimizing the sensor's energy consumption due to efficient data source selection.

Local-HDP (for Local Hierarchical Dirichlet Process) is a hierarchical Bayesian method that has recently been used for open-ended 3D object category recognition. This method has been proven to be efficient in real-time robotic applications. However, the method is not robust to a high degree of occlusion. We address this limitation in two steps. First, we propose a novel semantic 3D object-parts segmentation method that has the flexibility of Local-HDP. This method is shown to be suitable for open-ended scenarios where the number of 3D objects or object parts is not fixed and can grow over time. We show that the proposed method has a higher percentage of mean intersection over union, using a smaller number of learning instances. Second, we integrate this technique with a recently introduced argumentation-based online incremental learning method, thereby enabling the model to handle a high degree of occlusion. We show that the resulting model produces an explicit set of explanations for the 3D object category recognition task. Accepted at ICRA 2023 Conference

Many educators accept the idea that we need to systematically assess the performance of our students. Easily accessible writing tools complicate the practice of assessment: how do we gauge whether an assignment is original work? In the age of AI, academic integrity is at stake – or so we’re told.

This paper is based on a review of the literature that brings together GVCs, green and digital transformations. Or to be more precise, the analysis is based on three main components: (a) the greening of GVCs and environmental upgrading; (b) the digital transformation of manufacturing GVCs and (c) an initial exploration of the green and digital joint transformations in GVCs. The aim is to provide a framework bringing together environmental upgrading and digital technologies in manufacturing GVCs. We find that the greening of the global value chains in manufacturing industries unfold in analytically separable steps: a) new patterns of demand preferences and consumer behaviours, b) new green strategies by lead firms and global buyers and c) enforcement of environmental standards and associated patterns of upgrading and downgrading across global supply bases. Digitalization in manufacturing GVCs have differentiated effects across the Global South. The importation and adoption of advanced digital technologies is still limited to a small number of countries (the so-called emerging economies) and their production at any scale is limited to an even smaller set of advanced economies plus China. Across most of the Global South, adoption rates of smart manufacturing and service technologies as well new technologies for data processing and analysis are very low and many firms still face challenges with adopting much older manufacturing and service technologies. Still very little is known about the extent to which key enabling digital technologies support the process of environmental upgrading in the Global South firms that are inserted into GVCs. This is because these techno-institutional waves are still concentrated geographically and the full extent of the ramifications across the Global South remains to be seen. This also means that synergy-creation is challenging. The small pool of literature identified for this study suggests that potentials are mainly limited to certain digital technologies and specific types of environmental upgrading. These insights are anyhow useful because they may help to early direct the efforts of policymakers towards the more likely opportunities.

In ‘Oorlog uit Eerste Hand: Oorlogsbrieven (1935-1950) van het NIOD digitaal’ worden de (papieren) oorlogsbrieven van het NIOD gescand en getranscribeerd. Het digitaliseren geeft de historische stukken uit collectie 247: correspondentie een nieuw leven – en dat terwijl ze vaak tal van ‘levens’ achter de rug hebben, waarin ze in steeds weer een andere betekenis hebben gekregen: de oorlogsbrieven zijn geschreven, gelezen, bewaard en gekoesterd, en zijn daarna onderdeel van een archiefcollectie geworden. In deze blog laat ik zien hoe een brief door deze ontwikkelingen telkens weer een nieuwe betekenis krijgt.

Solomon Islands has relied on highly unsustainable industrial logging since the 1980s. While the development narrative around logging emphasizes its macro-economic importance, it structurally overlooks the impacts on local people's lives. Based on 200 qualitative interviews conducted in 25 villages and 14 logging operations in Malaita Province between 2016 and 2019, this paper demonstrates that the impacts of logging on subsistence and social relations are systemic rather than incidental. By making use of interview quotes, the paper gives voice to rural Solomon Islanders. The results show that the logging industry fails to generate lasting local benefits, while unsustainable logging practices undermine subsistence livelihoods, especially fisheries. Logging triggers conflict that long outlasts the operations themselves, causes sexual exploitation, facilitates excessive alcohol use and reinforces gender disparities by stru cturally excluding women from decision-making and benefit-sharing. This paper calls for a stronger focus on the social impacts of logging in forestry science, policy and practice.

Global demand for timber is projected to grow and much of this timber will continue to be sourced from natural forests. As these forests, particularly in the tropics, tend to be inhabited by the world's most marginalized communities, the social impacts of logging require more attention within policy, practice and research. This Introduction to the Special Issue of International Forestry Review on The Social Impacts of Logging compiles evidence that the overwhelmingly negative social impacts of logging are systemic. As logging companies fail to fulfill their social obligations, and elite capture is common, the extent to which local communities benefit from logging operations is minimal, while long-term, harmful effects on livelihoods, social fabric and safety are severe. Logging operations reinforce and often exacerbate pre-existing inequities, particularly for women and Indigenous people. Weak governance, a lack of transparency and poor participation procedures partially explain this unfavourable situation. However, logging will only achieve better social outcomes if underlying power-imbalances are tackled.

Sinds 2020 wordt bij het NIOD in het project ‘Oorlog uit Eerste Hand: Oorlogsbrieven (1935-1950) van het NIOD digitaal’ gewerkt aan de digitalisering van de bijzondere collectie handgeschreven brieven uit de periode voor, tijdens en na de Duitse bezetting van Nederland en de Onafhankelijkheidsoorlog in Indonesië. Het gaat binnen dit project om meer dan 160.000, vaak persoonlijke documenten die sinds de bevrijding in 1945 bij het NIOD zijn verzameld. Tijdens de campagneweek ‘Postbus NIOD’ (31 maart – 7 april 2023) roept het NIOD iedereen op om persoonlijke oorlogscorrespondentie die nog op zolders bij mensen thuis ligt te versloffen aan het NIOD te doneren.