scholarly journals Cybersecurity of Microgrid: State-of-the-Art Review and Possible Directions of Future Research

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (21) ◽  
pp. 9812
Author(s):  
Norziana Jamil ◽  
Qais Saif Qassim ◽  
Farah Aqilah Bohani ◽  
Muhamad Mansor ◽  
Vigna Kumaran Ramachandaramurthy

The infrastructure of and processes involved in a microgrid electrical system require advanced technology to facilitate connection among its various components in order to provide the intelligence and automation that can benefit users. As a consequence, the microgrid has vulnerabilities that can expose it to a wide range of attacks. If they are not adequately addressed, these vulnerabilities may have a destructive impact on a country’s critical infrastructure and economy. While the impact of exploiting vulnerabilities in them is understood, research on the cybersecurity of microgrids is inadequate. This paper provides a comprehensive review of microgrid cybersecurity. In particular, it (1) reviews the state-of-the-art microgrid electrical systems, communication protocols, standards, and vulnerabilities while highlighting prevalent solutions to cybersecurity-related issues in them; (2) provides recommendations to enhance the security of these systems by segregating layers of the microgrid, and (3) identifies the gap in research in the area, and suggests directions for future work to enhance the cybersecurity of microgrids.

2021 ◽  
pp. 016264342198997
Author(s):  
Sojung Jung ◽  
Ciara Ousley ◽  
David McNaughton ◽  
Pamela Wolfe

In this meta-analytic review, we investigated the effects of technology supports on the acquisition of shopping skills for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) between the ages of 5 and 24. Nineteen single-case experimental research studies, presented in 15 research articles, met the current study’s inclusion criteria and the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) standards. An analysis of potential moderators was conducted, and we calculated effect sizes using Tau-U to examine the impact of age, diagnosis, and type of technology on the reported outcomes for the 56 participants. The results from the included studies provide evidence that a wide range of technology interventions had a positive impact on shopping performance. These positive effects were seen for individuals across a wide range of ages and disability types, and for a wide variety of shopping skills. The strongest effect sizes were observed for technologies that provided visual supports rather than just auditory support. We provide an interpretation of the findings, implications of the results, and recommended areas for future research.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Géraldine Fauville ◽  
Anna C. M. Queiroz ◽  
Erika S. Woolsey ◽  
Jonathan W. Kelly ◽  
Jeremy N. Bailenson

AbstractResearch about vection (illusory self-motion) has investigated a wide range of sensory cues and employed various methods and equipment, including use of virtual reality (VR). However, there is currently no research in the field of vection on the impact of floating in water while experiencing VR. Aquatic immersion presents a new and interesting method to potentially enhance vection by reducing conflicting sensory information that is usually experienced when standing or sitting on a stable surface. This study compares vection, visually induced motion sickness, and presence among participants experiencing VR while standing on the ground or floating in water. Results show that vection was significantly enhanced for the participants in the Water condition, whose judgments of self-displacement were larger than those of participants in the Ground condition. No differences in visually induced motion sickness or presence were found between conditions. We discuss the implication of this new type of VR experience for the fields of VR and vection while also discussing future research questions that emerge from our findings.


2022 ◽  
Vol 54 (7) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Lynda Tamine ◽  
Lorraine Goeuriot

The explosive growth and widespread accessibility of medical information on the Internet have led to a surge of research activity in a wide range of scientific communities including health informatics and information retrieval (IR). One of the common concerns of this research, across these disciplines, is how to design either clinical decision support systems or medical search engines capable of providing adequate support for both novices (e.g., patients and their next-of-kin) and experts (e.g., physicians, clinicians) tackling complex tasks (e.g., search for diagnosis, search for a treatment). However, despite the significant multi-disciplinary research advances, current medical search systems exhibit low levels of performance. This survey provides an overview of the state of the art in the disciplines of IR and health informatics, and bridging these disciplines shows how semantic search techniques can facilitate medical IR. First,we will give a broad picture of semantic search and medical IR and then highlight the major scientific challenges. Second, focusing on the semantic gap challenge, we will discuss representative state-of-the-art work related to feature-based as well as semantic-based representation and matching models that support medical search systems. In addition to seminal works, we will present recent works that rely on research advancements in deep learning. Third, we make a thorough cross-model analysis and provide some findings and lessons learned. Finally, we discuss some open issues and possible promising directions for future research trends.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 240-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anisah Dickson ◽  
Laura B. Perry ◽  
Susan Ledger

International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes are growing rapidly worldwide, driven in part by their global reputation and concept-driven, inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning. This thematic review of a range of literature sources examines the impact of IB programmes on teaching and learning, highlighting trends, challenges, and benefits. Findings of the review revealed that most of the studies, both qualitative and quantitative, examined stakeholders’ perspectives or self-reported experiences of IB programmes; a very small number used research designs that control for confounding factors or allow causal inferences to be drawn. A wide range of stakeholders report that IB programmes develop research and critical thinking skills, intercultural appreciation and global awareness, as well as cultivate collaborative working cultures and creative pedagogical practices among teachers. Challenges include extra demands on teachers for lesson planning and assessment, additional stress for teachers and students, and competing demands and expectations with national requirements. Recommendations are provided which may guide future research endeavours.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Fallah ◽  
Sungmin O ◽  
Rene Orth

Abstract. Precipitation is a crucial variable for hydro-meteorological applications. Unfortunately, rain gauge measurements are sparse and unevenly distributed, which substantially hampers the use of in-situ precipitation data in many regions of the world. The increasing availability of high-resolution gridded precipitation products presents a valuable alternative, especially over gauge-sparse regions. Nevertheless, uncertainties and corresponding differences across products can limit the applicability of these data. This study examines the usefulness of current state-of-the-art precipitation datasets in hydrological modelling. For this purpose, we force a conceptual hydrological model with multiple precipitation datasets in > 200 European catchments. We consider a wide range of precipitation products, which are generated via (1) interpolation of gauge measurements (E-OBS and GPCC V.2018), (2) combination of multiple sources (MSWEP V2) and (3) data assimilation into reanalysis models (ERA-Interim, ERA5, and CFSR). For each catchment, runoff and evapotranspiration simulations are obtained by forcing the model with the various precipitation products. Evaluation is done at the monthly time scale during the period of 1984–2007. We find that simulated runoff values are highly dependent on the accuracy of precipitation inputs, and thus show significant differences between the simulations. By contrast, simulated evapotranspiration is generally much less influenced. The results are further analysed with respect to different hydro-climatic regimes. We find that the impact of precipitation uncertainty on simulated runoff increases towards wetter regions, while the opposite is observed in the case of evapotranspiration. Finally, we perform an indirect performance evaluation of the precipitation datasets by comparing the runoff simulations with streamflow observations. Thereby, E-OBS yields the best agreement, while furthermore ERA5, GPCC V.2018 and MSWEP V2 show good performance. In summary, our findings highlight a climate-dependent propagation of precipitation uncertainty through the water cycle; while runoff is strongly impacted in comparatively wet regions such as Central Europe, there are increasing implications on evapotranspiration towards drier regions.


Author(s):  
Edward J. Oughton

Space weather is a collective term for different solar or space phenomena that can detrimentally affect technology. However, current understanding of space weather hazards is still relatively embryonic in comparison to terrestrial natural hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Indeed, certain types of space weather such as large Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are an archetypal example of a low-probability, high-severity hazard. Few major events, short time-series data, and the lack of consensus regarding the potential impacts on critical infrastructure have hampered the economic impact assessment of space weather. Yet, space weather has the potential to disrupt a wide range of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) systems including electricity transmission, satellite communications and positioning, aviation, and rail transportation. In the early 21st century, there has been growing interest in these potential economic and societal impacts. Estimates range from millions of dollars of equipment damage from the Quebec 1989 event, to some analysts asserting that losses will be in the billions of dollars in the wider economy from potential future disaster scenarios. Hence, the origin and development of the socioeconomic evaluation of space weather is tracked, from 1989 to 2017, and future research directions for the field are articulated. Since 1989, many economic analyzes of space weather hazards have often completely overlooked the physical impacts on infrastructure assets and the topology of different infrastructure networks. Moreover, too many studies have relied on qualitative assumptions about the vulnerability of CNI. By modeling both the vulnerability of critical infrastructure and the socioeconomic impacts of failure, the total potential impacts of space weather can be estimated, providing vital information for decision makers in government and industry. Efforts on this subject have historically been relatively piecemeal, which has led to little exploration of model sensitivities, particularly in relation to different assumption sets about infrastructure failure and restoration. Improvements may be expedited in this research area by open-sourcing model code, increasing the existing level of data sharing, and improving multidisciplinary research collaborations between scientists, engineers, and economists.


Author(s):  
Zheng Wang ◽  
Zhixiang Wang ◽  
Yinqiang Zheng ◽  
Yang Wu ◽  
Wenjun Zeng ◽  
...  

An efficient and effective person re-identification (ReID) system relieves the users from painful and boring video watching and accelerates the process of video analysis. Recently, with the explosive demands of practical applications, a lot of research efforts have been dedicated to heterogeneous person re-identification (Hetero-ReID). In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art Hetero-ReID methods that address the challenge of inter-modality discrepancies. According to the application scenario, we classify the methods into four categories --- low-resolution, infrared, sketch, and text. We begin with an introduction of ReID, and make a comparison between Homogeneous ReID (Homo-ReID) and Hetero-ReID tasks. Then, we describe and compare existing datasets for performing evaluations, and survey the models that have been widely employed in Hetero-ReID. We also summarize and compare the representative approaches from two perspectives, i.e., the application scenario and the learning pipeline. We conclude by a discussion of some future research directions. Follow-up updates are available at https://github.com/lightChaserX/Awesome-Hetero-reID


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 438-477
Author(s):  
Bryan R Early ◽  
Menevis Cilizoglu

Abstract Policymakers employ economic sanctions to deal with a wide range of international challenges, making them an indispensable foreign policy tool. While scholarship on sanctions has tended to focus on the factors affecting their success, newer research programs have emerged that explore the reasons for why sanctions are threatened and initiated, the ways they are designed and enforced, and their consequences. This scholarship has yielded a wealth of new insights into how economic sanctions work, but most of those insights are based on sanctions observations from the 20th Century. The ways that policymakers employ sanctions have fundamentally changed over the past two decades, though, raising concerns about whether historically derived insights are still relevant to contemporary sanctions policies. In this forum, the contributors discuss the scholarly and policy-relevant insights of existing research on sanctions and then explore what gaps remain in our knowledge and new trends in sanctions policymaking. This forum will inform readers on the state of the art in sanctions research and propose avenues for future research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominik Havsteen-Franklin ◽  
Megan Tjasink ◽  
Jacqueline Winter Kottler ◽  
Claire Grant ◽  
Veena Kumari

Crisis events, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can have a devastating effect on communities and the care professionals within them. Over recent years, arts-based interventions have helped in a wide range of crisis situations, being recommended to support the workforce during and after complex crisis but there has been no systematic review of the role of arts-based crisis interventions and whether there are cogent themes regarding practice elements and outcomes. We, therefore, conducted a systematic review to (i) define the arts-based change process used during and after crisis events, and (ii) explore the perceptions of intermediate and long-term mental health benefits of arts-based interventions for professionals in caring roles. Our search yielded six studies (all qualitative). All data were thematically aggregated and meta-synthesized, revealing seven practice elements (a safe place, focusing on strengths and protective factors, developing psychosocial competencies to support peers, emotional expression and processing, identifying and naming the impact of the crisis, using an integrative creative approach, and cultural and organizational sensitivity) applied across all six studies, as well as a range of intermediate and long-term benefits shared common features (adapting, growing, and recovering; using the community as a healing resource; reducing or preventing symptoms of stress or trauma reactions, psychophysiological homeostasis). The ways in which these studies were designed independently from one another and yet used the same practice elements in their crisis interventions indicates that there is comparability about how and why the arts-based practice elements are being used and to what effect. Our findings provide a sound basis and meaningful parameters for future research incorporating quantitative and qualitative approaches to firmly establish the effectiveness of art-based interventions, and how arts can support cultural sensitivity, acceptability and indicated outcomes, particularly those relating to stress and trauma during or following a crisis.


Author(s):  
Nicole B. Ellison

This chapter examines the state of the art in telework research. The author reviews the most central scholarly literature examining the phenomenon of telework (also called home-based work or telecommuting) and develops a framework for organizing this body of work. She organizes previous research on telework into six major thematic concerns relating to the definition, measurement, and scope of telework; management of teleworkers; travel-related impacts of telework; organizational culture and employee isolation; boundaries between “home” and “work” and the impact of telework on the individual and the family. Areas for future research are suggested.


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