Community Networks Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Traditionally, the American child welfare system intervenes in cases of evident and severe maltreatment. Families in need of help, but who have not reached a crisis, are excluded from typical services. Some suggest that if these families... more

Traditionally, the American child welfare system intervenes in cases of evident and severe maltreatment. Families in need of help, but who have not reached a crisis, are excluded from typical services. Some suggest that if these families were served, few would be rereferred to the child welfare system. California’s Differential Response (DR) has three tracks, of which ‘‘Track 1’’ targets families screened out of child protective services (CPS) and refers them to agencies that provide voluntary, home-based services and referrals. This study examined child-welfare trajectories for families receiving Track 1 DR services in one California county. Using survival analysis, treatment group children (N = 134) were compared to children eligible for services but denied due to program capacity (comparison group N = 511). Findings suggest no statistically significant differences between groups on the likelihood of a re-report following program participation, timing of maltreatment reports, or r...

This paper describes the development of a methodology to import key products of the DoD Architecture Framework into an executable form to conduct a dynamic analysis of the Command and Control (C2) system or capability represented by the... more

This paper describes the development of a methodology to import key products of the DoD Architecture Framework into an executable form to conduct a dynamic analysis of the Command and Control (C2) system or capability represented by the architecture. Dynamic analysis of these models enables a user to assess the impact of change and determine measures of performance and effectiveness. The research team successfully implemented the methodology in a demonstration that made a three-way link among a business process model, a communications network model, and a combat simulation representing the system's operational environment. We linked these models together via the Runtime Infrastructure (RTI) of the High Level Architecture (HLA). Basic HLA interactions that we established allowed key events in the combat simulation to initiate one or more business processes in the process model. As a business process proceeded in time, the process model requested from the communications model a de...

BACKGROUND Practice-based research networks (PBRNs) are collaborations between clinical practitioners and academics. PBRNs aim to foster research in general practice through opportunities to learn more about how to undertake and... more

BACKGROUND Practice-based research networks (PBRNs) are collaborations between clinical practitioners and academics. PBRNs aim to foster research in general practice through opportunities to learn more about how to undertake and participate in research, and assist in translating new knowledge into practice. Critically, PBRNs also offer clinicians the chance to contribute to research by posing questions of importance to quality clinical care. OBJECTIVE The objectives of this article are to describe why PRBNs are needed, the current situation regarding PBRNs in Australia, and why Australian general practice and patient outcomes could benefit from further investment in PBRNs. DISCUSSION PBRNs may assist by engaging more general practitioners (GPs) in the research process, thereby increasing the relevance of the research questions posed to the outcomes of the population GPs work within. Unlike similar countries (eg UK and The Netherlands), Australia no longer has any funding to support ...

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. This, in turn, necessitates preparing computer science students to face the challenges associated... more

With the rapid increase in offshore outsourcing of software development, Global Software Development (GSD) has become the need of the hour. This, in turn, necessitates preparing computer science students to face the challenges associated with GSD. Today’s information technology, in the form of communication networks and tooling opportunities, provides us with a supposedly ready infrastructure to support GSD. However, selecting an appropriate combination of open source tools that cross cultural boundaries and account for unique in-country connectivity situations is not a trivial task. In this paper, we describe our experience of evolving an infrastructure for student GSD projects over a period four years, culminating in an environment to accommodate the needs of five different teams from four globally dispersed universities in countries straddling many technological divides.

Purpose. Conduct a social network analysis of the health and non–health related organizations that participate in Bogotá's Ciclovía Recreativa (Ciclovía). Design. Cross-sectional study. Setting. Ciclovía is a multisectoral... more

Purpose. Conduct a social network analysis of the health and non–health related organizations that participate in Bogotá's Ciclovía Recreativa (Ciclovía). Design. Cross-sectional study. Setting. Ciclovía is a multisectoral community-based mass program in which streets are temporarily closed to motorized transport, allowing exclusive access to individuals for leisure activities and physical activity. Subjects. Twenty-five organizations that participate in the Ciclovía. Measures. Seven variables were examined by using network analytic methods: relationship, link attributes (integration, contact, and importance), and node attributes (leadership, years in the program, and the sector of the organization). Analysis. The network analytic methods were based on a visual descriptive analysis and an exponential random graph model. Results. Analysis shows that the most central organizations in the network were outside of the Health sector and include Sports and Recreation, Government, and S...

Empirical studies of citizen communication networks and participation go as far back as the 1940s, with a bolder focus in political—not civic—activities. A consistent finding reveals that individuals with larger networks are more engaged... more

Empirical studies of citizen communication networks and participation go as far back as the 1940s, with a bolder focus in political—not civic—activities. A consistent finding reveals that individuals with larger networks are more engaged than those with smaller networks. This article expands this line of work with a number of novel tests. First, it compares the predictive power of online

Summary form only given. It is well known that despite all of its advantages the digital revolution also leads to large variety of new risks. One principal issue in this context is the growing dependence of our modern information society... more

Summary form only given. It is well known that despite all of its advantages the digital revolution also leads to large variety of new risks. One principal issue in this context is the growing dependence of our modern information society from the availability and correct (proved) function of modern communication services. First, I'll give a short overview on threats in communication networks (grids, clouds, etc), protocols and secure personal devices. Then I'll discuss current network security approaches based on anonymous message exchanges within communicating systems. Cryptography was first used to ensure data confidentiality, it has been “democratized” by ensuring the safety of telecommunications services, thereby extending its scope to authentication of a person or device, or a message, non-repudiation, integrity but also the anonymity of transactions. The anonymity is sometimes quite important in the new telecommunication and mobile networks services, much more than just message confidentiality. The talk will focus on some examples and new approaches developed in our research laboratory to deal with anonymity in routing protocols for mobile communicating systems.

The simulation of communication networks using a continuous-state, or fluid modeling approach, has shown to be very efficient for a wide range of performance evaluation scenarios. In this paper we present a fluid model of the RED active... more

The simulation of communication networks using a continuous-state, or fluid modeling approach, has shown to be very efficient for a wide range of performance evaluation scenarios. In this paper we present a fluid model of the RED active queue management algorithm for FluidSim, a simulation tool based on the fluid paradigm. We compare the behavior and efficiency of our model

to design a community healthcare information network for all 450,000 citizen in the State of Geneva, Switzerland, connecting public and private healthcare professionals. Requirements include the decentralized storage of information at the... more

to design a community healthcare information network for all 450,000 citizen in the State of Geneva, Switzerland, connecting public and private healthcare professionals. Requirements include the decentralized storage of information at the source of its production, the creation of a virtual patient record at the time of the consultation, the control by the patient of the access rights to the information, and the interoperability with other similar networks at the national and european level. a participative approach and real-world pilot projects are used to design, test and validate key components of the network, including its technical architecture and the strategy for the management of access rights by the patients. a distributed architecture using peer-to-peer communication of information mediators can implement the various requirements while limiting to an absolute minimum the amount of centralized information. Access control can be managed by the patient with the help of a medic...

We provide an in-depth study of applying wireless sensor networks to real-world habitat monitoring. A set of system design requirements are developed that cover the hardware design of the nodes, the design of the sensor network, and the... more

We provide an in-depth study of applying wireless sensor networks to real-world habitat monitoring. A set of system design requirements are developed that cover the hardware design of the nodes, the design of the sensor network, and the capabilities for remote data access and management. A system architecture is proposed to address these requirements for habitat monitoring in general, and

Wireless Community Networks (WCNs) are bottom-up broadband networks empowering people with their on-line communication means. Too often, however, services tailored for their characteristics are missing, with the consequence that they have... more

Wireless Community Networks (WCNs) are bottom-up broadband networks empowering people with their on-line communication means. Too often, however, services tailored for their characteristics are missing, with the consequence that they have worse performance than what they could. We present here an adaptation of an Open Source P2P live streaming platform that works efficiently, and with good application-level quality, over WCNs. WCNs links are usually symmetric, or at least asymmetry is not by design as it is in ADSL, and a WCN topology is local and normally flat (contrary to the the global Internet), so that the P2P overlay used for video distribution can be adapted to the underlaying network characteristics. We exploit this observation to derive over- lay building strategies that make use of cross-layer information to reduce the impact of the P2P streaming on the WCN while maintaining good application performance. We experiment with a real application in real WCN nodes, both in the Community-Lab provided by the CONFINE EU Project and within an emulation framework based on Mininet, where we can build larger topologies and interact more efficiently with the mesh underlay, which is unfortunately not accessible in Community-Lab. The results show that, with the overlay building strategies proposed, the P2P streaming applications can reduce the load on the WCN to about one half, also equalizing the load on links. At the same time the delivery rate and delay of video chunks are practically unaffected.

The Internet Society conducted the Internet Society's 2020 training program. I joined the Building Community Networks training: In this course I learned how to build wireless community networks. The covered topics included wireless... more

The Internet Society conducted the Internet Society's 2020 training program. I joined the Building Community Networks training: In this course I learned how to build wireless community networks. The covered topics included wireless network standards, radio physics, practical network planning, IP network administration, radio device configuration, securing wireless networks, and more. This course was recommended for professionals with basic technical background. As a participant with limited background in Community Networks; I was just interested in being an Advocate of community networks' initiatives. I have written an article; it explains the gap of digital divide by looking at the community of people with disabilities in Tanzania. I pleased to share with you attached herewith, for comments and constructive critique.