With increasing complexity of global construction supply chains and the substantial contribution such supply chains make to the environment, there is a need to understand how components of these supply chains can be reused and repurposed. Blockchains provide an important basis for recording transactions carried out in supply chains to aid potential reusability.A recent example of circularity in the built environment includes the tracking of material reuse across the building lifecycle (from construction to demolition and then reuse). The use of decentralisation and immutability in Blockchains is used to demonstrate how material passports may be supported and used as a basis to create a circular economy in construction.

During the last decade, big data management has attracted increasing interest from both the industrial and academic communities. In parallel, Cyber Security has become mandatory due to various and more intensive threats. In June 2022, a group of researchers has met to reflect on their community’s impacts on current research challenges. In particular, they have considered four dimensions: (1) dedicated systems being data processing and analytic platforms or time series management systems; (2) graphs analytics and distributed computation; (3) privacy; and (4) new hardware.

Twitter has emerged as one of the most popular platforms to get updates on entertainment and current events. However, due to its 280-character restriction and automatic shortening of URLs, it is continuously targeted by cybercriminals to carry out drive-by download attacks, where a user’s system is infected by merely visiting a Web page. Popular events that attract a large number of users are used by cybercriminals to infect and propagate malware by using popular hashtags and creating misleading tweets to lure users to malicious Web pages. A drive-by download attack is carried out by obfuscating a malicious URL in an enticing tweet and used as clickbait to lure users to a malicious Web page. In this article, we answer the following two questions: Why are certain malicious tweets retweeted more than others? Do emotions reflecting in a tweet drive virality? We gathered tweets from seven different sporting events over 3 years and identified those tweets that were used to carry to out a drive-by download attack. From the malicious (N= 105, 642) and benign (N= 169, 178) data sample identified, we built models to predict information flow size and survival. We define size as the number of retweets of an original tweet, and survival as the duration of the original tweet’s presence in the study window. We selected the zero-truncated negative binomial (ZTNB) regression method for our analysis based on the distribution exhibited by our dependent size measure and the comparison of results with other predictive models. We used the Cox regression technique to model the survival of information flows as it estimates proportional hazard rates for independent measures. Our results show that both social and content factors are statistically significant for the size and survival of information flows for both malicious and benign tweets. In the benign data sample, positive emotions and positive sentiment reflected in the tweet significantly predict size and survival. In contrast, for the malicious data sample, negative emotions, especially fear, are associated with both size and survival of information flows.

The popularity of Twitter for information discovery, coupled with the automatic shortening of URLs to save space, given the 140 character limit, provides cybercriminals with an opportunity to obfuscate the URL of a malicious Web page within a tweet. Once the URL is obfuscated, the cybercriminal can lure a user to click on it with enticing text and images before carrying out a cyber attack using a malicious Web server. This is known as a drive-by download . In a drive-by download a user's computer system is infected while interacting with the malicious endpoint, often without them being made aware the attack has taken place. An attacker can gain control of the system by exploiting unpatched system vulnerabilities and this form of attack currently represents one of the most common methods employed. In this paper we build a machine learning model using machine activity data and tweet metadata to move beyond post-execution classification of such URLs as malicious, to predict a URL will be malicious with 0.99 F -measure (using 10-fold cross-validation) and 0.833 (using an unseen test set) at 1 s into the interaction with the URL. Thus, providing a basis from which to kill the connection to the server before an attack has completed and proactively blocking and preventing an attack, rather than reacting and repairing at a later date.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in real-world event identification using data collected from social media, where the Web enables the general public to post real-time reactions to terrestrial events - thereby acting as social sensors of terrestrial activity. Automatically extracting and categorizing activity from streamed data is a non-trivial task. To address this task, we present a novel event detection framework which comprises five main components: data collection, pre-processing, classification, online clustering and summarization. The integration between classification and clustering allows events to be detected - including “disruptive” events - incidents that threaten social safety and security, or could disrupt the social order. We evaluate our framework on a large-scale, real-world dataset from Twitter. We also compare our results to other leading approaches using Flickr MediaEval Event Detection Benchmark.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in real-world event summarization using publicly accessible data made available through social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. People use these outlets to communicate with others, express their opinion and commentate on a wide variety of real-world events. Due to the heterogeneity, the sheer volume of text and the fact that some messages are more informative than others, automatic summarization is a very challenging task. This paper presents three techniques for summarizing microblog documents by selecting the most representative posts for real-world events (clusters). In particular, we tackle the task of multilingual summarization in Twitter. We evaluate the generated summaries by comparing them to both human produced summaries and to the summarization results of similar leading summarization systems. Our results show that our proposed Temporal TF-IDF method outperforms all the other summarization systems for both the English and non-English corpora as they lead to informative summaries.

Social media platforms provide an increasingly popular means for individuals to share content online. Whilst this produces undoubted societal benefits, the ability for content to be spontaneously posted and reposted creates an ideal environment for rumour and false/malicious information to spread rapidly. When this occurs it can cause significant harm and can be characterised as a “digital wildfire.” In this article, we demonstrate that the propagation and regulation of digital wildfires form important topics for research and conduct an overview of existing work in this area. We outline the relevance of a range of work from the computational and social sciences, including a series of insights into the propagation of rumour and false/malicious information. We argue that significant research gaps remain—for instance, there is an absence of systematic studies on the effects of digital wildfires and there is a need to combine empirical research with a consideration of how the responsible governance of social media can be determined. We propose an agenda for research that establishes a methodology to explore in full the propagation and regulation of unverified content on social media. This agenda promotes high-quality interdisciplinary research that will also inform policy debates.

Decision makers use information from a range of terrestrial and online sources to help underpin the processes through which they develop policies and react to events as they unfold. One such source of online information is social media. Twitter, as a form of social media, is a popular micro-blogging Web application serving hundreds of millions of users. User-generated content can be exploited as a rich source of information for identifying 'real-world' disruptive events. In this paper, we present an in-depth comparison of three types of features that could be useful for identifying disruptive events: temporal, spatial and textual. We make several interesting observations: first, disruptive events are identifiable regardless of the "influence of the user" discussing them, and over a variety of topics. Second, temporal features are the best event identifiers and hence should not be disregarded or ignored. Third, a combination of optimum textual features with temporal and spatial features achieves best performance in the event detection task. We believe that these findings provide new insights for gathering information around real-world events as well as a useful resource for improving situational awareness and decision support.

Massive online social networks with hundreds of millions of active users are increasingly being used by Cyber criminals to spread malicious software (malware) to exploit vulnerabilities on the machines of users for personal gain. Twitter is particularly susceptible to such activity as, with its 140 character limit, it is common for people to include URLs in their tweets to link to more detailed information, evidence, news reports and so on. URLs are often shortened so the endpoint is not obvious before a person clicks the link. Cyber criminals can exploit this to propagate malicious URLs on Twitter, for which the endpoint is a malicious server that performs unwanted actions on the person's machine. This is known as a drive-by-download. In this paper we develop a machine classification system to distinguish between malicious and benign URLs within seconds of the URL being clicked (i.e. 'real-time'). We train the classifier using machine activity logs created while interacting with URLs extracted from Twitter data collected during a large global event -- the Superbowl -- and test it using data from another large sporting event -- the Cricket World Cup. The results show that machine activity logs produce precision performances of up to 0.975 on training data from the first event and 0.747 on a test data from a second event. Furthermore, we examine the properties of the learned model to explain the relationship between machine activity and malicious software behaviour, and build a learning curve for the classifier to illustrate that very small samples of training data can be used with only a small detriment to performance.

The computational grid is rapidly evolving into a service-oriented computing infrastructure that facilitates resource sharing and large-scale problem solving over the Internet. Service discovery becomes an issue of vital importance in utilizing grid facilities. This paper presents ROSSE, a Rough sets-based search engine for grid service discovery. Building on the Rough sets theory, ROSSE is novel in its capability to deal with the uncertainty of properties when matching services. In this way, ROSSE can discover the services that are most relevant to a service query from a functional point of view. Since functionally matched services may have distinct nonfunctional properties related to the quality of service (QoS), ROSSE introduces a QoS model to further filter matched services with their QoS values to maximize user satisfaction in service discovery. ROSSE is evaluated from the aspects of accuracy and efficiency in discovery of computing services.

Provenance information provides a useful basis to verify whether a particular application behavior has been adhered to. This is particularly useful to evaluate the basis for a particular outcome, as a result of a process, and to verify if the process involved in making the decision conforms to some pre-defined set of rules. This is significant in a healthcare scenario, where it is necessary to demonstrate that patient data has been processed in a particular way. Understanding how provenance information may be recorded, stored, and subsequently analyzed by a decision maker is therefore significant in a service oriented architecture, which involves the use of third party services over which the decision maker does not have control. The aggregation of data from multiple sources of patient information plays an important part in subsequent treatments that are proposed for a patient. A tool to navigate through and analyze such provenance information is proposed, based on the use of a portal framework that allows different views on provenance information to co-exist. The portal enables users to add custom portlets enabling application specific views that would facilitate particular decision making

A feasibility study of a peer-to-peer distributed storage system for the archiving of large datasets produced by the Earth mantle modelling code TERRA is presented. The manner in which the nature of such data affects the indexing, duplication and performance requirements of such a system is analysed and a data-oriented overlay network to improve efficiency is proposed. Duplication methods are analysed and test bed performance measured