Reviewing volcano hazard and risk communications in Ecuador: experiences from a fast-format workshop

Hazard and risk communication requires the design and dissemination of clear messages that enhance people’s actions before, during, and after volcanic crises. To create effective messages, the communication components such as message format and content, must be considered. Changes in technology are changing the way people communicate at an ever-increasing pace; thus, we propose revising the basic components of the communication process to improve the dialogue between scientists and the public. We describe communication issues during and outside volcanic crises in Ecuador and assess possible causes and consequences. These ideas were discussed during the short-duration “Volcano Geophysical Principles and Hazards Communications” Workshop in Baños, Ecuador in 2019. We review and propose communication strategies for volcanic hazards and risks that resulted from the workshop discussions and experiences of experts from the Instituto Geofísico (IG-EPN), local and international professors involved in volcano research and communication, and students from universities across Ecuador.

A Review on the Service Virtualisation and Its Structural Pillars

Continuous delivery is an industry software development approach that aims to reduce the delivery time of software and increase the quality assurance within a short development cycle. The fast delivery and improved quality require continuous testing of the developed software service. Testing services are complicated and costly and postponed to the end of development due to unavailability of the requisite services. Therefore, an empirical approach that has been utilised to overcome these challenges is to automate software testing by virtualising the requisite services’ behaviour for the system being tested. Service virtualisation involves analysing the behaviour of software services to uncover their external behaviour in order to generate a light-weight executable model of the requisite services. There are different research areas which can be used to create such a virtual model of services from network interactions or service execution logs, including message format extraction, inferring control model, data model and multi-service dependencies. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art of how these areas have been used in automating the service virtualisation to make available the required environment for testing software. This paper provides a review of the relevant research within these four fields by carrying out a structured study on about 80 research works. These studies were then categorised according to their functional context as, extracting the message format, control model, data model and multi-service dependencies that can be employed to automate the service virtualisation activity. Based on our knowledge, this is the first structural review paper in service virtualisation fields.

Genomic Considerations for FHIR; eMERGE Implementation Lessons

Structured representation of clinical genetic results is necessary for advancing precision medicine. The Electronic Medical Records and Genomics (eMERGE) Network’s Phase III program initially used a commercially developed XML message format for standardized and structured representation of genetic results for electronic health record (EHR) integration. In a desire to move towards a standard representation, the network created a new standardized format based upon Health Level Seven Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (HL7 FHIR), to represent clinical genomics results. These new standards improve the utility of HL7 FHIR as an international healthcare interoperability standard for management of genetic data from patients. This work advances the establishment of standards that are being designed for broad adoption in the current health information technology landscape.

A Review on SECS/GEM: A Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Communication Protocol for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 has imminently emerged as the fourth industrial revolution. It garners emphasis primarily on the interaction between factory equipment and machines involved in entire value-chain activities for boosting efficiency and production with limited human intervention. The M2M communication protocols have gained significant prominence amidst sage minds in recent years, particularly in the manufacturing industries. Several M2M communication protocols have been developed for the industry, such as SECS/GEM, OPC UA, DDS, and MQTT. Among these protocols, SECS/GEM is a semiconductor’s equipment interface protocol for equipment-to-host data communications. It is not a modern, but decades-long protocol, and has been again brought to the fore by Industry 4.0. Thereupon, it was imperative to review amenability of SECS/GEM protocol in the context of adaptation of features depicted by industry 4.0, and limelight plethora of shortcomings and limitations. In this paper, comparisons of prominent features and limitations of the aforementioned M2M communication protocols in general and review of the SECS/GEM protocol in particular, have been made. Findings include deficiencies in security, point to point communication, discovery mechanism, fixed message format, interoperability, extendibility, and manual integration.

A Study on the Concept of Using Efficient Lightweight Hash Chain to Improve Authentication in VMF Military Standard

Authentication algorithms in the form of cryptographic schemes, such as the Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA-1) and the digital signature algorithm (DSA), specified in the current variable message format (VMF) military standard have numerous reliability-related limitations when applied to tactical data link (TDL) and multi-TDL networks (MTN). This is because TDL and MTN require maximum tactical security, communication integrity, and low network overhead based on many protocol header bits for rapid communication with limited network resources. The application of such authentication algorithms to TDL and MTN in a rapidly changing battlefield environment without reinforcement measures will lead to functional weaknesses and vulnerabilities when high-level digital-covert activities and deception tactics are implemented. Consequently, the existing VMF authentication scheme must be improved to secure transmission integrity, lower network transaction, and receive authentication tactical information in VMF-based combat network radio (CNR) networks. Therefore, in this study, a tactical wireless ad hoc network topology, similar to that of the existing CNRs, is considered, and a lightweight multi-factor hash chain-based authentication scheme that includes a time-based one-time password (T-OTP) for network overhead reduction and terminal authentication is proposed, coupled with exception handling. The proposed method enhances the confidentiality of tactical message exchanges and reduces unnecessary network transactions and transmission bits for authentication flows between real-time military terminals owned by squads, while ensuring robustness in limited battlefields. Based on these approaches, in the future, we intend to increase the authentication reliability between wireless terminals in the Korean variable message format (KVMF)-based CNR networks based on the Korean Army Corps network scenarios.

Countering the “Harmless E-Cigarette” Myth: The Interplay of Message Format, Message Sidedness, and Prior Experience With E-Cigarette Use in Misinformation Correction

A 2 ( message format: story vs. nonstory) × 2 ( message sidedness: one sided vs. two sided) between-subjects experiment tested the effectiveness of narrative communication as a potential tool for correcting misinformation about e-cigarettes. Results revealed that stories were more emotionally involving and engaging than nonstories but did not reduce counterarguing when used as correctives. The study found that prior experience of e-cigarette use moderated the interaction between message format and message sidedness. For participants who had never used e-cigarettes, the one-sided story was favored. However, for participants who had smoked e-cigarettes before, the advantages of the one-sided story disappeared.