Resource Providers Research Articles

Enhancing trust and security in IoT computing offloading through game theory and blockchain‐based control strategy

SummaryCollaboration between IoT end‐devices and edge servers or idle devices enables offloading of computational tasks, providing an effective solution to address inherent limitations in computational resources, storage capacity, and energy efficiency. However, IoT network openness introduces security challenges, such as privacy breaches, data security, and “free‐riding” attack. Securing computational offloading is crucial for service quality and reliability. In this article, we introduce a comprehensive approach to address these challenges. First, trust metrics are performed at the level of resource requester and resource provider respectively, and the trust level of both parties is matched to reduce the adverse effects of malicious devices or servers on computing offloading. Then, a distributed decision‐making method based on game theory is designed to improve the performance of the algorithm and avoid the single‐point‐of‐failure problem through the joint participation of multiple edge servers in decision‐making. Finally, a blockchain‐based task offloading process control strategy is used to deal with the “free‐riding” attack. The results of simulation experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed offloading decision‐making method.

User perceptions and continuance intentions: An in-depth analysis of perceived values in amateur-hosted sharing accommodations

The sharing economy is believed to be a sustainable concept that can be beneficial both environmentally and economically, while it is noted that the sharing economy has shifted from purely amateur to a mix of professional and amateur resource providers in practice. To explore this phenomenon, this study investigates users' perceived values and continuance intention in amateur-hosted sharing accommodations. By conducting qualitative content analysis and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) analysis on Airbnb user reviews, values were categorized into functional, aesthetic, emotional, service responsiveness, and economic value dimensions, with themes of satisfaction and continuance intention also identified. Analytical methods, including manual labeling, Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm, sentiment analysis, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), are applied to find that functional, economic, and emotional values significantly influence user satisfaction and continuance intention. This study offers insights into user perceptions, attitudes, and continuance intention in amateur-hosted sharing accommodations.

Perspectives on Implications of ChatGPT on Teaching, Learning, Research and Innovation in the Higher Education Sector

As of 16 March 2023, 26,222 prominent entrepreneurs and business executives had signed a petition to cease all Artificial Intelligence (AI) experimentation and training beyond GPT-4.”[1] The rationale for this intervention was to examine the impact of AI developments and whether they pose a major risk to humanity. The petitioners believe that current AI developments can compete with humans in almost all respects and caution that AI technological advancements can lead to developments beyond human control with a high potential to outsmart humans. Teaching and learning (T&L), research and innovation form the backbone of the higher education sector. Higher education institutions develop individuals' intellectual, operational and technical abilities for a functional society. By its definition, a higher education institution and a university in particular is a provider of facilities and resources that enable intellectuals and expertise to facilitate T&L, research and community engagement.[2] Recently, the question of community engagement viewed in respect of its earlier reference to the triple helix has been redefined into quad helix as “engagement” to embrace all “stakeholders”. Here, mutual T&L between the higher education sector and industries continues to increase learning machine technologies for operational purposes in agriculture, manufacturing, and packaging.[3]

Analisis Akuntabilitas Laporan Keuangan Pada SMP Swasta Nasrani Belawan

Non-profit organization (school) financial reports prepared based on PSAK No. 45 provides information about the resources provided by the resource provider and can also be used as a consideration for decision making. If a non-profit organization does not present financial reports that comply with standards, it will reduce the trust of resource providers in providing resources to a non-profit organization. The purpose of this research is to find out whether the financial reports presented by the Belawan Christian Private Middle School show accountability and transparency as well as planning and administration in accordance with PSAK No. 45. The type of data used in this research is qualitative data which describes a brief history, organizational structure, vision and mission. This research uses secondary and primary data sources, namely data obtained from the field and other sources. The data collection methods used in this research are documentation and interviews. The data analysis technique used in this research is a descriptive method, which is done by interpreting the data obtained so as to provide an overview of the problems faced. The results of this research indicate that the financial reports at the Belawan Christian Private Middle School cannot reflect accountability and transparency in accordance with PSAK No. 45, In presenting financial reports, the Belawan Christian Private Middle School presents monthly financial reports and there are no annual financial reports, resulting in inadequate information. Based on PSAK No. 45 regulations, non-profit entity financial reports should be presented annually, financial reports in accordance with PSAK No. 45. 45, namely Financial Position Report, Activity Report, Cash Flow Report, and Notes to Financial Reports.Keyword: Akuntability, Financial Report, Junior High School, Christian, Belawan

Documentation of Ethno-Orthopedic Healing Process in Gurap, Hooghly District, West Bengal

ABSTRACT The purpose of this paper is to document the existing traditional knowledge of the medicinal plants for bone setting health care practices and to analyse the present treatment process and identifying the medicinal plants as key factor of ethno-orthopedic healing system in Gurap area in Hooghly district of West Bengal. Data were collected from the patients as well as practitioners through questionnaires and personal interviews to know about the general information, orthopaedic problems, treatment process, restrictions and the usefulness of the practice through the traditional knowledge and medicinal plant. The predominance of rural folk (86%) indicates the importance of the traditional bone setters as healthcare providers in rural areas. Most of the patients (96%) were satisfied with this treatment. The plant also identified through the present study namely Ipomoea obscura that can be obtained patent and preserve for future generation. The study has drawn upon focuses on the documentation of traditional knowledge, valuable medicinal plant and treatment process adopted in the study area, which may help to the other communities as a medical resource for further use. Library can acts as resource providers of such authentic medicine.

Toward Fast and Energy-Efficient Access to Cloudlets in Hostile Environments

Cloudlets, which refer to the edge computing services deployed at the proximity of end devices, are key providers of connectivity, storage, and computation resources to many applications. While access to cloudlets is pervasive in typical settings, it can be difficult in challenging, even hostile environments, such as military or post-disaster scenarios, featuring multi-hop communication and energy-constrained end devices. In these cases, cloudlets may have become the only equipment powerful enough to execute life-critical applications, such as battle-field situation awareness, tactic cooperation, and search-and-rescue missions. Quality of these services is greatly influenced by the minimum time that a packet can be delivered, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i.e</i> ., the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">cloudlet access delay</i> (CAD), whose characteristics remain unknown. To address the open question of fast and efficient cloudlet access, we establish a <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">packet mobility</i> model that allows CAD and energy consumption to be analyzed as a function of the initial device-cloudlet distance. We find that the expected CAD scales either linearly or quadratically under distinct types of packet mobility, and the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">successful access rate</i> (SAR) can be bounded by functions of the delay constraint. Based on these findings, we develop a packet shedding algorithm that saves 24% transmission power, and reduces the average CAD by 2%, while maintaining a similar SAR in simulated cloudlet access environments.

Evolving models of care for ambulatory systemic treatment.

155 Background: Increasing demand for systemic cancer treatment in Ontario, Canada, due to an aging population and therapeutic advances, is compounded by resource shortages and provider burnout heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. This landscape has led to longer wait times, reduced services, poorer patient experiences, and widened health inequities, particularly impacting marginalized populations. In response, Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario) developed recommendations to optimize ambulatory systemic treatment delivery from various perspectives, including patients, providers, cancer programs, and organizations. Methods: Evidence-based recommendations were derived from a targeted literature review, current state surveys, and follow-up interviews across 16 Ontario treatment facilities. Feedback was gathered via focus groups involving patients, families, care partners, and providers. Key informants from cancer agencies in Canada and internationally were consulted through jurisdictional scans. Furthermore, focused discussions with First Nations, Inuit, Métis, urban Indigenous (FNIMUI) communities, Francophone populations, and other equity deserving groups informed the unique needs, experiences, and barriers to care of these groups. Results: Twenty-six recommendations that span various aspects of systemic treatment delivery, including referral processes, scheduling, role integration, patient education, patient and provider experiences, virtual care, and care transitions were developed. Priorities include evidence-based, person-centred care, timely access, effective collaboration, provider well-being, and technological innovation. Additionally, we highlight partnerships with FNIMUI communities, and other equity-deserving groups as strategies to address additional barriers to care. Conclusions: These recommendations strive to address challenges faced by healthcare providers and patients, ensure equitable access to care, and improve provider well-being. Engagement with FNIMUI communities and other equity-deserving groups influenced these recommendations, emphasizing the need for system-level oversight and investment to realize equitable and sustainable service delivery province-wide.

Penalty or Reward? The Role of Hybrid Identities in Social Enterprises’ Resource Acquisition

Resource acquisition is important for social enterprises’ resilience. Prior studies have explored social enterprises’ hybridity and resource acquisition outcomes, but have ignored funders’ heterogeneity. This paper examines how the identities of both social enterprises and financial resource providers are associated with financial resource acquisition. We specifically study how social enterprises’ social and financial identities are related to the acquisition of financial resources. Using an international entrepreneurship database (2014–2019), we find that social enterprises receive financial support from equity investors in a similar way as pure for-profits, while social enterprises receive less support from philanthropic donors, compared to pure nonprofits. We discuss the implications for social entrepreneurship research and practice.

Social citizenship as a marble cake: The changing pattern of right production and the role of the EU

The launch of the European Pillar of Social Rights has reinvigorated the debate on the role that the European Union can exercise in the sphere of subjective rights. Such debate has traditionally focused on the limits of the current social acquis, considered unable to create fully-fledged European social citizenship, that ultimately remains limited to the right to reside and freely move within the EU and enjoy social rights as nationals. Conversely, this article argues that the gradual expansion of the EU’s social acquis has slowly but clearly started to disconnect social rights from their exclusive national foundations, leading to the emergence of a new marble cake pattern of right production, which to a large extent reproduces the trajectory of federal polities. To capture this development, this article proposes an original analytical framework to dissect the notion of social rights as bundles of power resources (normative, instrumental and enforcement), which enable individuals to claim and actually receive material benefits in order to cope with a codified array of risks and needs. By shifting the attention from the formal dimension (laws and their enforcement) to its concrete practice (access and outputs), our conception connects the concept of social citizenship more directly to what ultimately matters for life chances (individualised material benefits) as well as for the social and political bonds of a community (the rights-based claim and experience of social protection). In so doing, we move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state as the only producer of social entitlements and are able to appreciate the increasing relevance of the European Union as a provider of power resources and guarantor of policy outputs.

Resource-seeking and media choice process: A case of irrational decision making

Resource seeking is crucial for individual and organizational success only if it is effective in convincing the resource provider to offer the needed resource. Computer-mediated communication theories provide insight into an ideal match between media and communication tasks, but typically treat task as attainment of mutual understanding between communicating partners. Instead, we developed theoretical models for media perceptions and the subsequent media choice as a behavioral decision process considering the characteristics of the resource-seeking context. In an experiment with 119 participants, we found that face-to-face resource seeking is vastly more effective than an email request regardless of the level of closeness between communication partners, but requesters underestimate the difference between the two channels. A consecutive study with 121 participants revealed that this underestimation combined with the fear of embarrassment and awkwardness lead requesters to select the less effective channel (email). Our findings have practical implications, and contribute to media selection theories by calling for focus on the characteristics of the communication goal and the source of irrationality in media selection decisions.

A Thailand-based Comparative Study of Government and Private School Teachers’ Perceptions of School Heads’ Level of Instructional Leadership

This study investigated the differences in perception of Filipino teachers employed in government and private school teachers based in Thailand of the instructional leadership of their respective school heads. 65 Filipino teachers volunteered to be the respondents of this study. Thirty-two (32) were teachers in government schools while thirty-three (33) were private school teachers. The Instructional Leadership Questionnaire (ILQ), which measures the respondent’s perception of a school leader’s 7 domains of instructional leadership, namely: Instructional Resource Provider (7 items), Maintain Visible Presence (6 items), Professional Development (7 items), Maximize Instructional Time (6 items), Monitoring Students’ Progress (4 items), Feedback on Teaching Learning (5 items) and Curriculum Implementation (5 items) was administered on the respondents. In terms of instructional resource provider and curriculum implementation, similar scores were obtained by government and private school teachers. However, the private school teachers had higher ratings for their respective school leaders in the domains of Maintain Visible Presence, Professional Development, Maximize Instructional Time, Monitoring Students’ Progress and Feedback on Teaching Learning. Statistically significant differences were established in the domains Professional Development and Monitoring Students’ Progress. In both these domains, the means of the private school teachers were higher than those of the government teachers.

Weathering the Storm: Planning and Building Smarter

The importance and challenge of utility distribution system strategy and planning cannot be overstated in light of climate change and the increasing frequency of extreme storms. Independent power producers, distributed energy resource (DER) providers, and retail energy providers similarly face the same challenges. The United States witnessed a record‐breaking hurricane season in 2020, resulting in staggering damages of approximately $95 billion. The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights the urgency of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to limit global warming to mitigate the disastrous and costly effects of climate change. The report indicated that these events are likely to become the norm and will worsen if mitigation and adaptation measures aren't established. These events are becoming more frequent and severe, making it imperative to establish effective mitigation and adaptation measures.

Implementasi Good Corporate Governance Penguatan BUMN Dalam Perlindungan Keuangan Negara

Promoting effective, open and compliant markets requires good governance. Therefore, in the current era of bureaucratic reform, the implementation of GCG in BUMN must be supported by 3 interrelated pillars, namely: The state and its systems act as regulators, businesses as market actors, and citizens as users of business products and services. Regulations issued by the government have a significant impact on the implementation of GCG. Society lends legitimacy to companies as providers of resources and buyers of company products. A good business leader must be able to balance different interests in supporting the business. This research method uses qualitative research, where these studies are systematized from several sections and phenomena and refer to causal relationships between theories from different sources.

Cripping grounded theory: disabled disability resource providers and disability disclosure in postsecondary education

Disability disclosure is a complex, ongoing process involves navigating medical, legal, educational, economic, and employment systems. Disclosure decision making occurs for all disabled individuals regardless of how apparent their disability is to others. Professionals working in disability resource positions, who identify as disabled, navigate multiple layers of disclosure on personal, interpersonal, and institutional levels. Disabled disability resource professionals hold complex understandings of disclosure mediated by their environment, relationships, and identity. Centering the expertise of disabled professionals and their embodied knowledge (e.g. cripistemologies) the authors propose a model for the complex interplay of factors that influence each disclosure decision and how disabled staff crip disclosure and use it as a tool to navigate institutional, inter-, and intra-personal dynamics.

CNN based Blockchain Information Protection Model for Emerging Cloud Applications

In the age of mobile internet, the amount of data is growing, and ability to process service data is always getting better. So, protecting data privacy and making sure the service environment is trustworthy have become very important. This paper looks at a trusted privacy service computing model for common uses of convolutional neural networks. The goal is to find data and model calculation methods that support homomorphic encryption to protect data privacy. Build a service process certificate and a method for distributing calculation rights based on blockchain and new contract technology to make sure that service calculations are open, trustworthy, and easy to track. Explore how the new cloud environment resource data service model helps resource providers, model owners, and users work together to make the most of their resources and grow the sharing economy. Lastly, experiments are done to figure out how the model protects privacy.

Dynamic multi-objective workflow scheduling for combined resources in cloud

Cloud resource providers offer idle resources to users as spot instances. The price of the instances changes with market supply and demand, and the dynamic price can have a significant impact on workflow scheduling. In this work, we use a combination of spot and on-demand instances as the foundation cloud resource and characterize the dynamic workflow scheduling problem as a dynamic multi-objective optimization problem (DMOP), where the dynamics originate from the dynamic price of spot instances. The scheduling solution is found by considering three objectives: maximizing the reliability of the instances while minimizing the makespan and cost. In addition, we provide an enhanced MOEAD algorithm called MOEA/D-URDI that combines diversity introduction and uniform random sampling, where the uniform random sampling paradigm is used to generate the initial weight vector. The dynamic multi-objective optimization evolutionary algorithm DMOEA/D-URDI is then created by combining the method with a dynamic optimization framework. Our technique beats existing algorithms, according to experimental data based on dynamic benchmark sets and three well-known scientific procedures in terms of metrics on dynamic benchmark sets and better ensures reliability in scheduling scientific workflows while reducing makespan and cost.

On Habit and Organizing: A Transactional Perspective Relating Firms, Consumers, and Social Institutions

Habits and routines are foundational to several organizational theories. Considering organizational members to be predominately employees, established habit-based models recognize how these members’ habits help build organizations and are shaped by them. Departing from this traditional, internal focus, our paper highlights an important aspect of organizing, which has been relatively overlooked by established habit-based models, namely, how firms engineer consumer habits to their advantage and, by extension, strategically shape the habits of other key resource providers. To better theorize consumer habits and their engineering, and to integrate these phenomena within extant organizational theory, we develop a new habit-based perspective relating firms, consumers, and social institutions. Inspired by Dewey’s transactional approach and drawing on modern habit science, our transactional framework helps illuminate habit engineering, promotes a richer and more integrated view of organizing, and opens new possibilities for habit-based organizational theories. Our paper also offers several implications for firms’ managers, individual consumers, and broader society.

Windows versus waves of opportunity: How reputation alters venture capital firms' resource mobilization

AbstractResearch SummaryThis paper investigates how reputation affects firm responses to resource mobilization opportunities. We theorize that lower‐reputation firms are likely to be particularly responsive to resource mobilization opportunities because they are otherwise constrained. By contrast, higher‐reputation firms have access to greater resource supply and may self‐restrain demand. We test these arguments in the context of venture capital (VC) firms raising investment funds. We indeed find that lower‐reputation VCs are more responsive to opportunities presented by recent successes. Unexpectedly, we find that high‐reputation VCs are more responsive to market‐wide heat. Through multi‐method follow‐on analyses, we propose that while recent successes constitute “windows of opportunity” upon which firms act with individual discretion, hot market conditions serve as “waves of opportunity,” exerting a push on the resource mobilization of all firms and influencing their propensity toward scaling up.Managerial SummaryWe explore how low‐ and high‐reputation venture capital (VC) firms respond to fundraising opportunities such as recent successes or hot market conditions. We show that low‐reputation VCs are more likely to fundraise from limited partners in response to firm‐specific “windows of opportunity” (such as after a portfolio company IPO) because it is a rare chance to attract resource provider attention. By contrast, high‐reputation firms are more likely to fundraise at their own pace, regardless of short‐term successes. However, we unexpectedly find that high‐reputation firms are more likely than low‐reputation ones to take advantage of market‐wide “waves of opportunity” (i.e., hot markets), likely because they benefit from increased fundraising process efficiency. Our study illustrates how hot market periods may be unusually advantageous fundraising opportunities for high‐reputation firms and may be a key driver of when such firms scale up.

A Distributed Pricing Strategy for Edge Computation Offloading Optimization in Autonomous Driving

The increase of on-vehicle applications has brought explosive computation demands to autonomous vehicles and overwhelmed their limited onboard resources. Edge computing can offload application load and effectively alleviate this problem. However, the introduction of edge computing faces significant challenges, including the considerable amount of resource contention due to the scarcity of edge resources and the competition among edge computing resource providers to earn users' services requests. We notice that the problem is not purely technical as solutions for these two problems can become conflicting to each other. In this paper, we propose a distributed pricing strategy to achieve full use of computing resources at the edge and maximize the revenue of service operators, both with guaranteed quality-of-service of on-vehicle applications. More specifically, we first use the multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game theory to model the pricing of on-vehicle task offloading under edge computing. Next, we propose a distributed pricing strategy to enable edge servers to adjust their local price distributions so that edge servers can bargain with offloading requesters independently. Experimental results confirm that the proposed distributed pricing strategy can provide more optimized server computing resource utilization while guaranteeing the performance of in-vehicle applications.

Trusted Collaboration for MEC-Enabled VR Video Streaming: A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Approach

Collaboration among mobile edge computing (MEC) has been envisioned as a promising paradigm to meet the requirements of wireless virtual reality (VR) applications. However, trust risks create tremendous challenges in MEC collaboration due to the distributed, complex, and unreliable nature of resource providers. In this paper, we present a trusted collaboration framework for VR video streaming to manage the video buffer in VR devices (VDs) under a more realistic distributed environment. In the framework, the rendering tasks can be processed collaboratively among edge servers (ESs) by exploring their behaviors (e.g., selfish behavior, malicious behavior, and cooperative behavior). Considering the collaborator may not be fully trustworthy, we present a novel trust evaluation method by combining direct and indirect values, aiming to ensure reliable collaborator selection. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to maintain an effective buffer state in VR devices (VDs) through jointly optimizing collaborator selection, spectrum allocation, and rendering resource allocation. Due to the fluctuating wireless fading channel and the dynamic video rate, the optimization problem is intractable by adopting traditional methods. Then, we adopt the multi-agent deep deterministic policy gradient (MADDPG) to tackle this dynamic and distributed problem. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can achieve a good performance.