In today Smart Cities, the automation strategy based on massive IoT devices deployment to gather Big Data to get insights into city behavior to improve its services. The Smart IoT devices interconnected to the Cyberinfrastructure in a Smart City can be exposed to security threats. To overcome failures and Cyberinfrastructure hacker's attacks, surveillance systems to monitor every citizen activity, compromise their privacy rights. We propose in this paper a use case where Blockchain is a promise to conciliate security versus privacy. Moreover, we discuss how we can start implementing a control access system integrating Blockchain, and we discuss benefits and challenges briefly.

The analysis and follow up of asphalt infrastructure using image processing techniques has received increased attention recently. However, the vast majority of developments have focused only on determining the presence or absence of road damages, forgoing other more pressing concerns. Nonetheless, in order to be useful to road managers and governmental agencies, the information gathered during an inspection procedure must provide actionable insights that go beyond punctual and isolated measurements: the characteristics, type, and extent of the road damages must be effectively and automatically extracted and digitally stored, preferably using inexpensive mobile equipment. In recent years, computer vision acquisition systems have emerged as a promising solution for road damage automated inspection systems when integrated into georeferenced mobile computing devices such as smartphones. However, the artificial intelligence algorithms that power these computer vision acquisition systems have been rather limited owing to the scarcity of large and homogenized road damage datasets. In this work, we aim to contribute in bridging this gap using two strategies. First, we introduce a new and very large asphalt dataset, which incorporates a set of damages not present in previous studies, making it more robust and representative of certain damages such as potholes. This dataset is composed of 18,345 road damage images captured by a mobile phone mounted on a car, with 45,435 instances of road surface damages (linear, lateral, and alligator cracks; potholes; and various types of painting blurs). In order to generate this dataset, we obtained images from several public datasets and augmented it with crowdsourced images, which where manually annotated for further processing. The images were captured under a variety of weather and illumination conditions and a quality-aware data augmentation strategy was employed to filter out samples of poor quality, which helped in improving the performance metrics over the baseline. Second, we trained different object detection models amenable for mobile implementation with an acceptable performance for many applications. We performed an ablation study to assess the effectiveness of the quality-aware data augmentation strategy and compared our results with other recent works, achieving better accuracies (mAP) for all classes and lower inference times (3× faster).

Industry 4.0 is having a great impact in all smart efforts. This is not a single product but is composed of several technologies, one of them being Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Currently, there are very varied implementation options offered by several companies, and this imposes a new challenge to companies that want to implement IIoT in their processes. This challenge suggests using multi-criteria analysis to make a repeatable and justified decision, requiring a set of alternatives and criteria. This paper proposes a new methodology and comprehensive criteria to help organizations to take an educated decision by applying multi-criteria analysis. Here, we suggest a new original use of PROMETHEE-II with a full example from weight calculation up to IIoT platform selection, showing this methodology as an effective study for other organizations interested in selecting an IIoT platform. The criteria proposed stands out from previous work by including not only technical aspects, but economic and social criteria, providing a full view of the problem analyzed. A case of study was used to prove this proposed methodology and finds the minimum subset to reach the best possible ranking.

We can find several online assessment applications, Windows oriented or Web based, licensed or gnu free software, proprietary or standardized. All of them executing basic questions and test interoperability stages: providing assessment items, training and/or evaluation, and the assignment of a grade. Tons of information resulting of this educational process is stored into databases, including starting times, local or remote IP addresses, finishing times and, the student's behavior: frequency of visits, attempts to be trained, and preliminary grades for specific subjects, demographics and perceptions about subject under evaluation. We propose the use of data mining to identify students (persons) that commit cheat in online assessments (cyber cheats) and identify patterns to detect and avoid this practice