Conference Presentation

Conference Presentation

The new decentralised and integrated digital management systems aim to support various industries with product lifecycle management, share and utilise digital assets, integrate and unlock efficiencies and traceability, provide users with great convenience, and streamline information management. Blockchain technology provides a distributed trust and allocated ledger for the Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and edge computing applications. It is also an effective method for Industry 4.0 in cloud computing and business process management. This paper proposes a Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution based on an open-source enterprise-grade permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) and integration with a web-based implementation mechanism for IoT. The framework for building and creating proposed enterprise-grade Blockchain solutions using HLF protocol consists of five layers: device layer, network layer, middleware layer, service support layer and application layer. Also, HLF protocol, through developed Smart Contracts, helps address major security requirements and solve most of the architectural shortcomings of IoT with its “security by design” architecture. A RAFT consensus algorithm and a dynamic trust-suitable algorithm are used with created Smart Contracts to improve the Blockchain’s transaction latency and throughput and reduce the number of transactions validated in new blocks. This paper analyses the main challenges the research community faces in smoothly integrating HLF Blockchain protocol and IoT and presents an observation about novel uses of HLF protocol in the machine economy through exposed Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface (REST API) endpoints. Finally, the paper presents Blockchain framework and performance experiments with meta-data that indicate that the method performs well in IoT edge applications.

(Un)Directed Reading is an interactive installation (Edmonds, 2010) initially derived from the “Directed Reading” course, which all undergraduate students at the University must take during their final year. In this course, students are assigned different writing exercises and research assign-ments to open their creative and constructive minds in writing (Edwards-Groves, 2012; McVey, 2008). Every year, at the end of the course and after a selection process, a collection of stories is uploaded to a database of original stories. We then developed an open-source application to print a receipt ticket from a thermal printer with a randomly picked story every time a user pushes a button. An arcade game-style button is installed on a kiosk designed in collaboration with students and set on the university's campus (left photo). The printed receipt presents a short extract of one of the stories and a QR code that links to the full story decorated with illustrations. In a modern society where most of our interactions are audiovisual-based, young generations are less and less encouraged to read and even less to write. By offering a simple kiosk installation with short stories and graph-ical illustrations, we propose a new interactive interface that can easily engage passers-by to eventually stimulate their reading and creativity. By reading these stories, students, professors, staff, and visitors can be surprised by the talent of our students, as it stimulates students to write new pieces to be selected. The interactive kiosk was accessible to all for a period of 3 months with 23 stories during which we automatically collected some data to use in quantitative analysis. In this first run, we focused on data from the user's interactions such as story printed, story read, date and time. It allowed us to see the ratio between the printed receipt and the actual online reading of a story and more.