Towards an extensive set of criteria for safety and cyber-security evaluation of cyber-physical systems.

Verification and validation (V&V) are complex processes combining different approaches and incorporating many different methods including many activities. System engineers regularly face the question if their V&V activities lead to better products, and having appropriate criteria at hand for evaluation of safety and cybersecurity of the systems would help to answer such a question. Additionally, when there is a demand to improve the quality of an already managed V&V process, there is a struggle over what criteria to use in order to measure the improvement. This paper presents an extensive set of criteria suitable for safety and cybersecurity evaluation of cyberphysical systems. The evaluation criteria are agreed upon by 60 researchers from 32 academic and industrial organizations jointly working in a large-scale European research project on 13 real-world use cases from the domains of automotive, railway, aerospace, agriculture, healthcare, and industrial robotics.

GDPRValidator: a tool to enable companies using cloud services to be GDPR compliant.

This article presents a tool called GDPRValidator that aims to assist small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that have migrated their services, or a part of them, to the cloud to be General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant when they manage and store employees' or customers' data in the cloud. As these companies have a limited budget to hire legal experts to guide them in complying with GDPR, the main objective of this tool is to help SMEs to be more competitive by saving a considerable amount of money. By using GDPRValidator, these companies can learn and begin the GDPR compliance process by themselves and decide whether it will be necessary to hire GDPR legal experts in the end. GDPRValidator implements a process that aids companies in compliance analysis and validation and generates a series of documents with recommendations. These documents do not guarantee full GDPR compliance, but they can help the company better understand the regulation and improve its data management strategies. In order to validate the efficiency and efficacy of the tool, two SMEs have used it and provided feedback about its perceived ease of use and its perceived usefulness for understanding and complying with GDPR. The results of the validation showed that, for both companies, the degree of perceived usefulness and ease of use of GDPRValidator is quite good. All the scores expressed agreement.

Feeling of Safety and Comfort towards a Socially Assistive Unmanned Aerial Vehicle That Monitors People in a Virtual Home.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent a new model of social robots for home care of dependent persons. In this regard, this article introduces a study on people's feeling of safety and comfort while watching the monitoring trajectory of a quadrotor dedicated to determining their condition. Three main parameters are evaluated: the relative monitoring altitude, the monitoring velocity and the shape of the monitoring path around the person (ellipsoidal or circular). For this purpose, a new trajectory generator based on a state machine, which is successfully implemented and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink®, is described. The study is carried out with 37 participants using a virtual reality (VR) platform based on two modules, UAV simulator and VR Visualiser, both communicating through the MQTT protocol. The participants' preferences have been a high relative monitoring altitude, a high monitoring velocity and a circular path. These choices are a starting point for the design of trustworthy socially assistive UAVs flying in real homes.

The Problem Is Not Professional Publishing, But the Publish-or-Perish Culture.

The publication of scientific papers has become increasingly problematic in the last decades. Even if we agree that a renewed model is needed for peer-reviewed scientific publication, we think the problem does not essentially lie in professional publishing-with economic incentives-but in the publish-or-perish culture that dominates the lives of researchers and academics.