SUMMER 2014
Team: Big Data
The term big data refers to everincreasing amount of
information that organisations are storing, processing and
analysing with the growing number of information sources in
use. However, there are many potential security issues with
big data. For example, organisations collect and process huge
sensitive information regarding customers, employees, IPs
(intellectual property), and financial information. Then, such
confidential information are aggregated and centralized in one
place for analysis in order to increase their value.
Centralizing data in one place is risk per se it is a
valuable target for attackers and those confidential
information might be exposed. Hence, we will first investigate
potential security issues with big data, and then study
corresponding stateofart security solutions.
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Team: Big Data Finance
Big Data will minimize risk in fraud detection, compliance
and portfolio management. This risk reduction, in combination
with improving trading strategies, has the potential to give
financial service companies a substantial competitive
advantage.
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Team: Charlies Angels
People are more and more connected and need to access Wi-Fi
everywhere at any time. This observation is undeniably true
and appears to cause big changes to happen in IT technologies.
For instance, during the 2013 Google I/O conference, Google
announced that they would soon release a version of Android
Auto to enable drivers to stay connected in their car. In the
past few years, Wi-Fi access has become more and more
available in any type of transportation (buses, trains, etc.)
but what about planes?
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Team: Cloud Break
This paper seeks to investigate the applications, obstacles,
and current offerings of cloud computing in the national
security realm. First, the paper illustrates two primary
national security applications that could benefit from cloud
computing -- biometric identification and maritime domain
awareness. From these two applications, 6 general qualitative
requirements of cloud computing are derived. Two of the six
requirements, related to network and data security, are
investigated further through a high level survey of current
cloud computing security technologies and protocols. Finally,
it is shown that the recent launch of the Amazon Web Services
(AWS) GovCloud, is poised to meet the needs of national
security cloud computing.
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Team: Droud
When we talk about UAVs, or Drones as commonly known, we are
basically referring to an aircraft without a human pilot on
board. If we go to the US Department of Defense, we can find a
more technical definition of UAVs; “powered aerial vehicles
sustained in flight by aerodynamic lift over most of their
flight path and guided without an onboard crew”. Overall, this
“vehicles” without pilots, were first thought for military
purposes only, and for many years it remained as the only use
for drones. The first drone ever used was on February 4, 2002,
by the CIA with a military purpose, as stated in the article
“A Brief History of Drones” by John Sifton. Nevertheless, as
technology began to arise and rapidly evolve through time,
people started to realize that UAVs had many more uses than
only in the military, and that it was foolish not taking
advantage of how technology and the use of drones was
evolving. It became clear that UAVs could be used for
commercial uses as well as for military uses.
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Team: Ever Cloud
Email has become synonymous with one’s identity in today’s
digital knowledge economy. The original intent of email is
very different from the way we use email today. Email has
become the kitchen sink of all digital notification needs;
almost every digital service that a user can sign up to uses
email or requires the user’s email address. Many modern mobile
and desktop apps started because users had frustrations
conducting the main function of these apps using email. For
example, people used to share their favorite bookmarks with
their friends or colleagues using email until dedicated social
bookmarking products allowed for a better way to do this
(del.ici.ous started this in 2003 [O1]). Now, users can share
a bookmark they like on the web using Facebook, Google+, and
other social network applications.
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Team: G Internet
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and
make it universally accessible and useful1. Nearly everyone
that has used Google’s search capabilities would agree that
Google has done a phenomenal job on the first part of their
mission statement, namely to organize the world’s information.
The second half, which focuses on making it universally
accessible, may turn out to be more of a challenge given that
nearly two thirds of the global population does not have
Internet access2. In typical Google fashion, Google has
undertaken this challenge by making heavy investments in
unique technologies. The following report will provide an
overview of these technologies and evaluate both the financial
and social impact of these programs. It will also answer the
question: “Can Google make the Internet available to everyone
on earth?”
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Team: GainIT
The increasing focus on big data and how it has potential to
influence almost every industry, gives it a often
deterministic presence that presents it as a
implement-and-reap beneficial solution for enterprises.
However, many organizations and often SMEs fail to
successfully implement technological and organizational
frameworks in order to build the capabilities to harness some
of the potential that data, both small and big, can hold. The
early uses of gathering a large variety and volume of data has
mostly been within large corporations and used for fraud
detection and coupon systems for retailers. The project is
inspired by the limited focus on the potential for SMEs to
harness big data instead of multinational enterprises. As
noted, mostly larger enterprises has launched initiatives to
compliment their analytical proficiencies, but as technologies
mature, and more companies adopt frameworks for handling data,
and learn how to organize within this new framework, SMEs
might find an easier time reaping some of the benefits. Also
led by cheaper and more easily accessible servers and data
centers, delivered through cloud vendors, SMEs now face less
of a constraint on upfront investment, rather the challenges
presents themselves as organizational and strategic of nature.
The right technologies still needs to be chosen, but with well
supported and documented open source data systems being
available, it has increasingly become a question of choosing
right, and choosing a scalable option that fits the specific
need of an SME.
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Team: GenZ
Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, predicted that the “internet of
things” market will be worth $19 trillion by 2020. He
emphasised that gadgets and devices around humans will be
interconnected wirelessly. With Google acquiring Nest, a
company that $3.2 billion dollars, Samsung introducing the
“Smart home” app connecting home devices, and Apple developing
Siri for voice command recognition and iBeacon for indoor GPS,
the market is not far from realising the implications of home
intelligence. There is a need to utilise ‘big data’ to analyse
human behavior, sensors and information to make ‘things’
smarter. Peter Nieh, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners
sees the potential of integrating software and hardware to
create a great customer experience. As we see the hype in
automating and interconnecting home devices, where will the
development of home automation lead to? This project aims to
explain the development and direction of the automation/
“smart things” technology.
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Team: Marketplaces
The natural place to begin a discussion of marketplaces is
with defining what we mean when we use the term; as well, it
is important to disambiguate what we don’t mean when we use
the term. When we refer to marketplaces, we mean entities that
facilitate transactions between buyers and sellers;
importantly, they act as a third party to the principal
transaction at hand. The marketplace is thus not the seller
(nor a buyer), and as such it does not own the inventory or
services transacted on the platform. If they did, the entities
wouldn’t be marketplaces, but rather traditional retailers.
Accordingly, it would be incorrect to state that recognized
digital marketplaces like Uber, Etsy, and AirBnb sell
transportation, handcrafted goods, or lodging [1]. Rather,
they facilitate transactions between drivers and riders;
artisans and buyers; and hosts and lodgers.
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Team: MedX
The underdeveloped world, commonly referred to as developing
countries or less developed, is defined as “a nation with a
lower living standard, underdeveloped industrial base, and low
Human Development Index (HDI) relative to other countries.”
This includes countries like India, Africa, and Eastern
Europe. The rapid increase in smart phone and smart device
usage now provides a viable medium to deliver services to the
population in these countries. Research firm IDC has stated
that: “Smartphone sales in India are expected to reach 80.57
million units by the end of this year. Also, the sales would
continue to grow at a CAGR of about 40 per cent over the next
five years.” . Plus, people in these countries have better
access to cell phones than access to clean water and
electricity .
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Team: MI6
The exponential convergence of existing biomedical data with
both genomic and biophysiologic data will render medical data
to be even more voluminous, complex, and heterogeneous. This
explosion of medical data will need a more sophisticated
database management strategy as well as cloud and virtual
environments to enhance data discovery as well as ensure data
security and privacy. First, future medical data can be
managed in a graph-based meta-database management system with
real time analytic processing for both its storage capability
and its query flexibility to accommodate the large and complex
medical data in the ensuing decades.
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Team: Ploutos
Cloud computing has been considered as one of the most
important technologies to drive the next generation internet
revolution since 2006. This paper studies the cloud computing
in a different prospect, financial services, to analyze the
impact of cloud computing in traditional financial services,
notably the mutual funds and loans. by investigating the
challenges in existing products and startups in this field, we
demonstrate huge opportunities in leveraging cloud computing
in financial service which could effectively improve the money
efficiency and significantly reduce the risk.
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Team: Yost
The final purpose of the research we illustrate in this
paper is to describe all the different features of the cloud
computing business in 2014. Since this technology is
developing and growing fast, our aim is to clearly define its
actual aspects and potentialities for the future. Cloud
computing has not only introduced a new kind of IT technology
in the market, but has also revolutionized the existent
businesses operating in several different sectors. Changings
regard the business model, the way of organizing employees’
work, the estimation of costs and profits and numerous other
key factors for corporations. Our overview of the cloud
computing market passes though statistics, academic
publications, newspapers’ articles and experts’ opinions. In
this way, we made our research complete and detailed.
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