This paper outlines the IoT Databox model as a means of making the Internet of Things (IoT) accountable to individuals. Accountability is a key to building consumer trust and is mandated by the European Union's general data protection regulation (GDPR). We focus here on the 'external' data subject accountability requirement specified by GDPR and how meeting this requirement turns on surfacing the invisible actions and interactions of connected devices and the social arrangements in which they are embedded. The IoT Databox model is proposed as an in principle means of enabling accountability and providing individuals with the mechanisms needed to build trust into the IoT.

In a federated database system, each independent party exports some of its data for information sharing. The information sharing in such a system is very inflexible, as all peer parties access the same set of data exported by a party, while the party may want to authorize different peer parties to access different portions of its information. We propose a novel query evaluation scheme that supports differentiated access control with decentralized query processing. A new efficient join method, named split-join, along with other safe join methods is adopted in the query planning algorithm. The generated query execution reduces the communication cost by pushing partial query computation to data sources in a safe way. The proofs of the correctness and safety of the algorithm are presented. The evaluation demonstrates that the scheme significantly saves the communication cost in a variety of circumstances and settings while enforcing autonomous and differentiated information sharing effectively.

Abstract-In recent years, the networks of low-power devices have gained popularity. Typically these devices are wireless and interact to form large networks such as the Machine to Machine (M2M) networks, Internet of Things (IoT), Wearable Computing, and Wireless Sensor Networks. The collaboration among these devices is a key to achieving the full potential of these networks. A major problem in this field is to guarantee robust communication between elements while keeping the whole network energy efficient. In this paper, we introduce an extended and improved emergent broadcast slot (EBS) scheme, which facilitates collaboration for robust communication and is energy efficient. In the EBS, nodes communication unit remains in sleeping mode and are awake just to communicate. The EBS scheme is fully decentralized, that is, nodes coordinate their wake-up window in partially overlapped manner within each duty-cycle to avoid message collisions. We show the theoretical convergence behavior of the scheme, which is confirmed through real test-bed experimentation.

Online Citizen Science platforms are good examples of socio-technical systems where technologyenabled interactions occur between scientists and the general public (volunteers). Citizen Science platforms usually host multiple Citizen Science projects, and allow volunteers to choose the ones to participate in. Recent work in the area has demonstrated a positive feedback loop between participation and learning and creativity in Citizen Science projects, which is one of the motivating factors both for scientists and the volunteers. This emphasises the importance of creating successful Citizen Science platforms, which support this feedback process, and enable enhanced learning and creativity to occur through knowledge sharing and diverse participation. In this paper, we present guidelines for designing these platforms as user-inspired socio-technical systems. The guidelines are the result of CitizenGrid Platform developers reflecting on their experiences in a focus group and state-of-the-art literature review. We also present the case-studies on popular Citizen Science platforms, including our own CitizenGrid platform, developed as part of the European Union funded Citizen CyberLab project, as well as Zooniverse, World Community Grid, CrowdCrafting and EpiCollect+ to see how closely these platforms follow our proposed guidelines and how these may be further improved to incorporate the creativity enabled by the collective knowledge sharing.

In recent years, citizen science has grown in popularity due to a number of reasons, including the emphasis on informal learning and creativity potential associated with these initiatives. Citizen science projects address research questions from various domains, ranging from Ecology to Astronomy. Due to the advancement of communication technologies, which makes outreach and engagement of wider communities easier, scientists are keen to turn their own research into citizen science projects. However, the development, deployment and management of these projects remains challenging. One of the most important challenges is building the project itself. There is no single tool or framework, which guides the step-by-step development of the project, since every project has specific characteristics, such as geographical constraints or volunteers' mode of participation. Therefore, in this article, we present a series of conceptual frameworks for categorisation, decision and deployment, which guide a citizen science project creator in every step of creating a new project starting from the research question to project deployment. The frameworks are designed with consideration to the properties of already existing citizen science projects and could be easily extended to include other dimensions, which are not currently perceived.