Biblio

The development of autonomous agents have gained renewed interest, largely due to the recent successes of machine learning. Social robots can be considered a special class of autonomous agents that are often intended to be integrated into sensitive environments. We present experiences from our work with two specific humanoid social service robots, and highlight how eschewing privacy and security by design principles leads to implementations with serious privacy and security flaws. The paper introduces the robots as platforms and their associated features, ecosystems and cloud platforms that are required for certain use cases or tasks. The paper encourages design aims for privacy and security, and then in this light studies the implementation from two different manufacturers. The results show a worrisome lack of design focus in handling privacy and security. The paper aims not to cover all the security flaws and possible mitigations, but does look closer into the use of the WebSocket protocol and it’s challenges when used for operational control. The conclusions of the paper provide insights on how manufacturers can rectify the discovered security flaws and presents key policies like accountability when it comes to implementing technical features of autonomous agents.

Quality Critical Decentralised Applications (QC-DApp) have high requirements for system performance and service quality, involve heterogeneous infrastructures (Clouds, Fogs, Edges and IoT), and rely on the trustworthy collaborations among participants of data sources and infrastructure providers to deliver their business value. The development of the QCDApp has to tackle the low-performance challenge of the current blockchain technologies due to the low collaboration efficiency among distributed peers for consensus. On the other hand, the resilience of the Cloud has enabled significant advances in software-defined storage, networking, infrastructure, and every technology; however, those rich programmabilities of infrastructure (in particular, the advances of new hardware accelerators in the infrastructures) can still not be effectively utilised for QCDApp due to lack of suitable architecture and programming model.