during an 11 days mission in february 2000 the shuttle radar topography mission (srtm) collected data over 80% of the earth's land surface, for all areas between 60 degrees n and 56 degrees s latitude. since srtm data became available, many studies utilized them for application in topography and morphometric landscape analysis. exploiting srtm data for recognition and extraction of topographic ...

This paper describes a cryptographic protocol for securing self-organized data storage through periodic verifications. Such verifications are beyond simple integrity checks since peers generate a proof that they still conserve the data they are supposed to be storing. The proposed verification protocol is efficient, deterministic, and scalable and successfully prevents most of the security thre...

Component additions or failures are common for large-scale storage clusters in production environments. To improve manageability, it is desirable to automatically integrate new resources into an existing system as one virtual volume and repair data redundancy damaged by component failures. A key enabling technique for these capabilities is a flexible and scalable object placement and location s...

Many of the current bio-inspired delivery networks set their focus on search, e.g., by using artificial ants. If the network size and, therefore, the search space gets too large, the users experience high delays until the requested content can be consumed. In previous work, we proposed different replication strategies to reduce the search space. In this report we further evaluate measures for s...

This paper describes how to establish trust for P2P storage using a payment-based scheme. This scheme relies on the monitoring of storage peers on a regular basis. The verification operations allow assessing peer behavior and eventually estimating their subsequent remuneration or punishment. The periodic verification operations are used to enforce the fair exchange of a payment against effectiv...

In this article, the use of the self-organizing map (SOM) is approached on the basis of current theories of learning. Possibilities of computer and networked platforms that aim at helping human learning are also inspected. It is shown how the SOM can be considered a model of constructive learning. The area of constructive learning is outlined and two cases of using the self-organizing map in co...