Tomáš Pitner

• Associate Professor
• Principal Investigator at Masaryk University

This paper provides a glimpse into the realm of CERIT’s (CEnter for Research and education in IT) service-oriented startups across diverse sectors, highlighting their impact on media, sports, energy, manufacturing, maintenance, chips design, and cybersecurity and defense while showing the evolution as part of the global movements. Each case can ser...

While approaches aimed at developing forensic-ready systems are starting to emerge, it is still primarily a theoretical concept. This paper presents a case study of integrating forensic readiness capabilities into SensitiveCloud, an information system for storing and processing sensitive data. A risk-based approach to forensic readiness design is f...

Software engineers widely acknowledge the inclusion of security requirements in the early stages of the development process. However, the need to prepare the software for the failure of the implemented security controls and subsequent investigation of the incident is often not discussed. Forensic‐ready software systems represent an evolution of sec...

The importance of systems secure-by-design is well recognised. However, incidents or disputes requiring thorough investigation might occur even in highly secure systems. Forensic-ready software systems aim to ease the investigations by including requirements for reliable, admissible, and on-point data - potential evidence. Yet, the software enginee...

Complex Systems were identified and studied in different fields, such as physics, biology, and economics. These systems exhibit exciting properties such as self-organization, robust order, and emergence. In recent years, software systems displaying behaviors associated with Complex Systems are starting to appear, and these behaviors are showing pre...

Trust is a primary concern, particularly for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, where constrained devices should be able to effectively detect attacks based on their trust models. The main purpose of this survey is to summarize outstanding research activities on trust-based Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) in IoT networks. We first summari...

Cyberattacks perpetrated by insiders are difficult to prevent using traditional security approaches. Often, such attackers misuse legitimate access to the system to conduct an attack, or an external attacker manipulates or masquerades as an insider to gain access, bypassing the security controls. A possible solution to this problem are forensic-rea...

A recommender system may recommend certain items that the users would not prefer. This can be caused by either the imperfection of the recommender system or the change of user preferences. When those failed recommendations appear often in the system, the users may consider that the recommender system is not able to capture the user preference. This...

The energy domain is part of Critical Infrastructures (CI), in which Smart Grids (SG) play the role of major enabler of concepts such as Smart Cities. The capability of reasoning through ontologies is of paramount importance to allow a better integration of sensors and devices part of the smart energy domain. In this paper, we provide a comprehensi...

In social media, human-generated web data from real-world events have become exponentially complex due to the chaotic and spontaneous features of natural language. This may create an information overload for the information consumers, and in turn not easily digest a large amount of information in a limited time. To tackle this issue, we propose to...

Currently, numerous approaches exist supporting the implementation of forensic readiness and, indirectly, forensic-ready software systems. However, the terminology used in the approaches and their focus tends to vary. To facilitate the design of forensic-ready software systems, the clarity of the underlying concepts needs to be established so that...

Blockchain has recently emerged as an auspicious technology for enabling vulnerable data to be exchanged anonymously and securely within Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). Furthermore, Blockchain can be used as an access control mechanism to present a decentralized solution to the distributed authentication problem in the Internet of Bikes (I...

Healthcare Real-time emergency systems have attracted a great deal of interest from both academia and industry. It is important to provide timely medical services at remote areas through an effective communication between healthcare providers. The healthcare stakeholders (including the doctors, nurses, etc.) are facing tremendous problems to track...

The integration of renewable sources, communication and power networks with information and communication technologies is one of the main challenges in Smart Grids (SG) large-scale testing. For this reason, the coupling of simulators is commonly used to dynamically simulate several aspects of the SG infrastructure, in the so-called co-simulations....

The design and development of secure systems is an important and challenging task. However, such systems should also be prepared for eventual disputes or occurrences of a security incident. To solve this, forensic-ready software systems are, by-design, prepared to assist in the forensic investigation and to provide on-point data with high evidentia...

Using new methodologies such as Blockchain in data communications in wireless sensor networks (WSN) has emerged owing to the proliferation of collaborative technologies. However, the WSN is still vulnerable to denial of service cyber attacks, in which jamming attack becomes prevalent in blocking data communications in WSN. The jamming attack launch...

The design and development of secure systems is an important and challenging task. However, such systems should also be prepared for eventual disputes or occurrences of a security incident. To solve this, forensic-ready software systems are, by-design, prepared to assist in the forensic investigation and to provide on-point data with high evidentia...

The integration of renewable sources, communication and power networks with information and communication technologies is one of the main challenges in Smart Grids (SG) large-scale testing. For this reason, the coupling of simulators is commonly used to dynamically simulate several aspects of the SG infrastructure, in the so-called co-simulations....

The 6LoWPAN standard has been widely applied in different Internet of Things (IoT) application domains. However, since the nodes in the IoT are mostly resource constrained, 6LoWPAN is vulnerable to a variety of security attacks. Among others, replication attack is one of the severe security threads to IoT networks. This paper therefore proposes a t...

Smart home systems are developed to interconnect and automate household appliances and create ubiquitous home services. Such a system is mainly driven by the communications among Internet-of-Things (IoT) objects along with Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) technologies, where the RFID techniques in the IoT network are commonly prone to maliciou...

The integration of 6LoWPAN standard in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been emerging and applied in many domains such as smart transportation and healthcare. However, given the resource constrained nature of nodes in the IoT, 6LoWPAN is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, among others, replication attack can be launched to consume the node’s resou...

As energy distribution systems evolve from a traditional hierarchical load structure towards distributed smart grids, flexibility is increasingly investigated as both a key measure and core challenge of grid balancing. This paper contributes to the theoretical framework for quantifying network flexibility potential by introducing a machine learning...

Despite of their increasing popularity, Internet of Things (IoT) platforms are still suffering from major security problems, particularly during communications between the IoT devices. Indeed, these devices are commonly prone to malicious attacks and require prior mutual authentication to guarantee the confidentiality and security of data being sha...

Cyber defense exercises (CDXs) represent an effective way to train cybersecurity experts. However, their development is lengthy and expensive. The reason lies in current practice where the CDX life cycle is not sufficiently mapped and formalized, and then exercises are developed ad-hoc. However, the CDX development shares many aspects with software...

With the recent developments of the Internet of Things and its integration in the web environment, the Web of Things and the real-time data submissions to Reasoners are enabled. However, the data that are fed to the Reasoners are often inconsistent. This can be possibly caused by the malfunction of certain Internet of Things device or by human erro...

With the increasing threat of cybercrime, there is also an increasing need for the forensic investigation of those crimes. However, the topic of systematic preparation on the possible forensic investigation during the software development, called forensic readiness, has only been explored since recently. Thus, there are still many challenges and op...

Blockchains have emerged over time as a reliable and secure way to record transactions in an immutable manner in a wide range of application domains. However, current related solutions are not yet capable of appropriately checking the authenticity of data when their volumes are huge. They are not also capable of updating Blockchain data blocks and...

Smart home systems are featured by a variety of connected smart household devices, where Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the critical enablers in the smart home environment. Since these smart home IoT devices are working collaboratively, the access control among the IoT devices becomes more and more important because non-authorised access can re...

Thanks to the huge progress in miniaturization, communication technologies, and mobile computing, smart homes are becoming increasingly popular. In order to manage the related facilities and provide the expected services, dedicated systems are commonly using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices. However, these devices are still prone to se...

Trading of distributed energy resources is an important aspect to fully achieve energy efficiency. Modern microgrids and consumer/prosumer energy transactions are such kind of enablers. The blockchain has been proposed as a solution to aid microgrid applications with the support of a decentralized trading model, operations processing, computation a...

Is our software ready for forensic investigation? Digital forensic investigation is a time-consuming and delicate process, tasked to recover evidence of cybercrime or major failure. Unfortunately, a vast number of software systems do not produce useable evidence. Even if produced, it often contains unnecessary data, is unreliable, or difficult to a...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is developed to facilitate the connections and data sharing among people, devices, and systems. Among the infrastructural IoT techniques, Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) has been used to enable the proliferation and communication in IoT networks. However, the RFID techniques usually suffer from security issues due...

With the development of wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices, Radio frequency identification (RFID) has been used as a promising technology for the proliferation and communication in IoT networks. However, the RFID techniques are usually plagued with security and privacy issues due to the inherent weaknesses of underlying wireless radio commun...

More and more science and technology parks (STPs) are established in the world, but also the Czech Republic. Many benefits are attributed to them. One of them is also technology transfer support. This paper focuses on examining this feature of the STP using the case study of CERIT SP. This park was founded by Masaryk University in 2014 and brings t...

Proactive preparation of software systems for forensic investigation (forensic readiness) during the software development process, has been addressed only recently and has many open challenges. Representation of the forensic concerns and specific requirements of forensic readiness is one of them. A common way of representing concepts in software de...

Proactive preparation of software systems for forensic investigation (forensic readiness) during the software development process, has been addressed only recently and has many open challenges. Representation of the forensic concerns and specific requirements of forensic readiness is one of them. A common way of representing concepts in software de...

New devices in smart grid such as smart meters and sensors have emerged to become a massive and complex network, where a large volume of data is flowing to the smart grid systems. Those data can be real-time, fast-moving, and originated from a vast variety of terminal devices. However, the big smart grid data also bring various data quality problem...

New devices in smart grid such as smart meters and sensors have emerged to become a massive and complex network, where a large volume of data is flowing to the smart grid systems. Those data can be real-time, fast-moving, and originated from a vast variety of terminal devices. However, the big smart grid data also bring various data quality problem...

Context: Software testing plays an essential role in product quality improvement. For this reason, several software testing models have been developed to support organizations. However, adoption of testing process models inside organizations is still sporadic, with a need for more evidence about reported experiences. Aim: Our goal is to identify re...

The Smart Grid (SG) is nowadays an essential part of modern society, providing two-way energy flow and smart services between providers and customers. The main drawback is the SG complexity, with an SG composed of multiple layers, with devices and components that have to communicate, integrate, and cooperate as a unified system. Such complexity bri...

Cybersecurity plays important role in the digital economy. We face a serious lack of workforce that may worsen. The acute, immediate, and growing workforce demand requires establishing new cybersecurity programs or courses of study. The institutions responsible for study programs need curricular guidance. In this paper, we describe existing framewo...

Science and technology parks (STPs) allow gathering companies together and try to create space for knowledge transfer. They are constantly evolving so it is necessary to define the desirable objectives in terms of collaboration with a university to achieve. In this paper, the key areas are described to help better understanding of academic-industri...

The choice of the first programming language (FPL) has been a controversial issue for several decades. Nearly everyone agrees that the FPL is important and affects students’ subsequent education on programming. The study presented in this article investigates the suitability of various C-like and Pascal-like programming languages as a FPL. Students...

Facility benchmarking and evaluation of facility performance are the crucial tasks in reaching efficient, economical and sustainable facility operation. Modern buildings are equipped with building automation systems (BAS) that contain vast numbers of various sensors that can be utilised in performance assessment. However, such systems lack convenie...

Mobile cloud computing (MCC) is becoming a popular mobile technology that aims to augment local resources of mobile devices, such as energy, computing, and storage, by using available cloud services and functionalities. The offloading process is one of the techniques used in MCC to enhance the capabilities of mobile devices by moving mobile data an...

Technology enhanced learning (TEL) is increasingly influencing university education, mainly in overcoming disadvantages of direct instruction teaching approaches, and encouraging creativity, problem solving and critical thinking in student-centered, interactive learning environments. In this paper, experiences from object-oriented programming (OOP)...

Information systems increase their size and complexity. Users of information systems become rather partners than clients of software developers. Users take increasing part in agile and modifiable business processes supported by software systems. They usually should take part in system development and maintenance and be able to apply their business...

Smart grid is a concept defining future electricity distribution network with the purpose of improving its reliability, efficiency and reducing its ecological impact. To achieve that, massive volumes of data need to be sensed and transmitted between the elements of the grid. A robust and efficient communication infrastructure is thus as essential p...

Building construction has gone through a significant change with the emerging spread of ICT during last decades. Intelligent buildings are equipped with building automation systems (BAS) that can be remotely controlled and programmed. However, such systems lack convenient tools for data inspection, making building performance and efficiency analysi...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th IFIP WG 5.11 International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems, ISESS 2017, held in Zadar, Croatia, in May 2017. The 35 revised full papers presented together with 4 keynote lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 46 submissions. The papers deal with environmental chall...

In recent years, we have been witnessing profound transformation of energy distribution systems fueled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), towards the so called Smart Grid. However, while the Smart Grid design strategies have been studied by academia, only anecdotal guidance is provided to the industry with respect to increasing th...

There is a large number of European Union (EU) projects that deal with Smart Grids research and deployment. Overall, they provide a substantial amount of knowledge that can be mined to gain useful insights for future projects and on-going roll-outs of Smart Grid related utilities. In the current paper, we focus on Smart Meters and we evaluate diffe...

Building construction has gone through significant change with the emerging spread of ICT during last decades. “Intelligent buildings” are equipped with building automation systems (BAS) that can be remotely controlled and programmed and that are able to communicate and collaborate. However, BAS aim to facilitate operation of the building and do no...

In this paper, different aspects and experiences from object-oriented programming courses that are taught in three institutions from three different European countries are presented and compared. The emphasis is given on courses' syllabus, organization and methodology of teaching and ways and methods of evaluation of students' knowledge and program...

Emergency management is a discipline of dealing with and avoiding risks. In case of any emergency the immediate and fast intervention is necessary. It is possible only because of well-prepared contingency plans and adequate software support. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to focus on the common characteristics of process modelling within emerg...

Smart Building is a trend towards the Buildings Automation paradigm. Smart Building aims to autonomously control devices and systems in given environment. These devices and systems are nevertheless supervised by facility management. The facility management normally is aided by heterogeneous systems and applications. Due to multifarious data of the...

Cloud computing is becoming more increasingly attractive solutions for companies to ensure the possibility of effective information services for businesses. The paper deals with the safety aspects of the use of the model Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS). There are described basic safety aspects for selecting a suitable provider of cloud services...

First, the paper presents the position of the ICT sector in the Czech Republic (CZ) as a transition economy; it pays particular attention to the ICT industry, university studies, research, and development. Then, it focuses on academic-industrial cooperation (AIC) in the CZ. As economic conditions in the CZ are different from the traditional develop...

Scaling Complex Event Processing applications is inherently problematic. Many state of the art techniques for scaling use filtering on producers, vertical scaling, or stratification of an Event Processing Network. The solutions usually aren't distributed and require centralized coordination. In this paper, we are introducing a technique for scaling...

When monitoring cloud infrastructure, the monitoring data related to a particular resource or entity are typically produced by multiple distributed producers spread across many individual computing nodes. In order to determine the state and behavior of a particular resource all the relevant data must be collected, processed, and evaluated without o...

The article addresses the problem of intelligent analysis and evaluation of facility management data gathered from heterogeneous sources, including environmental data collected from building automation sensors, temporal weather characteristics and scheduling. We suggest the framework of analytical model, based on deriving descriptors which could se...

Smart building is a trend towards the Buildings Automation paradigm. Smart building aims to autonomously control devices and systems in given environment. These devices and systems are nevertheless supervised by facility management. The facility management normally is aided by heterogeneous systems and applications. Due to multifarious data of the...

The use of stream processing for state monitoring of distributed infrastructures has been advocated by some in order to overcome the issues of traditional monitoring solutions when tasked with complex continuous queries. However, in the domain of behavior monitoring the situation gets more complicated. It is mainly because of the low-quality source...

The paper presents an integrated view on creation an ecosystem for academic-industrial cooperation in the ICT sector under the conditions of the Czech business and higher education systems. It shows one case of a relatively long established system working at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Czech Republic. It identifies the infrastru...

project management case studies

Computer logs represent a valuable source of monitoring information being typically the only mechanism for gaining visibility into the behavior of monitored resources. However, even in modern cloud data centers the majority of logs is produced in an unstructured data format with free-form natural language messages carrying the most important portio...

This paper presents a specific approach to Business Process design by combining selected principles of Adaptive Case Management, traditional modeling of processes executable in Business Process Management Systems, and a constraint-based approach to process design. This combined approach is intended for business situations, where traditional process...

Building construction has gone through substantial change with the emerging spread of ICT during last decades. In the field of construction industry, the term intelligent buildings describes facilities equipped with devices and systems that can be remotely controlled and programmed and that are able to communicate and collaborate in order to ensure...

The paper will describe the features and show advantages of process orientation in all phases of university course design and implementation applied in an introductory course on environmental science at Masaryk University, Faculty of Informatics in Brno, Czech Republic. It will demonstrate the principles of process-oriented learning design and its...

There are significant differences between the development of classical software project and a web/mobile-based project. I try to define new project management approach derived from methodology of large software projects. This approach called LAWA – Lean Agile Web Approach – shall be easily applicable on small projects, to IT product developed from...

Mechanisms for controlling and regulating business flexibility are no longer limited to adjusting the number of pieces or changing item output in production processes. Information infrastructures, systems and web technologies have become an important factor for flexible business alignment: The company’s scope of action comes along with communicatio...

In this paper we present our latest research in the area of social network system implementation. Both business and technological aspects of social network system development is considered. There are many tools, languages and methods for developing large-size software systems and architectures represented by social network systems. However, no rese...

The article addresses the problem of intelligent monitoring of facility management data flows collected from heterogeneous sources, including low-level data of sensors and probes, geographical indicators, scheduling and personal identification systems. We suggest the framework of analytical model, based on deriving descriptors which could sentinel...