Big Data and Cloud Computing as two mainstream technologies, are at the center of concern in the IT field. Every day a huge amount of data is produced from different sources. This data is so big in size that traditional processing tools are unable to deal with them. Besides being big, this data moves fast and has a lot of variety. Big Data is a concept that deals with storing, processing and analyzing large amounts of data. Cloud computing on the other hand is about offering the infrastructure to enable such processes in a cost-effective and efficient manner. Many sectors, including among others businesses (small or large), healthcare, education, etc. are trying to leverage the power of Big Data. In healthcare, for example, Big Data is being used to reduce costs of treatment, predict outbreaks of pandemics, prevent diseases etc. This paper, presents an overview of Big Data Analytics as a crucial process in many fields and sectors. We start by a brief introduction to the concept of Big Data, the amount of data that is generated on a daily bases, features and characteristics of Big Data. We then delve into Big Data Analytics were we discuss issues such as analytics cycle, analytics benefits and the movement from ETL to ELT paradigm as a result of Big Data analytics in Cloud. As a case study we analyze Google’s BigQuery which is a fully-managed, serverless data warehouse that enables scalable analysis over petabytes of data. As a Platform as a Service (PaaS) supports querying using ANSI SQL. We use the tool to perform different experiments such as average read, average compute, average write, on different sizes of datasets.
Anonymity and privacy in the electoral process are mandatory features found in any democratic society, and many authors consider these fundamental civil liberties and rights. During the election process, every voter must be identified as eligible, but after casting a vote, the voter must stay anonymous, assuring voter and vote unlinkability. Voter anonymity and privacy are the most critical issues and challenges of almost all electronic voting systems. However, vote immutability must be assured as well, which is a problem in many new democracies, and Blockchain as a distributed technology meets this data immutability requirement. Our paper analyzes current solutions in Blockchain and proposes a new approach through the combination of two different Blockchains to achieve privacy and anonymity. The first Blockchain will be used for key management, while the second will store anonymous votes. The encrypted vote is salted with a nonce, hashed, and finally digitally signed with the voter’s private key, and by mixing the timestamp of votes and shuffling the order of cast votes, the chances of linking the vote to the voter will be reduced. Adopting this approach with Blockchain technology will significantly transform the current voting process by guaranteeing anonymity and privacy.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.