Biblio

In the recent years, sustainability has becoming an important topic in agro-food supply chain. Moreover, these supply chains are more vulnerable due to different interrelated risks from man-made and natural disasters. However, most of the previous studies consider less about interrelation in assessing sustainability risks. The purpose of this research is to develop a framework to assess supply chain sustainability risks by rnking environmental risks, economic risks, social risks and operational risks. To solve this problem, the proposed methodology is an integrated rough decision- making and trial evaluation laboratory (DEMA℡) method that consider the interrelationship between different risks and the group preference diversity. In order to evaluate the applicability of the proposed method, a real-world case study of Tunisian agro-food company is presented. The results show that the most important risks are corruption, inflation and uncertainty in supply and demand.

Human-in-the-Loop has been receiving special attention from the data science and machine learning community. It is essential to realize the advantages of human feedback and the pressing need for manual annotation to improve machine learning performance. Recent advancements in natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning have created unique challenges and opportunities for digital humanities research. In particular, there are ample opportunities for NLP and machine learning researchers to analyze data from literary texts and use these complex source texts to broaden our understanding of human sentiment using the human-in-the-loop approach. This paper presents our understanding of how human annotators differ from machine annotators in sentiment analysis tasks and how these differences can contribute to designing systems for the "human in the loop" sentiment analysis in complex, unstructured texts. We further explore the challenges and benefits of the human-machine collaboration for sentiment analysis using a case study in Greek tragedy and address some open questions about collaborative annotation for sentiments in literary texts. We focus primarily on (i) an analysis of the challenges in sentiment analysis tasks for humans and machines, and (ii) whether consistent annotation results are generated from multiple human annotators and multiple machine annotators. For human annotators, we have used a survey-based approach with about 60 college students. We have selected six popular sentiment analysis tools for machine annotators, including VADER, CoreNLP's sentiment annotator, TextBlob, LIME, Glove+LSTM, and RoBERTa. We have conducted a qualitative and quantitative evaluation with the human-in-the-loop approach and confirmed our observations on sentiment tasks using the Greek tragedy case study.

Advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have shown tremendous promise in the medical domain. However, the deep learning tools that are helping the domain, can also be used against it. Given the prevalence of fraud in the healthcare domain, it is important to consider the adversarial use of DNNs in manipulating sensitive data that is crucial to patient healthcare. In this work, we present the design and implementation of a DNN-based image translation attack on biomedical imagery. More specifically, we propose Jekyll, a neural style transfer framework that takes as input a biomedical image of a patient and translates it to a new image that indicates an attacker-chosen disease condition. The potential for fraudulent claims based on such generated `fake' medical images is significant, and we demonstrate successful attacks on both X-rays and retinal fundus image modalities. We show that these attacks manage to mislead both medical professionals and algorithmic detection schemes. Lastly, we also investigate defensive measures based on machine learning to detect images generated by Jekyll.

In this paper, we address the problem of joint user association and power allocation for non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks with multiple base stations (BSs). A user grouping procedure into orthogonal clusters, as well as an allocation of different physical resource blocks (PRBs) is considered. The problem of interest is mathematically described using the maximization of the weighted sum rate. We apply two different swarm intelligence algorithms, namely, the recently introduced Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO), and the popular Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), in order to solve this problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the above-described problem can be satisfactorily addressed by both algorithms.

Peer review is a widely utilized pedagogical feedback mechanism for engaging students, which has been shown to improve educational outcomes. However, we find limited discussion and empirical measurement of peer review in visualization coursework. In addition to engagement, peer review provides direct and diverse feedback and reinforces recently-learned course concepts through critical evaluation of others’ work. In this paper, we discuss the construction and application of peer review in a computer science visualization course, including: projects that reuse code and visualizations in a feedback-guided, continual improvement process and a peer review rubric to reinforce key course concepts. To measure the effectiveness of the approach, we evaluate student projects, peer review text, and a post-course questionnaire from 3 semesters of mixed undergraduate and graduate courses. The results indicate that course concepts are reinforced with peer review—82% reported learning more because of peer review, and 75% of students recommended continuing it. Finally, we provide a road-map for adapting peer review to other visualization courses to produce more highly engaged students.

Secure wireless communication is essential for most industrial applications. The secure and reliable control of processes as well as the data integrity of measured values are key targets in these applications. The industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) tries to connect an increasing number of sensors wirelessly. The wireless sensors form wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, wireless sensor nodes are exposed to various security threats ranging from physical modification on the device itself to remote attacks via the communication channel. It is important to secure the complete lifetime of the wireless sensor nodes and other system components. This includes the production phase, shipping, preparation phase and operational phase. This paper presents a lifetime security concept for a wireless sensor network applied in automotive test beds. In this application scenario, the wireless sensor nodes are used to capture various temperatures in an automotive unit under test. In order to indicate the current state of trustworthiness of the system, a trustworthiness indicator is implemented which is shown to the user. An evaluation of the impact of encrypted communication on power consumption shows that the increase is negligible, and can be expected to be provided by the wireless sensor node's power supply without reducing the node lifetime.

This paper investigated the sliding mode load frequency control (LFC) for an multi-area power system (MPS) under deception attacks (DA). A Luenberger observer is designed to obtain the state estimate of MPS. By using the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method, a sliding mode surface (SMS) is designed to ensure the stability. Then the accessibility analysis ensures that the trajectory of the MPS can reach the specified SMS. Finally, the serviceability of the method is explained by providing a case study.

The recent advancement in the automotive sector has led to a technological explosion. As a result, the modern car provides a wide range of features supported by state of the art hardware and software. Unfortunately, while this is the case of most major components, in the same vehicle we find dozens of sensors and sub-systems built over legacy hardware and software with limited computational capabilities. This paper presents LOKI, a lightweight cryptographic key distribution scheme applicable in the case of the classical invehicle communication systems. The LOKI protocol stands out compared to already proposed protocols in the literature due to its ability to use only a single broadcast message to initiate the generation of a new cryptographic key across a group of nodes. It's lightweight key derivation algorithm takes advantage of a reverse hash chain traversal algorithm to generate fresh session keys. Experimental results consisting of a laboratory-scale system based on Vector Informatik's CANoe simulation environment demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed methodology and its seamless impact manifested on the network.

Recently, graph-based malware similarity analysis has been widely used in the field of malware detection. However, the wide application of code obfuscation, polymorphism, and deformation changes the structure of malicious code, which brings great challenges to the malware similarity analysis. To solve these problems, in this paper, we present a new approach to malware similarity analysis based on the network control structure graph (NCSG). This method analyzed the behavior of malware by application program interface (API) association and constructed NCSG. The graph could reflect the command-and-control(C&C) logic of malware. Therefore, it can resist the interference of code obfuscation technology. The structural features extracted from NCSG will be used as the basis of similarity analysis for training the detection model. Finally, we tested the dataset constructed from five known malware family samples, and the experimental results showed that the accuracy of this method for malware variation analysis reached 92.75%. In conclusion, the malware similarity analysis based on NCSG has a strong application value for identifying the same family of malware.

With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence technology to make smart devices, understanding how humans develop trust in virtual agents is emerging as a critical research field. Through our research, we report on a novel methodology to investigate user's trust in auditory assistance in a Virtual Reality (VR) based search task, under both high and low cognitive load and under varying levels of agent accuracy. We collected physiological sensor data such as electroencephalography (EEG), galvanic skin response (GSR), and heart-rate variability (HRV), subjective data through questionnaire such as System Trust Scale (STS), Subjective Mental Effort Questionnaire (SMEQ) and NASA-TLX. We also collected a behavioral measure of trust (congruency of users' head motion in response to valid/ invalid verbal advice from the agent). Our results indicate that our custom VR environment enables researchers to measure and understand human trust in virtual agents using the matrices, and both cognitive load and agent accuracy play an important role in trust formation. We discuss the implications of the research and directions for future work.

The work we present is a comparative study based on an experimental approach to the mechanical and thermal properties of different local clay-based building materials with the incorporation of agricultural waste in Chad. These local building materials have been used since ancient times by the low-income population. They were the subject of a detailed characterization of their mechanical and thermal parameters. The objective is to obtain lightweight materials with good thermomechanical performance and which can contribute to improving thermal comfort, energy-saving, and security in social housing in Chad while reducing the cost of investment. Several clay-based samples with increasing incorporation of 0 to 8% of agricultural waste (cow dung or millet pod) were made. We used appropriate experimental methods for porous materials (the hydraulic press for mechanical tests and the box method for thermal tests). In this article, we have highlighted the values and variations of the mechanical compressive resistances, thermal conductivities, and thermal resistances of test pieces made with these materials. Knowing the mechanical and thermal characteristics, we also carried out a thermomechanical study. The thermal data made it possible to make Dynamic Thermal Simulations (STD) of the buildings thanks to the Pléiades + COMFIE software. The results obtained show that the use of these materials in a building presents good mechanical and thermal performance with low consumption of electrical energy for better thermal comfort of the occupants. Thus agricultural waste can be recovered thanks to its integration into building materials based on clay.

In digital communication, the transmission of medical images over communication network is very explosive. We need a communication system to transmit the medical information rapidly and securely. In this manuscript, we propose a cryptosystem with novel encoding strategy and lossless compression technique. The chaos based DNA cryptography is used to enrich security of medical images. The lossless Discrete Haar Wavelet Transform is used to reduce space and time efficiency during transmission. The cryptanalysis proves that proposed cryptosystem is secure against different types of attacks. The compression ratio and pixel comparison is performed to verify the similarity of retained medical image.

The massive proliferation of state of the art interfaces into the automotive sector has triggered a revolution in terms of the technological ecosystem that is found in today's modern car. Accordingly, on the one hand, we find dozens of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) running several hundred MB of code, and more and more sophisticated dashboards with integrated wireless communications. On the other hand, in the same vehicle we find the underlying communication infrastructure struggling to keep up with the pace of these radical changes. This paper presents MixCAN (MIXed data authentication for Control Area Networks), an approach for mixing different message signatures (i.e., authentication tags) in order to reduce the overhead of Controller Area Network (CAN) communications. MixCAN leverages the attributes of Bloom Filters in order to ensure that an ECU can sign messages with different CAN identifiers (i.e., mix different message signatures), and that other ECUs can verify the signature for a subset of monitored CAN identifiers. Extensive experimental results based on Vectors Informatik's CANoe/CANalyzer simulation environment and the data set provided by Hacking and Countermeasure Research Lab (HCRL) confirm the validity and applicability of the developed approach. Subsequent experiments including a test bed consisting of Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ systems equipped with CAN communication modules demonstrate the practical integration of MixCAN in real automotive systems.

The high penetration of wind power generation into the grid evokes all the concerns for the deep understanding of its behavior and impact on the existing power system. This paper investigates the optimal operation of the Doubly Fed Induction Generator (DFIG) for the maximum power point tracking in deep with modal analysis. The grid connected DFIG system has been examined in two cases viz. open-loop case and closed-loop case where closed-loop case consists the system with the Flux Magnitude Angle Control (FMAC) and Direct Torque Control (DTC) approach. Various modes of the oscillation and their damping factor has been found in both the cases for the examination of the internal behavior of the system. Further, the effectiveness of the all the employed controls along with MPPT when the system is subjected to a stepped wind speed disturbance and voltage-dip have been confirmed. It was found from the simulation and the modal analysis that the frequency of the various oscillating modes is lesser while the damping is improved in the case of DTC control.

Mathematical morphology provides a large set of powerful non-linear image operators, widely used for feature extraction, noise removal or image enhancement. Although morphological filters might be used to remove artifacts produced by image manipulations, both on binary and gray level documents, little effort has been spent towards their forensic identification. In this paper we propose a non-trivial extension of a deterministic approach originally detecting erosion and dilation of binary images. The proposed approach operates on grayscale images and is robust to image compression and other typical attacks. When the image is attacked the method looses its deterministic nature and uses a properly trained SVM classifier, using the original detector as a feature extractor. Extensive tests demonstrate that the proposed method guarantees very high accuracy in filtering detection, providing 100% accuracy in discriminating the presence and the type of morphological filter in raw images of three different datasets. The achieved accuracy is also good after JPEG compression, equal or above 76.8% on all datasets for quality factors above 80. The proposed approach is also able to determine the adopted structuring element for moderate compression factors. Finally, it is robust against noise addition and it can distinguish morphological filter from other filters.

Attacks targeting several millions of non-internet based application users are on the rise. These applications such as SMS and USSD typically do not benefit from existing multi-factor authentication methods due to the nature of their interaction interfaces and mode of operations. To address this problem, we propose an approach that augments blockchain with multi-factor authentication based on evidence from blockchain transactions combined with risk analysis. A profile of how a user performs transactions is built overtime and is used to analyse the risk level of each new transaction. If a transaction is flagged as high risk, we generate n-factor layers of authentication using past endorsed blockchain transactions. A demonstration of how we used the proposed approach to authenticate critical financial transactions in a blockchain-based asset financing platform is also discussed.

Existing security models are highly linear and fail to capture the rich interactions that occur across security technology, infrastructure, cybersecurity, and human/organizational components. In this work, we will leverage insights from resilience science, complex system theory, and network theory to develop a next-generation security model based on these interactions to address challenges in complex, nonlinear risk environments and against innovative and disruptive technologies. Developing such a model is a key step forward toward a dynamic security paradigm (e.g., shifting from detection to anticipation) and establishing the foundation for designing next-generation physical security systems against evolving threats in uncontrolled or contested operational environments.

This work presents the results of the Multi-Robot System designing that works on the basis of Swarm Intelligence models and is used to search for optimal solutions. The process of searching for optimal solutions is performed based on a field of gradient vectors that can be generated by ionizing radiation sources, radio-electro-magnetic devices, temperature generating sources, etc. The concept of the operation System is based on the distribution in the search space of a multitude of Mobile Robots that form a Mesh network between them. Each Mobile Robot has a set of ultrasonic sensors for excluding the collisions with obstacles, two sensors for identifying the gradient vector of the analyzed field, resources for wireless storage, processing and communication. The direction of the Mobile Robot movement is determined by the rotational speed of two DC motors which is calculated based on the models of Artificial Neural Networks. Gradient vectors generated by all Mobile Robots in the system structure are used to calculate the movement direction.

With the rapid growth in Natural Language Processing (NLP), all types of industries find a need for analyzing a massive amount of data. Sentiment analysis is becoming a more exciting area for the businessmen and researchers in Text mining & NLP. This process includes the calculation of various sentiments with the help of text mining. Supplementary to this, the world is connected through Information Technology and, businesses are moving toward the next step of the development to make their system more intelligent. Microservices have fulfilled the need for development platforms which help the developers to use various development tools (Languages and applications) efficiently. With the consideration of data analysis for business growth, data security becomes a major concern in front of developers. This paper gives a solution to keep the data secured by providing required access to data scientists without disturbing the base system software. This paper has discussed data storage and exchange policies of microservices through common JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) response which performs the sentiment analysis of customer's data fetched from various microservices through secured APIs.

The design of reliable and secure codes with finite block length is an important requirement for industrial machine type communications. In this work, we develop an autoencoder for the multi-mode fiber wiretap channel taking into account the error performance at the legitimate receiver and the information leakage at potential eavesdroppers. The estimate of the mutual information leakage includes AWGN and fading channels. The code design is tailored to the specific channel setup where the eavesdropper experiences a mode dependent loss. Numerical simulations illustrate the performance and show a Pareto improvement of the proposed scheme compared to the state-of-the-art polar wiretap codes.

Data warehouse and big data have become the trend to help organise data effectively. Business data are originating in various kinds of sources with different forms from conventional structured data to unstructured data, it is the input for producing useful information essential for business sustainability. This research will navigate through the complicated designs of the common big data and data warehousing technologies to propose an effective approach to use these technologies for designing and building an unstructured textual data warehouse, a crucial and essential tool for most enterprises nowadays for decision making and gaining business competitive advantages. In this research, we utilised the IBM BigInsights Text Analytics, PostgreSQL, and Pentaho tools, an unstructured data warehouse is implemented and worked excellently with the unstructured text from Amazon review datasets, the new proposed approach creates a practical solution for building an unstructured data warehouse.

Traffic Characterization, Application Identification, Per Application Classification, and VPN/Non-VPN Traffic Characterization have been some of the most notable research topics over the past few years. Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) promises an increase in Quality of Service (QoS) for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), simplifies network management and plays a vital role in content censoring. DPI has been used to help ease the flow of network traffic. For instance, if there is a high priority message, DPI could be used to enable high-priority information to pass through immediately, ahead of other lower priority messages. It can be used to prioritize packets that are mission-critical, ahead of ordinary browsing packets. Throttling or slowing down the rate of data transfer can be achieved using DPI for certain traffic types like peer-to-peer downloads. It can also be used to enhance the capabilities of ISPs to prevent the exploitation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in Distributed Denial-Of-Service (DDOS) attacks by blocking malicious requests from devices. In this paper, we introduce a novel architecture for DPI using neural networks utilizing layers of word embedding, convolutional neural networks and bidirectional recurrent neural networks which proved to have promising results in this task. The proposed architecture introduces a new mix of layers which outperforms the proposed approaches before.

The paper proposes a new measurement method for impairments identification in wireline channels (i.e. wire cables) by exploiting a Compressive Sampling (CS)-based technique. The method consists of two-phases: (i) acquisition and reconstruction of the channel impulse response in the nominal working condition and (ii) analysis of the channel state to detect any physical anomaly/discontinuity like deterioration (e.g. aging due to harsh environment) or unauthorized side channel attacks (e.g. taps). The first results demonstrate that the proposed method is capable of estimating the channel impairments with an accuracy that could allow the classification of the main channel impairments. The proposed method could be used to develop low-cost instrumentation for continuous monitoring of the physical layer of data networks and to improve their hardware security.

Currently and particularly with remote working scenarios during COVID-19, phishing attack has become one of the most significant threats faced by internet users, organizations, and service providers. In a phishing attack, the attacker tries to steal client sensitive data (such as login, passwords, and credit card details) using spoofed emails and fake websites. Cybercriminals, hacktivists, and nation-state spy agencies have now got a fertilized ground to deploy their latest innovative phishing attacks. Timely detection of phishing attacks has become most crucial than ever. Machine learning algorithms can be used to accurately detect phishing attacks before a user is harmed. This paper presents a novel ensemble model to detect phishing attacks on the website. We select three machine learning classifiers: Artificial Neural Network (ANN), K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), and Decision Tree (C4.5) to use in an ensemble method with Random Forest Classifier (RFC). This ensemble method effectively detects website phishing attacks with better accuracy than existing studies. Experimental results demonstrate that the ensemble of KNN and RFC detects phishing attacks with 97.33% accuracy.

An open source and low-cost Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System based on Node-RED and Arduino microcontrollers is presented in this paper. The system is designed for monitoring, supervision, and remotely controlling motors and sensors deployed for oil and gas facilities. The Internet of Things (IoT) based SCADA system consists of a host computer on which a server is deployed using the Node-RED programming tool and two terminal units connected to it: Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega. The Arduino Uno collects and communicates the data acquired from the temperature, flowrate, and water level sensors to the Node-Red on the computer through the serial port. It also uses a local liquid crystal display (LCD) to display the temperature. Node-RED on the computer retrieves the data from the voltage, current, rotary, accelerometer, and distance sensors through the Arduino Mega. Also, a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) is created using Node-RED and hosted on the local server for parsing the collected data. Finally, an HTTP basic access authentication is implemented using Nginx to control the clients' access from the Internet to the local server and to enhance its security and reliability.