Biblio

This Innovative Practice Work-in-Progress paper presents a virtual, proactive, and collaborative learning paradigm that can engage learners with different backgrounds and enable effective retention and transfer of the multidisciplinary AI-cybersecurity knowledge. While progress has been made to better understand the trustworthiness and security of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, little has been done to translate this knowledge to education and training. There is a critical need to foster a qualified cybersecurity workforce that understands the usefulness, limitations, and best practices of AI technologies in the cybersecurity domain. To address this import issue, in our proposed learning paradigm, we leverage multidisciplinary expertise in cybersecurity, AI, and statistics to systematically investigate two cohesive research and education goals. First, we develop an immersive learning environment that motivates the students to explore AI/machine learning (ML) development in the context of real-world cybersecurity scenarios by constructing learning models with tangible objects. Second, we design a proactive education paradigm with the use of hackathon activities based on game-based learning, lifelong learning, and social constructivism. The proposed paradigm will benefit a wide range of learners, especially underrepresented students. It will also help the general public understand the security implications of AI. In this paper, we describe our proposed learning paradigm and present our current progress of this ongoing research work. In the current stage, we focus on the first research and education goal and have been leveraging cost-effective Minecraft platform to develop an immersive learning environment where the learners are able to investigate the insights of the emerging AI/ML concepts by constructing related learning modules via interacting with tangible AI/ML building blocks.

Cyberspace is vulnerable to continuous malicious attacks. Traceability of network attacks is an effective defense means to curb and counter network attacks. In this paper, the evolutionary game model is used to analyze the network attack and defense behavior. On the basis of the quantification of attack and defense benefits, the replication dynamic learning mechanism is used to describe the change process of the selection probability of attack and defense strategies, and finally the evolutionary stability strategies and their solution curves of both sides are obtained. On this basis, the attack behavior is analyzed, and the probability curve of attack strategy and the optimal attack strategy are obtained, so as to realize the effective traceability of attack behavior.

In this paper, an implementation of a human in the loop (HITL) technique for robot navigation in an indoor environment is described. The HITL technique is integrated into the reinforcement learning algorithms for mobile robot navigation. Reinforcement algorithms, specifically Q-learning and SARSA, are used combined with HITL since these algorithms are good in exploration and navigation. Turtlebot3 has been used as the robot for validating the algorithms by implementing the system using Robot Operating System and Gazebo. The robot-assisted with human feedback was found to be better in navigation task execution when compared to standard algorithms without using human in the loop. This is a work in progress and the next step of this research is exploring other reinforced learning methods and implementing them on a physical robot.

Existing defense strategies against adversarial attacks (AAs) on AI/ML are primarily focused on examining the input data streams using a wide variety of filtering techniques. For instance, input filters are used to remove noisy, misleading, and out-of-class inputs along with a variety of attacks on learning systems. However, a single filter may not be able to detect all types of AAs. To address this issue, in the current work, we propose a robust, transferable, distribution-independent, and cross-domain supported framework for selecting Adaptive Filter Ensembles (AFEs) to minimize the impact of data poisoning on learning systems. The optimal filter ensembles are determined through a Multi-Objective Bi-Level Programming Problem (MOBLPP) that provides a subset of diverse filter sequences, each exhibiting fair detection accuracy. The proposed framework of AFE is trained to model the pristine data distribution to identify the corrupted inputs and converges to the optimal AFE without vanishing gradients and mode collapses irrespective of input data distributions. We presented preliminary experiments to show the proposed defense outperforms the existing defenses in terms of robustness and accuracy.

This paper proposes an improved version of the newly developed Honey Badger Algorithm (HBA), called Generalized opposition Based-Learning HBA (GOBL-HBA), for solving the mesh routers placement problem. The proposed GOBLHBA is based on the integration of the generalized opposition-based learning strategy into the original HBA. GOBL-HBA is validated in terms of three performance metrics such as user coverage, network connectivity, and fitness value. The evaluation is done using various scenarios with different number of mesh clients, number of mesh routers, and coverage radius values. The simulation results revealed the efficiency of GOBL-HBA when compared with the classical HBA, Genetic Algorithm (GA), and Particle Swarm optimization (PSO).

Data mining technology is a very important technology in the current era of data explosion. With the informationization of society and the transparency and openness of information, network security issues have become the focus of concern of people all over the world. This paper wants to compare the accuracy of multiple machine learning methods and two deep learning frameworks when using lexical features to detect and classify malicious URLs. As a result, this paper shows that the Random Forest, which is an ensemble learning method for classification, is superior to 8 other machine learning methods in this paper. Furthermore, the Random Forest is even superior to some popular deep neural network models produced by famous frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch when using lexical features to detect and classify malicious URLs.

The federated learning scheme enhances the privacy preservation through avoiding the private data uploading in cloud-edge computing. However, the attacks against the uploaded model updates still cause private data leakage which demotivates the privacy-sensitive participating edge devices. Facing this issue, we aim to design a privacy-preserving incentive mechanism for the federated cloud-edge learning (PFCEL) system such that 1) the edge devices are motivated to actively contribute to the updated model uploading, 2) a trade-off between the private data leakage and the model accuracy is achieved. We formulate the incentive design problem as a three-layer Stackelberg game, where the server-device interaction is further formulated as a contract design problem. Extensive numerical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our designed mechanism in terms of privacy preservation and system utility.

The software industry is dominating many are like health care, finance, agriculture and entertainment. Software security has become an essential issue-outsider libraries, which assume a significant part in programming. The finding weaknesses in the binary code is a significant issue that presently cannot seem to be handled, as showed by numerous weaknesses wrote about an everyday schedule. Software seller sells the software to the client if the client wants to check the software's vulnerability it is a cumbersome task. Presently many deep learning-based methods also introduced to find the security weakness in the binary code. This paper present the merits and demerits of binary code analysis used by a different method.

Recently, the δ-mutual information between uncertain variables has been introduced as a generalization of Nair's non-stochastic mutual information functional [1], [2]. Within this framework, we introduce four different notions of capacity and present corresponding coding theorems. Our definitions include an analogue of Shannon's capacity in a non-stochastic setting, and a generalization of the zero-error capacity. The associated coding theorems hold for stationary, memoryless, non-stochastic uncertain channels. These results establish the relationship between the δ-mutual information and our operational definitions, providing a step towards the development of a complete non-stochastic information theory.

Recently, with the increasing number of large-scale remote sensing images, the demand for large-scale remote sensing image object classification is growing and attracting the interest of many researchers. Hashing, because of its low memory requirements and high time efficiency, has widely solve the problem of large-scale remote sensing image. Supervised hashing methods mainly leverage the label information of remote sensing image to learn hash function, however, the similarity of the original feature space cannot be well preserved, which can not meet the accurate requirements for object classification of remote sensing image. To solve the mentioned problem, we propose a novel method named Optimized Projection Supervised Discrete Hashing(OPSDH), which jointly learns a discrete binary codes generation and optimized projection constraint model. It uses an effective optimized projection method to further constraint the supervised hash learning and generated hash codes preserve the similarity based on the data label while retaining the similarity of the original feature space. The experimental results show that OPSDH reaches improved performance compared with the existing hash learning methods and demonstrate that the proposed method is more efficient for operational applications.

With the advancement of portable head-mounted displays, interest in educational application of immersive spherical video-based virtual reality (SVVR) has been emerging. However, it remains unclear regarding the effects of immersive SVVR on cognitive and affective outcomes. In this study, we retrieved 58 learning outcomes from 16 studies. A meta-analysis was performed using the random effects model to calculate the effect size. Several important moderators were also examined such as control group treatment, learning outcome type, interaction functionality, content instruction, learning domain, and learner's stage. The results show that immersive SVVR is more effective than other instructional conditions with a medium effect size. The key findings of the moderator analysis are that immersive SVVR has a greater impact on affective outcomes, as well as under the conditions that learning system provides interaction functionality or integrates with content instruction before virtual exploratory learning.

Since a training system using VR can reproduce an actual training environment, training systems have been studied in commercial fields such as medical care and construction. This immersive experience in a virtual space can have a great effect on learning a second language. In this paper, we propose an immersive learning system that learns phrases used in the customer service industry in the customer service experience. We asked the subjects to experience the system, measured the effects of learning, and evaluated the system. Evaluating the learning effect of phrases used in customer service English on 8 students, all student achieved good learning results. Besides, to evaluate the usability of the system, the VR system was evaluated by performing SSQ to measure VR sickness shows this system doesn't cause virtual sickness, SUS to measure usability shows this system evaluation is higher than average system, and IPQ to measure presence in an immersive space shows this system gives average virtual reality experience.

Analysis of large, high-dimensional, and heterogeneous datasets is challenging as no one technique is suitable for visualizing and clustering such data in order to make sense of the underlying information. For instance, heterogeneous logs detailing machine repair and maintenance in an organization often need to be analyzed to diagnose errors and identify abnormal patterns, formalize root-cause analyses, and plan preventive maintenance. Such real-world datasets are also beset by issues such as inconsistent and/or missing entries. To conduct an effective diagnosis, it is important to extract and understand patterns from the data with support from analytic algorithms (e.g., finding that certain kinds of machine complaints occur more in the summer) while involving the human-in-the-loop. To address these challenges, we adopt existing techniques for dimensionality reduction (DR) and clustering of numerical, categorical, and text data dimensions, and introduce a visual analytics approach that uses multiple coordinated views to connect DR + clustering results across each kind of the data dimension stated. To help analysts label the clusters, each clustering view is supplemented with techniques and visualizations that contrast a cluster of interest with the rest of the dataset. Our approach assists analysts to make sense of machine maintenance logs and their errors. Then the gained insights help them carry out preventive maintenance. We illustrate and evaluate our approach through use cases and expert studies respectively, and discuss generalization of the approach to other heterogeneous data.

The design of attacks for cyber physical systems is critical to assess CPS resilience at design time and run-time, and to generate rich datasets from testbeds for research. Attacks against cyber physical systems distinguish themselves from IT attacks in that the main objective is to harm the physical system. Therefore, both cyber and physical system knowledge are needed to design such attacks. The current practice to generate attacks either focuses on the cyber part of the system using IT cyber security existing body of knowledge, or uses heuristics to inject attacks that could potentially harm the physical process. In this paper, we present a systematic approach to automatically generate integrity attacks from the CPS safety and control specifications, without knowledge of the physical system or its dynamics. The generated attacks violate the system operational and safety requirements, hence present a genuine test for system resilience. We present an algorithm to automate the malware payload development. Several examples are given throughout the paper to illustrate the proposed approach.

Anomaly detection is a popular and vital task in various research contexts, which has been studied for several decades. To ensure the safety of people’s lives and assets, video surveillance has been widely deployed in various public spaces, such as crossroads, elevators, hospitals, banks, and even in private homes. Deep learning has shown its capacity in a number of domains, ranging from acoustics, images, to natural language processing. However, it is non-trivial to devise intelligent video anomaly detection systems cause anomalies significantly differ from each other in different application scenarios. There are numerous advantages if such intelligent systems could be realised in our daily lives, such as saving human resources in a large degree, reducing financial burden on the government, and identifying the anomalous behaviours timely and accurately. Recently, many studies on extending deep learning models for solving anomaly detection problems have emerged, resulting in beneficial advances in deep video anomaly detection techniques. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of deep learning-based methods to detect the video anomalies from a new perspective. Specifically, we summarise the opportunities and challenges of deep learning models on video anomaly detection tasks, respectively. We put forth several potential future research directions of intelligent video anomaly detection system in various application domains. Moreover, we summarise the characteristics and technical problems in current deep learning methods for video anomaly detection.

Most famous malware defense tools depend on a large number of detect rules, which are time consuming to develop and require lots of professional experience. Meanwhile, even commercial tools may show high false-negative for some new coming malware, whose patterns were not curved in the prepared rules. This paper proposed the Normalized CNN based Malicious binary Detection method on condition of String, Feature mining (NCMDSF) to address the above problems. Firstly, amount of string feature was extracted from thousands of windows binary applications. Secondly, a 3-layer normalized CNN model, with normalization layer other than down sampling layer, was fit to detect malware. Finally, the proposed method NCMDSF was evaluated to discover malware from more than 1,000 windows binary applications by K-fold cross validation. Experimental results showed that, NCMDSF was superior to some other learning-based methods, including classical CNN, LSTM, normalized LSTM, and won higher true positive rate on the condition of same false positive rate. Furthermore, it successfully avoids over-fitting that occurs in deep learning methods without using normalization.

Network traffic detection is closely related to network security, and it is also a hot research topic now. With the development of encryption technology, traffic detection has become more and more difficult, and many crimes have occurred on the dark web, so how to detect dark web traffic is the subject of this study. In this paper, we proposed a dark web traffic(Tor traffic) detection scheme based on deep learning and conducted experiments on public data sets. By analyzing the results of the experiment, our detection precision rate reached 95.47%.

Currently, one method to deal with the storage and computation of multimedia retrieval applications is an approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search. Hashing algorithms and Vector quantization (VQ) are widely used in ANN search. So, K-mean clustering is a method of VQ that can solve those problems. With the increasing growth of multimedia data such as text view, image view, video view, audio view, and 3D view. Thus, it is a reason that why multimedia retrieval is very important. We can retrieve the results of each media type by inputting a query of that type. Even though many hashing algorithms and VQ techniques are proposed to produce a compact or short binary codes. In the real-time purposes the exhaustive search is impractical, and Hamming distance computation in the Hamming space suffers inaccurate results. The challenge of this paper is focusing on how to learn multimedia raw data or features representation to search on each media type for multimedia retrieval. So we propose a new search method that utilizes K-mean hash codes by computing the probability of a cluster in the index code. The proposed employs the index code from the K-mean cluster number that is converted to hash code. The inverted index table is constructed basing on the K-mean hash code. Then we can improve the original K-mean index accuracy and efficiency by learning a deep neural network (DNN). We performed the experiments on four benchmark multimedia datasets to retrieve each view such as 3D, image, video, text, and audio, where hash codes are produced by K-mean clustering methods. Our results show the effectiveness boost the performance on the baseline (exhaustive search).

In photovoltaic (PV) systems, machine learning-based methods have been used for fault detection and diagnosis in the past years, which require large amounts of data. However, fault types in a single PV station are usually insufficient in practice. Due to insufficient and non-identically distributed data, packet loss and privacy concerns, it is difficult to train a model for diagnosing all fault types. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a decentralized federated learning (FL)-based fault diagnosis method for insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) open-circuits in PV inverters. All PV stations use the convolutional neural network (CNN) to train local diagnosis models. By aggregating neighboring model parameters, each PV station benefits from the fault diagnosis knowledge learned from neighbors and achieves diagnosing all fault types without sharing original data. Extensive experiments are conducted in terms of non-identical data distributions, various transmission channel conditions and whether to use the FL framework. The results are as follows: 1) Using data with non-identical distributions, the collaboratively trained model diagnoses faults accurately and robustly; 2) The continuous transmission and aggregation of model parameters in multiple rounds make it possible to obtain ideal training results even in the presence of packet loss; 3) The proposed method allows each PV station to diagnose all fault types without original data sharing, which protects data privacy.

This paper presents an observer-based security control scheme for a Cyber-Physical System (CPS). In the considered system, the feedback channel of the CPS may suffer from Denial-of-Service (DoS). To begin with, a time-delayed switching CPS model is constructed according to two different attack situations. And then, based on the switching model, an observer-based controller is designed in the cyber-layer, Meanwhile, the stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed based on H$ınfty$ stability of switching systems in view of Average Dwell Time (ADT). At last, the performance of the proposed security control scheme is illustrated by an numerical example in Simulation.

The model-free adaptive security tracking control (MFASTC) problem of nonlinear networked control systems is explored in this paper with DoS attacks and delays consideration. In order to alleviate the impact of DoS attack and RTT delays on NCSs performance, an attack compensation mechanism and a networked predictive-based delay compensation mechanism are designed, respectively. The data-based designed method need not the dynamic and structure of the system, The MFASTC algorithm is proposed to ensure the output tracking error being bounded in the mean-square sense. Finally, an example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the new algorithm by a comparison.

Automatic modulation recognition (AMR) plays an important role in cognitive radio and electronic reconnaissance applications. In order to solve the problem that the lack of modulation signal data sets, the labeled data sets are generated by the software radio equipment NI-USRP 2920 and LabVIEW software development tool. In this paper, a combined network based on deep learning is proposed to identify ten types of digital modulation signals. Convolutional neural network (CNN) and Inception network are trained on different data sets, respectively. We combine CNN with Inception network to distinguish different modulation signals well. Experimental results show that our proposed method can recognize ten types of digital modulation signals with high identification accuracy, even in scenarios with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).

Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a relatively novel classification technology, which has shown higher performance than traditional learning methods in many applications. Therefore, some security researchers have proposed an intrusion detection method based on SVM. However, the SVM algorithm is very sensitive to the choice of kernel function and parameter adjustment. Once the parameter selection is unscientific, it will lead to poor classification accuracy. To solve this problem, this paper presents a Grey Wolf Optimizer Algorithm based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSOGWO) algorithm to improve the Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on SVM. This method uses PSOGWO algorithm to optimize the parameters of SVM to improve the overall performance of intrusion detection based on SVM. The "optimal detection model" of SVM classifier is determined by the fusion of PSOGWO algorithm and SVM. The comparison experiments based on NSL-KDD dataset show that the intrusion detection method based on PSOGWO-SVM achieves the optimization of the parameters of SVM, and has improved significantly in terms of detection rate, convergence speed and model balance. This shows that the method has better performance for network intrusion detection.

Collaborative learning has gained great popularity due to its benefit of data privacy protection: participants can jointly train a Deep Learning model without sharing their training sets. However, recent works discovered that an adversary can fully recover the sensitive training samples from the shared gradients. Such reconstruction attacks pose severe threats to collaborative learning. Hence, effective mitigation solutions are urgently desired.In this paper, we propose to leverage data augmentation to defeat reconstruction attacks: by preprocessing sensitive images with carefully-selected transformation policies, it becomes infeasible for the adversary to extract any useful information from the corresponding gradients. We design a novel search method to automatically discover qualified policies. We adopt two new metrics to quantify the impacts of transformations on data privacy and model usability, which can significantly accelerate the search speed. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that the policies discovered by our method can defeat existing reconstruction attacks in collaborative learning, with high efficiency and negligible impact on the model performance.

As multi-robot systems (MRS) are widely used in various tasks such as natural disaster response and social security, people enthusiastically expect an MRS to be ubiquitous that a general user without heavy training can easily operate. However, humans have various preferences on balancing between task performance and safety, imposing different requirements onto MRS control. Failing to comply with preferences makes people feel difficult in operation and decreases human willingness of using an MRS. Therefore, to improve social acceptance as well as performance, there is an urgent need to adjust MRS behaviors according to human preferences before triggering human corrections, which increases cognitive load. In this paper, a novel Meta Preference Learning (MPL) method was developed to enable an MRS to fast adapt to user preferences. MPL based on meta learning mechanism can quickly assess human preferences from limited instructions; then, a neural network based preference model adjusts MRS behaviors for preference adaption. To validate method effectiveness, a task scenario "An MRS searches victims in an earthquake disaster site" was designed; 20 human users were involved to identify preferences as "aggressive", "medium", "reserved"; based on user guidance and domain knowledge, about 20,000 preferences were simulated to cover different operations related to "task quality", "task progress", "robot safety". The effectiveness of MPL in preference adaption was validated by the reduced duration and frequency of human interventions.