Biblio

Humanoid robots, with a focus on personalised social behaviours, are increasingly being deployed in educational settings to support learning. However, crafting pedagogical HRI designs and robot interventions that have a real, positive impact on participants' learning, as well as effectively measuring such impact, is still an open challenge. As a first effort in tackling the issue, in this paper we propose a novel robot-mediated, collaborative problem solving activity for school children, called JUSThink, aiming at improving their computational thinking skills. JUSThink will serve as a baseline and reference for investigating how the robot's behaviour can influence the engagement of the children with the activity, as well as their collaboration and mutual understanding while working on it. To this end, this first iteration aims at investigating (i) participants' engagement with the activity (Intrinsic Motivation Inventory-IMI), their mutual understanding (IMIlike) and perception of the robot (Godspeed Questionnaire); (ii) participants' performance during the activity, using several performance and learning metrics. We carried out an extensive user-study in two international schools in Switzerland, in which around 100 children participated in pairs in one-hour long interactions with the activity. Surprisingly, we observe that while a teams' performance significantly affects how team members evaluate their competence, mutual understanding and task engagement, it does not affect their perception of the robot and its helpfulness, a fact which highlights the need for baseline studies and multi-dimensional evaluation metrics when assessing the impact of robots in educational activities.

In modern high-performance computing (HPC) systems, network congestion is an important factor that contributes to performance degradation. However, how network congestion impacts application performance is not fully understood. As Aries network, a recent HPC network architecture featuring a dragonfly topology, is equipped with network counters measuring packet transmission statistics on each router, these network metrics can potentially be utilized to understand network performance. In this work, by experiments on a large HPC system, we quantify the impact of network congestion on various applications' performance in terms of execution time, and we correlate application performance with network metrics. Our results demonstrate diverse impacts of network congestion: while applications with intensive MPI operations (such as HACC and MILC) suffer from more than 40% extension in their execution times under network congestion, applications with less intensive MPI operations (such as Graph500 and HPCG) are mostly not affected. We also demonstrate that a stall-to-flit ratio metric derived from Aries network counters is positively correlated with performance degradation and, thus, this metric can serve as an indicator of network congestion in HPC systems.

Intrusion Detection System is a well-known term in the domain of Network and Information Security. It's one of the important components of the Network and Information Security infrastructure. Host Intrusion Detection System (HIDS) helps to detect unauthorized use, abnormal and malicious activities on the host, whereas Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) helps to detect attacks and intrusion on networks. Various researchers are actively working on different approaches to improving the IDS performance and many improvements have been achieved. However, development in many other technologies and newly emerging techniques always opens the doors of opportunity to add a sharp edge to IDS and to make it more robust and reliable. This paper proposes the development of Distributed Intrusion Detection System (DIDS) using emerging and promising technologies like Blockchain upon a stable platform like cloud infrastructure.

We consider different models of malicious multiple access channels, especially for binary adder channel and for A-channel, and show how they can be used for the reformulation of digital fingerprinting coding problems. In particular, we propose a new model of multimedia fingerprinting coding. In the new model, not only zeroes and plus/minus ones but arbitrary coefficients of linear combinations of noise-like signals for forming watermarks (digital fingerprints) can be used. This modification allows dramatically increase the possible number of users with the property that if t or less malicious users create a forge digital fingerprint then a dealer of the system can find all of them with zero-error probability. We show how arisen problems are related to the compressed sensing problem.

In order to accurately extract the data from unstructured Chinese text, this paper proposes a rule-based method based on natural language processing and regular expression. This method makes use of the language expression rules of the data in the text and other related knowledge to form the feature word lists and rule template to match the text. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the designed algorithm is 94.09%.

Protocol detection is the process of determining the application layer protocol in the context of network security monitoring, which requires a timely and precise decision to enable protocol-specific deep packet inspection. This task has proven to be complex, as isolated characteristics, like port numbers, are not sufficient to reliably determine the application layer protocol. In this paper, we analyze the Dynamic Protocol Detection mechanisms employed by popular and widespread open-source network monitoring tools. On the example of HTTP, we show that all analyzed detection mechanisms are vulnerable to evasion attacks. This poses a serious threat to real-world monitoring operations. We find that the underlying fundamental problem of protocol disambiguation is not adequately addressed in two of three monitoring systems that we analyzed. To enable adequate operational decisions, this paper highlights the inherent trade-offs within Dynamic Protocol Detection.

Security services and share information is provided by the computer network. The computer network is by default there is not security. The Attackers can use this provision to hack and steal private information. Confidentiality, creation, changes, and truthful of data is will be big problems in the network. Many types of research have given many methods regarding this, from these methods Generating Initial Chromosome Key called Generating Dynamic Chromosome Key (GDCK), which is a novel approach. With the help of the RSA (Rivest Shamir Adleman) algorithm, GICK and GDCK have created an initial key. The proposed method has produced new techniques using genetic fitness function for the sender and receiver. The outcome of GICK and GDCK has been verified by NIST (National Institute of Standards Technology) tools and analyzes randomness of auto-generated keys with various methods. The proposed system has involved three examines; it has been yield better P-Values 6.44, 7.05, and 8.05 while comparing existing methods.

The method of extremal filtration implementing the decomposition of signals into alternating components is considered. The history of the method development is described, its mathematical substantiation is given. The method suggests signal decomposition based on the removal of known components locally determined by their extrema. The similarity of the method with empirical modes decomposition in terms of the result is shown, and their comparison is also carried out. The algorithm of extremal filtration has a simple mathematical basis that does not require the calculation of transcendental functions, which provides it with higher performance with comparable results. The advantages and disadvantages of the extremal filtration method are analyzed, and the possibility of its application for solving various technical problems is shown, i.e. the formation of diagnostic features, rapid analysis of signals, spectral and time-frequency analysis, etc. The methods for calculating spectral characteristics are described: by the parameters of the distinguished components, based on the approximation on the extrema by bell-shaped pulses. The method distribution in case of wavelet transform of signals is described. The method allows obtaining rapid evaluation of the frequencies and amplitudes (powers) of the components, which can be used as diagnostic features in solving problems of recognition, diagnosis and monitoring. The possibility of using extremal filtration in real-time systems is shown.

This paper proposes a steganography method using the digital images. Here, we are embedding the data which is to be secured into the digital image. Human Visual System proved that the changes in the image edges are insensitive to human eyes. Therefore we are using edge detection method in steganography to increase data hiding capacity by embedding more data in these edge pixels. So, if we can increase number of edge pixels, we can increase the amount of data that can be hidden in the image. To increase the number of edge pixels, multiple edge detection is employed. Edge detection is carried out using more sophisticated operator like canny operator. To compensate for the resulting decrease in the PSNR because of increase in the amount of data hidden, Minimum Error Replacement [MER] method is used. Therefore, the main goal of image steganography i.e. security with highest embedding capacity and good visual qualities are achieved. To extract the data we need the original image and the embedding ratio. Extraction is done by taking multiple edges detecting the original image and the data is extracted corresponding to the embedding ratio.

Cryptography is the method of transforming the original texted message into an unknown form and in reverse also. It is the process of hiding and forwarding the data in an appropriate form so that only authorized persons can know and can process it. Cryptographic process secures the data from hijacking or transmutation, it is mainly used for users data security. This paper justifies the encryption and decryption using DNA(Deoxyribo Nucleic Acid) sequence. This process includes several intermediate steps, the perception of binary-coded form and generating of arbitrary keys is used to encrypt the message. A common key should be established between the sender and receiver for encryption and decryption process. The common key provides more security to the sequence. In this paper, both the process of binary-coded form and generating of arbitrary keys are used to encrypt the message. It is widely used in an institution and by every individual to hide their data from the muggers and hijackers and provides the data securely, and confidentially over the transmission of information.

We all are living in the digital era, where the maximum of the information is available online. The digital world has made the transfer of information easy and provides the basic needs of security like authentication, integrity, nonrepudiation, etc. But, with the improvement in security, cyber-attacks have also increased. Security researchers have provided many techniques to prevent these cyber-attacks; one is a Digital Signature (DS). The digital signature uses cryptographic key pairs (public and private) to provide the message's integrity and verify the sender's identity. The private key used in the digital signature is confidential; if attackers find it by using various techniques, then this can result in an attack. This paper presents a brief introduction about the digital signature and how it is vulnerable to a man-in-the-middle attack. Further, it discusses a technique to prevent this attack in the digital signature.

Microgrids' dependency on communication links exposes the control systems to cyber attack threats. In this work, instead of designing reactive defense approaches, a proacitve moving target defense mechanism is proposed for securing microgrid secondary frequency control from denial of service (DoS) attack. The sensor data is transmitted by following a Markov process, not in a deterministic way. This uncertainty will increase the difficulty for attacker's decision making and thus significantly reduce the attack space. As the system parameters are constantly changing, a gain scheduling based secondary frequency controller is designed to sustain the system performance. Case studies of a microgrid with four inverter-based DGs show the proposed moving target mechanism can enhance the resiliency of the microgrid control systems against DoS attacks.

For real-time applications of arbitrary style transformation, there is a trade-off between the quality of results and the running time of existing algorithms. Hence, it is required to maintain the equilibrium of the quality of generated artwork with the speed of execution. It's complicated for the present arbitrary style-transformation procedures to preserve the structure of content-image while blending with the design and pattern of style-image. This paper presents the implementation of a network using SANET models for generating impressive artworks. It is flexible in the fusion of new style characteristics while sustaining the semantic-structure of the content-image. The identity-loss function helps to minimize the overall loss and conserves the spatial-arrangement of content. The results demonstrate that this method is practically efficient, and therefore it can be employed for real-time fusion and transformation using arbitrary styles.

Trust among humans affects the way we interact with each other. In autonomous systems, this trust is often predefined and hard-coded before the systems are deployed. However, when systems encounter unfolding situations, requiring them to interact with others, a notion of trust will be inevitable. In this paper, we discuss trust as a fundamental measure to enable an autonomous system to decide whether or not to interact with another system, whether biological or artificial. These decisions become increasingly important when continuously integrating with others during runtime.

Increased availability of mobile cameras has led to more opportunities for people to record videos of significantly more of their lives. Many times people want to share these videos, but only to certain people who were co-present. Since the videos may be of a large event where the attendees are not necessarily known, we need a method for proving co-presence without revealing information before co-presence is proven. In this demonstration, we present a privacy-preserving method for comparing the similarity of two videos without revealing the contents of either video. This technique leverages the Similarity of Simultaneous Observation technique for detecting hidden webcams and modifies the existing algorithms so that they are computationally feasible to run under fully homomorphic encryption scheme on modern mobile devices. The demonstration will consist of a variety of devices preloaded with our software. We will demonstrate the video sharing software performing comparisons in real time. We will also make the software available to Android devices via a QR code so that participants can record and exchange their own videos.

Advanced persistent threats (APT) have increased in recent times as a result of the rise in interest by nation-states and sophisticated corporations to obtain high profile information. Typically, APT attacks are more challenging to detect since they leverage zero-day attacks and common benign tools. Furthermore, these attack campaigns are often prolonged to evade detection. We leverage an approach that uses a provenance graph to obtain execution traces of host nodes in order to detect anomalous behavior. By using the provenance graph, we extract features that are then used to train an online adaptive metric learning. Online metric learning is a deep learning method that learns a function to minimize the separation between similar classes and maximizes the separation between dis-similar instances. We compare our approach with baseline models and we show our method outperforms the baseline models by increasing detection accuracy on average by 11.3 % and increases True positive rate (TPR) on average by 18.3 %.

The current evaluation of API recommendation systems mainly focuses on correctness, which is calculated through matching results with ground-truth APIs. However, this measurement may be affected if there exist more than one APIs in a result. In practice, some APIs are used to implement basic functionalities (e.g., print and log generation). These APIs can be invoked everywhere, and they may contribute less than functionally related APIs to the given requirements in recommendation. To study the impacts of correct-but-useless APIs, we use utility to measure them. Our study is conducted on more than 5,000 matched results generated by two specification-based API recommendation techniques. The results show that the matched APIs are heavily overlapped, 10% APIs compose more than 80% matched results. The selected 10% APIs are all correct, but few of them are used to implement the required functionality. We further propose a heuristic approach to measure the utility and conduct an online evaluation with 15 developers. Their reports confirm that the matched results with higher utility score usually have more efforts on programming than the lower ones.

Recent advances in visual media technology have led to new tools for processing and, above all, generating multimedia contents. In particular, modern AI-based technologies have provided easy-to-use tools to create extremely realistic manipulated videos. Such synthetic videos, named Deep Fakes, may constitute a serious threat to attack the reputation of public subjects or to address the general opinion on a certain event. According to this, being able to individuate this kind of fake information becomes fundamental. In this work, a new forensic technique able to discern between fake and original video sequences is given; unlike other state-of-the-art methods which resorts at single video frames, we propose the adoption of optical flow fields to exploit possible inter-frame dissimilarities. Such a clue is then used as feature to be learned by CNN classifiers. Preliminary results obtained on FaceForensics++ dataset highlight very promising performances.

Nowadays, people faced an emerging problem of AI-synthesized face swapping videos, widely known as the DeepFakes. This kind of videos can be created to cause threats to privacy, fraudulence and so on. Sometimes good quality DeepFake videos recognition could be hard to distinguish with people eyes. That's why researchers need to develop algorithms to detect them. In this work, we present overview of indicators that can tell us about the fact that face swapping algorithms were used on photos. Main purpose of this paper is to find algorithm or technology that can decide whether photo was changed with DeepFake technology or not with good accuracy.

Conventional blockchain implementations with append-only semantics do not support deleting or overwriting data in confirmed blocks. However, many industry-relevant use cases require the ability to delete data, especially when personally identifiable information is stored or when data growth has to be constrained. Existing attempts to reconcile these contradictions compromise on core qualities of the blockchain paradigm, as they include backdoor-like approaches such as central authorities with elevated rights or usage of specialized chameleon hash algorithms in chaining of the blocks. The contribution of this paper is a novel architecture for the blockchain ledger and consensus, which uses a tree of context chains with simultaneous validity. A context chain captures the transactions of a closed group of entities and persons, thus structuring blocks in a precisely defined way. The resulting context isolation enables consensus-steered deletion of an entire context without side effects to other contexts. We show how this architecture supports truncation, data rollover and separation of concerns, how the GDPR regulations can be fulfilled by this architecture and how it differs from sidechains and state channels.

Partitional Clustering Algorithm (PCA) on the Hadoop Distributed File System is to perform big data securities using the Perturbation Technique is the main idea of the proposed work. There are numerous clustering methods available that are used to categorize the information from the big data. PCA discovers the cluster based on the initial partition of the data. In this approach, it is possible to develop a security safeguarding of data that is impoverished to allow the calculations and communication. The performances were analyzed on Health Care database under the studies of various parameters like precision, accuracy, and F-score measure. The outcome of the results is to demonstrate that this method is used to decrease the complication in preserving privacy and better accuracy than that of the existing techniques.

Big Data Platform provides business units with data platforms, data products and data services by integrating all data to fully analyze and exploit the intrinsic value of data. Data accessed by big data platforms may include many users' privacy and sensitive information, such as the user's hotel stay history, user payment information, etc., which is at risk of leakage. This paper first analyzes the risks of data leakage, then introduces in detail the theoretical basis and common methods of data desensitization technology, and finally puts forward a set of effective market subject credit supervision application based on asccii, which is committed to solving the problems of insufficient breadth and depth of data utilization for enterprises involved, the problems of lagging regulatory laws and standards, the problems of separating credit construction and market supervision business, and the credit constraints of data governance.

The unequal area facility layout problem (UA-FLP) is to place some objects in a specified space according to certain requirements, which is a NP-hard problem in mathematics because of the complexity of its solution, the combination explosion and the complexity of engineering system. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is a kind of swarm intelligence algorithm by simulating the predatory behavior of birds. Aiming at the minimization of material handling cost and the maximization of workshop area utilization, the optimization mathematical model of UA-FLPP is established, and it is solved by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm which simulates the design of birds' predation behavior. The improved PSO algorithm is constructed by using nonlinear inertia weight, dynamic inertia weight and other methods to solve static unequal area facility layout problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation experiments.

Real-time discovery of all different types of unique attributes within unstructured data is a challenging problem to solve when dealing with multiple petabytes of unstructured data volume everyday. Popular discovery solutions such as the creation of offline jobs to uniquely identify attributes or running aggregation queries on raw data sets limits real time discovery use-cases and often results into poor resource utilization. The discovery information must be treated as a parallel problem to just storing raw data sets efficiently onto back-end big data systems. Solving the discovery problem by creating a parallel discovery data store infrastructure has multiple benefits as it allows such to channel the actual search queries against the raw data set in much more funneled manner instead of being widespread across the entire data sets. Such focused search queries and data separation are far more performant and requires less compute and memory footprint.

Image style transfer is an increasingly interesting topic in computer vision where the goal is to map images from one style to another. In this paper, we propose a new framework called Combined Layer GAN as a solution of dealing with image style transfer problem. Specifically, the edge-constraint and color-constraint are proposed and explored in the GAN based image translation method to improve the performance. The motivation of the work is that color and edge are fundamental vision factors for an image, while in the traditional deep network based approach, there is a lack of fine control of these factors in the process of translation and the performance is degraded consequently. Our experiments and evaluations show that our novel method with the edge and color constrains is more stable, and significantly improves the performance compared with the traditional methods.