Biblio

The autonomy of intelligent systems and their safety rely on their ability for local decision making based on collected environmental information. This is even more for cyber-physical systems running safety critical activities. While this intelligence is partial and fragmented, and cognitive techniques are of limited maturity, the decision function must produce results whose validity and scope must be weighted in light of the underlying assumptions, unavoidable uncertainty and hypothetical safety limitation. Besides the cognitive techniques dependability, it is about the assurance level of the decision self-making. Beyond the pure decision-making capabilities of the autonomous intelligent system, we need techniques that guarantee the system assurance required for the intended use. Security mechanisms for cognitive systems may be consequently tightly intricated. We propose a trustworthiness module which is part of the system and its resulting safety. In this paper, we briefly review the state of the art regarding the dependability of cognitive techniques, the assurance level definition in this context, and related engineering practices. We elaborate regarding the design of autonomous intelligent systems safety, then we discuss its security design and approaches for the mitigation of safety violations by the cognitive functions.

While Explanatory AI (XAI) is attracting increasing interest from academic research, most AI-based solutions still rely on black box methods. This is unsuitable for certain domains, such as smart homes, where transparency is key to gaining user trust and solution adoption. Moreover, smart homes are challenging environments for XAI, as they are decentralized systems that undergo runtime changes. We aim to develop an XAI solution for addressing problems that an autonomic management system either could not resolve or resolved in a surprising manner. This implies situations where the current state of affairs is not what the user expected, hence requiring an explanation. The objective is to solve the apparent conflict between expectation and observation through understandable logical steps, thus generating an argumentative dialogue. While focusing on the smart home domain, our approach is intended to be generic and transferable to other cyber-physical systems offering similar challenges. This position paper focuses on proposing a decentralized algorithm, called D-CAN, and its corresponding generic decentralized architecture. This approach is particularly suited for SISSY systems, as it enables XAI functions to be extended and updated when devices join and leave the managed system dynamically. We illustrate our proposal via several representative case studies from the smart home domain.

The classical SWOT methodology and many of the tools based on it used so far are very static, used for one stable project and lacking dynamics [1]. This paper proposes the idea of combining several SWOT analyses enriched with computing with words (CWW) paradigm into a single network. In this network, individual analysis of the situation is treated as the node. The whole structure is based on fuzzy cognitive maps (FCM) that have forward and backward chaining, so it is called fuzzy SWOT maps. Fuzzy SWOT maps methodology newly introduces the dynamics that projects are interacting, what exists in a real dynamic environment. The whole fuzzy SWOT maps network structure has explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) traits because each node in this network is a "white box"-all the reasoning chain can be tracked and checked why a particular decision has been made, which increases explainability by being able to check the rules to determine why a particular decision was made or why and how one project affects another. To confirm the vitality of the approach, a case with three interacting projects has been analyzed with a developed prototypical software tool and results are delivered.

One of the main threats to the underwater communication cables identified in the recent years is possible tampering or damage by malicious actors. This paper proposes a solution with explanation abilities to detect and investigate this kind of threat within the evidence theory framework. The reasoning scheme implements the traditional “opportunity-capability-intent” threat model to assess a degree to which a given vessel may pose a threat. The scenario discussed considers a variety of possible pieces of information available from different sources. A source quality model is used to reason with the partially reliable sources and the impact of this meta-information on the overall assessment is illustrated. Examples of uncertain relationships between the relevant variables are modelled and the constructed model is used to investigate the probability of threat of four vessels of different types. One of these cases is discussed in more detail to demonstrate the explanation abilities. Explanations about inference are provided thanks to sensitivity spaces in which the impact of the different pieces of information on the reasoning are compared.

Embodiment of actions and tasks has typically been analyzed from the robot's perspective where the robot's embodiment helps develop and maintain trust. However, we ask a similar question looking at the interaction from the human perspective. Embodied cognition has been shown in the cognitive science literature to produce increased social empathy and cooperation. To understand how human embodiment can help develop and increase trust in human-robot interactions, we created conducted a study where participants were tasked with memorizing greek letters associated with dance motions with the help of a humanoid robot. Participants either performed the dance motion or utilized a touch screen during the interaction. The results showed that participants' trust in the robot increased at a higher rate during human embodiment of motions as opposed to utilizing a touch screen device.

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.

This paper proposes a novel extension of blockchain systems with fuzzy ontologies. The main advantage is to let the users have flexible restrictions, represented using fuzzy sets, and to develop smart contracts where there is a partial agreement among the involved parts. We propose a general architecture based on four fuzzy ontologies and a process to develop and run the smart contracts, based on a reduction to a well-known fuzzy ontology reasoning task (Best Satisfiability Degree). We also investigate different operators to compute Pareto-optimal solutions and implement our approach in the Ethereum blockchain.

Differential privacy offers a formal framework for reasoning about privacy and accuracy of computations on private data. It also offers a rich set of building blocks for constructing private data analyses. When carefully calibrated, these analyses simultaneously guarantee the privacy of the individuals contributing their data, and the accuracy of the data analyses results, inferring useful properties about the population. The compositional nature of differential privacy has motivated the design and implementation of several programming languages aimed at helping a data analyst in programming differentially private analyses. However, most of the programming languages for differential privacy proposed so far provide support for reasoning about privacy but not for reasoning about the accuracy of data analyses. To overcome this limitation, in this work we present DPella, a programming framework providing data analysts with support for reasoning about privacy, accuracy and their trade-offs. The distinguishing feature of DPella is a novel component which statically tracks the accuracy of different data analyses. In order to make tighter accuracy estimations, this component leverages taint analysis for automatically inferring statistical independence of the different noise quantities added for guaranteeing privacy. We evaluate our approach by implementing several classical queries from the literature and showing how data analysts can figure out the best manner to calibrate privacy to meet the accuracy requirements.

Steganalysis is an interesting classification problem in order to discriminate the images, including hidden messages from the clean ones. There are many methods, including deep CNN networks to extract fine features for this classification task. Nevertheless, a few researches have been conducted to improve the final classifier. Some state-of-the-art methods try to ensemble the networks by a voting strategy to achieve more stable performance. In this paper, a selection phase is proposed to filter improper networks before any voting. This filtering is done by a binary relevance multi-label classification approach. The Logistic Regression (LR) is chosen here as the last layer of network for classification. The large-margin Fisher’s linear discriminant (FLD) classifier is assigned to each one of the networks. It learns to discriminate the training instances which associated network is suitable for or not. Xu-Net, one of the most famous state-of-the-art Steganalysis models, is chosen as the base networks. The proposed method with different approaches is applied on the BOSSbase dataset and is compared with traditional voting and also some state-of-the-art related ensemble techniques. The results show significant accuracy improvement of the proposed method in comparison with others.

Routing security plays an important role in the mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Despite many attempts to improve its security, the routing mechanism of MANETs remains vulnerable to attacks. Unlike most existing solutions that prevent the specific problems, our approach tends to detect the misbehavior and identify the anomalous nodes in MANETs automatically. The existing approaches offer support for detecting attacks or debugging in different routing phases, but many of them cannot answer the absence of an event. Besides, without considering the privacy of the nodes, these methods depend on the central control program or a third party to supervise the whole network. In this paper, we present a system called DAPV that can find single or collaborative malicious nodes and the paralyzed nodes which behave abnormally. DAPV can detect both direct and indirect attacks launched during the routing phase. To detect malicious or abnormal nodes, DAPV relies on two main techniques. First, the provenance tracking enables the hosts to deduce the expected log information of the peers with the known log entries. Second, the privacy-preserving verification uses Merkle Hash Tree to verify the logs without revealing any privacy of the nodes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by applying DAPV to three scenarios: 1) detecting injected malicious intermediated routers which commit active and passive attacks in MANETs; 2) resisting the collaborative black-hole attack of the AODV protocol, and; 3) detecting paralyzed routers in university campus networks. Our experimental results show that our approach can detect the malicious and paralyzed nodes, and the overhead of DAPV is moderate.

The human side of cyber is fundamentally important to understanding and improving cyber operations. With the exception of Capture the Flag (CTF) exercises, cyber testing and experimentation tends to ignore the human attacker. While traditional CTF events include a deeply rooted human component, they rarely aim to measure human performance, cognition, or psychology. We argue that CTF is not sufficient for measuring these aspects of the human; instead, we examine the value in performing red team behavioral and cognitive testing in a large-scale, controlled human-subject experiment. In this paper we describe the pros and cons of performing this type of experimentation and provide detailed exposition of the data collection and experimental controls used during a recent cyber deception experiment-the Tularosa Study. Finally, we will discuss lessons learned and how our experiences can inform best practices in future cyber operations studies of human behavior and cognition.

Social media are increasingly reflecting and influencing the behavior of human and financial market. Cognitive hacking leverages the influence of social media to spread deceptive information with an intent to gain abnormal profits illegally or to cause losses. Measuring the information content in financial social media can be useful for identifying these attacks. In this paper, we developed an approach to identifying social media features that correlate with abnormal returns of the stocks of companies vulnerable to be targets of cognitive hacking. To test the approach, we collected price data and 865,289 social media messages on four technology companies from July 2017 to June 2018, and extracted features that contributed to abnormal stock movements. Preliminary results show that terms that are simple, motivate actions, incite emotion, and uses exaggeration are ranked high in the features of messages associated with abnormal price movements. We also provide selected messages to illustrate the use of these features in potential cognitive hacking attacks.

This paper describes a machine assistance approach to grading decisions for values that might be missing or need validation, using a mathematical algebraic form of an Expert System, instead of the traditional textual or logic forms and builds a neural network computational graph structure. This Experts System approach is also structured into a neural network like format of: input, hidden and output layers that provide a structured approach to the knowledge-base organization, this provides a useful abstraction for reuse for data migration applications in big data, Cyber and relational databases. The approach is further enhanced with a Bayesian probability tree approach to grade the confidences of value probabilities, instead of the traditional grading of the rule probabilities, and estimates the most probable value in light of all evidence presented. This is ground work for a Machine Learning (ML) experts system approach in a form that is closer to a Neural Network node structure.

We consider a compositional construction of approximate abstractions of interconnected control systems. In our framework, an abstraction acts as a substitute in the controller design process and is itself a continuous control system. The abstraction is related to the concrete control system via a so-called simulation function: a Lyapunov-like function, which is used to establish a quantitative bound between the behavior of the approximate abstraction and the concrete system. In the first part of the paper, we provide a small gain type condition that facilitates the compositional construction of an abstraction of an interconnected control system together with a simulation function from the abstractions and simulation functions of the individual subsystems. In the second part of the paper, we restrict our attention to linear control system and characterize simulation functions in terms of controlled invariant, externally stabilizable subspaces. Based on those characterizations, we propose a particular scheme to construct abstractions for linear control systems. We illustrate the compositional construction of an abstraction on an interconnected system consisting of four linear subsystems. We use the abstraction as a substitute to synthesize a controller to enforce a certain linear temporal logic specification.

Affective Computing is a rapidly growing field spurred by advancements in artificial intelligence, but often, held back by the inability to translate psychological theories of emotion into tractable computational models. To address this, we propose a probabilistic programming approach to affective computing, which models psychological-grounded theories as generative models of emotion, and implements them as stochastic, executable computer programs. We first review probabilistic approaches that integrate reasoning about emotions with reasoning about other latent mental states (e.g., beliefs, desires) in context. Recently-developed probabilistic programming languages offer several key desidarata over previous approaches, such as: (i) flexibility in representing emotions and emotional processes; (ii) modularity and compositionality; (iii) integration with deep learning libraries that facilitate efficient inference and learning from large, naturalistic data; and (iv) ease of adoption. Furthermore, using a probabilistic programming framework allows a standardized platform for theory-building and experimentation: Competing theories (e.g., of appraisal or other emotional processes) can be easily compared via modular substitution of code followed by model comparison. To jumpstart adoption, we illustrate our points with executable code that researchers can easily modify for their own models. We end with a discussion of applications and future directions of the probabilistic programming approach

Because of the high-value data of an enterprise, sophisticated cyber-attacks targeted at enterprise networks have become prominent. Attack graphs are useful tools that facilitate a scalable security analysis of enterprise networks. However, the administrators face difficulties in effectively modelling security problems and making right decisions when constructing attack graphs as their risk assessment experience is often limited. In this paper, we propose an innovative method of security assessment through an ontology- and graph-based approach. An ontology is designed to represent security knowledge such as assets, vulnerabilities, attacks, countermeasures, and relationships between them in a common vocabulary. An efficient algorithm is proposed to generate an attack graph based on the inference ability of the security ontology. The proposed algorithm is evaluated with different sizes and topologies of test networks; the results show that our proposed algorithm facilitates a scalable security analysis of enterprise networks.

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS)-Internet of Things (IoT) enabled healthcare services and infrastructures improve human life, but are vulnerable to a variety of emerging cyber-attacks. Cybersecurity specialists are finding it hard to keep pace of the increasingly sophisticated attack methods. There is a critical need for innovative cognitive cybersecurity for CPS-IoT enabled healthcare ecosystem. This paper presents a cognitive cybersecurity framework for simulating the human cognitive behaviour to anticipate and respond to new and emerging cybersecurity and privacy threats to CPS-IoT and critical infrastructure systems. It includes the conceptualisation and description of a layered architecture which combines Artificial Intelligence, cognitive methods and innovative security mechanisms.

To solve the problems of weak linkage ability and low intellectualization of strategy allocation in existing network security devices, a new method of cognitive linkage of network security equipment is proposed by learning from human brain. Firstly, the basic connotation and cognitive cycle of cognitive linkage are expounded. Secondly, the main functions of cognitive linkage are clarified. Finally, the cognitive linkage system model is constructed, and the information process flow of cognitive linkage is described. Cognitive linkage of network security equipment provides a new way to effectively enhance the overall protection capability of network security equipment.

To improve production efficiency, more industrial control systems are connected to IT networks, and more IT technologies are applied to industrial control networks, network security has become an important problem. Industrial control network security analysis and decision-making is a effective method to solve the problem, which can predict risks and support to make decisions before the actual fault of the industrial control network system has not occurred. This paper proposes a security analysis and decision-making method with forward reasoning based on strong relevant logic for industrial control networks. The paper presents a case study in security analysis and decision-making for industrial control networks. The result of the case study shows that the proposed method is effective.

The smart grid is a complex cyber-physical system (CPS) that poses challenges related to scale, integration, interoperability, processes, governance, and human elements. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and its government, university and industry collaborators, developed an approach, called CPS Framework, to reasoning about CPS across multiple levels of concern and competency, including trustworthiness, privacy, reliability, and regulatory. The approach uses ontology and reasoning techniques to achieve a greater understanding of the interdependencies among the elements of the CPS Framework model applied to use cases. This paper demonstrates that the approach extends naturally to automated and manual decision-making for smart grids: we apply it to smart grid use cases, and illustrate how it can be used to analyze grid topologies and address concerns about the smart grid. Smart grid stakeholders, whose decision making may be assisted by this approach, include planners, designers and operators.

Cyber adversaries employ a variety of malware and exploits to attack computer systems, usually via sequential or “chained” attacks, that take advantage of vulnerability dependencies. In this paper, we introduce a formalism to model such attacks. We show that the determination of the set of capabilities gained by an attacker, which also translates to extent to which the system is compromised, corresponds with the convergence of a simple fixed-point operator. We then address the problem of determining the optimal/most-dangerous strategy for a cyber-adversary with respect to this model and find it to be an NP-Complete problem. To address this complexity we utilize an A*-based approach with an admissible heuristic, that incorporates the result of the fixed-point operator and uses memoization for greater efficiency. We provide an implementation and show through a suite of experiments, using both simulated and actual vulnerability data, that this method performs well in practice for identifying adversarial courses of action in this domain. On average, we found that our techniques decrease runtime by 82%.

This paper discusses two pieces of software designed for intelligence analysis, the brainstorming tool and the Scenario Planning Advisor. These tools were developed in the Cognitive Immersive Systems Lab (CISL) in conjunction with IBM. We discuss the immersive environment the tools are situated in, and the proposed benefit for intelligence analysis.

The paper reviews a project on the automation of term system construction. TSBuilder (Term System Builder) was developed in 2014 as a multilayer Rosenblatt's perceptron for supervised machine learning, namely 1-3 word terms identification in natural language texts and their rigid categorization. The program is being modified to reduce the rigidity of categorization which will bring text mining more in line with human thinking.We are expanding the range of parameters (semantical, morphological, and syntactical) for categorization, removing the restriction of the term length of three words, using convolution on a continuous sequence of terms, and present the probabilities of a term falling into different categories. The neural network will not assign a single category to a term but give N answers (where N is the number of predefined classes), each of which O ∈ [0, 1] is the probability of the term to belong to a given class.

Research in combating misinformation reports many negative results: facts may not change minds, especially if they come from sources that are not trusted. Individuals can disregard and justify lies told by trusted sources. This problem is made even worse by social recommendation algorithms which help amplify conspiracy theories and information confirming one's own biases due to companies' efforts to optimize for clicks and watch time over individuals' own values and public good. As a result, more nuanced voices and facts are drowned out by a continuous erosion of trust in better information sources. Most misinformation mitigation techniques assume that discrediting, filtering, or demoting low veracity information will help news consumers make better information decisions. However, these negative results indicate that some news consumers, particularly extreme or conspiracy news consumers will not be helped. We argue that, given this background, technology solutions to combating misinformation should not simply seek facts or discredit bad news sources, but instead use more subtle nudges towards better information consumption. Repeated exposure to such nudges can help promote trust in better information sources and also improve societal outcomes in the long run. In this article, we will talk about technological solutions that can help us in developing such an approach, and introduce one such model called Trust Nudging.

Phishing attacks are prevalent and humans are central to this online identity theft attack, which aims to steal victims' sensitive and personal information such as username, password, and online banking details. There are many antiphishing tools developed to thwart against phishing attacks. Since humans are the weakest link in phishing, it is important to educate them to detect and avoid phishing attacks. One can argue self-efficacy is one of the most important determinants of individual's motivation in phishing threat avoidance behaviour, which has co-relation with knowledge. The proposed research endeavours on the user's self-efficacy in order to enhance the individual's phishing threat avoidance behaviour through their motivation. Using social cognitive theory, we explored that various knowledge attributes such as observational (vicarious) knowledge, heuristic knowledge and structural knowledge contributes immensely towards the individual's self-efficacy to enhance phishing threat prevention behaviour. A theoretical framework is then developed depicting the mechanism that links knowledge attributes, self-efficacy, threat avoidance motivation that leads to users' threat avoidance behaviour. Finally, a gaming prototype is designed incorporating the knowledge elements identified in this research that aimed to enhance individual's self-efficacy in phishing threat avoidance behaviour.