Biblio

Conversational Intelligent Tutoring Systems (CITS) in learning environments are capable of providing personalized instruction to students in different domains, to improve the learning process. This interaction between the Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) and the user is carried out through dialogues in natural language. In this study, we use an open source framework called Rasa to adapt the original button-based user interface of an algebraic/arithmetic word problem-solving ITS to one based primarily on the use of natural language. We conducted an empirical study showing that once properly trained, our conversational agent was able to recognize the intent related to the content of the student’s message with an average accuracy above 0.95.

Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVAs) have become ubiquitous in our daily lives, displaying increased complexity of form and function. Initial IVA development efforts provided basic functionality to suit users' needs, typically in work or educational settings, but are now present in numerous contexts in more realistic, complex forms. In this paper, we focus on personalization of embodied human intelligent virtual agents to assist individuals as part of physical training “exergames”.

In this work, the use of an undercover conversational agent, acting as a participative student in a synchronous virtual reality distance learning scenario is proposed to stimulate social interaction between teacher and students. The outcome of an exploratory user study indicated that the undercover conversational agent is capable of fostering interaction, relieving social pressure, and overall leading to a more satisfactory and engaging learning experience without sacrificing learning performance.

In the era of Internet usage growth, storage services are widely used where users' can store their data, while hackers techniques pose massive threats to users' data security. The proposed system introduces multiple layers of security where data confidentiality, integrity and availability are achieved using honey encryption, hashed random passwords as well as detecting intruders and preventing them. The used techniques can ensure security against brute force and denial of service attacks. Our proposed methodology proofs the efficiency for storing and retrieving data using honey words and password hashing with less execution time and more security features achieved compared with other systems. Other systems depend on user password leading to easily predict it, we avoid this approach by making the password given to the user is randomly generated which make it unpredictable and hard to break. Moreover, we created a simple user interface to interact with users to take their inputs and store them along with the given password in true database, if an adversary detected, he will be processed as a normal user but with fake information taken from another database called false database, after that, the admin will be notified about this illegitimate access by providing the IP address. This approach will make the admin have continuous detection and ensure availability and confidentiality. Our execution time is efficient as the encryption process takes 244 ms and decryption 229 ms.

Android controls the majority of the global OS market. Android Open Source Project (AOSP) is a very complex system with many layers including the apps, the Application Framework, the middle-ware, the customized Linux kernel, and the trusted components. Although security is implemented in every layer, the Application Framework forms an important of the attack surface due to managing the user interface and permissions. Android security has evolved over the years. The security flaws that have been found in the Application Framework led to a redesign of Android permissions. Part of this evolution includes fixes to the vulnerabilities that are publicly released in the monthly Android security bulletins. In this study, we analyze the CVEs listed in the Android security bulletin within the last 6 years. We focus on the Android application framework and investigate several research questions relating to 1) the security relevant components, 2) the type and amount of testing information for the security patches, and 3) the adequacy of the tests designed to test these patches. Our findings indicate that Android security testing practices can be further improved by designing security bulletin update specific tests, and by improving code coverage of patched files.

Intelligent Environments (IEs) enrich the physical world by connecting it to software applications in order to increase user comfort, safety and efficiency. IEs are often supported by wireless networks of smart sensors and actuators, which offer multi-year battery life within small packages. However, existing radio mesh networks suffer from high latency, which precludes their use in many user interface systems such as real-time speech, touch or positioning. While recent advances in optical networks promise low end-to-end latency through symbol-synchronous transmission, current approaches are power hungry and therefore cannot be battery powered. We tackle this problem by introducing BoboLink, a mesh network that delivers low-power and low-latency optical networking through a combination of symbol-synchronous transmission and a novel wake-up technology. BoboLink delivers mesh-wide wake-up in 1.13ms, with a quiescent power consumption of 237µW. This enables building-wide human computer interfaces to be seamlessly delivered using wireless mesh networks for the first time.

This paper provides an overview of the security service controls that are applied in a big data processing (BDP) system to defend against cyber security attacks. We validate this approach by modeling attacks and effectiveness of security service controls in a sequence of states and transitions. This Finite State Machine (FSM) approach uses the probable effectiveness of security service controls, as defined in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Risk Management Framework (RMF). The attacks used in the model are defined in the ATT&CK™ framework. Five different BDP security architecture configurations are considered, spanning from a low-cost default BDP configuration to a more expensive, industry supported layered security architecture. The analysis demonstrates the importance of a multi-layer approach to implementing security in BDP systems. With increasing interest in using BDP systems to analyze sensitive data sets, it is important to understand and justify BDP security architecture configurations with their significant costs. The output of the model demonstrates that over the run time, larger investment in security service controls results in significantly more uptime. There is a significant increase in uptime with a linear increase in security service control investment. We believe that these results support our recommended BDP security architecture. That is, a layered architecture with security service controls integrated into the user interface, boundary, central management of security policies, and applications that incorporate privacy preserving programs. These results enable making BDP systems operational for sensitive data accessed in a multi-tenant environment.

Smart assistants, like Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri, have become commonplace in many people's lives, appearing in their phones and homes. Despite their ubiquity, these conversational AI agents still largely remain a mystery to many, in terms of how they work and what they can do. To lower the barrier to entry to understanding and creating these agents for young students, we expanded on Convo, a conversational programming agent that can respond to both voice and text inputs. The previous version of Convo focused on teaching only programming skills, so we created a simple, intuitive user interface for students to use those programming skills to train and create their own conversational AI agents. We also developed a curriculum to teach students about key concepts in AI and conversational AI in particular. We ran a 3-day workshop with 15 participating middle school students. Through the data collected from the pre- and post-workshop surveys as well as a mid-workshop brainstorming session, we found that after the workshop, students tended to think that conversational AI agents were less intelligent than originally perceived, gained confidence in their abilities to build these agents, and learned some key technical concepts about conversational AI as a whole. Based on these results, we are optimistic about CONVO'S ability to teach and empower students to develop conversational AI agents in an intuitive way.

Trusted Platform Modules (TPM) have grown to be crucial safeguards from the number of software-based strikes. By giving a restricted range of cryptographic providers by way of a well-defined user interface, divided as a result of the program itself, TPM and Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) can function as a root of loyalty so when a foundation aimed at advanced equal protection methods. This information studies the works aimed at uses on TPM within the cloud computing atmosphere, by journal times composed somewhere among 2013 as well as 2020. It identifies the present fashion as well as goals from these technologies within the cloud, as well as the kind of risks that it mitigates. The primary investigation is being focused on the TPM's association to the IaaS security based on the authorization and the enabling schema for integrity. Since integrity measurement is among the key uses of TPM and IaaS, particular focus is given towards the evaluation of operating period phases as well as S/W levels it's put on to. Finally, the deep survey on recent schemes can be applied on Cloud Environment.

Recommender systems help people in finding a particular item based on their preference from a wide range of products in online shopping rapidly. One of the most popular models of recommendation systems is the Collaborative Filtering Recommendation System (CFRS) that recommend the top-K items to active user based on peer grouping user ratings. The implementation of CFRS is easy and it can easily be attacked by fake users and affect the recommendation. Fake users create a fake profile to attack the RS and change the output of it. Different attack types with different features and attacking methods exist in which decrease the accuracy. It is important to detect fake users, remove their rating from rating matrix and recognize the items has been attacked. In the recent years, many algorithms have been proposed to detect the attackers but first, researchers have to inject the attack type into their dataset and then evaluate their proposed approach. The purpose of this article is to develop a tool to inject the different attack types to datasets. Proposed tool constructs a new dataset containing the fake users therefore researchers can use it for evaluating their proposed attack detection methods. Researchers could choose the attack type and the size of attack with a user interface of our proposed tool easily.

This paper presents a design concept of an innovative CAPTCHA that can filter the color-vision–recognition states of different users. It can simultaneously verify the real-human-user identity, differentiate between the color-vision needs, and decide the content to be presented automatically.

Malicious hackers breach security perimeters, cause infrastructure disruptions as well as steal proprietary information, financial data, and violate consumers' privacy. Protection of the whole organization by using the firm's security officers can be besieged with faulty warnings. Engineers must shift from console to console to put together investigative clues as a result of today's fragmented security technologies that cause frustratingly sluggish investigations. Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions adds an extra layer of protection to prevent an endpoint action into a breach. EDR is the region's foremost detection and response tool that combines endpoint and network data to recognize and respond to sophisticated threats. Offering unrivaled security and operational effectiveness, it integrates prevention, investigation, detection, and responding in a single platform. EDR provides enterprise coverage and uninterrupted defense with its continuous monitoring and response to threats. We have presented a comprehensive review of existing EDRs through various security layers that includes detection, response and management capabilities which enables security teams to have unified end-to-end corporate accessibility, powerful analytics along with additional features such as web threat scan, external device scan and automatic reaction across the whole technological tower.

Scientific applications built on wide-area distributed systems such as emerging cloud based architectures and the legacy grid computing infrastructure often struggle with user adoption even though they succeed from a systems research perspective. This paper examines the coupling of user-centered design processes with modern distributed systems. Further in this paper, we describe approaches for conceptualizing a product that solves a recognized need: to develop a data gateway to serve the data management and research needs of experimentalists of electron microscopes and similar shared scientific instruments in the context of a research service laboratory. The purpose of the data gateway is to provide secure, controlled access to data generated from a wide range of scientific instruments. From the functional perspective, we focus on the basic processing of raw data that underlies the lab's "business" processes, the movement of data from the laboratory to central access and archival storage points, and the distribution of data to respective authorized users. Through the gateway interface, users will be able to share the instrument data with collaborators or copy it to remote storage servers. Basic pipelines for extracting additional metadata (through a pluggable parser framework) will be enabled. The core contribution described in this paper, building on the aforementioned distributed data management capabilities, is the adoption of user-centered design processes for developing the scientific user interface. We describe the user-centered design methodology for exploring user needs, iteratively testing the design, learning from user experiences, and adapting what we learn to improve design and capabilities. We further conclude that user-centered design is, in turn, best enabled by an adaptable distributed systems framework. A key challenge to implementing a user-centered design is to have design tools closely linked with a software system architecture that can evolve over time while providing a highly available data gateway. A key contribution of this paper is to share the insights from crafting such an evolvable design-build-evaluate-deploy architecture and plans for iterative development and deployment.

Users rely on their web browser to provide information about the websites they are visiting, such as the security state of the web page their viewing. Current browsers do not differentiate between the live Web and the past Web. If a user loads an archived web page, known as a memento, they have to rely on user interface (UI) elements within the page itself to inform them that the page they are viewing is not the live Web. Memento-awareness extends beyond recognizing a page that has already been archived. The browser should give users the ability to easily archive live web pages as they are browsing. This report presents a proof-of-concept browser that is memento-aware and is created by extending Google's open-source web browser Chromium.

Augmented Reality has a long history and has seen major technical advantages in the last years. With WebXR, a new web standard, Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) applications are now available in the web browser. With our work, we implemented an Augmented Reality Information System and conducted a case study to evaluate the user acceptance of such an application build with WebXR. Our results indicate that the user acceptance regarding web-based MAR applications for our specific use case seems to be given. With our proposed architecture we also lay the foundation for other AR information systems.

Performing an interaction using gaze and pinch has been certified as an efficient interactive method in Mixed Reality, for such techniques can provide users concise and natural experiences. However, executing a task with individual interactions gradually is inefficient in some application scenarios. In this paper, we propose the Hand-Pinch Menu, which core concept is to reduce unnecessary operations by combining several interactions. Users can continuously perform multiple interactions on a selected object concurrently without changing gestures by using this technique. The user study results show that our Gaze-Pinch Menu can improve operational efficiency effectively.

This paper presents a decentralized messaging system based on blockchain technology. This system allows their users to securely send and receive digital messages in the network. Since the messages stored in a conventional blockchain could be easily read by everyone in the network, under the proposed approach these messages are previously encrypted using public-key cryptography, while the sender and recipient remain anonymous. The proposed system incorporates a browser-based user interface that enable their users to interact seamlessly in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Earth science metadata keyword assignment is a challenging problem. Dataset curators select appropriate keywords from the Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) set of keywords. The keywords are integral part of search and discovery of these datasets. Hence, selection of keywords are crucial in increasing the discoverability of datasets. Utilizing machine learning techniques, we provide users with automated keyword suggestions as an improved approach to complement manual selection. We trained a machine learning model that leverages the semantic embedding ability of Word2Vec models to process abstracts and suggest relevant keywords. A user interface tool we built to assist data curators in assignment of such keywords is also described.

Humans are a key part of software development, including customers, designers, coders, testers and end users. In this keynote talk I explain why incorporating human-centric issues into software engineering for next-generation applications is critical. I use several examples from our recent and current work on handling human-centric issues when engineering various `smart living' cloud- and edge-based software systems. This includes using human-centric, domain-specific visual models for non-technical experts to specify and generate data analysis applications; personality impact on aspects of software activities; incorporating end user emotions into software requirements engineering for smart homes; incorporating human usage patterns into emerging edge computing applications; visualising smart city-related data; reporting diverse software usability defects; and human-centric security and privacy requirements for smart living systems. I assess the usefulness of these approaches, highlight some outstanding research challenges, and briefly discuss our current work on new human-centric approaches to software engineering for smart living applications.

Steganography is a data hiding technique, which is generally used to hide the data within a file to avoid detection. It is used in the police department, detective investigation, and medical fields as well as in many more fields. Various techniques have been proposed over the years for Image Steganography and also attackers or hackers have developed many decoding tools to break these techniques to retrieve data. In this paper, CAPTCHA codes are used to ensure that the receiver is the intended receiver and not any machine. Here a randomized CAPTCHA code is created to provide additional security to communicate with the authenticated user and used Image Steganography to achieve confidentiality. For achieving secret and reliable communication, encryption and decryption mechanism is performed; hence a machine cannot decode it using any predefined algorithm. Once a secure connection has been established with the intended receiver, the original message is transmitted using the LSB algorithm, which uses the RGB color spectrum to hide the image data ensuring additional encryption.

Along with the development of the Windows operating system, browser applications to surf the internet are also growing rapidly. The most widely used browsers today are Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. Both browsers have a username and password management feature that makes users login to a website easily, but saving usernames and passwords in the browser is quite dangerous because the stored data can be hacked using brute force attacks or read through a program. One way to get a username and password in the browser is to use a program that can read Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox login data from the computer's internal storage and then show those data. In this study, an attack will be carried out by implementing Rubber Ducky using BadUSB to run the ChromePass and PasswordFox program and the PowerShell script using the Arduino Pro Micro Leonardo device as a USB Password Stealer. The results obtained from this study are the username and password on Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox successfully obtained when the USB is connected to the target device, the average time of the attack is 14 seconds then sending it to the author's email.

Windows is one of the popular operating systems in use today, while Universal Serial Bus (USB) is one of the mechanisms used by many people with practical plug and play functions. USB has long been used as a vector of attacks on computers. One method of attack is Keylogger. The Keylogger can take advantage of existing vulnerabilities in the Windows 10 operating system attacks carried out in the form of recording computer keystroke activity without the victim knowing. In this research, an attack will be carried out by running a Powershell Script using BadUSB to be able to activate the Keylogger program. The script is embedded in the Arduino Pro Micro device. The results obtained in the Keyboard Injection Attack research using Arduino Pro Micro were successfully carried out with an average time needed to run the keylogger is 7.474 seconds with a computer connected to the internet. The results of the keylogger will be sent to the attacker via email.

Web browsers display content in the form of HTML, CSS and JavaScript retrieved from the world wide web. The loaded content is subject to the web security model and considered untrusted and potentially malicious. To complicate security matters, Firefox uses the same technologies to render its user interface as it does to render untrusted web content which blurs the distinction between the two privilege levels.Getting interactions between the two correct turns out to be complicated and has led to numerous real-world security vulnerabilities. We study those vulnerabilities to discover common threats and explain how we address them systematically to harden Firefox.

ARtect is an Augmented Reality application developed with Unity 3D, which envisions an educational interactive and immersive tool for architects, designers, researchers, and artists. This digital instrument renders the competency to visualize custom-made 3D models and 2D graphics in interior and exterior environments. The user-friendly interface offers an accurate insight before the materialization of any architectural project, enabling evaluation of the design proposal. This practice could be integrated into learning architectural design process, saving resources of printed drawings, and 3D carton models during several stages of spatial conception.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is influencing almost all areas of human life. Even though these AI-based systems frequently provide state-of-the-art performance, humans still hesitate to develop, deploy, and use AI systems. The main reason for this is the lack of trust in AI systems caused by the deficiency of transparency of existing AI systems. As a solution, “Trustworthy AI” research area merged with the goal of defining guidelines and frameworks for improving user trust in AI systems, allowing humans to use them without fear. While trust in AI is an active area of research, very little work exists where the focus is to build human trust to improve the interactions between human and AI systems. In this paper, we provide a concise survey on concepts of trustworthy AI. Further, we present trustworthy AI development guidelines for improving the user trust to enhance the interactions between AI systems and humans, that happen during the AI system life cycle.